The phone rang while junior Jennifer Russell was frantically running around her bedroom collecting a few last-minute items for her semester abroad in Chile. It was the call she had been dreading for days. The call came from Russell's trip director, Tom Hook, who informed her that the trip would be delayed one week due to the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that had struck off the coast of Chile on February 27, about 270 miles away from the Harding campus in Vina del Mar. "Having it delayed was really disappointing," junior Ellen Erwin said. "We had waited so long, but after I remembered that my whole world had not just been destroyed by a terrible earthquake, my perspective changed a lot." Many team members began researching immediately, frightened by the devastating footage they had seen from the Haiti earthquake earlier that year. Several in the group bought toiletry kits for the locals they would encounter.They also packed extra clothes to leave behind for Chileans at the end of their trip. Unsure of what to expect, students were disturbed by the condition of the airport in the capital city of Santiago, but they were relieved to discover it would be the worst damage they would see throughout their semester. Only the week before the earthquake happened, an inspector had informed HULA directors that the student residence was one of the sturdiest in the country. "Once we were actually there, we felt nothing but excitement," sophomore Shelby Sweetser said. "There was a huge feeling of relief that we actually got to go at all! After that long of a wait, who wouldn't be ready?" Erwin said once everyone arrived, the entire group bonded because of their limited communication with friends and family back home. "We were all we had," Erwin said. "With exploring the Amazon and staying in huts and all our other adventures, we really pulled together like a family because we were so out of our element." According to Erwin, the "HULAgans," as they called themselves, felt their comfort zones dissolve quickly as they traveled through the Amazon to a small rural village, where students bought baskets and jewelry from the local women and interacted with a kindergarten class in the village. "The children sang to us and we sang back to them," Erwin said. "Everyone there seemed so satisfied with their lives. It was definitely an eye-opening experience." Through these experiences many HULA students watched their entire worldviews change. However, in spite of a scary start to the semester, neither the HULAgans' relationships with each other nor their excitement about being in Chile had been shaken. Heidi Tabor 4 2 student life
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