In El Salvador, a Story of Triumph

Written by Margaret Molina O'Brien, Special to RedCross.org

El Salvador, February 18, 2001 — A picture may be worth a thousand words but the grim reality facing thousands of El Salvadorans this month is more than any one photograph can accurately convey. Families, sometimes as many as six or seven, sleep together under whatever cover they can arrange from the scrap heaps that were once homes. Throughout the states of Cuscatlan, La Paz and San Vicente, the scenes repeat themselves at a frightening pace, and the faces of the population reflect the shock of two huge earthquakes in one small month.

If there is anything hopeful to be found here, it is that so many people have survived. But that is little comfort for 80-year-old Wilmar Oswaldo Franco, a father who stood by helplessly for three days, consoling his daughter who lay pinned under the cinderblock walls of what had been the kitchen. Maria Gunercindo Alvarado was serving her father's morning coffee and tortillas when the house collapsed.

Franco lived with his daughter in the tiny ranch that has been home to generations of Alvarados. While he stood vigil by Maria, waiting for someone to help dig her out, tragedy struck other members of the family.

A few towns away in the village of Candelaria, Maria's niece and her playmates were killed when their elementary school collapsed. Maria's sister, Rosa, was concerned that Maria did not attend the child's funeral. She asked American Red Cross psychologist Joe Prewitt Diaz, Ph.D., who was in Candelaria to counsel the parents of the children who died, to check on Maria and her father back in their village.

When the psychologist and a group of Salvadoran Red Cross Mental Health volunteers hiked the steep path to the crumbled ranch, they were greeted by Maria's 8-year-old daughter who begged them to come help her mother. Reaching the collapsed home, they found Maria badly dehydrated but still alive, pinned painfully under a dust-covered concrete slab. Maria's two tiny sons huddled near as her father stood silently at her side.

Doctor Prewitt-Diaz sent his team members to look for help to break up and lift the wall that confined Maria. He then called from his cell phone for an ambulance from the Salvadoran Red Cross station nearby and asked Maria's daughter to hike to the main road to signal them. After Maria was freed from the debris, Prewitt-Diaz fashioned a brace from pieces of wood to help support her crushed hip. Red Cross team members constructed a stretcher while a First Aid-trained volunteer monitored her vital signs.

Maria's life lay balanced between two cane rods, supported by the 6-foot-3 American Red Cross volunteer and the Salvadoran Red Cross volunteer he had trained. With Maria in the ambulance, and her baby son beside her, there was finally a moment to exhale.

The silence at the hilltop was broken by a whoop from the valley where the exhausted volunteers prepared to follow the ambulance. It was not a shout of victory, but one of joy. Although the volunteers knew that their job in El Salvador was far from over, they had managed to relieve at least a little bit of the massive human suffering caused by the earthquake.