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Turning burial site into land for the living
01 Jan 2001
 Website: Website: http://www.ccdhonduras.org

TOP: The streets of Tebaida remain filled with rubble from the quake. BOTTOM: In Armenia, children play in a daycare centre established by the Methodist Church.
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TOP: The streets of Tebaida remain filled with rubble from the quake. BOTTOM: In Armenia, children play in a daycare centre established by the Methodist Church.
Photos by Paul Jeffrey/ACT International

Background

•  Earthquakes

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In July, Paul Jeffrey of AlertNet member Action by Churches Together (ACT) visited the coffee-growing region of Colombia which was devastated by a severe earthquake in January 1999. He reports on several projects in Tebaida designed to rehouse and retrain people whose lives were wrecked by the disaster.

LA TEBAIDA, Colombia - Sandra Quintero spent most of her time after the earthquake thinking of the dead.

She buried her two-year old daughter, who was crushed by a falling wall, then set off to look at bodies in the morgue in a futile search for her husband Fernando, who'd disappeared the day the earth shook the mountains of western Colombia.

Pregnant and living in the street with her three surviving daughters, with little to eat and only a small piece of plastic to pull over their heads when it rained, Quintero says she felt very alone. "I thought more about the dead than the living," she remembers.

She tried suicide unsuccessfully, throwing herself in front of a car. A church-sponsored refuge took the family in and provided medical care, shelter, and food.

Quintero received counselling. "I slowly began to think more about the living," she says. "Although I still carried a lot of pain around with me, I began to feel hope, and a desire to survive."

The January 25, 1999, earthquake did more than shake down buildings here in the coffee-producing region of Colombia. It tore apart lives and neighbourhoods, yet it also gave those who survived an opportunity to rebuild their lives.

That's what Quintero is doing today in the El Cántaro neighborhood of Tebaida, where 200 families are building new homes and a new way of living together.

It's a project sponsored by the Mennonite Development Foundation of Colombia (Mencoldes), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance of church-related disaster agencies.

Mencoldes, which had carried out development and relief work for years in this war-torn country, came to Tebaida the day after the quake.

RELIEF ASSISTANCE TO VICTIMS

Along with members of the Mennonite Church in the nearby city of Armenia, Mencoldes staff provided relief assistance to victims of the quake.

Besides plastic tarpaulins and other emergency housing materials, the organisation offered workshops on post-traumatic stress, presented puppet shows for children, and began to look for a place where those left homeless by the quake could rebuild their lives.

In June 1999, Mencoldes found land that city planners had set aside for a cemetery. "We got permission to set up temporary housing there, but at a time when everyone was concerned with temporary needs, we tried to envision some long-term solutions to the problems that people faced," says Walter Ceballos, a Mencoldes staff member.

After conducting surveys of those left homeless by the quake, Mencoldes decided to invite into El Cántaro those families which were often left out of other reconstruction projects.

In addition to coming from the poorest economic strata, the families had to not own land anywhere else.

Moreover, a percentage of homes was set aside for single mothers, as well as for people with disabilities. And Mencoldes made an intentional effort to invite people who came from different religious denominations.

With Mencoldes' help, the families moved on to the land and began constructing temporary homes.

They also installed electricity, a water system, and sewage lines. They didn't ask permission from the city, and by the time they'd installed basic services, officials weren't willing to make them go elsewhere.

Participants find irony that the project is sited on land that was destined to be a cemetery. "We took a place set aside for the dead and converted it into a place for the living," says Yezid Beltrán, a Mencoldes social worker in El Cántaro.

After the temporary housing was completed and the families moved in, Mencoldes staff began meeting with the new community to design long-term housing for the site.

At the same time, as families chafed under the restrictions of living in close proximity to each other, the Mencoldes staff led workshops on non-violent conflict resolution.

TENSIONS TURNED VIOLENT

When daily tensions turned violent, or community members were involved in petty theft, the Mennonite staff helped residents discover alternative ways of handling the conflict.

A boy who stole pipes from the community was "sentenced" to repaying the damage and working for two weeks at cleaning the community. A woman who pulled a knife on a neighbour had her case resolved before a gathering of neighbours while local police and judicial officials observed the alternative procedure.

"Building houses together is just a pretext," says Ceballos. "Even more important is building the foundation for real justice and peace within the community."

According to Norbey Salazar, a Mennonite civil engineer who has provided support for El Cántaro, "The victims of the quake were poor people without houses before the disaster. Now they're going to be just poor people with houses unless we help can help them build a new sense of community and empowerment."

