A Couple of Quakes and Vanilla Lip Gloss

Panajachel, Guatemala

Early in the morning the earthquake woke me up. Paul told me later it registered a 6 on the richter scale. Later after Cali went to school there was another one, which was about a 5.6. That one went on for what seemed like a long time.

The first thing I heard was the tin roof rattling, but with all the roof drama we have, I didn’t think much about that. Then the water cooler released huge air bubbles into the top (hard to explain), then the couch started to move. At first I thought Madi was doing that nervous wiggle thing, but when she started freaking out, I realized it wasn’t her. Madi and I got up, tried to wake up Kier to get her out of bed, but that’s more like a 20 minute process. Even yelling, “Earthquake,” didn’t get her to move faster. Good to know. In case of another emergency we may need to drag the bed into the garden or stand her comotose body up in a doorway. Should be interesting.

Right after the earthquake, we had a knock at the door. Our Spanish teacher neighbor was standing there in her pjs with her dogs checking on us, which was nice. She said her whole house was shaking like crazy and it really scared her. It’s one of the stronger quakes she has felt in a while, although the one a few weeks ago was also a 6, but originated further away.

After that excitement the Spanish teacher came over again and said she wanted to show us her house, before it falls down. At first I was thinking that if the house is about to fall down, perhaps now isn’t the best time to view it. But then I realized she was just making a little earthquake joke. We went over to see her house, and it was something else. Very colorful, tropical feel, open rooms, balconies, difficult to describe. I wish I could have taken some pictures. Very unique place, like a setting for a movie.

The older two girls still have no school today since it is Winter break. Kier couldn’t go back to sleep after the quake, so she went out to breakfast with me. Madi wanted to stay home to watch movies. K and I tried a couple of new breakfasts. I was ready to get on with the day, but she wanted to sit and talk, so we did that, until 12:30! We were there for hours. Every time I said let’s head out, she didn’t budge, so we’d sit and talk a while longer. There aren’t too many days we can do that, so I went with the flow.

Kier spent the rest of the day reading in the hammock. She was so happy to read a book cover to cover without moving. Madi and Cali went to get the dog Max and played with him for three hours. Meanwhile, I went into town and had coffee with a friend. She is well known in town so we must have had at least 6 people join us here and there. I enjoyed it. Everyone was talking about the earthquake, specifically if the first one, which was during the night, woke them up. One woman who lives alone, thought someone was crawling into her bed because it was wiggling, totally freaked her out. Another woman thought her husband was thrashing around until she looked over and found that he wasn’t moving. The heavy sleepers didn’t wake up, the light sleepers did.

Kier cooked supper again, which is always appreciated. Tomorrow everyone is back to school. Madi found out that one of my sister’s cats died. So she was crying for quite sometime about that. She said this was the one time she forgot the cat to “not die” the last time she saw it. I think she was feeling somewhat responsible, no matter what I said to her. She went to bed early to cry in bed. Wish I could make her feel better.

Cali’s frog blog: Today I had lots and lots of fun because I had a beautiful breakfast of scrambled eggs. I went to school and had a class. Then we had math and that was when the earthquake happened. I was sharpening my pencil when it happened. I dropped my pencil and sharpener in the garbage by mistake because we had to move fast. We put our hands over our heads and then we crawled under our desks. Since there were two earthquakes in a row, one before school, it meant that we couldn’t be in the school building for the rest of the day. We took all of our stuff outside into the yard. We would go back inside to get our books if we needed more of our books. We were sort of in the shade but I still got too much sun. A boy said to me at the end of the day that I had too much sun on my face. We had English outside in the yard. We ate our lunches in the yard, so I told mom when I got home that there might be ants in my lunch containers. Then we had recess and then we had computer class without any computers. The teacher told us lots of things about computers. After that class I went to play. This guy kept saying, “Hey did you get some sun?” I was waiting for the long time for my tuk tuk again, but I went inside to the office. But my guy came when I went into the office. When I got home from school I played with Max the dog for a long time. Then we watched Robots, Kier cooked us supper and then I went to bed. My mom bought me more lip gloss because I can’t find mine anymore. So that made it a very very good day. I have strawberry, blueberry and vanilla. The vanilla is my favorite. P.S. I love you all very much.