Whole Life Times: Pisco Shakedown

March 2008 | Tune In

Pisco Shakedown

Disaster relief group, Burners Without Borders, brings hope, color and plumbing to Peru

By Gregory Dicum

The basic story is disarmingly pat: on August 15, 2007, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale devastated Pisco, Peru, a city of 80,000 on the desert coast south of Lima. Around 520 deaths were reported. Fifty thousand became homeless. In newspapers around the world, this calamity ran as a few inches of print, and then disappeared.

But six months later, the disaster is not over. Rolling into town on an unkind February wind — a sea breeze both salty and dusty — I passed jagged ruins and fields of rubble. Hasty piles of brick, adobe and dust dotted the city. Even the beach was covered in it. Tents from aid agencies around the world filled the streets, along with Peruvian government earthquake shacks that looked like toolsheds, except less sturdy.

Civil authorities in Pisco are in disarray, and the city has a lawless feel. For me, and virtually everyone not from Pisco, that meant not venturing out after dark at all. My desolate hotel on the beach was considered quite safe: it hadn’t been held up for two months.

But in a yellow concrete house in a residential neighborhood, where intact buildings stood next to collapsed buildings, newly vacant lots and windblown reed-and-tarp shelters, I found a hopeful, even cheerful scene: the Pisco headquarters of Burners Without Borders.

Started in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Burners Without Borders is an ad hoc disaster relief group that emerged from the Burning Man Festival. (Conscious Choice profiled BWB in August 2007, just before the quake hit.) While it is well known that the annual temporary city of 50,000 in the Nevada desert has its share of hedonistic party animals, it also has countless volunteers with the wherewithal to, well, build a city. Bring this community — carpenters, electricians, organizers, fundraisers, designers, planners and crane operators — together to build someone else’s city, and the results can be astonishing.

The effort in Pisco began when Sam Bloch, a carpenter who helped build Burning Man’s Center Camp, heard about the earthquake. He and three friends headed to Peru and just showed up on the scene to see if they could help.

The group, with experience in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami, got to work making connections with the big organizations — the UN and the Peruvian government and others — and started to identify gaps.

That meant a lot of clearing rubble, especially at first, but it also meant developing projects that will improve life in Pisco even after the immediate crisis has passed. Things like rebuilding a school in time for the start of the school year in March.

One of the biggest gaps is helping people make the transition from tent to home. “Temporary housing creates slums,” says Jimmy Levi, BWB’s Peru Coordinator. “It happens after every disaster, so we’re trying to do something more permanent.” Six months after the quake, sanitation in Pisco is woeful; along with the population, many volunteers are chronically ill from exposure to human waste as they clear debris.

“We call it the shitter,” says Sam Bloch of the solution he designed. “We need a better name for it,” he reconsiders as he sees me dutifully writing it down, “how about the Sanitation Module?” Whatever you want to call it, this compact concrete unit can make a big difference for a displaced family. It can be built on an empty lot and connected to the city’s sewer and water, providing a water tank, toilet, shower and kitchen connection. Not incidentally, it’s also a secure place to take refuge in the event of another temblor. The unit can be used immediately, and can become the permanent core of a new house.

If the team can gather the funding it needs from the Burning Man community and elsewhere, says Carmen Mauk, BWB’s director and its only paid staff member, the group can crank out a Sanitation Module a day. “People are really motivated to get out of the hot, unsafe tents,” she says, while standing in the back of BWB’s truck — soon to be converted to run on waste veggie oil. She dials her cell phone to check on a mural project at another school, adding, “everything you do does make a difference.”

So far, Burners Without Borders has had 90 volunteers in Pisco, from 15 countries. Many are travelers who came across flyers in guesthouses across the country. When foreigners arrive in Pisco — and there aren’t many who do anymore — tourism agencies direct them to Center Camp — BWB’s headquarters.

Everyone stays far longer than they had planned, and leaves behind a legacy they could not have imagined. “They are a gift from God,” says Alberto Garcia Soto, director of one of the schools BWB is rebuilding, “angels that came to help us.”

Gregory Dicum has been to Burning Man eleven times, but only once to Peru. He’s hoping to even things out in the future.

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