Five years ago, I had an opportunity to visit Italy. My high school had a program for traveling to Europe, as some bigger schools do. I spent one week across the pond touring, admiring the architecture and taking as many pictures as I possibly could. That was the one vacation I actually consistently took pictures. When I got home, I made two scrapbooks: one for myself and one for my grandparents who funded the trip. The requirement for the money? I had to write in a journal every night about my experience that day. Easy as pie, and way more rewarding. When I look back through those pages, I can't help but be humbled by the fact that I got to experience such an amazing and enriching adventure through the Italian countryside
Last week, on August 24th, I saw the headline “Central Italy Earthquake: Death Toll Rises to 120.” My stomach vaporized and my heart nearly jumped out my mouth. Italy is one of the European countries I hold close to my heart (for what seems like obvious reasons to me). I hold a few others like Germany and France & Austria and England. I'm not huge on geography, so at first, I saw rapid images in my mind's eye, replicas of pictures I took on my trip altered drastically by destroyed buildings. Hundreds-of-years-old architecture reduced to rubble. My imagination sprang to the destruction of the home of the Renaissance -- all of this happening in the span of a few milliseconds. I dug a little deeper and discovered that Rome was safe and relatively unharmed, though they felt the shaking of the earthquake 100 kilometers away from the mountainous epicenter: the villages of Amatrice, Accumoli, and Pescara del Tronto.
Seeing these three
village names at first brought me a small puff of relief, as they
weren't any of the three major cities I visited: Rome, Florence, and
Venice. My firsts thoughts were selfish, I'll admit. I was grateful
that my part of Italy had stayed intact, as though the safety of the
cities had preserved my experiences there. But in the next moment,
reality caught up with me. The village of Amatrice, voted one of
Italy's most beautiful areas last year, was destroyed. The Mayor of
Amatrice himself said that “half the town isn't here anymore.” I
realized that my Italy was never in danger -- it's safely stowed inside
the scrapbooks and meticulous photographs. The focus needs to be on
the families that were lost and broken. We need to support our
brothers and sisters in Italy, because it is their Italy that
crumbled last week.
Above is the
clocktower of Amatrice, its time stopped at the moment the magnitude
6.2 earthquake struck. A quake whose tremors were felt up to 155
miles away from the epicenter. With more than 2,000 aftershocks, a
couple of which were nearly as strong as the initial quake, 290
people died and 2,600 people were left homeless. This tragedy has left
Italy, and much of the first world, in turmoil. How much more hauntingly poetic can you get?
I'm beginning to feel like 2016 really could be the end of the world as we know it. The amount of negativity and disaster that has struck and spread feels unnatural. And all of us are helpless to stop it. But we can fight back and rebuild, which brings me to a very important point: the main factor behind this tragedy and how it could have been avoided is the lack of initiative in earthquake-proofing older structures in Italy. Entire buildings fell in on themselves and the families they held. The more urbanized areas withstand earthquakes better because of the retrofitting and preventative measures taken by the city. The citizens must get with the program here and protect their homes from these devastating seismic events or they'll be doomed to continue this cycle that's already come full circle since the deadly earthquake of 2009 that took over 300 Italian lives.
Please, 2016,
grow a heart or something, would you?
