The earth moved and it moved me.
Everything began the night of Saturday, February 27th of 2010 when I was living in Santiago de Chile. The night was calm and very warm. I was enjoying the visit of a close friend from Buenos Aires. I was sleeping very comfortable in my bed when suddenly I woke up with a very lousy noise followed by a strong movement. I got up from the bed and tried to walk towards the door but realized that I couldn't move forward. Everything was moving. My friend and I managed to reach the apartment's door and got to the building's emergency stairway. I remember going down the stairs and pieces of wall falling down in front of me. I had to make a huge effort to avoid them and not hurt myself.
Finally, after what it seemed an eternity, we got to the building entrance down the stairs and manage to get out of the building safe and sound.
Down there, we met with the rest of the neighbors that were escaping from the building as we did. It was then when we realized that we had experienced what it seemed one of the worst earthquake that hit Chile in its history.
Santiago de Chile is a very modern city, probably the most modern in Latin America, where buildings are prepared to face these type of events. Therefore, what I saw in the following days were only some cracks in buildings but nothing so bad. Especially in my neighborhood, which is a high-income neighborhood in Santiago.
However, it took me a few hours before I realized that outside Santiago, many extreme poor communities had been extremely affected by the earthquake. Many families had lost the few things they had and some had even lost a relative during the catastrophe.
The following Monday, I was at work when a colleague approached me and told me that he was volunteering for TECHO, a non-profit organization that transforms slums into sustainable communities, and whose housing program was perfect for emergencies such as the one Chile was facing at that time.
TECHO was fundraising and massively mobilizing young volunteers in those days to build transitional houses in two days for families that had lost everything during the earthquake. I didn't doubt it for a second, and so the following weekend I was traveling with a group of colleagues to an extreme poor community four hours away from Santiago.
We arrived to the community Friday night; we had to sleep in sleeping bags at the local school. We woke up very early in the morning and went to meet our family, who will spend the following days building the transitional house together with us.
A couple in their early 70s and their son who was in his 30s comprised the family. The old couple had lost their small house made out of mud and had been living in a neighbor’s car for the last week.
It took us two full days to build the transitional house. During those days, we shared our stories with them, and they told us about what happened, and how they ended up with nothing. We realized they had worked really hard their whole life to achieve very little and they lost that little in one night. They had nothing. Not even a home to survive the winter. We created a deep bond with them, we experienced first-hand their reality, and we were able to change it together with them.
When we finished, we had a “house warming” and Luis, the head of the family, thanked us with tears in his eyes, saying that now he would be able to sleep at night knowing his family had a safe house to sleep in and get through the winter.
The house we had built was a transitional house, meaning it was very basic, but even so it meant everything to them.
I went back home that day with tear in my eyes, I couldn't stop crying.
The earth had to move so that we all could see this reality. The earth moved so that we all could move and change this reality. But I never expected the experience to be such a moving one for me, enough to change my life forever.
Now I am so grateful that I have a home, a family, and a lot of possibilities. I realized that it was by sheer luck that I was born in a family with endless opportunities, that we could have just as well, been born with none, in fact, worse yet, with the odds against us. And that is exactly, what inspires me to give.
TECHO gave me the opportunity to experience the reality in which many families live in the world, and be able to change it. I will be grateful for ever.
(I'm currently living in the US, I am a US resident)
Review from #MyGivingStory