Five minutes out of Retiro and the Chileans at the back of the bus had already cut open a melon, filled it with wine, and drawn a Jack-o-Lantern face in red Sharpie on one side. Eight hours later, we pulled into Santiago.
Since the February 27th earthquake in Chile, we at VE Global have struggled to find tangible ways to get involved and help the people in areas that were harder hit than Santiago. As I mentioned in my last post, we helped out briefly at the Red Cross warehouse, but wanted to make a more significant commitment of time and labor. After investigating several options, we were lucky enough to snag spots on a bus with a student organization from the Universidad de Chile to Retiro, Chile, a town of 3,000 people 335 kilometers south of Santiago. Seven of us from VE joined the huge group of students, fairly unclear about how the weekend would play out but hopeful that we'd be able to make some sort of concrete difference.
From start to finish, the trip was a delightfully Chilean affair. First, we left Santiago about an hour after the stated departure time. After arriving in Retiro and standing around for 30 minutes, we got word that there would be an organizational meeting at 6:30 and that we would be free until then. Happy with the opportunity to stretch our legs, we decided to take a walk around the town and take a look at the damage.
Seeing the state of Retiro reminded me of walking through the intensely poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City where I volunteered with Safe Passage--both situations were so extreme, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I was physically there, seeing the conditions in front of me, not in a newspaper or a movie. The damage is incredible, and I can only imagine what the town looked like a month ago before any debris clearing had been done. We described it to our friends back in Santiago as looking like a war zone, holes where buildings used to be everywhere you looked.
We were welcomed to Retiro by this house, which sits directly across the street from the old school building where we stayed. While our building had only cracks, this house was absolutely destroyed:
Walls such as this one fell all around the town and those left standing have "Peligro" (Danger) spray-painted on them.
The most incredible site was this fallen water tower, which had knocked a second water tower down as it fell. We kept trying to imagine what the sound of this cracking and smashing to the ground was like.
In addition to the damages we saw, we also saw a lot of evidence of the work that's already been done to begin rebuilding the town. Two of our friends who had taken a previous trip to Retiro two weeks earlier told us that this house had been destroyed when they saw it on their last visit but had been rebuilt in the past two weeks. The wooden portion of the house to the right had previously been made of adobe and had completely fallen but was rebuilt beautifully to look like this:
We also saw quite a few "mediaguas" already completed around the town. Mediaguas are pre-fabricated temporary shelters that are currently being built all around Chile. They're 6 meters long by 3 meters wide and are meant to temporarily house a family of four for approximately one year, though they're meant to last up to ten. It was clear to us, however, while walking around Retiro, that these mediaguas would be in no way temporary for most of the families living in them. With winter fast approaching, the mediaguas are clearly better than the tents many families are living in, but picturing a family crammed in the tiny space for years and years is a hard thought to sit with.
It didn't take long for us to meet the precocious children of the town, who were both adorable and thrilled to meet some gringos. It's much less common for people in a town such as Retiro to hear English, especially as compared to Santiago, so they begged us to speak to them in English, laughing hysterically at the sound of it. They were also eager to have their pictures taken and showed no shortage of sass:
Upon returning to the school where we were staying for the "meeting," it became clear that a meeting was not going to happen any time soon, so we broke out a deck of cards and made friends with a few military guys who were finishing a week-long stint in Retiro building temporary houses. Although we could have gotten in a few hours of work that night, nothing seemed organized, so we played. Our two friends Meghan and Josh, whom we know through WorldTeach, had taken a bus to Retiro on Thursday evening and so had started working on Friday morning. At 10:30 p.m., they were still out working. This seemed crazy to us, the new arrivals on this trip, but Saturday would show us that logic was not exactly a factor in the weekend plans.
On Saturday morning, we headed to the property of a family who's house now looks like this:
Meghan and Josh had spent the evening digging holes for the pile-ons that made up the foundation of the "mediagua" we would build for the family and were excited to participate in the more exciting work of putting up the actual house. We started the day by nailing the floor into place, and by about 2:30 in the afternoon, the house was complete. Although it was gratifying to see the house finished, we were all a bit frustrated with our lack of skills and, due to the large number of people working at our site, the chunks of time we spent standing around feeling useless. There were moments in which it was important to have a lot of people, for putting up the walls, etc, so in some ways it was valuable for us to be there. Once we finished, we all felt confident that we would know what to do on the next mediagua and would be able to provide better assistance.
