Dear Friends back home,

Greetings from El Salvdor! / June, 2001

We have been amazed and touched at the outpouring of support and aid for our people in El Salvador. We are grateful for the many sacrifices that your earthquake donations represent. Because of your generosity and the support of the international community, many families have at least a provisional tin house in which to take shelter and some of the more fortunate are able to rebuild at least a portion of what was lost. Still, six months after the first major quake, the needs remain great.

More than 1.5 million Salvadorans (out of a population of 6.2 million) lost their homes to the series of quakes to hit the country starting January 13.


To rebuild what was lost to the average family would cost about $6,000 per house, a number that isn't do-able considering the immense need. The best that can be done so that the aid can reach the most is to build a sturdy, cement block, single-room house, something strong and secure to withstand tremors and inclement weather and that can be added onto in time, when the family gets the means. The typical cost for this type of structure is about $1,500, including labor. Almost all the reconstruction projects in El Salvador are building these single-room homes since the lower cost per unit allows more families to be helped.


Nevertheless, despite all the rebuilding going on throughout the country, it is heartbreaking to witness that the needs are far greater than any project or organization's capacity to alleviate them. For every family that can be helped, there are hundreds more that are left unreached by any form of aid. Yet, despite the odds, we must do what we can with what we have.

With donations received this passed month, today we are able to begin construction of two single-room cement block homes. One home is that of a poor family with ten children whose house was destroyed by Hurricane Mitch. They rebuilt only to lose their home again after the recent series of quakes. (All the months of tremors made the cracks bigger and bigger until finally they realized that they had to knock their little house down and start over since it was just too unsafe.) Recently, another one of our poorest families was able to rebuild two fallen walls of their home.

They had been living in a provisional tin dwelling until finishing home repairs with materials purchased from your donations. They tell me they are pleased to be back in a real house again; I hope to travel to their village this week to see how the reconstruction turned out for them.

One of those who lost her home to the quakes, Rosa Blanca Hernández, a woman who has been widowed twice, lives in a single-room tin house with her ten year old twin sons. The tin to build the little house was provided by the government with international aid. A stepson had lived with her until nine days ago when he was shot with a bullet intended for someone else. Here's a woman who has known a great deal of tragedy (besides her stepson, both of her husbands were murdered and her brother killed himself), but who keeps coming by the parish asking if she can be of help in anything. Anyway, Blanca has no help from any other source, so with the sacrifices of many North American Catholics, today work begins on building her a safe, secure house with a strong foundation and steel-reinforced structures to resist tremors.


Another woman, Isabel Tovar, had lived with her daughters and their families in a sturdy cement block home before the quake. The foundation of the home is still standing, but the walls are down. Isabel's son had gone to the States ten years ago as an undocumented immigrant, sending money back over the years to help her build a rather nice cement block home to replace the thatched mud and stick house she lived in previously. When she lost her home in the earthquake, he promised to help her rebuild--until he got deported back to Salvador when immigration caught up with him.


She now lives in a crowded single room tin house with three of her daughters and their families. When I went to visit her, all she asked for were twenty extra tin sheets to extend their living quarters a little, something easy to arrange. A fourth daughter, Luz Maravilla, living with her family next door did not get as many tin sheets from "city hall", so she and her family have been using bed sheetsfor walls. Luz asked for fifty sheets of tin, which she got. (Cost of the seventy sheets of tin=$440! No surprise that there are many who can't afford to live in even a tin home if it's not donated by the government or special aid projects!)


Isabel Tovar hopes that, in time, with all her adult children doing odd jobs, the tin dwelling will be replaced by something more permanent. In the meantime, Luz's husband, Alberto, is learning carpentry so that his family, too, will some day be able to live in a better home. For now, Isabel Tovar and family are extremely grateful for the extra sheets of tin to expand their living quarters while daughter Luz and family are blessing God for the new rainproof tin walls. Imagine being grateful just for tin!


All the photos shown with this update were taken in June 2001; as you can see, the needs are great. Nevertheless, our people are extremely thankful for all you've done for them. We continue to count on your spiritual and material support--what a marvelous grace to be able to serve God's poor ones where they need it the most!

