Storm of the century

As many of you have probably seen in the news, El Salvador recently experienced a really bad rain storm.  It was not a hurricane nor even a tropical storm, it was what they call a tropical depression.  Here they are calling it "the storm with no name" because it just had a number, 12-E.  However, despite it not meeting the qualifications for receiving a name, it wreaked a lot of havoc.  In fact, 12-E has done more damage than any hurricane here in El Salvador and is said to have been the worst storm the country has ever experienced.  The reason for the extent of damage was the sheer quantity of rain that fell between October 10th and 19th, and the fact that it lasted so long.  Because it is the rainy season the ground was already saturated, which set the stage for numerous landslides, mudslides, and floods.  Bridges washed out and roads crumbled.  At one point there were over 100,000 people evacuated and in shelters across the country, and an estimated 20,000 houses have been destroyed.  At last count there were 38 storm-related deaths, although this is likely to increase as there were also a lot of people unaccounted for.  The most affected areas are the coastal  and western regions as well as parts of San Salvador and the central zone.  One of the most hard-hit areas, the Bajo Lempa, received help for the first time only yesterday, as it had been unreachable for 9 days.

As far as I know none of the volunteers have been affected, although some of them live in communities that were evacuated.  Morazán was one of the least affected departments but we still experienced over a week of unceasing rain.  There were a few shelters set up here but mostly people were evacuated as a preventative measure and they have since returned to their communities.  However, in other parts of the country there are still around 50,000 people in shelters and the rebuilding is estimated to take months.  The most affected people were those who lived in vulnerable areas--at the edges of rivers, at the bases of mountains, or in other places where people with money would never build a house.  These people now have nothing but they also never really had anything.  Thus, the reconstruction not only will have to address the storm damages but also the poverty and lack of infrastructure that made these people so vulnerable to weather in the first place.  If there is a silver lining to what happened here these last two weeks it would be that it increased public awareness of the living conditions of  much of this country.  Hopefully, because of this, more will be done to address extreme poverty and decrease peoples' vulnerability in the future.

I ended up spending three days in the capital this week when I went in for a doctor appointment and then couldn't leave due to the storm.  We were on standfast, meaning that we couldn't travel from wherever we were, for a total of 9 days.  Next week several of my coworkers are going to the Bajo Lempa to assist with disaster relief.  Unfortunately, I can't go as it interferes with the volunteerism symposium we have been planning for months, but, hopefully, I will be able to help in the coming weeks.  Also, to all of you RPCVs out there, I just got word that El Salvador will be soliciting Response volunteers to work in disaster relief, probably starting around January.  Keep your eyes peeled for updates on the Peace Corps website!