C L A S S N O T E S

A l umn i P r o f i l e

A SHAKY START TO TEACHING IN CHILE

Earthquake means new career decisions for alumna

Written by AMY DERBEDROSIAN

E

laine Shaver ’09 describes her life as a bit of an ad- venture lately, but that may be an understatement. When the massive 8.8 earthquake hit Chile on Feb. 27, Elaine was there. Elaine was a veteran of California tremors—as

an undergraduate, she’d been in a basement robot- ics lab during a magnitude 6.0 earthquake—but even 200 miles away from the epicenter, she found the shaking in Chile impressive. The early-morning tim- ing of the Chilean earthquake made it all the more startling. “I was staying in Santiago, the capital city, and was sound asleep

when the quake hit,” Elaine reports. “It lasted about a minute before it got really strong, but, boy, then it got strong with a vengeance! My roommates and I ran outside to wait out the rest of it, and though we knew we’d just had a pretty big earthquake, we had no idea of its real strength or the scope of its impact.” Elaine had been due to begin teaching English at the Concepción,

Chile, campus of DuocUC in four days. The institution founded by the Catholic University of Chile to provide technical, vocational, and pro- fessional education for university students, had hired her soon after she earned a certificate from the Boston Language Institute in teaching English as a foreign language. The earthquake put her plans on hold. Instead, Elaine remains in Santiago, where, she notes, “the dam-

age really wasn’t as extensive as the news would have you believe, especially in my part of the city… It was difficult to comprehend how little damage there was, knowing that the magnitude of shaking we experienced in Santiago—estimated at around a 7.5—was the same or stronger than the quake that devastated Haiti so recently. It gave me a profound and tangible appreciation for sound structural engineering practices.”

On the afternoon of the earthquake, Elaine saw small piles of fallen brick and plaster in front of many buildings. More noticeable were the broken streetlights, whose

shattered globes littered downtown sidewalks, and the badly damaged Museo de Bellas Artes (pictured above), which Elaine says is one of the city’s finest museums and housed in a “lovely old building.” As she surveyed the city that day and in the days that

followed, Elaine was most aware of its silence. She explains, “People walked around in silence, still stunned, still taking stock of the damage. Shops were closed. The metro wasn’t

running. There was a very powerful sense of national shock and loss that kept people inside and quiet.” Yet Elaine notes that Chileans started picking up the pieces very quickly, both

literally and figuratively. Within a week of the earthquake, Chile held a national telethon that raised the equivalent of $30 million U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, the aftershocks have continued, including a magnitude 6.9 on March 11, a mag- nitude 6.7 on March 16, and several others with magnitudes greater than 5.0 more recently. A month after the earthquake, Shaver still didn’t know the extent of the dam-

age at the Concepción campus where she had expected to teach; getting infor- mation from that area of Chile remained difficult. But DuocUC had quickly de- cided that no new teachers would be sent to Concepción for the next six months. Instead, the institution offered administrative positions to Shaver and others. Rather than using her skills as a computer science graduate to manage

DuocUC’s website, Shaver opted to look for another position teaching English in Chile. With student enrollments lower nationwide after the earthquake, Shaver’s job search is challenging even in minimally damaged Santiago. Ultimately, Elaine wants to return to the United States to join Teach for Amer-

ica. She hopes her teaching assignment will take her back to sunny California. But that is her plan for 2011. She notes, “Before then, I’m a little up in the air.”

Amy DerBedrosian is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, Calif.

S P R I N G 2 0 1 0 H a r v e y Mu d d C o l l e g e 3 1

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