How do dogs know Spanish?: Un Techo Para Mi País

November 9th, 2009 was a horrible day in El Salvador. Nearly a meter of rain fell during a 4 hour period masked by the darkness of the night. The sun slowly rose showing the newly scarred face of the volcano Chinchontepeque, I was forced to leave my community, taking a 4 hour hike towards safety. The entire zone of the volcano covered in mud and boulders and thousands of people left without homes, clothing, food and water – hope was gone.

After a new death experience and the horrible destruction that I saw, I was left thinking that the part of El Salvador that I consider home would never be able to recover – I went back to the US to fundraise and spread awareness, thousands of people in the area were left waiting for help to arrive. It did.

Military support from both El Salvador and the United States, Rotary Club, La Cooperación Española, Peace Corps and many other groups came to help put the pieces back together. In Guadalupe, my new home, an entire area of houses was whipped out causing more than 20 deaths. Those who were lucky enough to survive were left with literally nothing. A refugee camp was set-up in a field between Guadalupe and the volcano so that the families had a place to live while major decisions were made. Public latrines were built, and a common cooking area was put together. Tents from the Salvadoran Army and Rotary Club International provided shelter for the families for over 4 months. All in all, a great help but no way to live for an extended period of time.

One Saturday while in the park with friends in Guadalupe another friend who was walking down the street in a hurry called to me and told me to follow him. He took me to the refugee camp where there was an important meeting going on. A group of both local families and younger adults were circled discussing something.
After the meeting closed I was presented to those in charge. The young adults were from a group called Un Techo Para Mi País (A Roof for My Country) and they arrived to Guadalupe to provide exactly that to the families what they needed most – a roof over their heads. Un Techo Para Mi País is an organization that started in Chile and now functions in many Latin American countries. There slogan is straight to the point, Acampar es divertido, pero No Para Sobrevivir – Camping is Fun but Not When You do it to Survive. The concept is simple: university students hook-up with Techo on weekends and together they build provisional housing (prefabricated houses of wood with a laminated roof).

I explained to the Techo who I was and what I was doing in Guadalupe and told that that I would really like to help out. I spent the next day building with a crew of men from Guadalupe and head guys from Techo. It was a hot day and the work was hard but I loved every second of it. As the day ended, I approached the guys in charge and told them they we should try to do a Techo-Peace Corps project in the future. Right away the guys smiled and said that they were looking for help to complete the project in Guadalupe. The deal was made.

I sent out a ton of e-mails and hoped that a few of my buddies from Peace Corps would want to come out and help. Twenty volunteers from all over the country came on a Friday afternoon in order to build Saturday and Sunday side-by-side with over eighty Salvadoran college students and the families that would live in the houses. We spent that Friday afternoon taking materials to building sites and then spent the night eating dinner and introducing ourselves and doing icebreakers with the crowd of Salvadoran strangers in a the common house in Guadalupe – a large area where we all slept. We had two goals – get the houses built and try to have a positive cultural exchange. House building teams were made of a mix of Salvadorans and Peace Corps and building started.

The following is a recap of a great weekend spent building houses and making friends.

It was interesting the first night, the majority of it was spent Peace Corps on one side of the room talking and all the Salvadoran college students on the other doing the same. That quickly change. Here is my buddy Gabe getting to know two of the students we spent the weekend with.

All the material was ready for us Saturday morning. When we got to the site we got right to work. By the way, if you really study this picture you get a sense of all the emotion centered around the building - even the horses couldn´t control themselves.

Step one was the hardest part. Digging holes to put in the posts, the houses are built about a half a foot off the ground, and making sure the posts are level was a long and stressful process.

Even with the stress we managed to make it fun!

Most groups had to re-dig their posts in order to make the house level - when you got it right it was time to celebrate!

General rule of thumb - measure twice, cut once... wait a minute - we better measure that a few more times.

This shot is of my team. We are starting the job, I am there talking with the soon to be homeowner.

Every morning kids from Guadalupe ran to the construction site to help us work - they loved it.

Still getting those posts right - a little bit of bilingual swearing every once and a while...

We used a tube with water in it to make sure the levels were on - this was cool.

Let´s get some saw action!

Here is my Peace Corps neighbor Anna, she came down to help both days - hard worker too.

Man the sun was beating down.

Posts in, platform of house nailed, time to get the walls up. That is me rocking my Peace Corps bball jearsey.

Walls up, time to get the roof started.

A shot of me and Brady. Brady lives on the other side of the country, spent all day getting out to the project and worked so hard.

I have been doing my push-ups.

At the end of day one we were dead-tired but look at all the progress we had made!

Sunday morning we woke up and went back at it. Dave and Brady here, the best Peace Corps combo of the weekend. Since I coordinated the event, I spent a lot of time walking around making sure that everyone was OK - these two were always working and joking around with the Salvo Students on their squad!

Speaking of coordinating. We spent two nights sleeping on a hard floor and no one brought anything to sleep on. I took off for an hour, we up the volcano to my site where I work to borrow 20 pads that were donated to the community after the disaster. Throwing them all on the bus was awesome!