Belen residents Pete and Hortencia Torres, and their friend Marie Sedillo, a Los Lunas native, got more than they bargained for when they vacationed in Chile.

The three, along with millions of others, were literally rattled from their beds last month when an 8.8 magnitude earthquake shook the South American country.
The friends had planned for a vacation in Chile a year ago. They left New Mexico on Feb. 15, and flew into Santiago, the capital of Chile, for their long anticipated visit.
They traveled south by rental car, stopping in small towns, including Puerto Montt, Puncon, Temuco and Valparaiso, staying in hotels and bed and breakfast inns while taking in the sights and culture.
“The vegetation is beautiful,” said Sedillo. “The homes are colorful, yellow, green, blue, and they use adobe, like us, not brick.”
“It’s incredibly beautiful,” said Pete Torres. “The lakes and mountains. We walked around and went horseback riding.”
“It’s really a great country,” added Hortencia. “Wonderful people.”
Their idyllic vacation was about to end with a bang, however.
In Valparaiso, about 70 miles north of Concepcion, the day before they were scheduled to return home, the Torres’ were shaken awake in the middle of the night.
The Chilean earthquake occurred at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, February 27. The earthquake was so strong it rotated the Earth’s axis by a degree, said Pete Torres.
“All we could do was sit and stare at one another,” he said. “It lasted two and a half minutes.”
The small bed and breakfast inn,  The Brighten, is built on stilts and solid granite.
“Rocks don’t feel very solid in an earthquake,” said Sedillo.
“We thought, any minute it would just fall apart,” said Pete. “You could hear people screaming outside.”
“It was a full moon, and I had trouble sleeping,” said Sedillo. “I felt the tremors before the earthquake. They got harder and harder, stronger and stronger. I could hear glass breaking and things crashing. Everything that hung on the walls fell off. I just froze there in bed. Then it started to slow down.”
“We opened our window,” said Pete. “Outside, you could see the lights going out on the hillside.”
The full moon eerily illuminated the dust the earth had shaken up, which was rising from the ground, he said.
Sirens were going off and people went outside in their pajamas, some in their underwear, said Sedillo.
The base of the old fashioned pedestal bathroom sink in Sedillo’s room broke and fell over, and the commode’s water tank cover came off.
Throughout the city, debris lay scattered from the violent quake.
The earthquake was felt in Santiago, and an eight-foot six-inch tsunami was recorded in southern Chile near Concepcion.
“There were some good little waves here, but we were about 400 yards up from the seashore,” said Pete. “Further south is where most of the damage occurred. The epicenter was at Concepcion.”
The next day, the Torreses’ and Sedillo walked throughout the city,  dismayed by all the damage.
“We walked down to the water. Windows and pieces of buildings were all over the ground,” said Pete. “We didn’t have light until three o’clock Saturday. When we turned the TV on, they had total coverage of the entire area.
“The Route No. 5 Pan American Highway, a super highway — all the bridges had collapsed. Cars fell off, people drove off and piled on one another,” he said. “A huge, 20,000 ton fishing boat came into the city (a small village in southern Chile), about a mile from the water.”
Transportation had stopped. The airport was closed, and no trains or buses were running. The three travelers would not be leaving as planned.
They surveyed other nearby small towns in the area, and went back to Santiago to hang out at their hotel until they were able to fly back home.
On Thursday night, March 4, was the first flight out, and they were on it.
Safely home, the Torreses’ gratitude has spurred a desire to hold a fundraiser for the people of Chile.
“We also want to thank all those who prayed for us,” said Pete.
“I feel so blessed, and I thank all my family friends for their prayers,” said Hortencia.
The fundraiser will be held at the Torreses’ restaurant, the Luna Mansion Landmark Steakhouse, from 3:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday, March 11. They will donate half of all sales to the American Red Cross for Chile relief.
Farther north, and earlier this year, an earthquake of a lesser magnitude caused even greater death and destruction in Haiti.
The country of Haiti in February 2010 was a far different place than the one that Pastor Jude Fournier visited in 2003.
Fournier, a pastoral counselor with Hospice of New Mexico and a resident of Los Lunas, recently took a trip to Haiti to lend a helping hand to the victims of the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter was near the town of Leogane, abouty 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
“The image that has stayed with me is of a woman’s leg dangling over the edge of a forklift that was carrying her body to a mass grave,” Fournier said. “Do you know how I knew it was a woman? Because she still had a shoe on.”
So many have died in the earthquake that they are using forklifts to unearth the bodies, and are using dump trucks to haul them off to a mass grave, he said.
“It was very emotional,” Fournier said.
Fournier sits with the dying to comfort them in his work for Hospice, and he tries to help them die with dignity, he explained.
“But there was no dignity for those who died in Haiti,” he said.
Fournier is no stranger to disaster areas. He went to Honduras and Nicaragua after hurricane Mitch hit in October 1998. In 2005, he went to help in Sri Lanka after the tsunami in December 2004, and he’s done some work with friends in the Village of Malawi in Africa. 
The pastor offers comfort, counseling and manual labor to people in need.
A lot of Fournier’s time in Haiti was spent with the orphaned children.
“I didn’t speak the language, Creole French, but they would follow me around,” said Fournier. “We played games and sang songs. Two of the Maryknoll nuns from the Sisters of Maryknoll Missionaries that I was working with spoke the language.”
“It’s poverty that kills,” says Fournier, “not earthquakes. It’s cheap construction materials that make homes easily destroyed.
“In San Francisco, they had an earthquake of the same magnitude as Haiti, but only 63 people were killed. About 250,000 were killed in Haiti. It’s the poor who are most in danger,” said Fournier.