Quintero is among those living in El Cántaro who share a sense of excitement about the project.

"The earthquake caused a lot of destruction and death, but it also helped us change how we live," she says.

"At times it's stressful to live in community, but we're overcoming our difficulties and learning to live with each other. We're learning better how to share. When one person doesn't have something the others share with them."

Quintero has had additional obstacles to overcome. She learned early this year that her husband didn't die in the earthquake, but rather took advantage of the disaster to abandon her and their three surviving children, along with her infant daughter born five months after the quake. "I would have preferred that he remained dead," she admits.

"Yet I realised that with the support of God and my daughters I can overcome a lot. They say a woman cannot live without a man, but I can now say that's not true."

A DISTANT DREAM

Quintero says owning her own house was only a distant dream before the quake. "With the tragedy we've achieved some things we only dreamed of before. With the little house we're going to have we're not going to be rich, but we're going to be a few steps farther away from being poor," she says.

El Cántaro has been financed in part by churches around the world that supported an $819,000 appeal by ACT for reconstruction work in Colombia. Yet Mencoldes' share of that money wasn't enough to finance the entire housing project in El Cántaro, so Mencoldes had to look to other sources.

The Colombian government promised to help rebuild the region ravaged by the earthquake, and within days of the disaster the Congress approved a special tax on financial transactions.

Observers noted the uncharacteristic speed with which the government responded, suggesting it illustrated the strategic importance the central government places on this region.

Besides being the source of the country's coffee exports, it's also one of few areas in the country where armed insurgents have yet to control daily life.

Yet proceeds of the special tax were designated first to rebuilding infrastructure and public buildings, and then to replacing housing that had been owned by the occupant.

That excluded from benefits the majority of earthquake victims, since 30,000 renting families had lost their homes, compared to just 11,000 homeowners. By January of this year, an organisation of renters had formed and marches and protests greeted government officials who travelled to the region to view reconstruction progress.

Officials in Santa Fe de Bogotá finally decided to also extend subsidies to former renters.

What's available from the government to affected families who rented is about $3,000. Initial estimates peg the cost of houses in El Cántaro at about $4,200 in materials, though that may change as residents fine tune the design.

LOW-INTEREST LOAN

A low-interest four-year loan to each family will cover the difference. And that's the cost only for materials; each family will invest the "sweat equity" necessary to build their house - roughly two months of full-time labour.

Government subsidies for housing construction have meant the migration of hundreds of poor families from other parts of Colombia attempting to pose as earthquake victims in order to qualify for economic assistance. At the same time, dozens of new non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have sprouted up throughout the region.

Some are private construction companies masquerading as NGOs, others are families that have formed their own NGOs. The goal is the same, to "rape and pillage the flow of resources for victims of the disaster," according to Beltrán.

The quake has been good news for some. Cement companies have raised their prices. Local landowners have profited from the need for stable land on which to build housing.

"The talk of solidarity that prevailed at the beginning has evaporated," says Salazar. "The reconstruction process as a whole is only going to widen the gap between rich and poor during the coming years."

In El Cántaro, residents are determined to construct something different from what's soon to go up in nearby neighbourhoods where private companies are taking 40 percent of the government subsidy and building a cement block shell with what remains.

Besides constructing dignified three-bedroom homes, the community plans to construct an open-air community centre for drama and dancing, an environmental

walkway along a river at the edge of its land, tree nurseries where women of the community can work cooperatively to earn income, and a shop where residents can receive skills training in building furniture from a local variety of bamboo.

Taking advantage of the disaster to rebuild a better life than the poor had before the earthquake struck is a common theme running through ACT-related projects in western Colombia.

In Quimbaya, for example, the Anglican Church is helping 50 families-all former renters-to build houses on land donated by a local political leader.

In several poor neighbourhoods of the city of Armenia, the Methodist Church of Colombia has formed day care centres so affected families can leave their children in loving hands while they work on rebuilding houses.

The Methodists are also opening skills training workshops where young people left homeless by the tragedy can learn new vocations.

"Rebuilding after the earthquake means helping construct life in all its fullness for the poor who were the victims of the disaster," says Carlos Anibal Beltrán, a Methodist pastor here.

"It means letting that spirit of solidarity which flourished at the beginning remake who we are, so that our mission as a church becomes more focused on building the integral justice and peace that God wants in our neighbourhoods.

It means much more than simply building houses. It means building lives, so that we'll someday look back on the earthquake and, though the pain will still be there, we'll claim it was a turning point in our lives."


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