Those Who Lost Everything in the Colombia Earthquake
Oskar Ortiz and his wife, Carolina, will have to start over after the earthquake destroyed the home they built through 22 years of work.
By Darine Waked (La Estrella de Panamá)
HAVANA TIMES – Oskar Ortiz holds his phone in front of what, until Monday, was his apartment. Behind him there is no longer a home, but an open, twisted structure, with rooms exposed and fragments of a life suspended amid the rubble. He walks as he talks. He points to a staircase that no longer leads anywhere, the bathroom of his home, a freshly painted wall, and the exact spot where he began to feel that the Quintas de Jardin Colonial complex—the home he had built in Risaralda after two decades of work—was coming apart beneath his feet.
The image freezes from time to time. The signal cuts out, but the destruction remains.
“I was coming down here when the stairs began to collapse,” he explains.
During his 21-year career, Oskar wrote the word “disaster victims” many times. He included it in headlines, reports, and stories about people who had lost their homes after a tragedy. It was a journalistic term, a way of describing others. He never imagined that one day he would have to learn its meaning from the inside: barefoot, dressed in pajamas, watching 22 years of work turn into broken concrete.
Now he is one of them.
He is also part of a story the world has known since August 10, when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia. The quake, whose epicenter was in San Jos del Palmar, Choco, was felt in Ecuador and Panama and was followed by dozens of aftershocks. As of August 13, the tragedy had left at least 273 people dead, more than 3,800 injured, and 377 missing, in addition to nearly 12,600 homes destroyed.
But the figures do not tell you that Oskar and his wife, Carolina, had just painted their apartment.
Nor do they tell you that the home held the story of their lives together: the years of effort, their savings, the belongings they had chosen together, and the peace of mind of having finally finished paying it off just this year. It contained everything they had built while Oskar worked as a journalist, sold clothing and cookies to pay for his studies, moved from city to city, and accepted opportunities far from his family in search of a better life.
It all began at 7:34 in the morning.
Carolina had just returned from the airport, where she had dropped off her father and sister for the last flight to leave the country before the earthquake. She laid down beside Oskar to rest before exercising. Going out for a run was part of their routine. Then the bed began to shake, and she exclaimed, “Earthquake!”
At first, Oskar thought she was exaggerating. Then the apartment began moving with a violence he compares to a waves. The walls creaked as if in an apocalyptic movie. The building seemed to dance and buckle in on itself. People screamed. Carolina cried.
They had both promised that if there was ever a strong earthquake, they would leave together. They ran down from the third floor. When Oskar reached the stairs, they began to give way and debris fell on top of him. He managed to keep going. Behind him, the building continued collapsing.
Everyone survived.
Four hours later, when the immediate emergency had passed and there was room to comprehend what had happened, Oskar screamed. It was not restrained weeping, but a roar of pain: the release of someone watching the result of more than two decades of sacrifice collapse in less than a minute.
The loss, however, was not his alone.
On the ground floor was Doña Maria’s store and the man who made deliveries. Magali lived on the second floor. Doña Cris lived on the third. On the fourth floor, a neighbor was trapped and other residents managed to rescue her. She now sleeps with her loved ones in a gymnasium. Around 40 families lived in the six affected buildings.
Oskar repeats their names because he does not want this to be only his story. Perhaps he was not equally close to everyone, but they knew one another, greeted one another, and inhabited the same small universe. “It is a personal pain, but also a collective one,” he sums up.
There was no stable signal that Monday. To let people know he was alive, the journalist did what he knew how to do: he wrote. He sent an email to his boss and human resources explaining that he would not be able to work. In a few paragraphs, he described how the building had danced, how the debris had grazed him, and how he thought they were going to die. “It was my way of finding catharsis,” he said.
After so many years of telling other people’s stories, Oskar found himself writing his own.
He managed to pack three pairs of underwear, two pairs of shorts, three pairs of socks, two shirts—one of the Colombian national team—a pair of sneakers, and a microphone for his cellphone into a backpack. It was almost nothing and, at the same time, everything he owned.
The microphone seemed like one of life’s jokes: not even an earthquake would allow him to stop being a journalist. He now uses it to amplify his testimony and ask Colombia not to forget those who must start over. The sneakers, the only thing recovered from his apartment, were christened “the Highlanders”: the immortals.
Carolina did not even have shoes. Someone lent her a pair of sneakers and a tracksuit. Together they walked eight kilometers until they met Oskar’s brother. They drank water, hugged, and cried. That night they were able to eat and sleep under a roof at their relatives’ home in Manizales.
President Abelardo de la Espriella declared an economic emergency, decreed three days of national mourning, and announced a reconstruction fund, rental subsidies, and the mobilization of government resources. Colombia also began receiving humanitarian assistance and specialized teams from countries including the United States, Ecuador, and El Salvador, while other nations sent or offered food, medicine, financial resources, and rescue personnel. The official response has faced questions over the criteria used to accept some international missions.
While the country calculates the damage and organizes reconstruction, Oskar measures his loss in small objects: a toothbrush, a pillow, his wallet, his documents, a jacket, or the old clothes his mother keeps in Bogota, which now make up a large part of everything he owns.
Starting from zero means discovering just how much was taken for granted.
Yet amid everything that fell, something remained in place. On a wall in the apartment’s bathroom, surrounded by destruction, a photograph of Oskar and Carolina remained firmly in place.
He chooses to read it as a message: the house collapsed, but the home did not.
His family knows what it means to start over repeatedly: his grandmother raised four children alone; his father went bankrupt and had to rebuild his life; his in-laws’ restaurant burned down and they went back to work. Oskar believes almost any Colombian can tell a similar story: one of losing, enduring, and beginning again.
That is why he makes jokes even while standing before the ruins. Not because the pain is small, but because there are already enough reasons to cry.
Oskar looks toward what used to be his home and says that although today it looks like hell, someday it will once again be his paradise. He will have to start from scratch, like his neighbors, like so many Colombians. But he will not be alone: Carolina remains by his side, and that photograph is still standing, reminding him that what mattered most managed to survive.
The earth destroyed the concrete. The home, however, remained intact.
First published in Spanish by La Estrella de Panamá and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.