Pisco
In August of 2007, an earthquake almost completely destroyed the city of Pisco, Peru.
I arrived on September 15th. I have never experienced such a disaster. I had no idea what to expect. What the hell did I know? How was I supposed to help?
After taking the bus down from Lima I found myself in, well, a disaster area. I jumped off of the bus and into a cab with a Limeño named John Carlos. He was a technical engineer, there for a few months to do some repair work. While trying to absorb my new surroundings, we chatted a bit about what we were both doing here, etc.. As we drove towards the centro I noticed that only a very small portion of the main roads were paved. As we got closer the situation worsened. Only a handfull of the city’s buildings were still in tact. We drove over a path full of loose rocks. I saw no street signs. Many homes were made of adobe, some of bamboo. Some homes didn’t have a roof, others a floor. Since most of the roads weren’t paved, there was dust everywhere, I found it difficult to take a clean breath. We dropped off John Carlos and headed to PSF (Pisco Sin Fronteras) headquarters. I walked in and introduced myself to a couple of people and more or less got settled in. My bed was in what was dubbed “the hallway.” I kind of felt like I was reliving my first day of school…
My first line of duty was a project we called the French Bathrooms. A while back a French non profit gathered about $10,000 to build four bathrooms/showers for a squatter community called Caucato. The job had been going on since July. There were tons of questions in my head; it was kind of overwhelming. I was curious as to how useful these rebuilding efforts would be to reconstruct Pisco. When was the next earthquake? How strong were these new structures? Why are we building a septic system? Then reality sank in, not my own reality, but the Pisco reality. Yes, there would probably be another earthquake, in about 50 years. No, there wouldn’t be a sewage system because there was not enough money to fund it. Everyone was doing what they could to move on, be it septic system or bamboo huts–people needed help immediately.
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