Chile Earthquake

Blog Post:  Posted July 22, 2010, 7:34 pm by Sandra Castañed...

Chile's first Comfort for Kids programs hold closing ceremony

Country: Chile

Topics: Children, Displacement, Emergencies, Health

On a chilly winter day in the community of Penco, we held the closing ceremony for the Comfort for Kids program, implemented by the Educacion Popular en Salud (or EPES) Foundation with the support of Mercy Corps. Approximately 150 of the 200 children that participated in the program in this community (there are more than 1,000 children participating in the entire program) showed up for the celebration accompanied, for the most part, by a significant adult — mother, father, grandfather, grandmother or aunt.

Local authorities in attendance included representatives from the mayor´s office, the Talcahuano Health Service and The Lirquén Hospital Local Development Council, as well as a Senator and Council Representative of the community. The ceremony was covered by journalists from the local government as well as the Talcahuano Health Service.

During the ceremony, the coordinator of the Penco Department of Health and the community Senator offered a few words, and two children shared their experience of participating in the Comfort for Kids workshops.

The Penco school hall was brightened with colored balloons representing each group of children from the program — in total, eight groups corresponding to the sectors of Nueva La Greda, Lomas del Conquistador, La Fech, La Ernita, Penco School, Jorge Montt School and Baquedano. Some groups came prepared with banners, thanking EPES for their support, others with drawings alluding to the hope for reconstruction after the disaster.

Each group was represented by one or two children who received, on behalf of the whole group, the diplomas made by EPES and handed out by the Senator and Council Representative and Department of Health. EPES also gave a certificate to and acknowledged the work done by the 13 facilitators who conducted the workshops, who after being voluntarily trained had the time and motivation to work in their communities with the children affected by the earthquake and tsunami. At this time a special atmosphere was created, as each facilitator was named, the children chanted the names of their “tias” or “aunts” as they were affectionately called.

Finally, the ceremony ended with a small celebration where all the children — together with their families and invited guests — enjoyed a delicious cake, juice and soft drinks.

Blog Post:  Posted June 3, 2010, 12:01 am by Karen Anderson

"Now I know what to do if it happens again"

Country: Chile

Topics: Health, Emergencies, Education, Displacement, Children

It’s been a marathon of logistics and preparations, but we are now bringing our tailored-for-Chile version of Mercy Corps workshops to some 800 boys and girls in the towns of Talcahuano, Penco, Coronel, Hualpén, San Pedro de la Paz and Chiguayante.

The coastal towns that ring the city of Concepción were dealt a double blow on February 27: a pre-dawn earthquake of unprecedented power (8.8 on the Richter scale, among the highest ever recorded) followed by three towering walls of water.

In launching the “My Earthquake/Tsunami Story” (Comfort for Kids) and “Moving Forward” sports program in schools and community centers, we’ve heard a lot of personal accounts from the parents, teachers and community leaders we’ve trained as mentors, and from the children themselves. Even children whose homes escaped damage tell vivid accounts of relatives or schoolmates losing homes or fleeing from the flooding.

But as the workshops advance, we’re beginning to hear something new from the children.

Abigail Figueroa, age 5, says “I love to read and draw and here I can get over being afraid, especially about tsunamis.”

Camila Flores, 10, finds the workshop “lots of fun. We write in our workbooks, color, paint our family, draw what happened to us in the tsunami the houses in the water, what we felt.”

“While it was happening, I thought we were going to die,” she says, “but now we learned that it was an earthquake.”

“The earthquake was a surprise for me, because afterwards, everyone came together, all the neighbors came by to see how we were, people went door to door to see how everyone was doing.”

Wepu Re Pu, Talcahuano

Abigail and Camila are participants in one of two workshops led by Millaray Casteñeda Meliñan in Talcahuano. “How many of you felt that your mother or father was angry, anguished, sad, irritable?” she asks the children, ages 7 to 11. “Remember that none of these things is your fault.”

