By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer

SAN SALVADOR—His house and his life fell apart during the earthquakes that struck El Salvador this year, but refugee Luis Ovidio Nuñez Vides is getting some of his material needs met to begin moving beyond the emotional aftershock.

Delivery day was April 24. Friends and family members, including children, carried cinder blocks on their heads along la linea, the train tracks, to a sloped clearing amid tropical greenery. In Ciudad Delgado, Vides purchased land to build a new 36-square-meter home.

The president of the neighborhood, Vides, his wife, Berta, and their six children are among hundreds of families receiving the materials to build houses through Food for the Poor, an international charitable organization to neighboring countries of the United States. The Vides family is one of over 150,000 families who lost their homes during major earthquakes in January and February.

He located the land with the help of FFP distribution coordinator Father David Blanchard, a Carmelite missionary from Massachusetts in the country for 15 years, who also lent him money to buy it, which the priest borrowed. And that’s no small feat in a country of 6.2 million people where six percent of the people own over 90 percent of the land.

Vides said he feels “very sad.” He spent all his life trying to build his house and he’s “lost everything.” Yet, thanks to Father Blanchard, he now has “hope that soon we’re going to have a place to live . . . Probably in a month or less we think we’re going to be able to have our home.”

During the earthquakes, Vides lost a four-room home in a middle-class neighborhood he’d worked years to build. He was out working when the first quake struck. He first asked God to keep his family safe.

“Lord Jesus, you are the one who can help at this moment . . . Please save my family,” he recalls praying. “I thought I would come home and find them in the river.”

His wife, mother-in-law and children were at home. The children ran out of the house screaming while the women sat on the floor while the house fell around them. Fortunately no one was hurt.

The house fell after the second earthquake and the government condemned the land, forcing the family and 11 other neighborhood families to move into tents in a refugee camp along the Pan-American Highway. Twenty-six adults and 14 children, from 1 to 13 years old, shared 15 mattresses.

Between the roar of passing traffic and the need to guard the refugio, or refugee camp, from thieves, most adult refugees didn’t get more than four hours of sleep a night, Vides said. They used a hole for a bathroom and borrowed running water from a neighbor’s hose.

Through FFP, Vides then built a temporary home of sheet metal where he now lives. With a sad, reserved demeanor only hinting at the magnitude of his tremors within, Vides walked down the beaten train track to piles of shard and cinder block rubble on the hilltop where his home used to be. He then followed the tracks, passing women carrying baskets on their heads and shacks of adobe, tin and plastic seemingly patched together like mosaics, to the new site. It is less than a mile, but like a world away.

Vides explained that his family and nine other families will build their houses there by late May and will then draw by lots to see who gets what house. His house won’t have indoor plumbing, but a well for now; they would prefer flatter land, but it’s the best they can get. It makes him nervous to live close to the tracks, where the train runs twice daily at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., so he always has to warn his children when sending them out to the store around dinnertime.

They’ll also have to guard the new building materials from thieves; four people will stay at the site nightly and rotate shifts so materials will always be protected.

“It has been pretty hard for our family to survive, to see an improvement because all we had during the war was destruction. We haven’t seen any big benefit because after the war people started to steal. You have to be at home all the time. You can’t go to work. You have to be at home because you’re afraid people are going to steal,” Vides said.

Vides, who can’t read or write, sells appliances and hopes to get his business up and running again.

“These days no one is buying anything from me,” he said through a translator. “No one can afford to. My family tries to help us, but it’s hardly enough for food.”

His children share their dreams with him and he knows education is the key to their future. A daughter, who is taking computer classes through the church, wants a computer. “I feel pain (for what) I would like to give them, but there’s nothing I can do to give them what they want.”

He says, even though it’s a shame that it takes earthquakes to get the world to notice his country, he is deeply grateful for FFP, for international support and prayers for El Salvador. They help him keep his faith, which for him is more powerful than any earthquake.

An evangelical Christian, he’s also grateful that relief aid has no denominational divisions.

“We have to believe (Jesus) is always with us and the only thing we’re never going to lose is faith. We now have to continue fighting one day at a time, working for progress of the family,” he continued. “The only way we’re going to survive is being together, being close to the church and getting the help from the church.”