THE RUBBLE-ROUSER.

• Author: Kephart, Beth
• Position: Rebuilding after earthquake in Santa Tecia, El Salvador

THE MATRIARCH OF A COFFEE FARM SETS OUT TO REBUILD HER HOME AND TOWN AFTER THE DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE IN EL SALVADOR

On the morning of January 13, 2001, in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the earth parted its jagged jaws and roared. My mother-in-law was parking her jeep in her carport when it happened. She was returning from a baptism and looking ahead to the afternoon when she heard the bellow and felt the pavement beneath her move. What had been solid became liquid ooze. What had been level rose like molten concrete waves, so that she went up and down but not forward as she ran toward an open space where only sky was at risk of crashing down. Nora, my mother-in-law, is sixty-eight, a divorcee with a bad leg. She wore her best church dress as she ran along the ground that had gone vertical in an instant.

Down the street, meanwhile, in a neighborhood of Santa Tecla called Las Colinas, mansions were tumbling from the sky, plunging from their mountain berths in a storm of dust and drama. Whatever was in their path fell prey--the clustered houses that sat on the mountain's lower face, the children spinning tops in the narrow streets, the idle conversations between neighbors. Before there was time to look up and run, a swath of suburbia was swallowed whole, entombed in a mudslide that stopped six blocks short of Nora's front door. Those who were saved were saved because of luck--because of an errand that had taken them away from home, because of a traffic jam that had delayed their return, because of a plate of hot tortillas they were delivering to a neighbor. Because of a baptism that had ended on time, not minutes later, when the cathedral would be lying in a smolder.

Central America is a noisy land--opinionated, self-serving, notoriously dissatisfied with its own design. At least six times, between 1545 and 1798, earthquakes shook El Salvador's capitals to the ground, like so many dogs shaking their coats to remove the wet. Volcanoes blew, turning hillsides into rivers of red lava. Lakes disappeared and new mountains warped up in their place. Revolutions coincided with eruptions of every geophysical confabulation. In the mid-1960s, the earth knocked against itself in the middle of the night, and,my husband, eight years old at the time, yanked his youngest brother from the crib and ran them both to safety on roiling ground. In 1986, a few months after I had returned from my first visit to El Salvador, a massive earthquake toppled the country's...