Students hold vigil for victims of Chile earthquake

Roughly 30 students and community members gathered on Saturday night outside the front entrance of Frist Campus Center for a candlelight vigil to honor those who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake that struck Chile on Feb. 27.

Chilean officials lowered the number of victims from 805 to 279 last Thursday, but noted that missing and unidentified victims could still change the death toll. Several coastal towns were swept away by the multiple tsunamis that followed the 8.8-magnitude earthquake, the largest to strike Chile since the 9.5-magnitude quake of 1960. Two aftershocks also struck Chile’s southern coastline, near the epicenter of the first quake, on Friday morning.

At the vigil, Rodrigo Munoz Rogers ’12, the event’s organizer, read two poems by Pablo Neruda aloud in Spanish. One poem celebrated what he loved about Chile, Rogers said in an interview after the service. “I thought it was appropriate, because Chile needs a new beginning now,” he explained.

Rogers, who is also the community outreach chair of Accion Latina, then read a note he received from his aunt’s friend detailing the current situation in Chile. The note recognized the catastrophe’s scale and acknowledged the desperation of residents in the capital city of Santiago.

The vigil concluded with a prayer read by Rev. Thomas Mullelly from the University’s Roman Catholic chaplaincy. Letizzia Wastavino, who is married to physics professor Robert Seiringer, then urged attendees to contribute to the relief efforts.

Wastavino and Chilean members of the Rutgers University community started a Facebook group to bring together the relatively small Chilean communities of the two universities and organize fundraising efforts.

“Chile is a very strong community; we help each other a lot, and we are used to tragedies,” she said during the service. “But when you are outside, you really feel the impotence that you cannot do anything to help.”

“I was there 25 years ago when 8.0 hit Santiago, and now it’s 8.8,” Wastavino explained in an interview following the vigil. “Nobody was expecting tsunamis, and whole towns just disappeared. We need to tell people how bad this was.”

Though about 60 students confirmed their attendance to the event Rogers created on Facebook, the group that gathered outside Frist was significantly smaller. “It wasn’t a huge turnout, but I was happy with it. It is the Saturday before midterms week, but you can’t plan for these things,” Rogers said.

Rogers noted that the earthquake struck just as Chilean president Michelle Bachelet prepares to step down, as president-elect Sebastian Pinera will be taking office this week.

“It is unfortunate that this happened during a transition of power,” Rogers said, “[but] Pinera has already appointed new people to deal with the disaster.”

Anna Moccia-Field ’10, who studied abroad in Santiago in spring 2009 and attended the vigil, said, “I didn’t expect it to be so religious at the end ... but it is Chile.”