Meeting Report: Ricardo Barrera
Location: Alcaldia de Mejicanos
Date: 27/04/09
Time: 9:00 – 10:00
Main topic: Future plans of Sector Montreal.
Present: Ricardo Barrera, Victor Perez, Pecco and Dieuwer

Two weeks ago Ricardo Barrera gave us some drawings of a future plan of Sector Montreal. This future plan contains networks, infrastructure and land use. To get to know the ideas behind the plans we arranged this meeting.
There are some problems while making a future plan in Sector Montreal. First, to plan public buildings or recreational areas the municipality needs to find and obtain unused land first. Next to the scarcity of unused land, which gives no freedom to implement any recreational, educational or economical space within the plan, it is often difficult to find the owner of the plot. In this situation the municipality starts to clean the land and wait till somebody comes to demand their property. [If so, the municipality tries to buy the land, if not they declare it as a public space and are able by law to develop it for communal use. The process is called ‘expropriacion’.] Second, the geographical layout of the area creates difficulties for connectivity and plan infrastructure. Third, there is no money. All the plans are still far form being constructed. The aim is to create a funding with help of NGO’s like Fundasal and Procomes. The future plan where we talk about is far from being realized. The plan of the land use is still just a proposition and nothing concrete. It gives the opportunity to have a critic look at some of the aspects. The infrastructural part of the plan only contains the main roads and intends to create a better connectivity. The passages are not included, which leaves out an important part of the risk reduction in the most vulnerable spots of the area. Because this plan contains the whole area of Sector Montreal it focuses on the scale of the urban area and not on the scale of a community. To reduce the social problems, especially in the north part of the Sector Montreal there is heavy gang activity, he wants to increase the social control by creating recreational areas and public buildings. All is limited of course by the unused spaces. To create more connectivity there is a new road planned. This road connects the main road of Sector Montreal to the mountain ridge on the west. The connection is made halfway, which improves the connectivity and create a better integration, but still to leaves the north part badly connected. It would be much more effective, in terms of creating social control, to make the connection in the north part; at the end of the community of Buenos Aires. Ricardo agrees, but explains that the possibility to create this road is cut of by the just constructed El Corintho; a big gated community housing project for the middle class. This is a prime example of the lack of urban planning. There is no integrated plan. Which is this example blocks, what might have been a big help to the social problems in Buenos Aires.
The gang activity in the north of Montreal is fed by the bad connectivity, but also by the connection that this area has with two other municipalities, not by using roads but by crossing fields to Cuscatancingo and Mariona. Victor explains how the gangs were pushed out of the community of Iberia, which was the headquarters for the ‘marreros’, by just the activity of creating infrastructure. The presence of the constructors and the activity around the construction made the ‘marreros’ move to Buenos Aires. It shows the importance of social control and activity of the public space.
Within the visits to Sector Montreal we had been told by a ‘law’, which enabled the municipality to construct and help at a private owned piece of land. This ‘law’ turns out to be a figurative law and is a regulation which is carried out by the municipality to prevent favoring individuals, in fear of getting accused for corruption.
One of the drawings shows a plan of all the existing black water plants and the new planned water plants. There is a little group of people that has a black water system, but the majority has dry tanks, a hole in the ground that serves as sanitation system. The problem with these holes is that there capacity is limited and it is dangerous to dig a second hole because of the risk for collapsing. There are already cases where people dump there black water illegally in the rivers, rivers wherein the women still washes the clothes. Clearly there is a desperate need for a sanitation system.

