La Ola Gigante que Nunca Llego

I just realized that I have completely overlooked something that I feel I should address. Last Thursday night, as the world knows, Japan was shaken by a tremendous earthquake ranking an 8.9 on the Richter Scale. This earthquake also triggered a 23 foot tsunami that plowed through the northeast coastal region and sent its waves pulsing outwards trough the Pacific.
On Friday morning, I woke up to a phone call from my program coordinator here in Chile telling me about the earthquake in and how the Chilean government had issued a tsunami warning for Chile's entire coastline. The phone call itself wasn't very traumatic it was afterwards that the news began to sink in that I started to feel scared. I have minimal experience in dealing with nature's destructive forces. A tornado hit my town in Maine last summer, but I was working in New Hampshire and wasn't there to experience the panic that it must have caused, the same panic that must have terrorized the people of Japan. A friend texted me everything that happened, giving me a play by play. But she was fine in the end. My family was fine. My friend's house had some serious damage, but everything really turned out like the rest, just fine.
I watched a documentary on tsunami's once, right after a massive one cleared out most of Indonesia a couple of years ago. So of course that is what I think of when I think of a tsunami, an enormous wave driven by an inconceivable force that contains the potential of destroying entire islands. I pictured the big casino here in Vina and the ritzy Sheraton hotel both being swept away by a single wave, the ships in the harbor colliding into apartment buildings and the stray dogs of Vina running for the hills, leaving us all to drown. I thought of my boyfriend who was camping on a peninsula in New Zealand, not having heard the news until it was too late. I thought of him being trapped in his tent as the waves approached the shore where he was camping and taking him out to sea. All very scary thoughts.
My friends and I had planned to go to Valpo that Friday but the tsunami almost made us cancel our plans. I am glad that we didn't. So went back to Valpariso and took an ascensor (elevator) up onto the top of a hill where you can see the sea for miles. It made me feel better being up high with people who understood what I was saying and being able to see the the ocean. It would have been amazing to witness the waves from up there. I felt like if something that powerful and destructive was going to happen, I wanted to see it. And I wanted to see it from that hill. I expect it would have been one of the most incredible things I would ever have seen in my life.
When we headed back to Vina we learned that the road connecting Vina and Valpo was closing at 9pm because of the government issued warning. When I got home my host family was there and told me that I couldn't leave the house anymore. So I went online and learned that everyone that lived at sea level was being evacuated to higher ground. My host sister took me out onto the balcony and showed me that all of the cars were in the garage and the streets were deserted, even the dogs could sense what was coming. It was a Friday night and everyone was at home. My family kept telling me that all of this was just precautionary and that there was no reason to be worried, like this sort of thing happened all the time. And maybe it does, I didn't really want to know at the moment. It was not until my host brother left to go to a friends house that the threat of anything actually happening was incredibly slim, which contradicted what that stupid documentary had told me years ago. I thought that the worst thing for a tsunami was open water because without anything to slow it down, it gains more speed and momentum. But if my host mom let him leave, it must not be that serious. At 1am I was finally able to sleep since the tsunami was due to arrive at 12:31am. If anything was going to happen it already would have.
In Vina nothing happened. Maybe a couple waves were a few feet bigger than normal,  and a few friends had to abandon their homes that night, but everything here is OK. Just like Maine after the tornado.
After the scare and the stress, and as the death toll continues to raise in northeast Japan, I am eternally grateful that I am OK. That Vina is OK and that everything here turned out just fine.