The workshop is organized by Wepu Re Pu, a new cultural association for urban Mapuches. The name means “building roads” in Mapudungun. Co-founder Ivonne Nahuelpan explains how the workshop entwines two types of recovery: emotional and cultural.

Interspersed with the workbook activities, Millaray teaches the children songs, greetings and numbers in Mapudungun. Many children know the legend of Tren Tren and how, in ancient times, he helped the Mapuche run into the hills as the waters rose. “To us, this is a story about surviving a tsunami,” says Ivonne.

“This program has been a gift to us,” she adds. “Our children suffered greatly. They need emotional support. Our culture and cosmovision can help them, too.”

Villa Centinela, Talcahuano

The Villa Centinela Community Hall is located in a housing project in the hills of Talcahuano. Mentors Mery Caro and Herminda Guzman, mothers and community leaders, are eager for the first session to being. While waiting for the children to arrive, we discuss recent news reports that have everyone talking: researchers say that the region can expect a grade 7 aftershock within the next two months.

Some 20 children show up, accompanied by their mothers. The mentors explain how the sessions will help children reestablish the four pillars of feeling safe: People, Place, Ritual and Routine.

They show mothers and children the backpack that each child will receive, packed with pencils, eraser, case, flashlight, a stuffed animal, toothbrush, toothpaste and the "My Story" workbook.

Reestablishing routine is very important, one of the mentors explains. “I bet some of you forgot to brush your teeth after the earthquake,” she chides the children, before catching herself. “Of course, none of us had water then, either,” she laughs.

Rosa Medel Elementary School, Coronel

When the coalmines closed in Coronel, fish factories moved in, bringing poorly paid jobs and a terrible stench. The Rosa Medel Elementary School is located across from a cannery and next to a coal-fired power station in Caleta Lo Rojas, where Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES) ran its first program nearly 30 years ago.

Of the school’s 230 students, 30 lost their houses.

This poor school was made poorer still once it lost windows, walls and most of its bathrooms. The indoor gym where “Moving Forward” is being held was repaired with a donation from local industries.

We meet with school principal Carlos Segundo Torres, who reports that his students are still afraid — especially when mothers run to the school to fetch them with every aftershock. But students and parents are growing less apprehensive.

Second grade teacher Jovina Torres credits the workshops for calming nerves. “Just the other day, there was a tremor and the children all looked up at me as if saying ‘OK, we can deal with this.’”

Math teacher José Alarcón took the EPES/Mercy Corps training and then prepared elementary and PE teachers to conduct the My Story and Moving Forward programs. Some 60 parents attended the launch, Alarcón tells us, which was “an absolute success. You could see it on the faces of the children.” The volley and soccer balls, a net, a whistle, t-shirts and more are much-appreciated addition to the school’s meager sports gear, too.

Backpacks with EPES and Mercy Corps logos are all around the schoolyard. But for most children, one item is stored safely at home: the flashlight.

“I take mine to bed with me,” says Carla Copeli, a third grader, “and my mom sleeps there, too.”

Blog Post:  Posted April 20, 2010, 8:02 am by Karen Anderson

Three-day training session in Chile brings mentors on board

Country: Chile

Topics: Emergencies, Education, Displacement, Citizen Involvement, Children

The Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES, Mercy Corps' local partner) Center is humming with activity. In its community hall and playground, scores of school teachers, psychologists, social workers and community leaders are crawling, jumping, pulling, pushing and cheering one another in games with names like Treasure Chest and Streets and Avenues.

It lifts my heart to hear these laughs and shouts. Six weeks ago in this same playground, we were distributing emergency health kits and water to stunned families in a state of shock. Their homes and livelihoods had collapsed or been washed out to sea, looting was rampant and an 18-hour curfew was in place.

Today is the third and final day of the Mercy Corps training sessions here at the EPES Center in Hualpén, one of many Chilean cities devastated by the February 27 earthquake and tsunami.

