South American Explorer

Sarah Green joins an organization that helps the people of Pisco, Peru rebuild their lives following a devastating earthquake in August 2007.

Before the earthquake, Leonora ran a successful restaurant on the bustling Plaza de Armas. Now, she and her ever-expanding family share a tiny ‘chozita’ in a displaced community on the edge of town, struggling to make ends meet, like thousands of others who lost their homes.

But Leonora doesn’t live in Haiti or on the coast near Concepcion in Chile. She is from Pisco, Peru, a town three hours’ drive south of Lima, that was devastated by an earthquake over two and a half years ago.

The earthquake sent powerful shock-waves through the town, changing the lives of its 130,000 inhabitants forever.

Official records put the earthquake at somewhere around 8.0 on the Richter scale. Ask any local, however, and they’ll tell you it was much higher, but capped so that the government wasn’t forced into ploughing more money into the regeneration of the ruined town.

Looking closely at Pisco today, there is little evidence of any cash having been injected into the town at all. Roads are still dirt tracks full of pot holes, sanitation is bad, drains are exposed. People live amongst dust, rubble, litter and excrement. The local government operates out of temporary building. Rumours of corruption are rife. 

However, the true Pisco is now neatly concealed behind the dozens of metres of eight foot high redbrick walls which now line almost every street in the centre of the town. These so-called ‘muros de verguenza’, or walls of shame, hide families of eight living in tiny 3×5 pre-fabricated wooden modular buildings, piles of rubble still to be cleared, packs of feral dogs that rule the streets.

On the outskirts of town, nestled in the sand dunes, thousands live in what can only be described as glorified refugee camps.

One of these communities is El Molino, where Leonora and her family of 13 live. Today, very few tents remain, but they have instead been replaced by row upon row of ‘sweat boxes’ made from tarpaulin sheets, bamboo, plywood… whatever materials their occupants could get their hands on to create something that they could call home.

Water supplies, until a year ago, were almost non-existent. Now, pipes are laid, but supplies are intermittent. No-one has the luxury of a bathroom. Most families use a bucket in the corner of their room, emptying waste into an ever-growing rubbish dump.

Illness, disease and depression are rife. Girls barely old enough to be out of school wander through the dust, heavily pregnant, the father of the child inside them nowhere to be seen. Children play barefoot in the dirt, most suffer from respiratory problems.

Families sleep five or six to a bed, many have little or no furniture.

Maria, another El Molino resident, and her family, spend their evenings sitting by candlelight in their one-roomed home on tree-stumps, inadequate replacements for the sofa they lost in the earthquake.

Leonora is one of the ‘luckier’ victims of the earthquake. Despite her dire circumstances, she has a wicked sense of humour and a zest for life. She has managed to find the drive to do something about her situation, although with an army of young, hungry mouths to feed, she probably had little choice. She earns little more than 20 soles (around US$7) a day, cooking lunches for volunteers constructing a medical centre a stone’s throw from her house. What she’ll do to make a living once the building work finishes and the volunteers move on, I don’t know.

All aid supplies, national and international, dried up months after the earthquake, most volunteers packed their bags and returned to the comparative luxury of their Western lives. 

Devastated at the thought of his town being abandoned, Harold Zevallos, a tour guide who had been translating for relief organisations, knew that the reconstruction work these groups had started couldn’t just stop, so many people were still waiting and praying that help would come to them next.

With the help of a few volunteers from Burners Without Borders, a US volunteer group, and with no money, a handful of tools and a temperamental rust-bucket of a van, Harold set up Pisco Sin Fronteras.  

A year and a half later, the organisation has grown from six volunteers camping out in someone’s back yard, being fed by Harold’s parents, to a 100-strong volunteer force, whose distinctive sky-blue t-shirts are recognised across the whole of Pisco.

Most of the volunteers are travellers who stumble across posters for PSF, or are attracted by the stories of ex-volunteers they bump into at some point on their journey. Others are there for the long-haul and are treated like locals. But one thing is certain. Not one single volunteer leaves Pisco without being deeply affected by the devastation they have seen, the dire living conditions and the welcome embraces of the locals who have nothing but the bleakest of futures ahead of them.

The only aid organisation in Pisco today, PSF receives no money from foreign organisations. It relies purely on donations from volunteers, families and friends. This in turn means the work the organisation can undertake is severely restricted. Volunteers do what they can with the limited resources they have.

The government will give a couple of thousand soles to former home-owners with clear title to the land for them to rebuild their house, but this will barely cover materials, let alone labour, so volunteers will knock down adobe walls, take up floors, and will start from scratch digging new trenches, raising brick walls. Only 30 percent of Pisco’s residents are eligible for this scheme. Victims of the earthquake who rented their homes receive no governmental support, so if someone’s chozita is in need of repair, a volunteer may offer to buy new tarpaulin or straw sheeting, some bamboo or the materials to pour a cement floor.

Once the cameras stop rolling and news reporters return home, it is easy to forget that recovery continues and that reconstruction can take years. 

But there is only so much PSF volunteers can do for Pisco. The real change needs to come from within Peru itself. For so long, the government has sat back and ignored Pisco, once home to a thriving fishing industry, a popular seaside town. But change needs to happen, and soon.

Without an injection of cash and commitment from the government, the lives of these people will never improve and they will be stuck in the same vicious cycle of unemployment, teenage pregnancy and poverty for generations to come.

Sarah Green is budding writer, whose passion for travel has taken her across Europe, Asia, Central and Southern America. Having spent time living in Barcelona and Peru, home is currently Bristol, UK, where she works as a trainee lawyer, although her heart is still somewhere a few hundred kilometres south of Lima.