Meeting Report: Mercedes and Jorge
Location: Fundasal
Date: 27/04/09
Time: 15:00 – 16:30
Main topic: Urban Matters
Present: Mercedes, Jorge and Dieuwer

Urban matters is a new program which is a collaboration between Cordaid, Fundasal and an umbrella of different governmental, non-governmental and private organizations.
Instead of doing a project with a community or with a municipality, this program will work integrated on multiple levels using as well as Dutch as El Salvadorian resources. The main focus is to give life to urban planning on the scale of the municipality, which is unknown in Central American countries. The biggest problem in El Salvador is the lack of resources and the short ruling period of the local government. Creating a platform where the municipality can work together with the national government, private sector and NGO’s (of Dutch and El Salvadorian origin) to create a development plan for a number of years, should lead to durability and a continues process even if the local government changes.
Urban Matters will be implemented at Sector Montreal, Mejicanos and Sector Limon, Soyapango. Both are half slum and half popular housing and evolved without any planning. First the people came, and after the municipality implemented infrastructure, basic services, and other networks. Both have gang related problems, are vulnerable for yearly repetitive disasters and outskirts of the greater San Salvador. Limon contains a population of 30 thousand families and Montreal 10 thousand. Where in Limon there are spaces to create parks recreational areas and economical activity, there is a lack of space in Montreal. Adjacent to the lack of space the area of Montreal has a geographical layout which is hard to coop with. To create improved dwellings for instance, there are two possibilities; to build a better house at the same place or to create a new settlement, which opens the possibilities for more social and economical activities. But the question is if people will give up there peace of land.
For Fundasal it is an exception on there regulations, while they intend to help only the poorest people, to work on this project. In this new program the whole area is involved, and not only the poorest people and poorest communities. But the opportunity to create the start of integrated urban planning in El Salvador could not be refused. The idea of an integrated plan goes from dwelling, infrastructure, networks, education, health, recreation etc. as far as to social programs and economical stimulation.



The structure of Dutch and El Salvadorian stakeholders should help and create a bigger participation of the El Salvadorian private sector. At this moment it is hard to find corporate funding or sponsorships because the companies don’t have any social affiliations. The Dutch private sector that is involved consists out of specialists in recycling (the mobile factory), waste and water, but also urban management (Osborne and Arcadis). Out of the Dutch ministry of VROM there will be help to create waste water treatment plants.

Meeting Report: Intercomunale 2
Location: Community center Iberia
Date: 24/04/09
Time: 18:00 - 20:15
Main topic: Intercomunale de Montreal: workshop of Fundaspad, survey

The inter-communal meeting is organized every Friday evening. Every other week there is a meeting with a workshop provided by FUNDASPAD and the other Fridays are reserved for the communities to discuss their problems.

FUNDASPAD

FUNDASPAD is a social organization that exists out of six volunteers working for three years to establish a sense of people’s power in different communities. They accomplish meetings in these communities to be able to teach about social and economical issues like human rights, legislation, how to get organized etc.
This meeting FUNDASPAD teach about exploitation. A small workshop is given to teach the people the boundaries of exploitation at work and their rights. When they are taken advance of, the inhabitants of the different communities can unify to plead their cause and have a better chance to accomplish their rights. The main focus of FUNDASPAD is to teach the people how to analyze their situation and construct ‘people’s power’ in the lower classes of society. In the last three years they had different experiences with these workshops
There is an attendance list kept by for the inter-communal meeting, here we can check which communities how often show up.

Survey

Some people of the communities that didn't receive a survey didn't understand the reason why and felt missed out. Victor helped explaining that a research about a part of Montreal would provide information to get a better understanding of the whole Montreal.
The willing to participate of the survey seems high. To illustrate this, one community that only received a single interview as an example, copied this in order to make the complete survey. Willington and Vera Cruz that didn't complete the survey yet will pass it through Victor Perez.

At the next meeting, the eight of May we will give a short presentation on the survey and our analysis so far.

Meeting Report: Community Meeting Sector Montreal, Mejicanos
Location: Community house, Iberia
Date: 17/04/09
Time: 18:00-20:00
Main topic: Introduction to Urban Emergencies and distributing the survey

Every Friday a community meeting is held to create a platform for communities to discuss their problems and point them out to the Municipality. The organizational structure is set up with a board of directors for the whole sector (who are leading the meeting), and two spokesmen of any community who are the directors of their community. The municipality is represented by the promotional workers in the Sector: Victor and Hector. Next to the municipality there are two spokesmen of the catholic organization CEFO who worked in the area starting after the earthquake of 1986, [mostly housing.]

