(Toll update: Gina tells me, on 12/08/03, that "scores of thousands missing" was wrong and needed correcting. The figure included double-counts. I've fixed this.) Algeria is a huge, beautiful and potentially wealthy country with a tragic recent history.
Since a bloody struggle for independence from France, won in 1962 and only acknowledged as a "war" by both parties in the 1980s, its people have seen more than anybody's fair share of official corruption and ruinous strife.
"Outrage", as Gina called this first scene on a street in the capital, has become part of daily life. Many Algerians, particularly young people, channel their fear and distrust of the government and its security forces into insurrection, armed, artistic or intellectual.
Descendants of those who lived there before the Arabs arrived -- they conquered north Africa in the 7th century -- also seek recognition of "minority rights".

On top of high unemployment, lack of housing and other economic and political woes, Algerians were wracked by a devastating earthquake in 1980.
Last May 21 (2003), a new one struck the Mediterranean coast, its epicentre in a "picturesque place", my colleague says, called Zemmoria.
More than 2,300 people died and 10,000 were injured, according to official figures at the end of that month, but thousands were missing.
The Algerian Red Crescent numbers the homeless, in a July 10 appeal, at 100,000.
The bulk of the population lives in the coastal region and the highlands inland from it, since around four-fifths of Algeria forms part of the northern Sahara.
Sent to cover the quake for AFP's English "wires", Gina saw the initial impact on this mosque in Zemmoria.

Much of the town of Boumerdes collapsed in a disaster which also wreaked havoc 50 kilometres (30 miles) to the east in the poorer districts of Algiers. The shocks struck further west in Tizi Ouzou, the "capital" of the nation's indigenous Berbers, who make up about 30 percent of the population.
The lopsided buildings across from the rubble are in Boumerdes.

Most of the pictures, she says in a covering e-mail, "are self-explanatory. The first one [in Algiers] is outside a building that was condemned after the 1980 earthquake, but its occupants have still not been rehoused."
Others were luckier -- until "the earth shook" (BBC eyewitness report).
Since building contractors routinely profit by ignoring construction regulations and using second-rate materials, new state housing in Zemmoria proved to be a stack of cards.

My friends at "the canteen", who come mainly from the Berber Kabylie region, gave me first-hand accounts of wheeling and dealing in the building trade. Most of them prefer a safer, DIY approach.
Gina, meanwhile, went in for a closer look at what she describes as "cheap iron rods".

"The one labelled 'Boumerdes crush' shows a building whose two lower floors collapsed; it had been the same height as the one on the left," Gina tells me.
At the time, she vividly described an apartment building turned "heap of death" in Reghaia, Algiers.
One of my buddies drily saw in the collapse of buildings on their foundations a metaphor for the once all-powerful National Liberation Front (FLN), "the aged pillars giving way."

Several aftershocks occurred as ordinary people joined rescue workers and scrabbled, often with the most rudimentary equipment, to dig family members, neighbours and friends out of their wrecked homes. For Algeria's surprisingly free press -- a "safety valve" permitted by shadowy generals who pull the political strings -- the disaster brought fury and despair (BBC monitoring) and a potential "political earthquake".

In recent comings and goings between Algiers and France, my Algerian friends have sadly told me of relations now considered dead. But while they challenge official casualty figures, they've also been happy to recount how local communities rallied to cope. Gina simply calls this one 'Boumerdes chain'.

People were not alone in losing their homes, if they had them. Parts of north Africa are renowned for storks, like this one nested atop the mosque in Zemmoria. "Sadly," Gina writes, "the minaret fell in a major aftershock."
Islam is widely practised. Much of Algeria's current violence, blamed on Muslim fundamentalists by the government and partly on the security forces by many others, began when the army in 1991 prevented disabused people from voting an Islamist party into power for lack of an alternative.
At its height, in the early 1990s, guerrilla warfare was accompanied by massive terrorist bomb attacks. There is no official death toll, but local journalists estimate it at more than 150,000.

Gina saw Zemmoria residents pack everything into vehicles to get out, calling this picture 'worldly belongings'.
Relatives have taken in some of them. The government swiftly promised around 1.6 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) to fund a rehousing programme. At "the canteen", they say the money may this time go to those it's intended to help, rather than the well-connected.
But by May 27, Gina reported for "the factory", more than a month before the authorities barred the foreign press (BBC again), most people had given up hunting for bodies and "bulldozers reigned supreme" (Relief Web).

Many thanks, Gina, for this record of your trip. If other people would like to contribute to this log as she has and as Béa did (after the Nigerian elections), such generous gifts are very welcome.