Civil Society, Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population, Poverty & SDGs

CHILE: Best Christmas Gift – a New House, Built by New Friends

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Dec 24 2008 (IPS) - Before the volunteers showed up at her house, Pamela Peña was nervous. She was embarrassed for others to see the poverty that her family lived in. But once the work started, she relaxed and enjoyed the unexpected Christmas present.

The builders were 24 young professionals and university graduates who had set the goal of building an 18-square-metre wooden house with two windows and a door in two days, along with Peña – a 40-year-old homemaker – and her family.

The family lives in the Juan Pablo II slum, which is paradoxically located in Lo Barnechea, one of Santiago’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.

“When they told me, I was so happy, but then I felt ashamed because I wouldn’t be able to attend them properly. I was thinking about the bathroom, about the food. But now I feel great because I have shared things with them that have nothing to do with money,” Peña told IPS on Sunday, Dec. 21, as the finishing touches were put on the new house.

“It’s uncomfortable when people with money come to a house without amenities,” she said over the noise of hammering. “It’s kind of embarrassing for them to see your old things. But they have been so sweet and kind to us, it wasn’t awkward at all; they have been so wonderful.”

Under the Fundación Un Techo para Chile (A Roof for Chile Foundation), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1997 by Jesuit priest Felipe Berríos which operates on the basis of donations and volunteer work, families, high school or university students, or companies and their staff cover the costs of the housing materials and build a simple wooden house alongside the beneficiary family.

The foundation takes care of the purchasing and transportation of the materials, and its staff members provide advice in the field.

The two groups – the volunteer builders and the beneficiary family – are introduced several weeks before the start of the construction project and receive an explanation of the social principles underlying the foundation’s initiatives.

Over the last decade, A Roof for Chile, which started out as a summer project for student volunteers, has built nearly 33,000 homes around the country.

The foundation’s ultimate goal is to eradicate slums by 2010 – not by building small wooden houses, but by helping families apply for state assistance and subsidies for the construction of solid permanent dwellings as part of new low-income housing projects that are gradually replacing the country’s shantytowns.

The foundation, whose aim is to empower the families as they help create their own neighbourhoods and communities, provides support, advice, coordination and supervision throughout the process of obtaining government housing funds and suitable land, and building the new neighbourhoods.

The foundation’s multidisciplinary team of young professionals works with government agencies, universities, and law practices, design offices, real estate agencies, construction companies, suppliers and other private businesses to create the new communities.

“For us, the little wooden houses we build are emergency housing for families in urgent need of solutions – people who need a decent structure to live in during the two years that it takes on average to build their permanent new housing,” Gabriel Prudencio, the foundation’s head of construction, told IPS.

The initiative, which has been replicated in 13 other nations of Latin America under the name Un Techo para mi País (A Roof for My Country), with 8,000 houses built so far, won fourth place in November in the Experiences in Social Innovation contest held by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) with support from the U.S.-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Although the foundation’s volunteers build homes year-round in Chile, a special effort is made before Christmas, “to generate ties of trust, which strengthen the sense of human solidarity,” said Prudencio. This year, a total of 180 families will have received new houses during the holiday season.

In some cases, the wooden houses serve as extensions to families’ shacks or rundown homes, as in the case of Pamela Peña, a mother of five children between the ages of five and 21, and grandmother of two.

Peña told IPS that she has always lived in Lo Barnechea. In a sad voice, she said her mother abandoned her when she was born, and that her father never recognised her.

When she grew up, the father of her four older children left her for another woman while she was pregnant, and did not provide child support.

Today she lives with Gustavo, the father of her youngest child, Francisco. Gustavo works loading and unloading trucks, for which he only earns 70,000 pesos (110 dollars) a month. That made it impossible for them to save up the 40,000 pesos (62 dollars) that A Roof for Chile charges the families, and which Peña and her partner still owe.

The idea behind the requirement for the families to make a small payment is so that they have an investment and are fully involved in the construction of their new houses, and so that they see their new homes as a step towards a better future, in which they will play a leading role. Another requirement is that the family clear the plot where the wooden house will be built.

Peña was tired of living in such crowded conditions. Although only three of her children now live with her and Gustavo, the five of them were all sleeping in the same room, since one of the two rooms in the little house that the city government assigned her 21 years ago collapsed because of termites. The roof of the remaining room leaks when it rains.

For the donors and volunteers, their involvement is a show of neighbourly love and solidarity.

“On Saturday, when we arrived (at Peña’s house), we all just greeted each other in a normal fashion. But when we had to leave, we hugged each other as if we had been friends our whole lives. This brings out the best in you,” Evelyn, a computer engineer from Cuba who has lived in Chile for 15 years, commented to IPS.

Generally, “lasting bonds of affection” emerge between the donors and the beneficiary families, she said.

“The first time I built one of these houses, last year, it had a huge impact on me because I hadn’t realised the depth of the poverty that people lived in,” said Evelyn who, along with her fellow employees from the company she works for, collected 1,260 dollars to purchase the materials for the two houses they have built.

Besides covering the cost of and building the houses, the group brought boxes of food and presents for the children, “so they would have a nicer Christmas.”

According to the information gathered by a Roof for Chile in 2007, there are 533 slums in this country, home to 29,000 families – down from 1,000 slums in 1997, where 126,000 families lived.

“We believe that A Roof for Chile cannot do this on its own, because it is too gigantic of a task, which is why we are trying to convince everyone to make it a national goal,” said Prudencio, who praised the housing policy of President Michelle Bachelet.

The government has relocated “more than 115,000 families from slums to permanent housing, and will continue working with the 20,000 families counted in 2007,” Housing and Urban Planning Minister Patricia Poblete said on Sunday.

Since March 2006, the government has distributed 83.5 percent of the housing assistance funds allotted for the 2006-2009 period – 557,000 dollars, said the minister. In that period, 868 low-income housing projects have been built for nearly 61,000 families.

“This year, the biggest possible effort was made to reduce the shortage of low-income housing, and more than 48,000 housing subsidies were granted – bringing the total to 73 percent of the 223,000 housing subsidies budgeted for until 2010,” said Poblete.

Furthermore, thanks to a new housing policy, the houses are larger – 44 square metres on average – and have two bedrooms, which can be expanded to four.

While she watched her new house go up, Peña thought about how to earn money for wood paneling to line the inside walls, to protect her family from the cold that would otherwise seep in through cracks between the boards when the southern hemisphere winter starts next June.

She said she is applying for a housing subsidy, but that she does not think that she will obtain it until 2012 because she and her partner are not able to save up much money. At any rate, for now, she is enjoying her new wooden house.