Stories from Appian Way: Magdalena Infante

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Transcript:

It was pretty scary to start looking at CNN Chile and CNN here and getting all this news and all this live forecast of what was going on. The images were shocking. It was the morning of February 27th, I was sleeping and I got a phone call from my friend – from my Chilean friend, who’s also studying here – and she says, “Did you know there was an earthquake in Chile?” Wow. So, we hang up and I immediately try to call my parents. So, I kept, the whole morning, trying to call my parents who were not … They were away from their hometown. That was impossible. I called them during the whole day and couldn’t connect with them. And, so I began to think of other ways to get some information about what was going on in Chile. And, so Facebook actually helped me a lot because people were beginning to post what was going on in Facebook. So I contacted the husband of one of my cousins who is American and lives in Chile, and he was sending messages to all of his friends. Through him I knew that everybody was OK in the family, and especially my grandma who I was especially concerned about.

The second day we … I realized we needed to do something to help. I was thinking, “Well, this is so bad. All the people that I know about have helped so much in the recent Haiti earthquake.” Right? So, I was like, “After that great disaster, I don’t know if we’re going to get much attention.” And so we wanted to get to the personal level and for that we thought we’re going to do it the Chilean way, which is about contacting people personally and sharing. We thought a nice way to do that is to share a very typical meal that is Chilean empanadas.

These are the empanadas; I have to give credit to Maria Paz who invented this idea. This is a typical Chilean dish, and we gave 300 empanadas to people that day of the event. If you want take a look, they’re pretty tasty. They’re basically a dough folded with a filling that gets fried or baked, depending on the case.

A lot of people came, and it’s amazing how the HGSE community in general…the people here are very generous in terms of helping others. We felt – and we’ve always felt from the beginning – that there’s a lot of support for students like us in these moments. And that people really care. In the end of the day you really realized how much you’re connected to your home country even if you are far away. On the other side, I also feel lucky to be here. Harvard is such a great place where there’s so many people you can contact to help Chile. So I’m really happy about that.