Quake-stricken villages in El Salvador
“look like a bomb was dropped on them”

By Paul Jeffrey
Action by Churches Together (ACT)

Ozatlán, Usulután, El Salvador

Waking suddenly in the predawn darkness, Rosario de Jesus Pablo felt the strong aftershock jolt her temporary home of wood scraps and plastic sheeting. She grabbed her sleeping grandchildren and hurriedly pulled them outside, huddling together in the bushes until the shaking subsided. In the quiet that followed, they listened to landslides rumbling down the steep slopes of the Usulatán Volcano that looms above their village. When the sun finally began to light the sky, Pablo led her grandchildren back to the shared mattress that serves as their bed, then lit a fire to heat water for coffee. Clouds of dust from the landslides lingered on the mountain for hours.

During the month since the January 13 earthquake that ravaged this small Central American country, more than 3,000 aftershocks have provided a regular reminder to Salvadorans of the fear and anguish they experienced during the 36 seconds when mountainsides collapsed on top of neighborhoods and entire villages literally fall apart. A month later, the official death toll from the 7.6-magnitude quake stands at 827, with 4,520 people injured. Some 1.1 million people were directly affected by the quake; 92,990 homes were destroyed and 130,515 damaged.

The February 7 aftershock that caused Pablo to pull her grandchildren from their temporary shelter was designated 5.6 on the Richter scale, enough on its own to knock down a wall or two. Yet here in the poor neighborhood of Nueva Guadalupe, part of the municipality of Ozatlán, there is nothing sizeable left to knock down. Residents have constructed temporary shelters of scrap lumber and plastic sheeting, which tend to sway with the new tremors but remain standing. Pablo’s son Rigoberto, who with his wife and two children share her house, said he didn’t even get out of bed when the strong aftershock hit. “The plastic and wood don’t weigh a lot, so if they fall on me it won’t hurt much,” he said.

Such nonchalance isn’t shared by everyone here; fear lingers in many long after the ground finishes its periodic shaking. Rigoberto’s four-year old daughter Sandra, unschooled in adult bravado, starts to cry when a strong wind rattles their temporary home. “She’s afraid it’s another earthquake, that her house is going to come crashing down again,” her grandmother explained.

What crashed down on January 13 was a house built of adobe - blocks of dried mud and straw that rural residents stack up provide shelter from the scorching sun that bakes the sugar and sesame fields of the coastal plain. When the January quake knocked down those walls, the dried adobe broke into a fine dust that swirls up from the ground with every whisper of wind. Everyone here is coughing these days.

And most are trying to figure out how to replace their simple homes. This is a poor region in a poor country. Although many families like Pablo’s possess small plots of land that they received under the country’s U.S.-sponsored agrarian reform, that reform was designed primarily to keep peasants from supporting leftist guerrillas during the eighties. It had nothing to do with empowering the poor, so there has been no agricultural credit nor technical assistance, and today families like Pablo’s manage to produce meager crops of corn and beans that barely keep them alive.

What capital they’ve managed to accumulate over the years was invested in their simple homes. So when their adobe walls disintegrated in January, so did their life’s savings.

That facet of the tragedy is more difficult to see than the well-televised drama lived by residents of the Las Colinas neighborhood of Santa Tecla, where a hillside collapsed on over 600 middle-class homes. More than half the death toll from the quake came from that one neighborhood, just a few minutes from the capital. Media crews from around the world could get their five minutes of tragedy and quickly commute back to San Salvador to upload their story. The scenes of bereaved family members searching for their loved ones under tons of rocks and dirt were truly dramatic and moving.

No camera crews have shown up in Nueva Guadalupe. Perhaps because no one died here. Since the quake started off with relatively gentle movements, many who would otherwise have been trapped in collapsing buildings were able to run outside to safety.

