Kiva Stories from the Field

A city bouncing back

17 February 2010 at 16:04 david 7 comments

By David Connelly, KF10 Peru

On August 15^th, 2007 Ica, Peru was hit with a major earthquake measuring at 8.0 on the Richter scale. The city was left in shambles.  In the affected region, 519 people were killed, 1366 injured, and some 76,000 homes collapsed. After two and a half years, Ica is still very much recovering.  Walk the streets and you can’t help but see the scars

and occasional open wounds.

As a new arrival, the earthquake defined Ica in my mind. Looking around, there seemed to be abandoned buildings everywhere. Even nicer-looking neighborhoods had skeletal structures on every block. Plastered and painted facades regularly give way to uneven brick and sloppy mortar, exposed masonry once concealed by a building now collapsed. Everywhere I saw unrepaired traces of that two-and-half-year-old disaster.  Everything evidenced destruction.

But that first week only one part of the story was clicking. Disoriented, a little sick, and clinging to what little I knew about the city, I was missing the amazing part: people here are constantly building. In fact, much of what I initially took for collapse is actually construction: rebar poking out of roofs, dangling cable waiting to be connected, piles of sand and brick, partially constructed walls. My coworker Luis explained it to me as we took a long walk through the center of this deceptively large city. In Peru there is a strong tradition of “self-building”, or autoconstruccion. People make additions and alterations at will, buying materials piecemeal and taking care of the construction themselves, one wall at a time.

Since it isn’t well regulated, this phenomenon has also had some unfortunate consequences. Luis suspects that poor materials and a lack of structural support features were largely responsible for the massive destruction in 2007. Visits to Kiva borrowers bear this out. I’ve heard story after story of walls and roofs collapsing because they lacked columns, arches, or simply weren’t put together well. The rural areas outside of town were particularly devastated since most buildings were made from less stable materials like cane and adobe.

Fortunately, people learn and adapt. Since the earthquake, there’s been a huge push for sturdier buildings using “materiales nobles” (a confusing term for our translators that basically means brick and mortar). Looking through Caja Rural’s borrower profiles, you’ll find almost everyone mentions their home. Many lost them (in whole or in part) to the earthquake and now hope to rebuild. Others have state-supplied modulars that they want to replace. They’re doing it, too, in large part thanks to the financing they receive from MFIs like Caja Rural “Señor de Luren.” And with so much destroyed in 2007, there’s a lot of room to build in Ica.

Entry filed under: Caja Rural Sr. de Luren, KF10 (Kiva Fellows 10th Class), Peru. Tags: autoconstuccion, caja rural senor de luren, David Connelly, disaster, Earthquake, ica, Peru, rebuilding.