Also, please keep in mind those in Peru who have suffered from the latest quake. We in El Salvador can truly empathize with what they are going through these days, and what they will continue to go through in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Gracias Mil Veces,

Sister Lisa Marie Belz, OSU
Chirilagua, El Salvador


Holy Week - El Salvador

Dear Friends,

Thinking of you with gratitude and wanting to send special Holy Week and Easter greetings your way.

Like hundreds of other parishes across the country whose churches were damaged by the recent earthquakes, we in Chirilagua have been celebrating Holy Week outside. Despite all the hard work of a number of people over many weeks, the church will not be completely ready for Easter, though
we are hoping to have a roof in place in time for Holy Thursday. However, as the parish priest of San Agustín, one of the towns completely leveled by the January 13th quake, reminded his people, the real

 
Church, that made up of living bricks, has not been shaken or destroyed by the quakes; on the contrary, it continues to grow and thrive despite adversity. Thus we learn what it is to be an Easter People.

Thanks again for all your support and your willingness to share, as Church, the hope of Easter with those who have lived through the losses of Good Friday.

Enjoy the enclosed photos of Good Friday in El Salvador. They are taken from Chirilagua and Gualoso, one of the forty five villages which comprise the Chirilagua parish.

Have a blessed and graced Holy Week and Easter season,

¡FELIZ PASCUA!

con cariño,
Sister Lisa Marie, osu

 

 
 


March 9, 2001

Dear Friends,

Sunny saludos from El Salvador. We have been quite busy down here with the task of building a new country, as well as trying to carry on with all the usual "life goes on" projects. Keeping up with the confirmation program, materials and catechists (and still two chapters left to finish the last redaction of the catechism), lent, regular pastoral activities, team needs, plus earthquake needs has been a bit overwhelming. Earthquake needs take predominance, but everything else needs special attention, too! All balance is hopelessly lost! Am trying to assert a little balance, at least, by taking time out to write you.

Just a total of seventy seconds of shaking between two major quakes (not to mention all the other tremors, smaller quakes, and aftershocks) has changed the whole country. It's unbelievable even for us who live here--it must be beyond imagining for you folks up north. Because we will be living with their consequences for some time to come, the tremors and quakes continue to dominate all our conversations, though thankfully, they are diminishing in frequency, intensity, and magnitude. Every now and then, however, we still get something strong enough to jump start the adrenalin, though certainly not like what we have had. (Thank God!!!) The shocks continue to cause damage, however, widening cracks, shaking loose boulders precariously perched by previous tremors, and setting off new landslides. We are all quite apprehensive about the impending rainy season and are expecting some serious landslides throughout the country as a result of the heavy tropical rains beating against soil loosened by two months of nearly continuous shaking.

On a positive note, however, I had the great joy this past week of distributing more than twenty two hundred dollars in earthquake relief to families in one of our hardest hit villages. Two thousand dollars of that amount was from Beaumont School. To make the money stretch to reach more households, the donations are being used to help families build a solid foundation with steel reinforced corners to support the roof. (With more than two thousand families homeless from the earthquake in just our parish alone, we will never receive enough aid in our area to rebuild homes for each family. The best we can hope for is to spread the donations as much as possible by providing those construction materials for a strong foundation that families can not afford, especially steel reinforcements.) The families will have to find a way to put up walls, probably out of adobe, but reinforced in a special way to make them more resistant to quakes, as is done in neighboring earthquake-prone Guatemala. (There were adobe homes built on solid foundations with steel-reinforced corners that withstood the quakes. Apparently, a good foundation with steel reinforcements, what many of our people don't have money for, goes a long way to resist earthquakes.)

 

 

I am proud of our Chirilagua people--every Monday for the past month they have been traveling six hours' round trip to the central part of the country even harder hit to deliver already prepared food. (See attached photos.) The towns and villages in the central part of the country, being much closer to the epicenter, look worse than a war zone and probably will for years to come; most of the earthquake fatalities were concentrated there. By contrast, because many of the homes in Chirilagua were more structurally damaged from the tremors rather than completely toppled, our people were able to salvage their belongings, including their food supplies stored for the dry season. Because the structural damage is beyond repair in many cases, the end result is that thousands are homeless in our parish and in need of safe housing. However, our people consider themselves fortunate not to have lost loved ones or household items or food, and, though homeless themselves, want to help others in even greater distress. Thanks to all the international aid coming into the country, more than three thousand families in the Chirilagua region alone have received corrugated tin with which to build provisional houses.