Trainers Eric Loc and Fabian Vinces worked with children after Peru’s 2007 earthquake. As this was their first visit to Chile, they spent a week visiting the areas hardest hit by the catastrophe, adapting the Mercy Corps programs to central and southern Chile’s triple disaster of earthquake, tidal wave and unrest.

They brought with them two programs: “Comfort for Kids,” based on storytelling for children age 7 to 10, and Hacia Adelante (Moving Forward) based on games and sports, for children age 10 to 14.

One of the first changes to be made was the name of program. EPES adopted the term “recuperación emocional” (emotional recovery) to describe these new programs for psycho-social support to children to deal with post-earthquake trauma. But we were so taken with the idea of providing comfort that we packed the “Telling My Story” workbook into a backpack with crayons, toothpaste, toothbrush, a flashlight and a stuffed animal toy for each child.

The second program, Hacia Adelante (Moving Forward), uses games and sports to encourage communication and restore self-confidence. As I write this, the EPES office in Hualpén is jammed with tote bags of soccer balls, volleyballs, marbles, nets, cones, jerseys, caps and a referee’s whistle — a full kit for every adult mentor who promises to reach out to children here, in Coronel, Penco, San Pedro and Talcahuano.

At the end of today’s training session, 55 enthusiastic mentors have signed up to work with young neighbors and students over 10 weeks of exploration and expression to dissipate frightening memories and lingering fears.

Maria Herrera, paramedic and health promoter from Huachicoop, will work through her Junta de Vecinos (neighborhoods meeting) at the local community center. She is excited about the Mi Historia del Terremoto y Maremoto de Chile (¨My story of the Earthquake and Tsunami in Chile¨) the twice-weekly workshop for younger children to narrate and illustrate their own stories of fright, hurt and confusion, as well as their dreams and realizations. Fabian Vinces, the therapist in charge of the training, says that narration is vital to recovery because, “what is unspoken remains unresolved.” By writing their own stories, “children recover a sense of what is their own, because they lost everything and now have to share everything.”

“Children cannot always explain their feelings, and adults are too preoccupied to listen,” Maria believes. One of the children she wants to see participate is her granddaughter, whose house in Santa Clara, Talcahuano was flooded by the tsunami.

Adriana Maureira is the President of the Hospital Penco Lirquén community council. Among the children who will benefit from mentoring is her 12-year-old granddaughter, who continues to vomit and cannot be left alone since the quake yanked her from sleep, bed and home in late February.

Early in the sessions, conducted in the EPES Community Hall from April 14 to 16, these mentors-in-training shared their own stories of shock, grief, escape and survival. Behind the common denominator of loss, their stories tell how — as in Tolstoy — every family lives disaster in its own way. All continue to live with its consequences, in material loss, strained family relations, sudden joblessness or sharing crowded living quarters with relatives and strangers.

In La Higuera, 50 families from the low-lying Penco neighborhoods of Gente de Mar, Cerro Verde Bajo and Playa Negra have been relocated to one-room wooden boxes with wide open slats and no windows, already defenseless against the coming cold winter rains and wind.

Like Sandra Mora and Zunilda Barrales, who lives with her 104-year-old grandmother Maria Luisa Calfuqueo, the women here have reacted with strength and intelligence to the disaster that swept them off the coastal strip, onto the Cerro del Cura hill and into an emergency camp in the elegantly-named Villa Bosquemar across from what is possibly the only church left standing in Talcahuano. Like most women, they feel they must hold in their own grief for the sake of others more vulnerable than themselves, and especially their children.

EPES will be working with Villa Bosquemar to help residents winterize their “temporary” homes with material support. (Sandra Mora shudders at the government’s estimate of a three-year wait before being considered for permanent housing.) EPES will also help them equip the community hall and train residents in first aid and other health care skills, including prevention of the respiratory illnesses that southern Chile's winter always brings.

There is no self pity here. Only a sense — with the earth still shaking noticeably several times a day — of security randomly shattered and immense vulnerability. This glimpse of fragility behind the face of stoical Fuerza Chile (“Chile Be Strong”) and similar public campaigns reaffirms something important: we cannot dismiss the emotional impacts of the quake, even if the rubble is now being cleared and a certain pretence of normality restored.

