Young Chileans spearheading quake recovery

Mar 4, 2010, 18:55 GMT

Santiago - Young people in Chile were believed to have turned their backs on politics, with less than 10 per cent of voters under 30 registered to participate in last year's presidential elections.

But the aftermath of Saturday's earthquake has shown young Chileans at the forefront of relief and recovery, with emergency workers, medical students and military conscripts putting in sleepless nights in the disaster zones.

'I have barely slept six hours since Saturday, half-an-hour at a time when I get the chance,' Concepcion firefighter Edgardo Cuevas, who is in his 20s, told the German Press Agency dpa.

The quake has left at at least 799 people dead and 500,000 homes seriously damaged.

Like all Chilean firefighters, Cuevas, is a volunteer and does not get paid to risk his life.

'We've had to put out fires without water. There is none,' he said. 'Sometimes we take the fire trucks to a lagoon near the University of Concepcion.'

Cuevas' biggest frustration has been dealing with his traumatized countrymen on the street.

'People ask us for water and get angry if we don't give them any,' he says. 'They don't understand that the little water we have is not drinkable, that the trucks are old and rusty.'

Cuevas was surrounded by comrades as young as himself who were trying to get some rest. The scene was marked by chaos and exhaustion.

A young man in torn clothes cleans the wounds on his feet, and another asks whether anyone has news of his girlfriend, whom he has not seen since Saturday. Nobody can reassure him.

The disaster zones are calmer since the early wave of looting that followed the quake and the resulting tsunami in southern Chile, where the country's military forces have imposed order.

Most of the men in uniform on the streets are barely 18, conscripts performing their military service. Armed with rifles and handguns, they enforce the 18-hour curfew and ward off the looters who overwhelmed police in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

The young soldiers in Concepcion, the country's second-largest city, which suffered severe damage, are mostly from other parts of Chile. Riding in on trucks, they were cheered on arrival in towns like Coronel, Lota and Concepcion.

   'Everything looks calm, although there have been some clashes,' says a military officer named Leon, as he asks reporters for cigarettes.

In hospitals, overwhelmed by the lack of equipment and without so much as a register of injured patients, students in health-sector fields try to help.

'Now we need everyone, even if they have not graduated yet. It is an exceptional situation,' said Alfredo Jerez, director of the hospital in the port of Talcahuano, near Concepcion.