Hope made of wood, plastic and tin

Temporary shelters provide relief and the basis for a permanent home

By Peter Bate, in Usulután, El Salvador

For José Rodolfo Martínez and his wife Ana Patricia Rosales, the new shelter could not have come at a better time. Their sixth child was born on Saturday, Jan. 20, the same day that the plastic-sided shelter was finished. The family’s modest adobe and red roof tile home in La Concordia, a rural hamlet in the outskirts of the city of Usulután, had been wrecked by the earthquake that hit El Salvador one week earlier.

Martínez, a few neighbors, and technical advisors from the Cooperative Housing Foundation (CHF), an American non-governmental organization, put up the 12-sq.-meter shelter made of wooden frames, corrugated sheet metal roof and sturdy white plastic provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The baby, who was named after his father, now lay on one of the two beds that crowd the dirt floor. The furnishings included a couple of chairs, a table laden with pots and pans and a few other items rescued from the rubble of the family home. Four of his five siblings, ages 9 to 3, darted in and out of the shelter, laughing and squealing as visitors took pictures of their new and hopefully temporary home.

"I was lying in a hammock and my wife was cooking when the earth started to shake and the tiles started raining down on us. Luckily, the kids were playing outside," said Martínez, who works as a day laborer loading and unloading trucks. There will be little he can do with the old house, since the few walls still standing are cracked.

The Martinezes’ shelter was the first to be completed of a batch of 20 units CHF built over the next few days in La Concordia, whose inhabitants still use horse-drawn public transportation to travel the deeply rutted, cactus-lined dirt roads that cut across Usulután’s sugarcane growing plains.

CHF was also planning to build 100 shelters in mountain hamlets close to Santiago de María, a town in a coffee-growing area of Usulután, the department that was hit hardest by the quake. In one of those tiny villages, Joya del Tigre, 114 out of 115 houses were either destroyed or severely damaged by the 7.6 Richter-scale seism.

An NGO that went global. CHF is a good example of how NGOs can be effective partners for foreign donors. Although this organization’s main activity is microlending for home improvement, over the past few years it has developed expertise in responding to natural disasters. Rather than shovels, rescue dogs and helicopters, CHF has architects, social workers and carpenters who can quickly assess housing damages and needs, obtain materials and start erecting shelters in a matter of days.

They also have the advantage of being present in Usulután, where they opened a large office a couple of years ago to carry out programs related to the reconstruction after Hurricane Mitch. Therefore, CHF has warehouse space to stock building materials and put together the wooden frames for the shelters in an assembly-line fashion. It also has a local base from which it has developed strong links with the community and its leaders.

CHF was founded in 1952 to promote affordable housing in rural and low-income urban areas of the United States. The organization started to work on cooperative housing, microlending and community development in Central America in the 1960s. From there it replicated its overseas programs in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

In El Salvador CHF had been carrying out a wide-ranging program after Hurricane Mitch that included the reconstruction of small infrastructure, schools, housing, environmental management, agricultural diversification and disaster preparedness.

To deal with this most recent catastrophe, CHF sent the director of its newly created Office of Emergency Management down to San Salvador to coordinate with its local staff and reinforcements sent in from neighboring Guatemala and Honduras. Through their contacts in Usulután, they quickly had an assessment of damages in areas close to their offices.

In order to decide who gets shelters first, CHF followed a few basic criteria: first in line are those who suffered the worst damage, who had the largest families and the lowest income, or had no income at all. Its requirements were also few. Beneficiaries had to help build their shelters and those of their neighbors. They also had to furnish some sort of evidence of ownership or rights to the property where the units would be built.

The lessons of Hurricane Mitch. CHF gained plenty of experience in erecting shelters during the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. In Honduras they built some 3,000 shelters, many of which are still in use or have been slowly transformed into more permanent housing. Roberto Rodríguez, a construction foreman from CHF’s office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, traveled to Usulután to train Salvadoran workers in building shelters. Using lumber shipped in from Honduras, Rodríguez and his assistants cut the wood and assembled the frames at CHF’s office. In the meantime, a social worker had already advised the beneficiaries that they must clear and level a 12 sq. meter area on their land. Holes would be dug at the four corners to insert the frames, which would be nailed together and then wrapped with the white plastic embossed with the USAID seal. The plastic would then be stapled to the frame and two flaps would be cut in the front, one for a window and one for a door. Sheet metal was used for the roof. Very large families–which abound in El Salvador–are sometimes given a couple of units. Schoolrooms can also be improvised, especially to serve small communities housed in these shelters. According to Rodríguez, a well-trained team can put together eight units in a single day.

The total cost per shelter is $450.

In order to build as many shelters as CHF hopes to erect in El Salvador, they would need to hire about 40 technicians, says Randall Lyness, the NGO’s director for finance and administration in Guatemala. Lyness has negotiated with USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance for funds and resources to build many more shelters.

Hopefully, a combination of efforts of groups like CHF and organizations like the IDB will help the Salvadorans cope with the housing crisis touched off by the earthquake. Most of a $20 million emergency loan prepared in record time by the IDB for El Salvador has been earmarked for the government’s own program to provide basic construction kits to build temporary shelters. The ambitious goal is to put a roof over more than 100,000 families in less than two months. This will be a daunting task, to say the least. Just the sheet metal required for the shelters is expected to be 10 times what El Salvador consumes in one year.

Naturally, not all the demands can be met immediately, even by organizations as flexible as CHF or as large as the IDB. While a team from San Salvador was visiting another worksite at La Concordia, a couple of men rode up on a bicycle. The older of the two introduced himself as a delegate from a nearby settlement, a group of adobe huts built along the railway. Many of their homes were destroyed by the quake and they would like to sign up for shelters. However, they do not own the land where they are living, although the man insists that the local assembly has given them assurances that there would be no evictions. Lyness told him politely that they must contact a municipal representative who will register their request and eventually forward it to CHF.

Later, after the two men rode away, Lyness explained that CHF cannot build shelters when the intended beneficiaries have tenuous property claims. "By law, in many Central American countries, any improvements made on leased or informally occupied property belong to the owner of the land. Owners could simply kick people off the land and keep the shelters," he said. Then there’s the issue of politicians who vouchsafe that there will be no evictions even though they themselves could be out of office anytime down the road. The last thing CHF wants is to stumble into a nasty dispute over land rights.

However, as he drove past the railway settlement and saw the leveled hovels, Lyness turned to a CHF colleague and said that they should check with authorities in Usulután and ask whether anything can be done.