The two Mercy Corps programs will be conducted in schools, community halls, churches and playgrounds over the next three months. To accompany the process, EPES has hired Zicri Orellana, a community psychologist and University of Concepcion lecturer experienced with youth, thanks to a grant from the 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers Union of New York State. After that, they can be replicated among the families, women and others who need to process their earthquake experiences through self expression or team work.

Blog Post:  Posted April 15, 2010, 4:49 pm by Iraida Izaguirre

Dispatch from Hualpén, Chile

Country: Chile

Topics: Emergencies, Displacement, Children

People are still living in tents 48 days after the earthquake in Chile. Fish is a source of income in Talcahuano, and many people lost their homes and they can’t go back to the sea for fishing. Boats are still in the main street — the tsunami destroyed their dreams.

Some fishermen tried to repair their boats but it has been almost impossible — people are afraid even of walking on the seashore.

Schools have begun their school year. Teachers said that they need to feel well to help others. “Children are so scared and anxious,” said Patricia, a young teacher who works in one school in Hualpén.

I am working together with two consultants from Peru building the capacities of Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES, our local partner here in Chile), to help caregivers help children through the psycho-social healing process and re-learning social and emotional skills. We are doing this through two mental health programs: Comfort for Kids and Moving Forward.

I will keep you updated on our work here in Chile.

Blog Post:  Posted March 15, 2010, 10:06 am by Karen Anderson

Playing earthquake while the ground rumbles and tempers flare

Country: Chile

Topics: Health, Emergencies, Displacement, Children

The Educacion Popular en Salud (or EPES, Mercy Corps' local partner in Chile) Center here — with its wooden gazebo and jungle gym — is an oasis of respite from the surrounding catastrophe, two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Concepción, Hualpén, Talcahuano and neighboring communities we have worked with for nearly 30 years.

While nervous parents lined up to get water from the EPES well — accompanied by children too frightened to stay behind at home — the EPES staff produced crayons and paper from office supplies recovered from the disarray, and encouraged the children to draw.

“All the drawings and all the talk is about the earthquake,” reported Maria Stella Toro, a Santiago-based EPES educator who traveled to Concepción last week to support the local staff. “The level of trauma is high.”

In the street, children are taking turns tossing one another about in an old handcart in their newly-invented game of “Earthquake and Aftershocks.” The following scene was captured by on video by EPES staffer Hector Reyes. The translated dialogue follows below:

“How strong was that?” someone asks.

"That was a 9!” the young quake-shaker announces, as a little boy relinquishes his space in the hot seat to the next comer.

As the shaking gets more energetic (“That’s an 11!” an onlooker announces), the little girl’s bravado crumbles.

“That’s enough, Karina,” she pleads, “not so strong.”

Bravado, acting out and game-playing are all coping mechanisms that children adopt in the aftermath of traumatic experiences like Chile’s 8.8 quake, one of the strongest ever recorded in a country whose deceptively modern facade is crumbling along social fault lines exposed by the seismic cataclysm.

Mercy Corps, will be providing EPES with its Comfort for Kids methodology (used after 9/11 in New York City, along the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and in the aftermath of earthquakes in Peru, China and Haiti) to help health workers, teachers, parents and other caregivers understand and address post-traumatic stress in children and adults.

Meanwhile, strong aftershocks continue to rock the area (tremors measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale jolted people awake early yesterday morning). Renewed tsunami alerts were decreed even as incoming President Sebastian Piñera was sworn into office last Thursday, while, outside the Congress building, panicked Valparaiso residents ran for the hills.

In Concepción, the start of the school year (scheduled for March 8) has been delayed due to collapsed buildings, disabled infrastructure, difficult transportation and the use of schools as temporary shelters. Reports indicate that one-third of the schools here are wholly or partially damaged.

