Out of the Ashes
by Jorge Jenkins Molieri
The residents of El Salvador’s Villa Centenario have built a whole new "healthy community" to replace the homes they lost to the earthquakes of 2001
PAHO engineers developed the prototype for Villa Centenario’s 100 houses. |
The first two months of 2001 were a living nightmare for the Osorio family, as for thousands of Salvadoran citizens. On the morning of Jan. 13, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck, centered 100 kilometers off the country’s Pacific coast. Its force was felt as far away as Mexico and Panama, but it hit El Salvador the hardest, collapsing homes and buildings, destroying roads and bridges, and setting off mudslides and landslides throughout the country. Thousands of aftershocks followed, one of which—on Feb. 13—was strong enough to be considered a quake on its own. In the end, more than 1,200 Salvadorans were dead, nearly 9,000 were injured and some 1.6 million were left homeless.
Before the earthquakes, Carlos Osorio, his wife María Ester Echeverría and seven of their 10 children had been living in poverty as caretakers on a large farm in Acajutla, in Sonsonate department in western El Salvador. Their house—a rickety structure of stick-and-mud walls and a makeshift plastic roof—was destroyed by the earthquakes. Used to hardship, the family now began a truly desperate search for new work and someplace else to live.
"I thought I was going to die and that my children would be left fatherless, just as my father left me when I was a child," Osorio recalls with tears in his eyes.
PAHO Director Mirta Roses Periago meets with community leader Carlos Osorio. |
But six months to the day after the first earthquake, the Osorios found new hope back in Acajutla, this time in the small village of Suncita. They were among the first of 100 families who would join an effort to build, from the ground up, a whole new community to replace their lost homes. Their town, named Villa Centenario in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), would become a model "healthy housing" project built with support from PAHO, El Salvador’s ministries of housing (which donated the land) and health, foreign donor countries, local missionaries and the Municipality of Acajutla.
Most important, however, was the active participation of the 100 families who are the project’s enthusiastic beneficiaries.
"It’s a miracle that God and all the organizations that helped us would give us our own house," says Osorio.
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