A day in my life…at the moment.
There are five regions that were affected by the earthquake: Valparaiso, Metropolitana, O’Higgins, Maule, Biobio and La Araucania. Within these regions Un Techo para Chile has set up emergency offices to roll out the distribution of temporary/transitional housing and within these regions,there are usually sub-region offices. I am working in a town called Santa Cruz, which is one of the three sub-region offices in the O’Higgins region (the other two offices are in: Rancagua and Las Cabras). From our office we look after about 13 towns/villages/areas and since the 14th March, my team have had about 2,377 mediaguas built – that’s an average of 237 per week!! So, you can beginning to understand the scale of the Un Techo para Chile operation at the moment and this emergency work is just one part of the work they do with communities.
In Santa Cruz, I have joined the core team of 6 people and some extra volunteers that have joined more recently. Our role is to coordinate the entire building process, which starts off with working with the council to find families who need mediaguas, evaluate the final list on a weekly basis, organise the hundreds of volunteers that turn up to build every weekend, ensure that they have all the tools needed, along with all the parts of the house. Then once built verify that the houses have been put up correctly and that the family are happy with their new home. So we might not be actually building houses all the time, but as you can imagine there is quite a bit of organisation and running around finding solutions last minute problems that arise.
So last Monday, the whole team went to Santiago for a meeting and I stayed in Santa Cruz with Robert, another volunteer, as we had nearly 200 volunteers building that day. We went to the office to pick up spare tools, food, nails etc and then drove to Chepica to meet the “Jefe de Escuela” (a head of one group of volunteers). The volunteers are usually university students and arrive in groups of anything from 60 to 200. They usually stay a weekend and sleep in a school that we find them near where the houses need to be built. So, we went to meet the volunteers at the school in Chepica and drove each team of volunteers (about 7 of them) to each of the families. Whilst doing this I checked that all the parts of the house had been correctly delivered, that the ground on which the house was to be built was ready and checked that the family had no concerns or queries. After about 3 hours of driving around in the pick up we went to grab some lunch at Casa Valdes in Cunaco, which serves the best empanadas. After lunch we drove to the other side of Santa Cruz and did the rounds of 15 houses where volunteers were build, helping the smaller teams with the construction or simply advising and solving technical issues with the houses. So I might not have built a house entirely, but I did participate in some way to over 30 of them!
One Month in Chile 