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Talcahuano
Welcome to the beautiful town of Talcahuano...A few weekends ago, I went to help build houses in the south that were destroyed in the tsunami after the earthquake. Building in Talcahuano was one of the most amazing experiences I have been a part of since I moved here.
I got into a bus with 80 other students, about 65 Chileans and 15 extranjeros. It was organized by three students for the engineering faculty of my university; they did the fund raising, organized where we stayed and ate, transportation, the families we were going to help, and got a hold of all of the materials.
We slept on the floor of an elementary school and about 5 women from town cooked the dinners for us with the supplies and ingredients that we brought. The "cueca club" (the national dance) came to the school and performed for us one night.
It has been extremely popular to build "medioaguas", emergency housing in order to get people a roof to sleep under before the winter hits. They take about a day to build and are usable for up to 5 years. The homes that we built were permanent homes that took about 3 days to build (without doors
Our site
This is our construction site, the home on the right was where the family lived before the tsunami. or windows). We built 10 over the 3 day weekend and finished almost every one.
We arrived in two buses on Friday morning at around 7, slept for 2 hours and got to work at 9am. Each day we worked about 10-12 hours; by the end of each day we were all exhausted. The 80 of us split into groups of about 6 people and focused on our individual house; my group was building a home for a woman, her daughter and three grandchildren that were going to live there.
10 people had died on their block alone. The tsunami had a bigger effect on this town than the actual earthquake- Talcahuano is a port where everyone survives working in the fisheries.
Our group had quite a few obstacles to overcome (besides the small detail that all 80 of us were students that had no idea how to build a house); the plans for our construction site had not arrived when we did, other materials came extremely late, etc. But by Sunday night, we had completed the roof!!! My group was amazing, super motivated and a lot of fun.
It was really awesome to see everyone
Tsunami
See the water stain half way up the wall? Crazy. come together and lift up a town the way we did.
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