Chile Forum

Hi everyone,

Words escape me - I just hope if any of you out there are in a bad way right now that your suffering is short lived. We are fine up in Santiago after a very bad night and evacuation from a 22 story building, which Thank God, stayed upright!!!

I am a regular in the Lonely Planet website and people are asking what they can do to help. Many have camping gear and skills to offer. Can we now dedicate this thread to advice or requests from you guys and I will put the link in their forum? Even if your advice is to 'stay away'.

I will wait for approval from ADMIN before I put in a link.

Take care everyone.

Brian

Well, here is the thing. Unless you have specific special skill sets (i.e. doctors, search and rescue), and understand Chile (most importantly complete fluency in Spanish is critical right now), we really don't think it is a good idea for anyone to just go running in to the disaster area, or any unqualified foreigner to rush in to the effected areas of Chile.

My advice, as a retired backpacker, for backpackers in Chile is to withdraw to parts of Chile that are cheap for you to live, out of the way, where you can leave if you need to, and wait. Don't go in to anywhere that you will become part of the problem. Then watch how things develop, and once reconstruction starts then offer to help. At that point I am sure there will be many many opportunities for things like building projects, social projects, and so on.

If backpackers want to do something right now, help find the foreigners that are in the country and pass word to relatives outside.

Backpackers in the South, Should stay south, and not try to travel through the central region. Exit Chile through Argentina or just stay where you are at.

If you want to help really, move to parts of Chile that are not effected and spend lots of money at the tourism resorts. When things get established help the tourism biz that are not effected.

Link to Chilean web sites. NOT FACEBOOK, TWITTER, CNN, or any of the other international big web sites. Chilean web sites, especially in the tourism industry, are getting slammed by Google because they are offline and at the same time not as big as the big web sites or have the search engine optimization to resist the deluge of international blogging jibberish. it could be years before they are found in the middle of all the big gun web sites. Those are sites backpackers will need to use years from now. We are all going to be here after CNN looses interest in Chile, but those pages will still be there stopping the entire country.

Yea, post the link.

Here is one for my fellow backpackers, spread this one around to the backpacker forums please:


Untecho para Chile (Chile habitat for humanity) They are one of the best in Chile, and they have a paypal button on their site for international credit card donations if people do not want to swing a hammer.
there site
http://www.untechoparachile.cl/
and we have a dedicated thread just for them, as I think they are going be key to this reconstruction effort.
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