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.

(First draft, text between [...] has to be verified)

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.

During the last two weeks most updates are post in reports (see Downloads, to the right). If you missed out on this and would like to read up on our work, please download the most recent reports. We will inform you from now on with quick posts to link you directly to the newest updates.

Due to ‘Semana Santa’ (Holy Week), inconsequential access to internet and the lack of working places during this vacation we’ve been focusing on getting the case studies of the ground. As a result of the Revision, we’ve chosen the combination of Mejicanos, Downtown AMSS and Santa Tecla. See Location presentation

For the last few days we’ve been meeting with key contacts of these locations to update and brainstorm on further development of the case studies. For every case study a short overview of objectives, actions and needs were made and are available for download here. We continue in to identify ourselves and the research in more specific detail to others in order to collaborate more efficient.

For the organization of the blog, we plan to update our findings in graphic illustrations and reports, tagged according to the case study. For a clear overview and quick navigation we advice to look for the tags: Mejicanos, Santa Tecla and Downtown AMSS, on the right.

For our research concerning Architectural Body we plan to update our photographic analysis, also tagged with Architectural Body. We continue to gather more information concerning the material flow and updates for the blog will follow soon.

We look forward to your replies and are thankful for the interests shown (mostly through mails) regarding our progress.

Objectives (ENG) of all case study locations, available for download here (zip)

Location presentation 20090414

View more presentations from wpocornie.

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.