Aid Workers Inspired by Burning Man Spirit in Peru
April 6, 2008
Read the original article from SF Gate here
Aid Worker Inspired by Burning Man Spirit in Peru- Volunteers offer talents to earthquake relief in small Peru town
By Gregory Dicum,
Chronicle Foreign Service
April 6, 2008
Mauk is the director of Burners Without Borders, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that is helping Peruvians clear rubble so they can start rebuilding.
Burners Without Borders grew out of an ad hoc relief effort in 2005, after hundreds of volunteers from the annual Burning Man art festival – who call themselves Burners – helped Biloxi, Miss., residents after Hurricane Katrina. Since then, Burners have participated in more than a dozen relief programs, including a coat drive for homeless people in London, debris cleanup after Southern California wildfires, a reconstruction effort in tsunami-ravaged Thailand and emergency flood work in Nevada. For the Pisco project, the group has raised more than $54,000 – mostly over the Internet from Burning Man participants.
In Peru, most Burners are from the Bay Area and are working alongside 154 volunteers from 23 nations and such humanitarian groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
“We’re not a disaster-relief agency,” said Mauk, who is the group’s only paid employee. “We’re an organization that finds gaps and steps in to fill them.”
The earthquake that struck Peru’s southern coast in August killed 500 and displaced 50,000 people. Tremors destroyed 80 percent of Pisco, a city of 116,000 inhabitants located near the quake’s epicenter. The downtown area, where 148 people died when the city cathedral collapsed, looks like a bombed-out war zone.
Eight months later, Pisco is still littered with rubble and dust. Walls of woven reeds and flimsy tarps are what many residents call home and offer their only protection from harsh desert winds and gangs of roving thieves.
On a recent evening at “Center Camp,” a yellow-painted concrete house that is the group’s headquarters, about 40 Burners adorned in nose rings, dreadlocks and tattoos ate a hearty vegetarian meal under the shade of several bougainvillea trees. Next to the tables, a half-dozen wheelbarrows sat at the ready. The sound of heavy trucks carrying loads of rubble emanated from beyond the aqua-painted garden wall.
Some volunteers say this arid area of northern Peru reminds them of the Burning Man site in Nevada. A constant wind and desert dust envelops most objects and sometimes incapacitates tools. And as work teams coalesce and then break up to do a variety of different jobs, new volunteers are added to the mix.
“The Burning Man environment is the world’s best training ground for international relief work,” said Roger Ryon, a flight instructor from Portland, Ore., who helps run the makeshift dirt airport for the art festival and has been clearing rubble in Pisco since January.
Jason Brulotte, an Oakland engineer, hopes to train local mechanics to convert diesel engines to run on vegetable oil, and eventually develop a micro-industry in alternative fuel.
“This is what I’ve wanted to do all my life,” he said. “I can come here and do work that nobody would let me do in the U.S. We are the social conscience growing outward from the Burning Man community.”
Rich Gellert, a resident of Santa Cruz who owns Hydrologic Systems, a company that manufactures water filters, donated a reverse-osmosis water-purification system to the Burners’ Pisco headquarters. When the volunteers end their effort sometime this summer, the group will donate the equipment to a primary school, providing students with clean water and a source of income if school officials opt to sell purified water.
Sam Bloch, a carpenter from Lake Tahoe, has designed a concrete unit that helps families jump-start reconstruction. It combines a water tank with kitchen and bathroom hookups and a sewer connection, providing earthquake victims with the core of a new house and a sanitation system while they rebuild.
“It can be built with unskilled labor. That’s the key – families can do a lot of it themselves,” Bloch said. “It gets people out of the tents and building their houses.”
At the Abraham Valdelomar elementary school, Burners have built a new library, donated 1,000 books, and painted a bright mural depicting a colorful map of the world.
At the San Clemente elementary school near Pisco’s trash- and rubble-strewn beach, volunteers are putting the finishing touches on a retrofitted building that replaces a collapsed structure. The Peruvian government estimates that more than 1,500 classrooms still need to be rebuilt.
Even though Burner volunteers contribute $5 a day, live in crowded conditions, are often sick with stomach ailments, and use vacation time or have quit jobs to work in Pisco, most say it’s worth it.
“Once you get here and see the need, you just can’t stop working,” said Lake Tahoe resident Jimmy Levi, Burners Without Borders’ Peru Program Coordinator.
Carmen Mauk stands in flip-flops atop a pile of broken bricks as she surveys a city devastated by a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. “People are being bled of their resources,” the San Francisco resident said. “They’re still waiting for their lots to be cleared – they won’t get government help until then.”
Mauk is the director of Burners Without Borders, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that is helping Peruvians clear rubble so they can start rebuilding.