Next door in Talcahuano, a port city destroyed by tidal flooding, 100 homeless people camp out in an emergency shelter at the Higueras Industrial High School. Dr. Lautaro López, director of EPES Concepción, has set up an improvised consulting “box” to dispense medical care, medicines and psychological support. Occupational therapist Liliana Estrada, an EPES volunteer from Santiago, organized a conversation “circle” (punctuated by several sessions of massage therapy) to address the topic of post-traumatic stress. But the sudden desperation and disorder provoked by the arrival of a batch of donated underwear reveals a underlying layer of need.

“The situation here is very difficult,” Lopez reports, “and the climate of convivencia (living together) and cooperation is complicated and tense.”

“The people here, and especially the women, need someone to listen to and understand their fears. But there is also a need to identify community leaders and coordinate with the city official who has just been assigned to oversee the shelter, in order to address emotional health needs and how to live together during this emergency.”

The EPES teams are returning today, after a visit to another temporary shelter located in the hills behind Hualpén.

Meanwhile, the second EPES relief team is returning to Santiago (where the short-staffed office is grateful for the support of former interns and friends volunteering during the emergency) and a third team has set off. The latest shift brings in two experienced health workers and an expert in disaster relief assessment — recently arrived from Haiti — courtesy of the Lutheran World Federation.

It has been two weeks since the earthquake and it feels like two months. We have so much work ahead.

Blog Post:  Posted March 10, 2010, 5:04 pm by Karen Anderson

Spring of hope: EPES provides emergency water to earthquake survivors

Country: Chile

Topics: Water/Sanitation, Health, Emergencies, Displacement

Within 24 hours of the quake — and still unable to locate several of its staff members— the center of Educacion Popular en Salud (or EPES, Mercy Corps' local partner in Chile) in Concepción was in action, distributing water to its neighbors in the René Schneider section of Haulpén, a earthquake-shattered city located between Concepción and the Talcahuano port.

EPES Concepción director Dr. Lautauro Lopez was the first to recall that the EPES building, built in 2006, draws its water from a well and a water main that could be accessed with an electric pump. Through immediate coordination with the municipality of Hualpén (whose offices had just been looted), EPES was given temporary use of the municipality’s emergency portable generator.

As the water started to flow, the mounting tension and despair gave way to an improvised but efficient community-led distribution system to supply some 300 families (nearly 1,200 people) with water from the EPES well. The untreated water was not safe for drinking, but instructions from the EPES team helped guarantee that neighbors would use it safely until an emergency water purification system could be put into place.

With the first rays of daylight, at 6 a.m., neighbors began to line up to assure their place in the distribution line. Pumping began at 9 a.m. and lasted until dusk. While some neighbors organized the numbers for a fair and orderly wait, other pumped water and filled buckets, canisters and bottles.

Within days, a team from EPES Santiago had reached Concepción as part of a caravan with the newly-formed Inter-Church Emergency Committee, Chile 2010 — created to respond to the crisis — with medicines and its own generator, which kept the pump running until electricity was restored and throughout continual power outages.

“You’ve been an enormous help to us,” says Mario, a neighbor waiting in line for his family’s water ration. “We are four families living allegados (without a home of his own) in my mother-in-law’s house: me, my wife, my two sisters-in-law and all our children. We would have had to go as far as Laguna Redonda (a small lake on the outskirts of Haulpén) to bring water.”

On Friday, EPES received a visit from a emergency relief specialists bearing a portable water filter sent by GlobalMedic, a Canadian organization that had reached Concepción right after the quake and had learned about the EPES makeshift water distribution through a member of the Inter-church Committee.

GlobalMedic staff members Dan Malka and Matt Capobianco trained the EPES team to use the water filter, which it donated to EPES, and instructed them on other, chemical alternatives for purifying water. The filter cleans up to four liters a minute, a much smaller amount than the 40 liters a minute being pumped untreated from the EPES well. A dual distribution system was devised to supply safe water for drinking.

As of yesterday, EPES was providing safe water between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. to pregnant women, nursing mothers, the elderly, people with disabilities and special health conditions — all identified in advance by the neighborhood health promoters.

