Bolivia – Posting 2 -- Habitat for Humanity Int'l 1
Bolivia – Posting 2
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Squatter house in the Pirai River community of Santa Cruz
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In Santa Cruz, homeless men sleep on the slim cement ledges that line the open sewer conduits that run through parts of the city. They fashion tattered tents from tarps and signs and pieces of cloth and lay their heads down inches from whizzing traffic on one side and, on the other, inches from the steep incline down to the black waters below.
On the banks of the city’s sluggish Pirai River, in an area officially designated as a nature preserve, 30 squatter families without other options have made their homes in lean-tos and huts, structures composed of discarded plastic advertisement banners, small tree branches bound together with rope, braided palm fronds, stitched-together rice bags. The dirt floors are swept, flowers and plants in plastic buckets sometimes lined up along the unsteady walls. These families build their lives on land that is not theirs because they often cannot afford to pay increasing rents or purchase precious property. The men work at the nearby river packing sand into trucks, sand that will be used to make bricks to build houses -- but not for them.
In certain sections of the valley city of Cochabamba, the second Bolivian location that Steffan and I visit, poor families live in houses that are still under construction, serving as caretakers, watching over someone else’s future home. As the house is completed and the owners prepare to move in, the families must find another building project in progress to maintain their unstable status quo.
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Habitat houses in Maria Auxiliadora, just outside Cochabamba
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For all the unbelievable places that people will live, however, perhaps the most incredible is a Habitat house, an improbably hopeful idea in an all-too-often harsh world. “Tranquila” is the word you hear most often from Bolivian partner families, that and pride that they now have a legacy of ownership to pass on to their children. In the small town of Porongo, just outside Santa Cruz, the Vilches family sits down to afternoon coffee in their three-year-old Habitat house. “This is the house of my sons,” says Loli, her relief shining in her wide smile.
Others are finding tranquila in new Habitat ways. In Cochabamba, for example, Habitat seeks out partnerships with local organizations. Outside the city, in a community that operates as a land cooperative and is known as Maria Auxiliadora, Habitat builds houses with families and is beginning to help with microfinanced improvements and rehabilitations in others. The community is built into the side of a mountain, families leveling the rocky land before they can build.
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Habitat partner family, the Vilches of Porongo
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Elsewhere in Cochabamba, Habitat works with a house-building project underwritten by a local nonprofit, Asociación Casa de los Niños. As part of the partnership, Habitat offers building materials and expert advice, as well as volunteers and construction staff, to the family builders, families like Virgilio Torres’. Torres, his wife Martha and their five children, now live in a half-finished house, cooking over an open fire, sleeping in the open air — but the day-laborer construction worker now spends his days working on a dream: the 16-unit housing development that will soon be his permanent home.