Every year, there is a „Teletón” in Chile, a big TV-show with loads of artists, celebrities and Chileans, who donate money. During a normal year this money would be donated for needy children and their parents. Critically ill people and the disabled could afford treatments which would be otherwise beyond their reach.

But this weekend the Teletón was all about the recent earthquake. True to the motto “Chileans help Chileans” the event raised more than 30 billion Chilean Pesos. That is just short of 60 million US-Dollars.

There is help and solidarity among the Chileans everywhere. In supermarkets, young people are packing aid-packages for the victims of the quake. You will get your windshield washed at the traffic lights and the money will get to the needy. There are shops giving discounts on their prices and donating the difference to the original price to the relief-effort. The whole country is laced with national flags. On Sunday they all flew on half-mast to show the solidarity of the nation with the victims of the quake. Public busses show appeals to come forth and help, not only with flags, but with tangible deeds as well. All this impresses me a lot, especially when I hear that even those, who do not own a lot, share with the needy.

The CARE-Packages are ready

There were more than 200 aftershocks since the devastating earthquake on Saturday one week ago. We could feel some of them here in Santiago de Chile. Sometimes during the day, sometimes in the middle of the night. Many people are still in a state of shock. They talk a lot about the quake, with neighbours, friends and their family and show around pictures of buildings and whole villages in ruins, as if it helps them to get over the shock. My colleague Axel Rottländer describes the feelings of the people in the southern region, where the epicentre of the earthquake was, with one simple sentence: “They are still afraid”. And while the Chileans try to find back to their everyday live, one week after the devastating quake, Axel and our partners from the Foundation for Development in Chile are preparing the first transport of aid items for Sauzal. They want to start on Tuesday with more than 200 CARE packages and strong plastic tarps that will protect affected people from the rain. Tents are hard to come by in this country. A truck has been ordered for the transport and is ready for loading.

Ban Ki-moon, Clinton and Westerwelle

There is a lot of help reaching the country, from friends all over the world. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the General Secretary of the UN, Ban Ki-moon and on Sunday German Secretary of State Guido Westerwelle came visiting. But there are still villages like Sauzal that have been forgotten. These villages still lack everything. Maybe the pilots of the international guests flew them over some of those villages to show that Chile still needs help – from Chileans as well as from their international friends.

I spent yesterday morning going around Santiago de Chile with Roswitha. She has told me of a home for the elderly that has been ravaged by the earthquake. It is lead by Franciscans since the 90s and more than 150 years old.

The first floor can not be used any more, due to the effects of the quake. Some of the 60 inhabitants – all of them women – have to sleep in the corridors and the sisters moved out of their quarters to make room for the elderly.

There is no money to restore the house to a safe state – or ensure dignified conditions for its inhabitants. The age of the inhabitants is between 80 and 100 years. Few of them have friends in the neighbourhood who look after them from time to time. When they hear that I am from Germany, they try to say “Guten Tag” or “Wie geht es Ihnen?”. I stay there for two hours. Before I left, I received a call from my colleague Axel Rottländer.

Impressions from unknown villages

He left the city in the small hours of the day together with Don Miguel. They went south to Concepción, where the epicentre of the devastating earthquake was. By now everybody who follows the news knows the name of this city. However, nobody knows Sauzal, not even in Chile itself. It is a village with 141 houses of which only 36 are still inhabitable. Axel sounds beleaguered: “There is no electricity here. There is no water. And it is more luck than anything else, if a tanker comes through.”

Together with 200 families of Sauzal, Axel and Don Miguel have started to compose the first list of needed items: staple foods like rice, sugar, powdered milk and noodles are desperately needed. This list will be sent out from Santiago to get offers for the items. “The tents are almost ordered,” Axel says on the phone. And then, somehow out of context: “The people here are afraid.” Some of them do not want to return even to the undamaged houses; there could be another heavy quake, they fear.

Then the list again: „We need everything. There is nothing left”, Axel says. So I keep on writing things down: fluorine for disinfection, toothpaste and –brushes, soap, towels, washing detergent, sanitary towels, diapers. No help reached those people up till now. Tomorrow I will visit the German Embassy in Santiago to talk about delivering aid to those people. I have written everything down. At the end it was easy to take notes, as just about everything is needed.

We’re watching from Haiti with shock and sadness as the news comes from Chile: another merciless earthquake, more powerful than ever. So soon after the devastation here in and around Port-au-Prince. (Was that only a few weeks ago? It feels like an eternity.)

Haitians understand all too well what the people of Chile are enduring. The desperate search for missing loved ones … sleepless nights in the street outside unstable houses … lack of communication to the outside world … the fear of what the future holds. The terror does not subside easily.

And yet, there’s an additional heartache for Haiti in hearing this news. Why was it so much worse here? Chile’s quake registered at 8.8, about 50 times more powerful than Haiti’s. But the numbers of Haitian dead have already surpassed 220,000 – close to the horrendous toll of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Chile’s dead, at last report, number some 700 – a tragic loss, but orders of magnitude fewer than Haiti’s. What explains this deadly disparity?

The answer lies partly in bad luck, but largely in poverty and human frailty. Where Chile had strict building codes, Haiti suffered from haphazard construction. Poor, rural people had for years flooded into the capital, living in precariously built shantytowns. Lack of enforcement, corruption and weak governance all contributed to grossly magnify the proportions of the catastrophe. It’s easy enough to see the exceptions here, which might have been the rule if earthquake-resistant building codes had been enforced: a few solid structures still tower above the rubble – scarred and cracked, to be sure, but standing all the same.

The news media have refocused their attention on Chile now, leaving Haiti behind for the most part. I don’t blame them – they’re doing their jobs. But I worry that, as so many times in the past, Haiti will quickly fade from public consciousness, once the world’s TV screens are no longer broadcasting terrifying pictures from Port-au-Prince.
All the more important that those of us who are working hand in hand with the Haitian people maintain our commitment for the long term, not just with material support but with the determination to rebuild safely and prudently. We can help provide the know-how. The Haitians will supply the courage and integrity.

(Just now, we felt another aftershock. A rude reminder that the crisis is not over yet for Haiti, not for a long time.)