Tour of a Disaster Zone: Courtesy of "Burners Without Borders"

Well like it or not, I´m back in control of the blog. Bwahaha. Hope everyone in out there is doing good. Rather than swanning about the place we´ve spent the last couple of weeks doing something a bit different and very worthwhile.

While we were in Quito we decided we would like to do some volunteer work somewhere in South America. Its difficult to pin down our exact motivation for this.... somewhere between wanting to help a worthy cause and wanting a different and more direct experience with people here. After doing a quick google search on volunteer opportunities we discovered that finding a worthy cause would be harder than we thought. Volunteer tourism is a booming industry here in south america, the idea being that you (or more normally mummy and daddy) fork out large piles of cash to some agency to plonk you somewhere nice and sheltered to plant trees or hunt for non existent bears or just generally muck around doing nothing. The most extreme example I have heard of this was a group of 18 year old english girls who sadly died in a bus crash after shelling out 10,000 pounds for a 10 week program! Don´t think that any of that cash is finding its way to local communities!

We cottoned on to an outfit called Burners without Borders who are working here in Pisco helping to rebuild after the 8.0 earthquake that hit in August last year. All they asked for is our time and a few dollars for room and board so we figured we were on to the real deal. We worked in Pisco for two weeks; Tessa worked mainly on the "shitter" project which involves building small seismically strengthened toilet blocks, providing sanitation and seismic protection to new houses; and I worked on a new school building in a slum area that popped up after the earthquake. The work is generally pretty much grunt labour as we don´t really have much in the way of high end tools or services on site. We mostly mixed concrete by hand and dug foundation trenches out with spades and picks. The other day we had to stop work as a flock of goats were herded through our construction site! Tessa was called in to provide structural engineering advice for the shitters but strangley enough no-one approached me for advice on providing low energy ventilation solutions....

Working with the burners was pretty inspirational. The group have put in a lot of hard work, their best ideas and months of their lives in order to build projects to help the community here in Pisco. They have been a great bunch of people to work with. It has certainly opened my eyes to just how difficult it is to rebuild from scratch after a disaster when, even months afterwards, there are few basic services such as power and running water. The other day we spent all day carrying buckets of water from a nearby well to a storage tank for mixing a large batch of concrete in the coming days.

So, whats Pisco like now? Well its a smelly, dirty mess. The streets are still piled with rubble and riddled with holes, there is rubbish pretty much everywhere especially heaped on any vacant land and there are areas of shanty towns where displaced people have been living in makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin houses. The picture to the left is of Nuevo Horizonte, a suburb which was established last August for people who had lost everything in the quake. The bamboo "structures" form their houses and they share water taps and portaloo style toilets in the streets. Crime in such areas is obviously pretty rampant and I don´t recall seeing a single police officer during my time in Pisco. There is heaps of building going on, from the massive school going up over the road to individual people trying to fix their cracked walls and roofs. The net café near the burner house currently has a huge crack in the floor. There are still scores of red cross tents which people are living in, even in the middle of town.

Despite our hopes of interacting more directly with locals, we tended to move around in large groups of gringos, heading in to do our work then going back to our casa at the end of the day. Although we did play a few games of football with some of the local kids on our days off.

Since the earthquake, people are poorer and more desperate and there have previously been a few incidents of muggings of volunteers. Due to this there are areas, such as the beach and the local disco that are off limits. This all gave a somewhat confined feeling to being in Pisco. We worked in our groups, lived and ate with the other volunteers in the house and stayed within certain areas of town. We lived in very close quarters in the dorm rooms at the house but through all this we´ve met some pretty cool people.

On the weekend almost 80% of the burners crew headed out to the small resort town of Huacachina for a bit of R&R. That´ll have to be the next blog I reckon.