EARTHQUAKE IN CHINANDEGA, NICARAGUA: SIGN MY SOUL BUT MY KNEES TREMBLED.
It was a night of medical guard in the ruined Hospital of Chinandega, Nicaragua.I had left the new inmates - I had already received - to handle the different departments like the hectic Emergency, gynecology, etc.
As I had done months before.I went to the room with beds where the male doctors rested and I started reading the newspaper La Prensa, of the opposition to the Sandinism, which we were strictly forbidden to read to the Cuban medical and paramedical personnel. Left by the Nicaraguan doctors, I kept them under a mattress in the afternoon to read it where nobody bothered because it brought very interesting articles about Cuba and unmasked the Cuban interference in the Central American country.
Suddenly I thought about earthquakes without there being a plausible reason. I remembered that the place to shelter in case of strong tremor, was under the lintel of the doors. I looked at the door. It seemed strong. I would stand and protect myself. I devoted myself to reading an editorial about the secret life of Fidel Castro when suddenly a stampede filled the space and the earth began to tremble.
There is no sensation that describes what it feels like when the earth, firm at our feet without feeling itself by habit, is no longer firm and one staggers from side to side.
I forgot the lintel of the door and terrified I ran to the garden that was in front. In my stampede I knocked down a barrel full of broken glass. I do not know where my body took the strength to knock it to the other side. I staggered in the garden while listening to a group of women screaming.They were the mothers of the children admitted to the Respiratory room and whose door was dislocated and could not be opened while the two nurses on the other side were pressing and hitting in the opposite direction, the door was not opened by the two pressures. But there is nothing more powerful than mothers fighting like lionesses for their babies: they knocked down the door and crushed the nurses in the stampede.
Then the electric light went off, a powerful thunderbolt thundered that illuminated everything like a flash and began a torrential rain.I went to help my inmates. All scared but without abandoning their labors. Nobody slept all night.
The next morning, when I left the guard to the house of the Cuban doctors, I observed the ravages of the night tremor. As always, houses of the homeless poor, people in the streets preparing a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe. And finally, I saw the famous Virgin so venerated by the locals, doubled in two, almost broken but with her divine face looking at the street.
And in their mansions, removed from the Somocistas, in the luxurious suburbs of Chinandega, the Cuban FAR and MININT officers did not even notice the incident.
Orlando Vicente Álvarez
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