March 1, 2008

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.

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.

Read the whole story…here too…