Scientists are now saying that the energy released from all the tremors and quakes these last two months in El Salvador is the equal of twelve thousand atomic bombs!!! (I wish I could say this was a gross exaggeration, but those shocks were too persistent and too many for me to contradict what the scientists say.) The entire country really has been brought to its knees and it will be years before it is able to stand up again. Imagine what it would be like if Northeastern Ohio, from Columbus on north and from Pennsylvania to Vermilion (roughly equivalent in size to El Salvador) had been hit by a series of earthquakes or bombs (God forbid!!). Imagine seventy percent of Cleveland toppled (like the city of San Vicente) and a straight line (like a fault line) of its neighboring towns and villages from Chagrin Falls to Bay Village completely leveled. Imagine Youngstown and Lorain being pretty hard hit, Wooster, Ashland and environs destroyed, and different population pockets here and there devastated, all leaving hundreds of thousands of families homeless. Double or triple the population so that it comes to six million (the population of El Salvador) and imagine 1.5 million people (more than the entire populaton of Greater Cleveland) without a home. Unimaginable. May it never happen. This is what El Salvador is now facing and will be facing for many years to come--making this disaster worse than the civil war or the 1986 San Salvador earthquake. All this, I know, is old news up north, but it continues to be news for us, though there is nothing "new" about it anymore.

 So, thanks for bearing with me as I try to let you know something about what it's like down here two months after the first major quake and nearly a month after the second. I must say, however, that I am grateful to be here, grateful to accompany these dear people at a time of so much national calamity and distress, grateful to walk with them at this juncture in their history, at this momentous opportunity to build a new and more solid (yes, pun intended) future. (Am also grateful that the tremors have calmed down enough lately to allow all of us in this little country more sleep at night!)

Thank you for all your support. Do continue to keep us all in your prayer. We do need it and we do feel its good effects.

peace, blessing,

Lisa Marie


Dear Friends -
Sunny saludos from Salvador! Thank God, aid is arriving slowly to our area. The mayor's office distributed corrugated tin this past week to 1,800 families and has put in a request for more since hundreds of other families are also in need. Of course, the tin is distributed to provide "provisional" housing which, sadly, will be permanent for many.
Enclosed are a few pictures taken while visiting some of our communities today to assess extra damage from Tuesday's quake. These are the people whom your donations help directly. There are more homeless families, not pictured, who have received blankets, foam mattresses, and plastic sheets thanks to your generosity.

 One of the enclosed pictures (martínezfamilychirilagua) is of Blanca Martínez and her family. Blanca's husband was grabbed from their home one night in the final days of the civil war and was never seen or heard from again. Blanca and her children are standing on the ruins of what used to be their home. In the background is the little shack that they use as shelter.

 
 

 The Reinaldo family (familiareinaldo), from the village of Puerto Viejo, stands in front of what's left of their home. Your donations are helping them get a stable foundation and iron-supported pillars for their new house, instilling them with new hope and courage to start over.

The neighbors on both sides of the Reinaldo family also lost their home. Enclosed is a picture of three little neighbors taking a break in a wheelbarrow (niñosdamnificados).

 

 

Down the hill from the Reinaldo family lives the family of Rosario Mejía, one of the community's catechists. Rosario's home was severely damaged, but she was luckier than many--the foundation of her home and one wall are intact, easing somewhat the cost of rebuilding (casaderosario). When visiting Puerto Viejo today, it was heartening to see Rosario leading the community of faith in a Celebration of the Word. Despite all their material losses, our people affirm that they have not lost what is most important to them.

When delivering some blankets and foam mattresses today to María Luisa Carranza, a leader in the Legion of Mary and a strong woman of faith raising alone children and grandchildren, María Luisa told me how she looked forward to traveling with the Legion of Mary Monday to San Vicente, an area very hard hit by last Tuesday's quake. Though homeless herself now after the earthquake, María Luisa takes the time to think of others less fortunate!
Thank you for all you have done and are doing for our people. And thank you, too, for all the prayer support--we really do feel it!
(Since Anna Kournikova never visits El Salvador, you won't have to worry that any of the attached photos might carry the "Anna virus".)
Gratefully,
Sr. Lisa Marie, OSU

Previous Update notes from Sr. Lisa Marie, OSU