The water supply has been disrupted, and people carry with them their pails, buckets, and bottles of all sorts, waiting for the water truck to pass by. Yet again, we set up a simple clinic in the yard of one of the families. Most houses destroyed, they, too, live beneath the multicolored plastic sheets that now paint the Salvadoran landscape by the thousands. In many ways, that is the most pressing problem here, in this stricken village, like all the others. The uncertainty of it all.
Tremors come without warning.
The greatest earthquakes and the smallest rumbles all feel the same at the beginning. We try to imagine what it's like to lie there in the dark, under a plastic tarp, having lost everything but your life itself, and fear the moving of the earth. We've worked in areas such as this for years, and have seen thousands of children. But never before have we seen such looks of fear. Or been begged by children for something to help them sleep.