One of the best aspects of working on this house was seeing the family watch the progress. They were also extremely generous and put out fruit and snacks for us, even making incredible homemade empanadas (a traditional Chilean snack that's similar to a calzone but smaller and in some cases deep-fried).
Here are a few pictures of the process:
Here's our group, including the students from the Universidad de Concepción who were leading the project and the family that now lives in the house:
Once the house was completed, we headed back to the school where we were staying and realized that we had no plan for what to do next. It was early in the day, we were still eager to work, but there was no one to tell us where to go. So we ate a snack and played cards. We laughed about it because we had to, but it was ultimately frustrating that even on an earthquake relief trip we could feel confused about how to help. After an hour or so of hanging out, we decided to set out and see if we could find any of the other groups and see if they needed help.
After some aimless wandering, we finally got word from Meghan and Josh that the students we worked with earlier that day had found a poorly constructed mediagua that needed to be taken down and rebuilt. We all met up there and began the process of carefully taking down the walls and marveling at all the mistakes that had been made during the initial construction. Among the more amusing mistakes: the floor was not nailed down to the pile-ons in any way and, once we lifted up the floor, we found the instructions for building the mediagua on the ground underneath. By this point, of course, it was getting dark, and although logic might suggest that this type of work not be done in the dark, Chile suggests otherwise:
Once we decided to stop work for the day, we found Meghan and a couple other VE-ers who had gone to work on a different project digging holes for pile-ons for a temporary house for a little old man with a swollen knee who was currently living in a bus stop with a plastic sheet for a wall. They had found a few lights and were digging holes with heavy iron rods. There were close to 30 people at the worksite, it was past 9:00 p.m., and they were attempting to measure and dig holes that were meant to be evenly spaced. We attempted to get involved, and at one point were sent on a mission to gather a wheelbarrow full of rocks from a pile of rubble a few blocks down, but after completing that task and standing around for a while, it became clear that some of us should just leave and get some rest.
At about 10:00 that night, the meeting that was supposedly going to happen the night before finally began. For over two hours they went around and around in circles talking about issues that were occurred throughout the weekend. Of course the "issues" they were discussing weren't things such as "We shouldn't work past dark" or "We should organize our projects more efficiently to utilize the people we have," but rather, "People shouldn't party during the weekend, we're here to work," versus, "People should party because it's such hard work." I couldn't tell you much more about the meeting, though, as I was outside playing ping pong the whole time. Whoops.
On Sunday morning we headed back to the site of the poorly constructed mediagua to begin taking out the pile-ons and digging new holes. Before a few of us began work, however, we went to deliver a few boxes of donations to a family for whom the students from the Universidad de Concepción had built two mediaguas earlier in the week. The boxes held food, winter clothing and blankets, along with some chocolate Easter eggs we had brought with us. Watching the family open the boxes was one of the highlights of the weekend for me, especially watching the girls try on their new hats and look through the baby clothes and blankets for their little sister:
Here's the family along with a few of the students who built their mediaguas:
Back at our worksite, we spent our last few hours of work time finishing the new holes and putting in pile-ons. It was tiring work but we were all thrilled to feel as though we were actually doing something.
After cold showers and one last maté in the park, we got on the 3:00 (er, 4:30) bus back to Santiago. Despite the long ride and an extremely stiff neck, I felt energized by the weekend. Although we didn't do quite as much work as we thought we would, it felt like a good balance of work and play and by far a cooler weekend than we would have had in Santiago. I loved participating in the weekend with my VE friends, with whom I work every day but in a very different way. I was impressed by everyone's energy and sense of humor throughout the weekend and feel extremely lucky that I got to be part of the trip.
I'm hoping to get down south again soon, maybe even to Retiro. It can be tricky to find chunks of time to get away from our hectic lives here, but there's still a lot to be done in Chile and although we may not be great with hammers, we can learn and could probably spare a couple of fingers.
Thanks, Retiro, for a beautiful weekend!