Yet many worry that the tragedy in rural villages like this will remain largely “invisible.” The country’s culture, politics, and economics have long been centered in the capital. “It’s very easy to forget the rest of the country exists, because of the historic marginalization of the countryside,” said Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, the local representative for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). “Yet the biggest number of quake victims are in the countryside. The houses collapsed and there is no water. The people are living under the trees. Some rural villages look like a bomb was dropped on them, but the international press hasn’t discovered them yet. What the press has shown is just Las Colinas.”

After an initial response that was confused and often bungling, the central government handed principal relief tasks over to local mayors. Yet the people of Nueva Guadalupe have received little attention from their local mayor, Jose Rosano, who represents the Republican National Alliance (ARENA), the ruling right-wing political party. “He only helps people with money, so we who are poor are left out here in the sun to fend for ourselves,” said Rosa Gonzalez, a neighbor to Pablo. “I used to be light-skinned, but after a few weeks of living without a house, now I’m dark-skinned, though it’s hard to tell what’s under the dust.”

Although local politicians ignored them, the 76 families in Nueva Guadalupe have not been left alone. A delegation of Lutherans from neighboring Nicaragua brought plastic sheeting and medical care one day. A student group twice came to play games with the children, thus helping them recover from the trauma of the quake. And food supplies–corn, beans, rice, cooking oil were delivered by regional staff of the LWF, one of several organizations here that are members of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance of church-based emergency relief agencies.

Benedicto Romero is the LWF emergency worker in this part of Usulután province. He’s worked for LWF since shortly after Hurricane Mitch ravaged this area in late 1998. Post-Mitch reconstruction was scheduled to end in March, and Romero was beginning to think about where he could look for another job that allowed him to continue serving the poor. The quake means he’ll stay on here, helping LWF and other ACT member agencies to assist communities like Nueva Guadalupe to construct new homes.

Romero limps as he walks through Nueva Guadalupe. His left foot was shattered by an army bullet during a demonstration at the University of El Salvador two decades ago. Yet most of the adults who live in this province bear scars of some sort. Having survived death squads and aerial bombing, they’re accustomed to adversity, and have spent the weeks since the quake recycling what they could from the wreckage of their homes, constructing temporary shelters, and clearing roads closed by landslides.

Despite their resilience, they worry their flimsy temporary shelters won’t withstand the rains that will begin in April or May. They’re hoping Romero will show up one of these days with news that the ACT alliance will provide them with the materials to get started on another house.

Even before the earthquake struck, El Salvador’s housing situation was in critical condition. According to the United Nations Development Program, in 1999 the country lacked 551,000 homes, meaning that roughly 2.5 million inhabitants - 40 percent of the Salvadorean population - were without adequate shelter. With the destruction of the January earthquake, the situation has gone from bad to worse; the country now lacks some 675,000 housing units, according to the government’s housing and urban development ministry.

With thousands of people still living in refugee shelters, and hundreds of thousands–like many in Nueva Guadalupe–living in plastic shelters hastily constructed on the ruins of their former homes, the next few weeks are critical, relief officials report. In order to help the greatest number of victims to begin reconstruction soon, many nongovernmental organizations are planning to provide homeless families with four posts and several sheets of roofing material. It will be up to the families to provide walls.

ACT member organizations here–which include LWF’s Department for World Service, the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod, Emmanuel Baptist Church, The Episcopal Church of El Salvador, the Reformed Church, the Salvadoran Ecological Organization, and the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Rights–have all been providing emergency services to affected communities. Hundreds of church members have volunteered to help, some taking leaves from their jobs to help with emergency work in remote villages. Several ACT members outside the region, including Norwegian Church Aid, Danchurchaid, and Diakonisches Werk, have sent specialized staff to assist with elements of the relief operation.

In the month since the earthquake, more than 42,000 families–over 200,000 people–have received assistance from ACT members here, and the alliance has worked with several U.N. agencies, the government’s Secretary of the Family, several mayors from throughout the political spectrum, and two Catholic base communities in the capital.

ACT members here are now working together to plan long-term reconstruction assistance, focusing their attention on the country’s poorest and most affected communities. ACT has issued an appeal for $3.9 million to support their activities.