"Don't forget us": they ask at Piña Palmera
Four weeks after the passage of Hurricane Agatha, the rehabilitation center for people with disabilities on the isthmus of Oaxaca remains closed. They need help to rebuild the roofs and also to recover the teaching equipment
Text: Daniela Pastrana
Photos: Courtesy of Piña Palmera
MEXICO CITY.- By telephone, Flavia Anau recounts:
“We need to rebuild roofs, which were highly damaged, raise the demolished spaces, such as the carpentry, which is a basic space to live independently. And we need to recover the didactic materials and the equipment…well, almost everything”, he finally says.
Flavia is the general coordinator of Piña Palmera, a rehabilitation center for people with disabilities that is in the municipality of Pochutla, Oaxaca, and that for 30 years has served the populations and communities most affected by poverty in the coastal region. and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
It does so from a community perspective, not charity, which means that it seeks to give tools to people who have a disability so that they can integrate into the community.
The call for help to the Pie de Página team is made by Carmina Hernández, a workshop facilitator from Piña Palmera, who communicates through Facebook and then by mail, to alert us of the situation in which the center is, a month after Hurricane Ágatha passed by the coast and collapsed everything.
“Dear Daniela, thank you for being open to listening to the tragedy that Piña Palmera is experiencing due to the hurricane, it has not been easy for the media to give us a voice. She has been working with them since 1996 and is an outstanding job with people with disabilities and their families in indigenous and / or rural communities. Since before the tragedy I sought to publicize it, because Piña is better known and recognized in other countries than in Mexico, ”says the message that she sent us by email, accompanied by photos and videos.
Like her are Malena, José, Paz, Toño, Alejandro, Misael and Cristian. People with different disabilities who have become teachers, responsible for activities and a central part of the project.
Six hours of rain destroy three decades of work
Hundreds of people with disabilities have passed through Piña Palmera, 30 years of work that has only been interrupted by the hurricane that made landfall four weeks ago 10 kilometers from Zipolite, the famous beach that is next to the rehabilitation center.
Until that moment, the center gave care to about 500 people, with different disabilities. It had permanent workshops for electricity, carpentry, cooking. And visits to communities such as Cosoaltepec, Santo Domingo, Las Cuevas, Zipolite, Puerto Escondido, Candelaria.
The hurricane that entered on May 30 destroyed 80 percent of the center. Three decades of work collapsed in six hours of rain.
“Do you remember there was a bridge? It was very small and there the trees got stuck and the water could no longer be stopped, which entered with an impressive force,” Flavia narrates on the phone.
He also says that when the governor, Alejandro Murat, arrived the next day, "he made a frightened face, because it was a disaster" and they sent the Army to help lift the trees. Then it was his wife, the president of the state DIF, who sent them a backhoe that worked for two days. She also donated mattresses to them.
But after that, the work has been of the volunteers. And help comes slowly. After four weeks, just this weekend they were able to get the internet back.
“We need the active participation of people because alone and alone we are not going to be able to rebuild what is required,” says Flavia.
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Daniela Pastrana
She wanted to be an explorer and see the world, but she got to know journalism and preferred to try to understand human societies. She directed the Red de Periodistas de a Pie for six years, and founded Pie de Página, a digital medium that seeks to change the narrative of terror installed in the Mexican press. She always has more questions than answers.
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