Huarmey - Mud, Sweat and Volunteers

Mariciela in what used to be her bedroom

After hearing so much about volunteering from other friends on the road, I decided to give up a couple of weeks to volunteer in a small town badly hit by flooding in March this year. So after a 23 hour bus to Lima, a night in the capital and another 5 hour bus up the coast, I found myself at the scene of one of the most catastrophic disasters to hit Peru in decades.

Around the time I was flying into South America, most of the coastal provinces of Peru, normally a desert area, were subject to more rain than they would normally get in a year in a less than week. A lot of significant damage was done in the north of the country which is where most of the disaster response has occurred, but next to the small but important provincial town of Huarmey, the normally very placid local river became a raging torrent that sent flood water as high as 2 metres in two separate floods a few days apart.

Before...

The organisation I work for, All Hands Volunteers, has been on the ground here since early April. Seeing the smaller coastal towns being neglected by the government and other NGOs in favour of the wealthier north, AHV stepped in to provide the immediate response in Huarmey. Most of the work is being done in large community spaces and houses owned by people unable to shift the mud themselves.

...After

And the mud, the endless mud. What we are shifting is thick, heavy river clay. Sometimes it's dry and comes up in chunks, sometimes it's still wet and we carve it off shovel by shovel. Sometimes it's a few inches, sometimes up to two solid feet. The worst sites have stones mixed in as well that block our shovels and make progress frustrating. But what every site has in common is the amount of personal possessions that come out of the muck: ruined clothes, shoes, kitchen utensils and furniture are common, but sometimes we will find a more personal items like a family photo, a patron saint.

About half of the rubble we shifted from that house

The lives of people have been affected in different ways. One of the first sites AHV completed was for a little old lady called Domitia whose entire home was lost with all her possessions, which forced her to sleep in the mud until we built her a temporary home. Yesterday I was at a site where the only room that survived intact was the bathroom, and the residents were sleeping in a ragged tent where their living room used to be. This afternoon, I watched two adorable children play with chunks of mud. When I asked them why they were playing with such dirty things, they told me their toys were all ruined and they didn't have money to buy more.

The people are so lovely too. Beneficiaries are always so grateful for the work we do. We regularly get small gifts from them, usually food. Today a family cooked us a delicious lunch, and the other day a lady kept feeding us mandarins until we were bursting. A few of the people we have helped have said they thought that the floods were the biblical end of the world, but that we must have been touched by God to come and help them in their time of need. Many tears of happiness have been shed on a finished site, on their side as well as ours.

The dogs are pretty cute here too

However, while we do not charge people or get paid for our services, they still don't come for free. As a volunteer organisation, All Hands is relying exclusively on private donations and receives no government money. This gives them a lot of flexibility for funding and a great deal of transparency in financial matters, but means that they have to keep raising cash to fund the volunteer effort in the disaster zones. Currently we are desperate for donations as the project here has been extended for two weeks after the community begged us to stay, but we are running a very tight line on finances to get there.

In light of this, I would like to ask all readers to make a donation to All Hands via my fundraising page. The process is secure and the money will go directly to resources for volunteers and the local community, not to bureaucrats in cushy offices. Please help us to help the good people of Huarmey.

Visit give.hands.org/natperu to donate.