Building a roof for Chile
This past weekend, I traveled with the organization Un Techo Para Chile (A Shelter for Chile) and a group of 250 young people to small town about an hour outside of Santiago in order to build one-room houses (well, by our terms, they would be called emergency shetlers...practically large tool sheds) for very low income families. It was similar to the same project that I did last semester with students from my university (there is a link to pictures on the right-hand side of this page).
The starting point
It was an amazing experience- my group of eight people built a house in the rural area of this small town, San Francisco de Mostazal. Previously, there were seven people (three generations) living in a very small, two-bedroom, one bathroom/kitchen house- the structure that we built was to give the daughter, her husband, and their son some privacy and their own place to live (although it was built right behind her mother´s house). When we finished constructing, we played cards (I taught them "Speed") and I gave them a small geography lesson of the locations of Reno and San Bernardino with an atlas that they happened to have in the house.
This weekend was a perfect demonstration of the differences in living standards that exists in Chile- it was interesting because although the family was not the poorest that I had met in Chile (they had a TV and DVD player!), they were still definitely in a state of poverty that doesn´t really exist in the States- the parents didn`t read or write nor do they have a contract for their work in the agricultural fields, which means that work is relatively unstable. Hygeiene seems next to impossible given that the kitchen and the bathroom were the same room in a house pieced together with concrete, wood, brick, and mud- living conditions that are 360 degrees different than that of their neighbors whose house was very modern with a landscaped lawn and sprinklers. And just down the way was the house of the person who owned all of the property. It was practically a castle with a guest house, horse stable, and a small man-made lake.
But that seems to be Chile`s great problem- staggering poverty next to astonishing wealth- a problem that desperately needs to be addressed if Chile wants to develop as a country.
The final product
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