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Mostrando las entradas de abril, 2010

Catastrophe Relief in Constitución, Chile

Well, for sure this is a little late in coming, but we've been all-systems-go here at the Mendoza base ever since the earthquake on February 27 with our near next-door neighbour Chile. We've been sending team after team there to volunteer in the coastal city of Constitución, which not only suffered the devastating quake but a 15m tsunami about twenty minutes later which pretty much wiped out an entire portion of the city. You see that kind of stuff on tv, you know, happening to other people, in countries really far away. It's a little different to be looking with your own eyes at the bare space where heaps of houses used to be, or seeing doorway after doorway marked in red with the number of dead found inside, or to sit and listen to a family tell you about how their daughters died when a wall fell on them in the dead of night. It hasn't been a time for the faint-hearted. We've all been tested to our limits. Both physically, as we help families deal with the mountai