The earth does not roar the way movies promise. There is no cinematic shriek of splitting continents, no slow-motion descent of towers crumbling into dust. When the ground breaks beneath a sleeping city, it sounds first like a freight train barreling through a living room, followed instantly by a sickening, wet wrenching of concrete and iron. Then comes the dust. A thick, grey fog that chokes out the stars and silences the night.
I remember the dust. I remember the way it settles on eyelashes, turning tears into mortar.
Colombia is no stranger to the volatile temper of the Andes. We live on a tectonic knife-edge, a geological collision zone where the Nazca and South American plates grind against each other in a slow, violent dance. We grow up knowing that the floorboards can become an enemy at any second. Yet, knowledge does not cushion the blow. When a magnitude earthquake tore through the region, fracturing homes and burying lives beneath rubble, the statistics quickly filled the news feeds: magnitudes, epicenters, estimated casualties, economic losses. Cold numbers. Safe numbers. Numbers that let people half a world away swipe to the next headline before their coffee cools.
Numbers do not bleed.
To understand what a three-day national period of mourning actually means, you have to step away from the seismographs. You have to walk into the makeshift camps pitched in public parks where families huddle under thin plastic tarps, watching heavy machinery claw at the ruins of what used to be their kitchen.
Consider a hypothetical mother named Sofia, whose story mirrors hundreds pulled from the wreckage in the disaster zones. Sofia had just tucked her seven-year-old son into bed when the walls buckled. In the span of a heartbeat, thirty years of a family's history—photographs taped to refrigerators, hand-me-down wooden chairs, the scent of morning coffee—turned into a gray crypt. When rescue workers finally reached her hours later, their hands raw and bleeding from tearing through rebar bare-handed, Sofia did not scream. She stared blankly at the dust clinging to her knuckles.
That blank stare is what three days of national mourning attempts to hold space for.
When President Gustavo Petro declared the three-day mourning period, flags dropped to half-mast across Bogotá, Medellín, and the hardest-hit rural municipalities. Public events were canceled. Music stopped bleeding from open doorways and car windows. For seventy-two hours, the nation collectively held its breath, trying to process a grief too vast for any single town to shoulder.
Mourning on a national scale is a strange psychological landscape. It forces a country to pause its relentless forward momentum. Economies stutter. Politicians stop shouting at each other across congressional floors. For a brief, agonizing window, the divisions that tear at a developing nation—inequality, political polarization, the daily struggle of inflation—are flattened by the sheer, indiscriminate equalizer of a natural disaster. The earth does not check your bank account before it drops your roof on your head.
Yet, grief is also intensely lonely.
I stood in a plaza days after the initial shock, watching volunteers pass out lukewarm water in plastic cups. The initial adrenaline of the rescue phase had given way to the heavy, hollow ache of recovery. This is the phase that cameras rarely capture. The rescue teams pack up their thermal imaging drones and search dogs. The international aid pledges turn into bureaucratic red tape. The survivors are left alone with the silence.
And that is the hidden cost of catastrophes like this. Buildings can be rebuilt. Bridges can be recast in steel and concrete. But how do you rebuild the quiet confidence of walking into your child's bedroom without wondering if the ceiling will hold? How do you convince a generation of children that the ground beneath their feet is a reliable foundation rather than a sleeping monster?
The Colombian spirit is stubbornly resilient, forged in a history of both geographic fury and human resilience. We are a people who know how to laugh through tears, how to share a single pot of sancocho with neighbors who lost everything, how to rebuild our homes with our bare hands while the cement is still wet. But resilience is not an infinite resource. It wears thin. It frays at the edges when disasters strike populations already stretched tight by economic strain.
As the flags rise back to full staff and the television anchors pivot back to the daily grind of politics and sports, the real work begins. The mourning period ends, but the empty chairs remain. The national grief transitions into private endurance.
Somewhere in the rubble of a collapsed adobe wall, a child's blue sneaker peeks out from beneath a slab of broken tile. The dust settles. The wind carries it away. But the earth remembers, and so do we.
