The destroyed village of Sauzal ©Axel Rottlander/CARE

By Thomas Schwarz
Friday, March 5th, 2010

I spent yesterday morning going around Santiago de Chile with Roswitha. She has told me of a home for the elderly that has been ravaged by the earthquake. It is lead by Franciscans since the 90s and more than 150 years old. The first floor can not be used any more, due to the effects of the quake. Some of the 60 inhabitants – all of them women – have to sleep in the corridors and the sisters moved out of their quarters to make room for the elderly.

There is no money to restore the house to a safe state – or ensure dignified conditions for its inhabitants. The age of the inhabitants is between 80 and 100 years. Few of them have friends in the neighbourhood who look after them from time to time. When they hear that I am from Germany, they try to say “Guten Tag” or “Wie geht es Ihnen?”. I stay there for two hours. Before I left, I received a call from my colleague Axel Rottländer.

Impressions from unknown villages

He left the city in the small hours of the day together with Don Miguel. They went south to Concepción, where the epicentre of the devastating earthquake was. By now everybody who follows the news knows the name of this city. However, nobody knows Sauzal, not even in Chile itself. It is a village with 141 houses of which only 36 are still inhabitable. Axel sounds beleaguered: “There is no electricity here. There is no water. And it is more luck than anything else, if a tanker comes through.”

Together with 200 families of Sauzal, Axel and Don Miguel have started to compose the first list of needed items: staple foods like rice, sugar, powdered milk and noodles are desperately needed. This list will be sent out from Santiago to get offers for the items. “The tents are almost ordered,” Axel says on the phone. And then, somehow out of context: “The people here are afraid.” Some of them do not want to return even to the undamaged houses; there could be another heavy quake, they fear.

Then the list again: „We need everything. There is nothing left”, Axel says. So I keep on writing things down: fluorine for disinfection, toothpaste and –brushes, soap, towels, washing detergent, sanitary towels, diapers. No help reached those people up till now. Tomorrow I will visit the German Embassy in Santiago to talk about delivering aid to those people. I have written everything down. At the end it was easy to take notes, as just about everything is needed.

Contact:
Thomas Schwarz (in Chile)
Mobile: +49 160 745 93 61
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