“Access to potable water is so important,” says Nadia Pardo, standing in line with her water jug to get water for her family, including her elderly father. “All the places to buy bottled water are closed, and if there was somewhere to buy it, it would be way too expensive.”

But mid-week, municipal water services should be restored and new challenges — including sewage treatment, clean-up and rebuilding lives and hopes — will begin.

Blog Post:  Posted March 9, 2010, 8:01 pm by Karen Anderson

In Chile, hard work and messages of hope

Country: Chile

Topics: Water/Sanitation, Urban, Health, Emergencies

Hector Reyes —a staff member for Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES), Mercy Corps' local partner here in Chile — and I returned from the earthquake-shattered city of Concepción late last night. It took us almost 12 hours to make the six-hour trip because of the earthquake damage to roads and bridges. The destruction in Concepción and surrounding towns is devastating. The port city of Talcahuano where we have worked is destroyed beyond belief.

Concepción felt like a war zone. When we arrived last Thursday — five days after the earthquake struck — an 18-hour curfew was in place and the military was posted throughout the city. We had to have a government-issued safe conduct pass to drive into the city to get to EPES and move about during curfew. At 7 p.m., Concepción was like a ghost town studded with military checkpoints.

We arrived at the EPES Concepción Center to see the church next door with gaping holes and major damage. But our EPES Center, built in 2006, is standing relatively unscathed. Dr. Lautauro Lopez, the EPES director in Concepción and the only local staff member who was able to reach the center, was there to meet us. We hugged and hugged each other. He was so happy and relieved we were there and we were equally relieved to finally see him. We still hadn’t made personal contact with our other three local staff members.

Since the earthquake, Dr. Lopez has worked without rest — providing emergency medical care and organizing the water distribution for the center's immediate neighbors, who, like the rest of Concepción, were without electricity and water.

More than 300 families (about 1,200 people) are getting water every day from a pump that's connected to a water main underneath EPES's center in Concepción. We had bought an emergency generator from Santiago, which we brought with us in our truck hastily borrowed from a friend. Fortunately, shortly after we got to the EPES center, electricity was restored and we were able to run the pump with electricity from our building. But we continued to experience power outages, so our generator allowed us to keep working — Hector, as usual, had thought of every imaginable problem and brought extension cords and tools.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lopez had helped organize the neighborhood committee to distribute the water. Fear, uncertainty and desperation made the first days very tense but things are running smoothly now. People start lining up at 6 a.m. outside the EPES center and the neighborhood committee gets there at 9 a.m. to start the distribution process. One person gives out numbers, while another coordinates the people receiving water and three others pump the water and put it in the containers that people bring with them. Water distribution continues all day.

Next to the makeshift water distribution point in the EPES center's yard, children are playing on the playground and gazebo built two years ago by volunteers from long-term EPES supporters Prince of Peace Lutheran Church (Clifton Park, NY), Trinity Lutheran Church (Owatonna, MN) and students from Swarthmore College. The children’s laughter helps a very tense situation feel more normal.

The health promoters, our staff and their families are unhurt — but the trauma is enormous. As soon as we arrived, we started visiting the health teams, distributing educational fliers on water management and disease prevention, as well as providing emergency health kits. When they saw Dr. Lopez, many wept then hugged him and said, "We knew EPES would come, we knew EPES would come."

The feeling of isolation and fear has been so great. After the earthquake, looting erupted in these neighborhoods, and people started protecting their streets with barricades and volunteer night patrols. Aftershocks of up to 6.8 magnitude caused waves of panic, as did false alarms of another tsunami.

There is still no running water in the communities EPES works in, the septic system is collapsing, public transportation is scarce and aid is only beginning to arrive. But there is also a strong sense of solidarity, of neighbors helping neighbors, and a spirit of coming together — every other car on our way back yesterday had messages of hope painted on the windows. Fuerza Chile! Vamos Chile!

Gracias for all your support!