five - After the earthquake: narratives of resilience, re-signification of fear and revitalisation of local identities in rural communities of Paredones, Chile

Summary

Editorial introduction

Many of the chapters in this book focus on resilience as a response to the chronic (that is, long-term and on-going) challenges of later life. This chapter focuses on a distinctly acute (that is, traumatic and time-limited) challenge – rebuilding life after an earthquake in rural Chile. The project explores the impact of creative interventions in the resilient responses at the individual and communal level. The creative interventions mix visual arts with storytelling. The chapter touches on the issues of creativity, resilience, social relationships and place-based identities.

Introduction

In this chapter, we examine the development of a psychosocial intervention (Forsman et al, 2011) specifically designed to support rural-living elders in Chile to overcome the trauma of an earthquake. We explain how we approached creativity during the intervention, and how it proved to be effective in dealing with multiple dimensions of individual and community resilience. We first explain our methodological approach and some of the key activities that were helpful for dealing with trauma, as well as gaining insights about ageing rural communities in post-disaster contexts. We then lay out how creative expression and imagination were fundamental in the re-conceptualisation of local community identity, in accepting ambiguous emotions towards past events and in finding safe outlets for trauma, and thus allowing the reconstruction of individual and collective well-being. We end the chapter with a discussion of the advantages and challenges of the psychosocial intervention in Paredones, and we argue for the importance of considering community resilience in response to natural disasters.

Chile is a country characterised by being constantly hit by natural disasters. One summer night in 2010, the rural district of Paredones was awoken by the shaking and roaring of the earth in an earthquake that reached 9.1 points on the Richter Scale at its epicentre. For nearly three minutes, the residents of the valleys at the foot of the Andes range saw their adobe houses crumbling around them. They tried to take shelter under any solid structure they could find, they ran out into the dark, attempting to avoid collapsing structures, and some, too frail to move, or refusing to leave their frail loved ones behind, prayed and waited for death. By the coast, seasoned fishermen, women and children ran towards the higher land. From there, they saw the sea first recede, and then return to knock down cottages ‘like they were matchboxes’.