Hope

There is always hope. This is the thing I like most about Chile, there is a different sense of hope here that doesn't exist everywhere. I have mentioned several times how I have a different feeling here, a feeling of happiness. Today I realized that it's an overall sense of contentment that fulfills me most of the time. I believe I have been very happy in my life, I was happy in love once, I was happy in school once, I had a great job and was happy with that...but here, there is nothing so specific, its not love or work or an amazing city...its just a feeling of contentment that spreads through the different areas of my life. Its a good feeling...and so there is hope.

I saw what hope really is and is not when we ventured down south for the weekend to help build media aguas (shacks, basically) to the victims of the earthquake. It was as entering a war zone. Destruction, what once was, is not..not at all. I expected a bit to feel sad during the weekend, a sense of helplessness, hopelessness...but overall once arriving in the small town of Retiro, Chile, something else happened. We hopped off the bus with our work gloves and hammers and greeted the military team that was staying in the same abandoned school that we would be sleeping in....and suddenly there was laughter. Maybe 6 children are more playing in the street in front of the school...laughing, bullying each other, dancing, running up to us..".de donde era?? Como se llama??" I got within minutes of standing on the dirt road and taking in the scene. "Sabe dónde la Meghan?" They were looking for the one other gringa girl who had come the weekend before...our friend Meghan, she was blond and bubbly and spoke spanish like a true chilean and befriended many of the children in the small town. So we stayed with the kids for a bit, talked, laughed, smiled, took pictures and I felt...relieved. Life always goes on, that's the thing with disaster, we often look at people with this sense of dread, of worry, of what will happen next? But with children, there is always hope. I was asked recently to write an article for the newspaper about children's responses to trauma and disaster as there are many children in Chile responding negatively to the earthquake experience and there are many worried parents who are not sure what step to take now. So in thinking about the article tonight, this word  just kept popping into my head....hope.

We ventured around the town to see what was left, it was astounding to say the least...

There was so little standing, but so much left. It's hard not to write this without being super cheasy, because this is what passed through me throughout the weekend. We spent the rest of the day Friday simply observing, hanging out with the chilean military, talking about the earthquake, not talking about the earthquake, playing with some children in the street...then nightfall came and we befriended the other 100 volunteers that ventured south that weekend as well to give back to their country what they felt was so rightfully theirs to give...hope.

It's one of those scenes that sort of lives on in your head....it's just a normal gathering of young people in the middle of nowhere maybe, boxed wine and music...but for me it was a bit more. The gathering of people for a similar cause. My favorite part of the night was when 60 or more people who mostly didn't know each other that made a giant circle and pulled out guitars and made instruments out of their laps and chairs and sang in unison spanish songs I mostly didn't know, but I sat there and smiled and enjoyed. Maybe it was the wine, but looking back I think it was something much more than that that passed among us that night.

So we woke up early the next morning, and as usual in chile, I didn't understand HOW people did it, but they stayed up till 6am and woke up at 8am ready to work...don't ask me how.

And so we set off for our first media agua. Quite the experience, but nothing short of interesting for sure. First we got to know a bit of the family we were building for, a family that had resided in the same house for generations, it was a split family house, a very old large building where two families shared either side. The pictures show how nothing was left after the earthquake. I watched the children that day, the young ones pretend to carry and build things with their play saws when they watched us work, the older ones actually carrying and sawing things among us. The father busy checking on the status and making sure things were in place...then their mother and aunt, or family member cooking....all day. This family had nothing left. They had a bucket for water they had to retrieve from a common tap down the road, they had no kitchen, no house, no shelter besides the converted botilleria they had started living in. I wondered where they slept but never got the chance or correct time to ask that question. But they cooked throughout the day, we had the most rica empanadas I have ever tasted, wine soaked melon (again drinking and working, but seems to work well in this country) chips, soda, etc. There were maybe 10 people working on building their future home for them and she fed us all very well, while smiliing and laughing. Thank you I thought to myself that day....thank you for the hope. To me I looked and saw what was, a poor family who had little before the earthquake and was left with even less...property, now they will live (maybe forever....) in a shack with no electricity or running water, but at least there is love, at least there was a sense of hope again. The problem is to come back in a year....maybe even 6 months from now, after the situation has settled and we have passed the despair and the hope and enter the transition, this is when you will most likely find people desperate for more, and living with a larger sense of helplessness...,but for this weekend, for today we had smiles and a bit of hope. Small steps I told myself over and over again, you can't compare life, you can only take it for what it is and appreciate people for who they are. 

And so we did. And we worked hard, we helped build two media aguas that day and started digging holes for a third when night fell. I was amazed at the sense of drive from the volunteers, our fellow chileans didn't stop when night fall came, they got some generators and we pulled out our headlamps and got dirty. Litterally. I reached my head and arms in a dirt hole and dug foundations...until midnight or so when we were cold and couldn't dig anymore. We returned to our shelter for the night for some more boxed wine and bonfire...

The next day proved the same as the day before, building. Here I got the chance to help deliver goods that had been donated by people throughout chile. A family who had their media agua built the weekend before recieved a few boxes of blankets and winter clothes to help them bear the cold that was approaching. The night before we spend a few hours wrapping chocolate eggs and candy to hand out to the children in the town, and when we woke up and ventured outside that day, I thought...ahhh...Chile. There was an open food and clothing market happening on the street. It was sunday, people were at church in half collapsed buildings, buying vegetables for pennies and riding bicycles down the street. Thank you again I thought. It was a good feeling that day, but always mixed with a sense of sadness...yes you have so little and you give so much. I understand this, in my life and the life I have been taught to live we give more than we receive. Our possessions mean nothing, I sold what little I owned before hopping on my flight to Chile, and after arriving and living off a quarter of the living I used to spend nightly in NY...to find more happiness is just proof. Its not what we have physically, its always what we have emotionally....and so spurred my future article...how do we respond to children after crisis...we give, we give emotionally. Listening is giving, touching is giving, physical closeness is giving. We need so little in our lives to survive, and so the reason we survived an earthquake with what was left, hope.