A natural disaster that occurred in my childhood and influenced my and my cohort’s development was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. October 17, 1989 at 4:40 p.m. I arrived for work at Allez, an athletic wear store in the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco. My shift started at 5:00 p.m. and at 5:04 p.m. the ground started to violently shake. What proceeded looked like a scene from a movie. People were running and screaming dragging their children by the hands trying to escape the mall. The 7.1 magnitude earthquake lasted 15 seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. When the shaking stopped I walked back to my dorm at San Francisco State University. When I arrived all of the dormitories were shut down so each building could be thoroughly inspected. All of the students wanted to call home to let their families know they were o.k, but the lines for the payphones were exceptionally long. Complete strangers were lending others their cell phones to make those calls. That night all of the students that lived on campus, and did not have place in the city to go, were forced to sleep in the parking lot. The conversations drifted between how lucky we were to be alive to what would we do with our school assignments that were due the next day.
In the morning it was determined that Verdugo Hall, the 15-story dorm I called home, was damaged beyond repair. The residents were only allowed to go in one floor at a time and retrieve their belongings. All of the residents had to find another place to stay while attending school. We were forced to rely upon our classmates, often acquaintances, to provide us with a place to stay. I slept on the floor of a friend’s dorm room for the remainder of that school year. This experience forced the students at SFSU to find support in classmates we hardly knew and lean on them in this time of need. We learned that our world could be turned upside down in an instant and it forced us to take a moment and appreciate what we...