Supporter: Karen Anderson

Maxene, Karen and Kyle.

We’ve just been cc’d into an email to Mercy Corps headquarters from Kyle Dietrich, director of youth programs for Mercy Corps in Haiti.

“This has been a tremendous and unexpected week,” writes Kyle. “Maxene and I have lots of ideas and a new energy for our challenging work.”

Kyle is writing from Chile, where he is attending the 2nd EPES International Training Course in Popular Education for Health. He is accompanied by Maxene Louisjean, a Haitian sociologist who works with Kyle on youth programs in Port Au Prince.

Kyle and Maxene are among 20 community activists from eight Latin American countries here in Santiago learning how to mobilize communities through popular education methodologies. Their presence here is greatly appreciated by all participants—they bring a depth of experience, perspective and knowledge that everyone admires and hopes to learn from.

EPES has nearly three decades of experience in developing such popular education tools as participatory diagnosis, peer-education and community mobilization from a human rights and gender perspective. EPES (Educación Popular en Salud/Popular Education in Health Foundation) was founded in 1982 (during the military dictatorship) to offer training, guidance, and support for community health groups. It has grown from a small, emergency-response team to a leader of community mobilizations to improve health services and awareness.

“Dignity, Empowerment and Equity” is the title of the 2011 EPES institute. This year, the course focused on “Rebuilding Dreams with Dignity” and EPES’ experiences of providing psychosocial and material support for rebuilding lives and communities in the wake of Chile’s February 27, 2010 earthquake.

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Six months have passed since the 8.8 earthquake and tsunami that flattened a large swath of central and southern Chile in February. Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES) is grateful to be working closely with Mercy Corps to implement the Comfort For Kids and Hacia Adelante (Moving Forward) programs for the emotional recovery of young disaster victims in the Concepción area.

Members of EPES Staff, Mercy Corps staff person Sara Murray (in red coat) and leaders of the emergency camp Eben Ezer standing by the recently installed banner on the Camp Eben Ezer community center: "Community Campaign: Wrapped in the warmth of solidarity, we protect our health." Photo: EPES

Since April, when EPES held its first training sessions for 60 adult mentors, we have helped some 1,000 children in five cities overcome their fears and recover self-confidence through these interventions.

This six-month anniversary coincides with closing ceremonies in many of the schools and community centers that have so enthusiastically put these workshops into motion.

Over the past week, our small EPES team has been shuttling among programs, applauding children as they receive diplomas, cheering from the sidelines of soccer matches, receiving feedback from facilitators. The latter is especially important as EPES embarks on a second stage of collaboration with Mercy Corps to extend the program to an additional 400 children. Mercy Corps has also responded to EPES’ emergency appeal to protect 43 families in the Eben Ezer resettlement camp from the bitter winter cold by helping them add leak-proof roofs and wind-proof metal siding to government-issued shelters.

Joining us in this transition last week was Mercy Corps staff member Sara Murray, visiting from the U.S. Perhaps it was Sara’s company that alerted me to the fact that Chile’s half-year milestone coincided with the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. This led me to reflect on the similarities and differences between our experiences here in Chile, compared to the massive fatalities of Haiti’s earthquake six weeks prior to ours, and the ongoing road to recovery after the flooding of New Orleans.

If I could erase from my mind’s eye the still-vivid images of the Concepción coast reduced to rubble, how would I evaluate the landscape before me? The iconic images of destruction are few and far between; debris has given way to void; the gaping holes that allowed us to peer into crushed lives and dreams have been largely boarded up. The genius of the Chilean maestro chasquilla (jack of all trades) for improvising a solution — so maddening when one wants a permanent repair and not a makeshift one -- has been elevated from annoyance to virtue. The obvious drama of the most powerful quake in recent history is fading from view in many neighborhoods — but not its daily, and long-term, impacts.

“Chile is not Haiti” is a comment we often hear, and certainly this has been true in terms of loss of life and the government’s possibilities to repair public infrastructure. But poverty equals vulnerability both here and there. A natural disaster like an earthquake occurs arbitrarily but its victims are not random. The poor suffer the most.

“Chile is not New Orleans,” on the other hand, is a comment that do we hope, eventually, to hear. We don’t want to look back from the vantage point of five years to see that, despite the possibility of efficient government intervention, poor people are still displaced, waiting for solutions, their initiatives stifled by top-down strategies.

When we attempt to look at post-earthquake Chile from the eyes of others, in comparison to similar tragedies in different contexts, we feel heartened by the tremendous energy that our communities have been able to amass and unleash to revert the seismic damage. But we also see behind the facade to where the structural damage, both social and material, resides.

We don’t want to look back five years from now to realize reconstruction could have lead to transformation, but didn’t.

That is why EPES is committed for the long haul to the arduous task of collectively rebuilding lives, livelihoods, homes and communities. We are grateful for your accompaniment and support.

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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.

“I love to read and draw and here I can get over being afraid, especially about tsunamis,” five-year-old Abigail Figueroa said about the Comfort for Kids program. Photo: courtesy of EPES

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.

Wepu Re Pu, a new cultural association for urban families from the Mapuche ethnic group, conducts a workshop for children between the ages of 7 and 11. Photo: courtesy of EPES

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.

Photo: courtesy of EPES

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.”

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We returned yesterday from our board meeting in Concepción. We had the opportunity to meet with the leaders of the emergency campamento in Penco, where we are working to help winterize 53 homes and run workshops on first aid, acute respiratory infections and other health related topics for families that have lost everything.

We plan to implement our partner organization Mercy Corps' "Comfort for Kids" program here too. The young leaders (all but one are women) received us in the "community center" — two of the very basic wooden emergency homes put together to make one room — with coffee and sopaipillas (typical Chilean fried bread that has cooked winter squash kneaded into the dough).

Some of the funds donated to Educacion Popular en Salud (EPES) for the emergency were used to equip the community center with tables and chairs so people have a place to meet, to talk, to share a cup of tea, and to organize. For more than an hour, we talked about the problems with the emergency homes (called mediaguas).

The heavy rains on Wednesday had already left everyone completely drenched and fearful during the night that their roofs were going to fly off. It was amazing to see how these people have been transformed into leaders...just a month ago when I was visiting, they expressed their lack of trust in each other. Families that lost everything had come from different places to live here. Now they are working together to solve the problems they face and providing leadership and support for the entire community.

The EPES team is so grateful for all the support we have received. Gracias! If you know others who are interested in supporting grassroots, participatory recovery efforts in Chile please feel free to share this video with them. A young friend, Camilo Lanfranco, did such a wonderful job making the video and his brother Jaime did the original music. It really captures why working with the community is so important in the recovery process.

And there is still much to do! We hope to have enough funds to start buying the materials to put tin roofs on all of the homes this week to help protect them from the wind and rain.

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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.

At the end of a three-day Mercy Corps training, 55 enthusiastic mentors signed up to work with young neighbors and students over 10 weeks of exploration and expression to dissipate frightening memories of the earthquake and lingering fears. They will use two proven Mercy Corps programs, Comfort for Kids and Moving Forward. Photo: courtesy of EPES

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.

Maria Herrera, aparamedic and health promoter, will work through her local community center to help younger children narrate and illustrate their own stories of fright, hurt and confusion, as well as their dreams and realizations. Photo: courtesy of EPES

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.

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