WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Alessandra De La Correa spent six agonizing hours wondering whether her parents were alive after two devastating earthquakes struck Venezuela's coastal city of La Guaira, collapsing buildings, killing members of her family and leaving survivors searching through rubble for anything they could salvage.
Her best friend since high school, Carla Alvarado, who now lives in West Palm Beach, woke De La Correa with nonstop phone calls in the middle of the night after the earthquake struck last week.
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"This has been really devastating," De La Correa said. "It's also pretty difficult to be far away when you know your family members are hurting and they need your help, and you cannot really be there for them physically."
Her parents survived, but several relatives did not.
"We lost my little cousin, she was 17 years old. We also lost my grandma, and we lost my uncle and his wife as well," she said. "It has been really hard, but we're also very grateful that we still have some family members left."
The losses came just weeks after De La Correa returned from her first visit to Venezuela in several years. She had traveled there to announce that she and her partner are expecting a baby later this year.
The family gathered together for Mother's Day during her final weekend in the country.
"We got to spend Mother's Day all together as family, and I am so grateful for that time now," she said. "These past days that I've looked at the photos and the videos and us laughing and having fun and being together, I'm just extremely grateful that we got to experience that, at least with my grandma."
Among those killed were her 17-year-old cousin, Claudia, who had planned to study dentistry after high school.
"She basically had her whole life ahead," De La Correa said. "When you're 17 years old, you just want to build your dreams and follow them and reach them, and it's just really tragic."
Claudia, a volleyball player, had been rehearsing a dance routine with classmates when the building collapsed, De La Correa said.
Her uncle, a former Navy member, searched through the rubble in darkness after the quake knocked out electricity across the area. When he found Claudia dead beneath the debris, he stayed behind to help rescue her trapped best friend.
"They were trying to take her out for around 13 hours," De La Correa said. "She was asking, 'Don't let me die here.'"
But the girl later was killed after another section of the structure collapsed during rescue efforts, De La Correa said.
The earthquake also destroyed her parents' home and businesses.
"We lost everything," De La Correa said. "So we basically are left now with no home, no memories, no work."
Her mother's children's clothing store had been located inside a shopping mall that collapsed entirely.
"She would have died if she was there," De La Correa said, explaining her parents survived only because they had closed the store early and were driving home when the earthquake struck.
Her uncle's apartment building also collapsed moments before he entered it.
"There is nothing left," she said. "It looks like a sand castle. It's just sand and destruction."
For De La Correa's parents, the destruction has revived memories of another deadly disaster in the same region in the '90s, when they also lost nearly everything.
"Back then, you had the energy to do it, because they were 34, 31 years old," she said. "But now you're over 60, and you have to start again."
Thousands of miles away in Palm Beach County, Carla Alvarado watched the disaster unfold, struggling with sleepless nights and constant anxiety as messages poured into family and WhatsApp group chats.
"At first I thought it was a small tremor," Alvarado said. "Then everybody started saying, 'A building collapsed here, another building collapsed there.'"
When she heard La Guaira had been hit hardest, she immediately thought of De La Correa.
"As the days were passing, she was finding out, 'We found the body of my grandmother,' 'We found my little cousin,'" Alvarado said. "So we were like, 'Oh my God, we need to help this family.'"
Feeling powerless from abroad, Alvarado launched a GoFundMe campaign to support De LaCorrea's relatives.
"As Venezuelans abroad, we feel a little bit useless in this situation because we cannot go and help with our own hands," she said. "So I thought, what can I do?"
The campaign, which aims to raise $15,000, is quickly spreading.
"I'm deeply grateful," Alvarado said. "I feel proud of my community, of Venezuelans, even the people on the ground helping strangers."
De La Correa said the support from friends and strangers has become a lifeline as her parents return daily to the ruins of their apartment building searching for salvageable belongings.
"They managed to recover some clothing, photos and documents," she said. "But my uncle couldn't even recover one fork from his apartment."
For now, the family's focus is survival and rebuilding.
"Our main effort right now is just to try to get some donations to cover necessities like food and shelter and clothing," De La Correa said.
Alvarado said helping has also become a way to cope with the emotional weight of watching her homeland suffer from afar.
"The only way to try not to get consumed by this situation is doing something," she said. "I'm just doing what I can."
But for De La Correa her friend offering aid from another content means everything.
"She has been like an angel."
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