Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Earthquake in Chile 4

Friday March 5th

We haven’t had much time recently to put an update on the blog as we’ve been busy and out of town. On Friday morning, we went to the Red Cross in Valdivia to see if there was anything we could do to help out. They said that they would call if they needed us. Well, they called that evening, and needed our help loading a transport truck with supplies to take out to a village that had not received any outside help yet, and had apparently been hit with a tsunami minutes after the earthquake. At 9pm we arrived at the Red Cross, and with all their volunteers, we all starting packing boxes out to the truck. There were about 400 prepared boxes to hand out to families and a number of extra boxes with miscellaneous goods, blankets, clothes, diapers, etc. By the time we were finished, the truck was full. Then the president of the Red Cross asked us to come the next morning with them to Lebú, and help out in whatever way possible. We already had some dog and cat food donations and some vaccines and dewormer that we decided to bring to administer if needed. Our intention was to help out where we could, but also to assess the community situation for impending problems in the area of veterinary public health. We had no idea what to expect.

At about 11pm or so, a professor from the university showed up with a dog food donation, and after we were finished packing the truck, he took us to the veterinary hospital to equip us with some essentials for the trip in case of emergency. We arrived home at about 1am, threw together our personal gear, packed our veterinary boxes with whatever we could find, and tried to sleep a bit before the alarm went off at 3:30am. I'll write Saturday's story tomorrow....



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