The community meeting starts of with the subjects of the previous meeting. The second point on the agenda is the explanation of our Urban Emergencies study followed by the distribution of the survey. Not every community is present at the meeting which makes it difficult to distribute the survey to all the intended communities. We give out an envelope with 30 surveys to the communities of Buenos Aires, Artiga, Veracruz, Iberia and Finca Argentina, and an envelope of 20 surveys to the Willington community.
While the directors and the municipality try to get all the directors to the meeting, not everybody shows up. Illustrative is the presence Buenos Aires, who attends for the first time to the meeting. After they get applause for their first attend, the sector director, Victor Perez and CEFO all give their personal appreciation to this attend. The repetitive appreciation shows how young and fragile the organization of the sector still is.
Next to the directors of the Buenos Aires community, there are four other men from the community. Their intention for this visit gets clear after we distributed the survey and the communities get the chance to point out some of the problems they have to deal with: A lower part of Buenos Aires has a problem with grey water that comes from houses at the upper part. The four present men are affected by this problem and made a plan of how to solve this problem, but the community is in need of money from the municipality to be able to carry out this plan. It seems the community is attending for this reason, reactionary to the problem.

After the discussion of this problem Victor Perez wants us to leave the community meeting, he doesn’t make clear what the exact reason for our early leaving is.

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Meeting Report: Protecion Civil
Location: Alcaldia Mejicanos
Date: 16/04/09
Time: 09:00-10:30
Main topic: Working methods of Protecion Civil (in Mejicanos)
Participants:[??], Victor Perez, Wouter & Sofia (UCA)


Introduction

This Protecion Civil (Civil Protection) is a department of the Alcaldia (City Hall) of Mejicanos dedicated to social development. We asked to meet with them in order to get an understanding about the involvement of the local/central government in social development and other support in Mejicanos. Accompanied by Victor Perez, we could inform about the most vulnerable zones in Mejicanos and the accessibility and possibilities to investigate these areas. They promised to share an investigation which could provide us with (general) facts and figures about […] Mejicanos. We can expect this on a digital CD, which Victor will bring with him next community meeting (Friday).


Most vulnerable zones

To choose our area of focus within Mejicanos we also informed to the most vulnerable zones concerning natural disasters. They responded with:
- Montreal
- San Ramon
- San Roque
- Chancana


About Protecion Civil

The inefficiency between the local and central government was immediately addressed; “the central government doesn’t help”. With the capacity that they have, they focus mostly on critical poverty. In order to increase their capacity (and that of the community) they are building capacity, to organize people. These projects are implemented on a national, Municipality and community scale.
In Montreal for example, after an emergency, they organized the people and distributed plastic materials (budget). They collaborated with Procomes, who shared tools with the Alcaldia while Protecion Civil was focussing on raising more awareness in developing an early alarm system [called “alarma temporal”].

They work before, during and after the emergency. During the emergency phase the have more community meetings instead of the weekly normative. They make inventory on necessities etc. and they receive help from national police, Red Cross and the army. NGO mostly helped by distributing clothes and food. Victor gave an example of ‘small’ disaster to illustrate the relation between citizens and the Alcaldia. There’s a lot of wind during summertime, trees can fall down. (He explained that he was contacted in the middle of the night by a family whose house was destroyed by a tree at 2 am and the problem was solved at 7 am.)
Before and after is more in the sense of prevention; building capacity and raising awareness. The educate how to use the community house during an emergency and about the infrastructure leading to it. Then they evaluate the system [after scenario training?] and educate the people how to use the measurement tools for quicker evacuation and prevention [help from Municipality]. The route of evacuation is identified with risk routes and they don’t have the financial capacity to improve the roads. In order to map the behaviour of people as a result of these projects (incentives) we asked about the experiences with this prevention trainings. It seems that in the summer, when the risk is lower than during winter, only a few people participate in the projects. While during the winter people experience the risk (all over again) and the participation is very high. We were told that this could be generalised as cultural perception; that people are very reactionary. [He illustrated this with the example of a volcano eruption that happened 15 years ago, killing 300 people and after that the settlement was exactly rebuild in the same way. The same could be set about the area Las Collinas, where they first earthquake of 2001 destroyed the settlement and now there is another settlement built on the other side of the hills/mountain.]


