A little over 24 hours ago, my world was rocked. Literally.
It seemed like a normal day on the race: we had just finished up our manual labor we were doing in the village for the day, and a couple of us were sitting around after lunch, chatting, the conversation not one unexpected of two racers. My feet were dangling of the edge of a tier of the mountain side, and the ground began to shake.
This might seem so crazy to some, but in a world of aftershocks from the first quake that hit just 17 days prior, most of us were quick to chalk it up to aftershocks. That was, until the ground began to shake hard, and keep shaking. I heard Dustin Mick (my squad leader) saying “get down, get down”. I watched building collapse as the quake hit further up the mountainside, and sat breathless because I just couldn’t believe it. I hear Dustin Mick say “Ya’ll, we just lived through an earthquake.” The conversations weren’t much more than “is everyone okay?” The shock of it all was there lkooo
The air was seemingly quiet after that moment, like somehow, the whole world stopped and wasn’t going anymore.
The reality of what that would mean for the coming hours and days didn’t hit me for a long time.
We had lived through an earthquake.
Quickly after that we learned we had just survived a 7.3/7.4 magnitude earthquake (for comparisons sake, the first quake that hit Nepal was a 7.9). That would change the course of what this month will look like for us; and for most of us, change how we looked at the world as we knew it for a long time.
To be continued…
