When the Ground Moved: Panama after the Earthquake – Part 1 of 5

Panama is where I was born and spent my early childhood. So when I heard about the earthquake, the news felt close in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who has never watched a place they call home become a disaster zone.

I was not in Los Pozos when the ground moved on October 9. I arrived in Panama a few days later to support local colleagues working on the psychological response. The stories of those first moments belong to the people who lived through them. My part was to listen, to help where I could, and to learn from the people already doing the work.

What has stayed with me most is how difficult it becomes to do something as ordinary as go to bed.

We walk into our homes at night assuming the walls will hold. We put our children to sleep and turn off the lights. We may worry about a hundred things, but usually the roof above us is not one of them. Then the ground shakes, and that assumption disappears.

People described a deep, unfamiliar sound before the movement began. Then dishes falling, walls cracking, people trying to get outside, reaching for children and calling for older relatives who could not move quickly. And when the shaking stopped, they had to look at what it had done to the places they knew.

The aftershocks made it hard to believe it was over. Each one brought people back to those first moments. Families slept in yards, in hammocks, under tarps, in the backs of trucks. Some had damaged homes. Others had homes that were still standing, but they could not bring themselves to go back inside.

That distinction matters. Looking at a house from the road tells you very little about whether the family who lives there feels able to sleep in it.

As I listened, I kept coming back to the same question: what would help people feel safe enough to get through tonight?

Sometimes the answer was very practical. They needed someone qualified to look at the cracks in their walls and tell them whether they could return. Without that answer, a family could spend another night outside, frightened and exhausted, wondering whether going home would put their children at risk.

Food and water were arriving. Panamanians were responding with the generosity I know so well, sending supplies and showing up for one another. But in some communities, people said they already had more of certain supplies than they could use. What they were still waiting for was reliable information about their homes.

That stayed with me because it is so easy, when we want to help, to start with what we can send. Listening asks something else of us. It asks us to find out what people actually need, even when the answer is different from what we expected.

And sometimes what they needed was time with another person.

Volunteers told me about arriving in communities and asking people how they were managing. Some people began talking and found they had a great deal to say. Some cried. Others said very little. There did not have to be a particular outcome to make that time worthwhile. Nobody needed to be pushed to describe the worst moment of their life. They needed room to speak if they wanted to, and company if they did not.

I have provided Psychological First Aid and whatever support I knew how after the earthquake in Nepal in 2015, the earthquake in Morocco in 2023 and after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013. Those experiences were with me in Panama. They have taught me to take practical concerns seriously and to be careful about assuming I know what someone else needs. Having been in another disaster does not mean I know this person’s experience. I still have to ask. I still have to listen.

The psychologists I met were seeing children who would not let go of their parents, who woke up crying or were frightened to go to the bathroom alone. They described adults unable to sleep, startled by a passing truck or any sound that resembled the beginning of another tremor. Older people were facing damage to homes they had spent years building and caring for.

I thought about how tiring it must be to remain on alert through the day and then face another night without proper sleep. About trying to reassure your children when you are frightened yourself. About being asked whether everything will be all right when you do not yet know whether your own house is safe.

In those early days, people can be frightened by their own reactions, too. They may wonder why they cannot settle down, why they keep crying, or why a small noise makes their heart race. Helping someone understand that these reactions can follow a terrifying experience can ease an additional burden. They are already dealing with enough without feeling ashamed of being afraid.

And reassurance has to be accompanied by practical help. It is difficult to rest while you are unsure where your family will sleep. It is difficult to regain a sense of safety when you cannot get an answer you trust. The emotional response and the practical response are intertwined in people’s daily lives.

The figures in the reports give some sense of the scale: thousands of homes damaged, schools and health services affected, families displaced. The official figures cited in the October 14 reporting recorded twenty-seven injuries and one death. I am grateful the loss of life was not greater. But I worry that people reading a relatively low death toll will assume the needs are small, or that the worst is already over.

For a parent still sleeping outside with a frightened child, it is not over. For someone looking at a crack across the wall of a home they worked for decades to build, it is not over. And for the professionals and volunteers trying to help while managing their own worries and exhaustion, there is still a great deal ahead.

That is why I want to write about Panama.

This is personal for me. My life began here, and I care about what happens to its people. I also know that the people carrying this response will still be there when those of us who came to help have gone home. Local psychologists, volunteers, neighbors and community leaders were doing the work before I arrived. They will continue doing it after the attention fades.

Over the next four posts, I will share more about the health professionals I met, the different needs of the affected communities, and the strain on the people helping. I also want to explore what useful support can look like in the months ahead.

For now, I keep thinking about those families facing another night outside their own homes. I want us to keep paying attention to them. To ask what they need, to listen to the answer, and to stay involved long enough for our help to matter.