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Transnational STS COVID-19 Project Participants
Profiles of participants in the Transnational STS COVID-19 Project.
COVID 19 PLACES: ECUADOR
This essay supports an upcoming discussion of how COVID-19 is unfolding in Ecuador and a broader discussion within the Transnational STS COVID-19 project.
Radical Care in Ecuador
A review on Ecuador's radical care actions amidst Covid 19 pandemic.
Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
A research Center at the University of Cuenca with the collaboration of FLACSO-Ecuador
Floating houses...
María Elissa TorresIn 1993 near my city, Cuenca - Ecuador, it ocurred maybe the biggest disaster that we have expirienced, we called it "La Josefina". A mountain collapsed, due to legal and illegal mining, and it completely blocked a river. Quickly the water of the river started to flood the surrondings, there was the fear of the big city of the region, Cuenca, being also flooded, a lot of homes, forests and bridges were lost, and it caused a huge impact in many families that lost everything, 150 lives were lost. But one particular story always came to my mind when I hear about this disaster: a man, called Walter Sánchez, saved his house because he carefully looked up his construction and he felt that he could make his house float, he was not an engineer, or architect, he didn't have college education, but he, with help of his friends and familiy, gathered tens of empty barrils, attached to the bottom of the house -his house was mainly wood and was screwed to the floor- , and at the end, when the water came and flooded the terrain his house floated and was saved. Here is a post of BBC in spanish about this event.
This came to my mind because sometimes we think that the fight against Climate Change is expensive and as the most part of the world is poor, and those are the ones who suffer more the consequences, the fight is lost. But all over the world there is people that in order to safe their lives and personal belongings have witty and ingenious ideas low-cost. Elizabeth English had one of those ideas in 2007, she is an architect that was concerned about how to help people in New Orleans to survive and don't lose anything in future Hurricanes, she knew about the procedure in Netherlands for allowing houses to float but it was way to expensive to the population because it meant, actually rebuilt the house, and even if someone wanted to rebuilt his/hers home, it was way to expensive. She decided to create an alternative and founded the non-profit Buoyant Foundation Project. You can read more about these "Anphibious Homes" here.
Image created with the use of a free image by Crystal Mirallegro (Unsplash website) for Ecuador's covid19 place essay