COLOMBIA: I Created A Safe Circle After A Deadly Earthquake

After a 7.4 earthquake shook Colombia, Milena and her brother opened a free embroidery circle in Medellín, giving people space to express what they were carrying together.

“All those fears — the ones that sometimes cannot be named in words — found their shape in the embroidery.”

On August 10, 2026, at 7:34 in the morning, several cities in Colombia lived through a shaking the ground had not delivered in more than 27 years, since the 1999 earthquake in Armenia, Colombia. It was a 7.4, and within a week it had reached 472 municipalities across the country.

I live in Medellín. We felt it here too, and for a few seconds our bodies and our sense of safety were at risk. But that risk was nothing next to what unfolded elsewhere: towns with catastrophic loss, people injured, people missing, homes and businesses that can no longer be inhabited.

In Medellín, the demand to return to normal arrived almost immediately. Still shaking, still trying to reach friends in the cities hit hardest, I could not find an answer to what "normal" was supposed to mean in the face of something that was not normal at all. I spent the days after repeating two sentences to myself: "I am safe, and, from that place of luck, what can I do for the people who are not?"

In all this, I am proud of something in Colombian culture: material aid for the most affected communities was mobilized fast and widely. But inside my own attempt to return to "normal," I kept running into people on the street, in the elevator, and on public transport, talking about what had happened without finding anyone to truly listen.

Something had moved in all of us that nobody could quite put into words. And that, I think, is where a disaster becomes a social event as well as a geological one. The buildings fall, and so do the scripts we normally use to hold each other.

That is where Refugio Creativo comes in. It is the project I run with my brother, self-financed and built on the conviction that psychology and art belong together. For this gathering, we worked alongside Somos Movimiento, a collective that helped us organize it. We decided to open a free public gathering in Medellín for anyone who wanted to do something with all of this pain, and to do it in community: to try to listen to each other, and to give each other strength.

That is how Bordando lo que hay en el corazón (Embroidering what you carry in your heart) came to be. We opened twenty spots. They filled in under two hours, and on Sunday, August 23, fifteen people showed up.

This city has dynamics that feel foreign to the culture of community we come from. I feel that gentrification has been quietly erasing those connections for years. For one afternoon, we got to inhabit public space again. To let whatever was still trembling underneath find a way out through the stitch, the word, the simple fact of sitting across from another person.

More than a month after the earthquake, what stays with me most is what the tremor revealed: that even inside a system that demands individualization, people are always looking for a way to connect with each other. To me, the pressure to consume and the cost of living here have only made those unconnected spaces more entrenched.

The earthquake didn’t only move our houses. It moved the idea of dying alone. Of watching the people we love die. Of losing what we have built with effort and what represents us. It even reached older wounds: abandonment, abuse, the isolation of feeling that our bodies can no longer inhabit the territory of this city the way they once did.

All those fears — the ones that sometimes cannot be named in words — found their shape in the embroidery. And the result was spectacular. One afternoon, two hours of registration, fifteen bodies in a circle. It is a small gesture against a very large current.

We can't yet offer this kind of open gathering as often as I would like. But it confirmed something about what collective care could look like at scale, if there were ever the infrastructure to let it be more than occasional.

So here's a small invitation, wherever you're reading this from: check in on someone today. Go beyond a quick "how are you" and take real time to listen. Call the friend you've been meaning to call. Sit with a neighbor for ten minutes without your phone. Ask someone how they're actually carrying what they're carrying, and then stay long enough to hear the answer. It doesn't take a disaster to need this — it just takes deciding, today, that someone's story is worth your full attention.

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