Un Techo Para Mi Pais
After leaving the folks on a bus in the middle of Peru (don’t worry they made it home ok) Pual and I headed to the centre of Pisco, the town worst hit by the Peru earthquake. As we drove it the devestation was just incredible, buildings and whole streets just reduced to rubble and lines and lines of emergeny tents along the road together with makeshift shelters. We arrived in Pisco to join a group called Hands on Disaster Response, who were working with volunteers there on all manner of projects from beach cleanup to rubble clearing to working with local kids. We spent the first day with them clearing the beach in the morning and then rubble in the afternoon. The following day, Saturday, since HODR usually don’t work weekends and we were on there for a few days, we joined a party who were going to work for the weekend with a local organisation Un Techo Para Mi Pais (a roof for my country) building emergency houses in remote areas together with groups of students form Lima. It was an interesting experience…. We certainly worked hard, from 7am to gone 1am, together in small groups with the Students building a house per group each day. It was really hard work, especially in Spanish when it got dark, and we were knackered by the time we were finished, but we did at least feel like we were definitely helping. How grateful the people receiving the houses were is a different question, and I’m sure the responses of different individuals varied but on our second day (building houses for poverty releif rather than earthquake damage) the family weren’t interested at the end of the day in seeing the house since they were watching TV! I don’t know, it is a wonderful organisation tho and they do some great things, maybe I missed something in the Spanish. At the end of the days tho we really weren’t interested in the touchy feely, sharing your love, campfire bonding at 2am, when we knew we had to be up again in 5 hours to do it all over again!
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