Future development

When we asked about the plans for future development, regarding for example job oppurtunities and accessibility to schools, they explained that there is no plan. There are different plans regarding subjects like security, healthcare and environmental issues but these are never integrated. To improve the liveability they explained that the (financial) capacity obstructs them to reach and improve this for more people. They focus on improving the pavements and put up protection walls on the scale of urban conditions. They look, put the responsibility, to the national government to develop an integrated plan and adjust the laws (rules & regulations). They indicated the flaws in the current political system with the example/scenario where (big) construction companies build a settlement in an identified high risk zone, volcano zone. Regardless of the problems and risk they intend to capitalize quickly and (unconsciously) add to the risks in those areas, with deforestation etc.

In the end we made to appointments with Victor Perez. One is to start attending the community meetings in Mejicanos and the other to meet with Procomes.

Meeting Report: Jamie Choto (Procomes)
Location: Procomes office
Date: 14/04/09
Time: 09:00-10:30
Main topic: Working methods of Procomes (in Mejicanos)
Participants: Jamie Choto, Eduardo, Victor Perez (Barbara, Dieuwer & Wouter)


Introduction

We were already familiar with some of the work that Procomes did in multiple communities in Mejicanos. They currently work in 9 out of the 14 departments.
Jamie Choto explained that they work closely with the Municipality and with national government in shelter response. Procomes has connections with different actors, see figure ##. The chair is formed by people from the community.




Organization

The main interest is to prevent, secondary is to react and they also help during the emergency phase. The organization has been working for 24 years in 4 programs:
- (local) people development
- basic houses
- enterprises/businesses
- microcredit
The process of covering needs:
1. Intercommunity (Intercommunal) center, group of people belonging to each community
2. Talk to mayor of Municipality
3. Organize principals
4. Decide with Municipality how to use funds
They make ‘Inventory-trips’ to define problems for community meeting. Choto explained that they are forced to first define 5 main problems, formulate solutions, project development, get funds and then solve. About the financial capacity they repeated the situation of last year, when there was 1500$ to be distributed over 16 communities for interventions.
Capacity building

They explain their way of capacity building: assist and guide people with building houses, so later on they can help other and/or take on a new job. There are success stories about this and we have the opportunity to meet two women who experienced this incentive, implemented by Procomes.


Risk prevention/reduction

They explained that since 2008 the efficiency of the alarm system improved. With the help of a metrological system, they get information about floods, strong winds and earthquakes. The information goes through SNET (national government) to inform the Municipality and communities.

During the summer they have scenario trainings and programs in the schools to raise risk awareness. During this time they have the opportunity to focus more on prevention, e.g. they go around the neighbourhood checking on trees which form a risk. The added with an example where heavy rains caused erosion and electricity poles and wires were damaged last summer.


Documentation

We received documentation in the form of educational guides and digital information on CD with lectures. We can contact them through e-mail, find more information their website and request information about the necessities lists, work plans and the places of resettlements in the community of Montreal.

We planned to visit to an area in Cuscantancingo accompanied by people of Procomes. They constructed a settlement there to move 32 families from a high risk zone to safer environment. With observation and interview as our main tool we aim to gather information about what incentives this response caused.

Meeting Report: Victor Perez
Location: Alcaldia de Mejicanos
Date: 06/04/09
Time: 09:00 till 10:00
Main topic: Explanation objectives and create appointments.

Victor Perez is the promotional worker for sector Montreal in Mejicanos. He lived there for over 40 years himself and is working as a community man to strive for development of the area. The area had its biggest growth of population in the 1980s. In the end of the 80s the municipality managed to supply water and electricity for the most of the houses.
The most vulnerable communities of Sector Montreal are Buenos Aires, Willington, Finca Argentina and Iberia. These communities will have the focus of our study. In order to create a thorough analysis of the contemporary situation, the disaster risk and responses given to the area we plan observation visits, a survey and different interviews. Victor seems to have a lot of time and creates the opportunity to get the appointments really quick.