medical

It’s been a marathon of logistics and preparations, but we are now bringing our tailored-for-Chile version of Mercy Corps workshops to some 800 boys and girls in the towns of Talcahuano, Penco, Coronel, Hualpén, San Pedro de la Paz and Chiguayante.
The coastal towns that ring the city of Concepción were dealt a double blow on February 27: a pre-dawn earthquake of unprecedented power (8.8 on the Richter scale, among the highest ever recorded) followed by three towering walls of water.
In launching the “My Earthquake/Tsunami Story” (Comfort for Kids) and “Moving Forward” sports program in schools and community centers, we’ve heard a lot of personal accounts from the parents, teachers and community leaders we’ve trained as mentors, and from the children themselves. Even children whose homes escaped damage tell vivid accounts of relatives or schoolmates losing homes or fleeing from the flooding.
“I love to read and draw and here I can get over being afraid, especially about tsunamis,” five-year-old Abigail Figueroa said about the Comfort for Kids program. Photo: courtesy of EPES
But as the workshops advance, we’re beginning to hear something new from the children.
Abigail Figueroa, age 5, says “I love to read and draw and here I can get over being afraid, especially about tsunamis.”
Camila Flores, 10, finds the workshop “lots of fun. We write in our workbooks, color, paint our family, draw what happened to us in the tsunami the houses in the water, what we felt.”
“While it was happening, I thought we were going to die,” she says, “but now we learned that it was an earthquake.”
“The earthquake was a surprise for me, because afterwards, everyone came together, all the neighbors came by to see how we were, people went door to door to see how everyone was doing.”Country: Chile
Topics: Health, Emergencies, Education, Displacement, Children