Santiago, dormitorios, Habitat and impact studies

Hey everyone, this is barb posting now from the beautiful city of Santiago de Chile.  I got here Saturday night and I found my new living quarters for the next two months.  Let's just say this, if I ever spend time in prison this will be good preparation.  The room is literally the size of a prison cell in the U.S.  Meaning I can't exactly touch both walls with my arms out-stretched but I can if I lean a bit each way.  It's that small!  It's a room that fits in the space they carved out underneath a staircase.  But it does have internet and a private bathroom.  So it's like being in jail with internet access.  And it's in a great neighborhood!  I can walk to the office.

Things are going in the typical latin american way: very slowly.  Not much is happening.  Tengan patiencia.  This is my first day in la oficina and the person who is charged with showing me around is in a meeting for most of the day.  The morning we spent running errands which was okay because it involved seeing the city and the ministeria de vivienda (dept of housing) whose offices all had brand new portraits of la Presidenta -Michele Bachelet!  I'm not exactly sure when things will really get going here.  I'm waiting for final versions of our study instruments (the interview and survey questions) from the other team members and then I have to try them out on someone here to see if the language we used in the instruments works here in Chile.  Then I can go out and start interviewing people. 

Oh, right! I forgot I haven't told you what we're studying yet.  Well, it went like this, we all got there to Costa Rica thinking we were going to study the impact of housing on other areas of people's lives beyond just the techo (roof) because that's what the voluntarios did last year in Costa Rica and they told us they wanted us to replicate that study in these four other countries (Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brasil). Pero, no salió asi.  It didn't turn out like that.  They want us to do something entirely different.  So we are developing a pilot study to see if Habitat is reaching all of their target population and if not, who is falling through the cracks and what can they do to reach those people? 

It's still an impact study, just a different kind of impact study.  It seems to me that Habitat has focused so much lately on being sustainable that they are looking only for people who they think have the capacity to actually pay back their housing loan eventually.  They have some programs where they don't worry about that so much such as in Indonesia after the tsunami, but those are emergency programs for the most part.  Most countries the national offices is working towards sustainability.  In Chile here they are working with the government who subsidizes poor families, so it's like a collaborative effort. 

I'm going to three or more different project areas, 2 probably within a day's drive of Santiago and the other maybe in Atacama -the desert area in the north.  Hopefully by the end of the week.  Until then wish mucho suerte con the Chilean accent which is causing me much difficulty.  Hasta entonces!

Comments

[surrogate]

Sounds like a cool trip. Enjoy.