“Get up, quickly! Get in the doorway!”

These words greeted Elias Britton, 9, of Tuolumne, at 3:36 a.m. Saturday. He was sick, and his father had stayed with him through the night in his room in the family’s temporary home near Santiago, Chile.

The young boy woke in confusion as a deep and primal rumbling echoed around him.

“I thought it was my Dad shaking my bed. I was wrong,” Elias wrote. “Really he was just shaking me ... the world was shaking my bed.”

Elias Britton and his family were caught in the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked Chile in the wee hours of Saturday morning, the strongest earthquake to hit the country in 50 years.

His father, Zach Britton was downstairs with the four Britton children when the ground started to shake. His wife, Holly Britton, was upstairs.

When the quaking stopped and inanimate objects stayed where they belonged, Holly ran downstairs to join the family. The first of the aftershocks began not long after. In between quakes, Zach and Holly gathered supplies, certain that after a quake like that, they wouldn’t have fresh water for some time.

Zach Britton is the chief executive officer of Front Porch, a Sonora company that develops technology for sales to the telecommunications industry. He and his family swapped homes with Rodrigo and Cecilia Saavedra, whom they know through the mother of three foreign exchange students the Brittons housed.

They arrived in Calera de Tango, a suburb of the capital city of Santiago, in late December with plans to stay until May.

The Saavedras, hundreds of miles away in Tuolumne, could only watch the images that appeared on the television as scenes of devastation arrived from Chile.

“To be so far away is very hard,” said Rodrigo Saavedra. “It’s harder than being there, because you don’t know what’s going on, how your family is. You know nothing.”

The Saavedra family was just fine, and busy checking on their new neighbors.

“Within half an hour, (Rodrigo’s) dad came to check on us,” Britton said. “It was 4:30 in the morning, pitch black, no power and glass everywhere, and this guy comes to check on us. The Chilean people are so hospitable and generous.”

The Brittons couldn’t check on the effects of the quake until the sun rose. Heavy tiles from the roof had fallen, and surrounded the home in cracked ruin. Most of the damage was concentrated in the garage, Britton said.

“It was nothing compared to what’s going on in some communities,” Britton said.

By Saturday evening, power and water were restored to the home, and by Sunday morning, the local shop — roughly the size of Tuolumne Market, Britton said — was open.

“The owner greeted everyone with a handshake and a nod,” Britton said.   

The owner dealt with the problem of food hoarding in a simple manner, Britton said. He didn’t allow the use of shopping carts, just hand baskets. What you could carry is what you could buy.

“From my informal poll, the first order of business was bread. The next order of business was beer,” Britton said.

The clean-up operation is ongoing, and the aftershocks continue. This interview with the Brittons was cut short as an aftershock rippled through, temporarily knocking out the 3G connection to Skype that has been their connection to the rest of the world.

The Brittons don’t intend to cut their “sabbatical” short, despite the adverse conditions. Instead, they plan to stick around and help out with the relief effort.

“We appreciate the prayers and support we have received,” he added. “We will report back to the community as the local needs become more clear.”