my beautiful mom with lidia at gabriel house :)

oh my. i'm so far behind it's overwhelming. still not back in ensenada so not a lot of pictures to post, but it was an incredible two weeks working with azusa pacific university and their mexico outreach program in ensenada and mexicali.

the camp that i was working at is located 40 miles outside of the epicenter...needless to say we felt the earthquake. i was playing scrabble inside an rv on sunday afternoon when it started shaking. someone i was with goes, 'aw someone's just messing with us and shaking the trailer.' then we looked up at each other, looked outside, and ran for the door. cars were rocking back and forth, alarms were going off, kids were crying, lampposts were swaying back and forth, and the earth was literally rolling around. it was so weird. at first it was a trembling feeling, but then it was like waves were moving through the ground. some people i was with got nauseous, and we heard that the initial earthquake lasted for almost 2 minutes. it was insane. the craziest part, though, was the aftershocks that happened all week. there were hundreds. some of them were just a couple seconds of the ground quivering, and it was hard to tell if it was an earthquake or not. other times we had to decide if it would be over soon or if we needed to evacuate the building we were in.

we went into town the next day and saw lots of damage...mostly broken store windows and some roofs that had caved in or fallen down. there was a lot of water damage from water being pushed up through the ground, but only 2 deaths.

we worked at the zoo the next day, helping clean up, and the damage there was pretty crazy. there was a new walkway that had recently been commissioned by the president's wife, and it was absolutely destroyed. just split right in half. we heard that a tiger and a hippo got out while there were 15,000 people at the zoo as the earthquake was happening. they caught them and no harm was done, but even the day after as we were walking around cleaning up there were birds everywhere who had gotten out of the aviary exhibit and were just hanging out all over the zoo grounds. it was kind of funny to see random peacocks walking around the playground...

this is at the zoo...this used to be a beautiful path meandering along the water, but half of it has fallen into the lake...and that's concrete, not dirt.

i miss my gabriel house kids so much. sonia was in the hospital but is doing a lot better and is back at gh. regular updates, i promise, once i'm back there on wednesday!