How do you talk about the earthquake?

Chile was recently hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.8, some 63 times greater in magnitude than the 7.0 that recently hit Haiti. At 3:34 on February 27th, I was on a bus in the northern part of Chile, about to be sheltered only a few hours later in a bubble known as San Pedro de Atacama, accurately described as a "tourist mecca." It's a small oasis town in the middle of the Atacama desert where half the people in the town are backpackers from Europe who have traveled to take tours of the breathtaking scenery to the east and south. The scenery is all the more amazing because it is hidden like needles in a haystack among a monotonous landscape of sand and rock that stretches on and on from the sides of roads that seem eternal. In San Pedro, our hostel's internet lay dysfunctional more than half of the time and the two ATMs in town were broken. When I first heard of the earthquake and began to respond to the worried messages of family and friends, I knew less than anyone in the US. Our flight (as with all non-essential domestic flights) was put on indefinite hold. And so, while Chile responded, we were trapped in an idyllic Odyssean paradise - full of worried travelers eager to return home, yet surrounded by arresting sights.
Home is where the heart lies, and as such, I have homes in New Jersey, Boston, Salamanca, and now Santiago. Whenever I travel, it feels like I'm holding my breath. I put my routines on hold and I go somewhere to do something. When I come home, everything goes back to normal. Normal is different in each of the four places, but I feel at home in each one.
For the last ten days, I've watched the news cover the initial impact, the aftershocks and tsunamis which continue, the looting - especially in Concepción, the efforts of the armed forces, the efforts of the volunteers, and more and more, the rebuilding efforts. Tonight, I watched the end of a "Telethon" which raised money to make Chile better after the earthquake. Interspersed between donations by organizations and performances to benefit the relief effort were inspirational videos, interviews, stories, and speeches. It's tough to imagine a telethon in the US that would be taken as seriously. The president Michelle Bachelet and the president-elect Sebastian Piñera both attended and both spoke. The closest thing in my (admittedly short) memory is Comic Relief, a telethon in the US, whose hosts included Robin Williams and Whoppie Goldberg, that raised money for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was on a different scale though. I find myself emotional with pride for a country that would not call me its own, but which I claim for myself. There's a commercial that explains that "We've always taught our children that Chile is a country of earthquakes." It shows a grandfather explaining the movements of the earth to his seven year old grandchild. Chile expects earthquakes and is determined to overcome them. Even an 8.8 earthquake will not stop Chile. I have strong hopes that a year from now, Chile will be stronger economically than it was before the earthquake. It is already stronger as a nation.
And yet, there are others with much better claims to talk about the earthquake than myself. I have not yet felt a single tremor. I haven't been to any areas that were damaged with the exception of the airport in Santiago. The worst damage I've seen in person is cracks in the uppermost corner of a single building's facade.
However, the earthquake does put a different lens on the beauties of the Atacama desert. Nowhere else is the tectonic history of the country as immediately obvious.
Here you can see the white stripes in rock from volcanic ash layered amidst rock and sand.Here you can see the volcanoes themselves, often three or four clearly visible from where you are standing. I heard one estimate that Chile has 10% of the world's volcanoes despite covering only 1/200th of the land.Here you can see the mountains formed in ridged waves as the Nazca and Antarctic plates crunch and slide under the South American plate, just under the west coast of the country.Here you can see the salt flats that came about when a lake of salt water was trapped between the newly forming coastal mountains and the older Andes and evaporated. Even today, the difference in the density of the plates contributes to the way mountain runoff water behaves.Here you can see geysers shooting up groundwater from the Andes, heated when it drops down to the level of hot rocks and magma underneath.And always in Chile, the Andes serve as a tremendous reminder. The Chilean people are part of this tectonic ecosystem and that seven year old grandchild will group up resilient in it.