The April 17th Earthquake rocked the coast of Ecuador affecting the community of Puerto Lopez. Mark Reimer immediately took action; using a variety of media sources to start a clothing drive, planned the "Elvis for Ecuador" event, hosted fundraising dinners, organized "Artists for Ecuador" and auctions. Mark has helped raise over $20 000 for Earthquake relief in Ecuador.
The summer program of 2016 had a change of plans with much of the volunteer work focusing on the rebuilding effort along the coast of Ecuador.
The summer program of 2016 had a change of plans with much of the volunteer work focusing on the rebuilding effort along the coast of Ecuador.
The first signs of destruction we encountered happened in Portoviejo, where practically every other house, or two out of three had lost a wall, had two holes in different walls, had no walls, the fence was down, the whole building was down … Although the rubble had been cleaned up, the damaged houses hadn’t. We could see the red (condemned), yellow (okay with reconstruction dollars spent) or green (all’s well) inspection tags on the houses as we drove past, but realized that the sanitized view we had, wasn’t the whole story of April 16th in that city. Many people died in the quake in Portoviejo, and it was pretty easy to see how that might have happened." Mark Reimer, 2016
We drove through beautiful countryside for 3.5 hours (instead of the five+ it would have taken on public transportation) before arriving in Bahia de Caraquez. The last few minutes on increasingly damaged, under construction roads. If you saw any of the images on-line of highways with deep cracks, or half the road missing, this would be that neighbourhood. The roads have now been dug down to constant point, and are now being rebuilt back up to the where the pavement is still good. There will be enough road work for years to come." Mark Reimer, 2016
Reimer responds to the relief work Manitoba to Ecuador did in the Summer of 2016