“We need many hands,” relatives and volunteers insist as they refuse to give up.
By Vanessa Davies
At the Opppe housing complex in Los Cocos Beach, day and night have become the same battlefront. The earthquakes of June 24 turned time itself into a test of human determination. Beneath the rubble, life still struggles to stay one step ahead of death, as volunteers and family members continue searching for those who lost their lives, regardless of the condition in which they may be found. The days go by, but hope does not.
The rescuers who crawl through twisted steel bars and shattered concrete slabs share a clear mission: to find the people who became trapped beneath the debris after 6:04 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24. No one at these buildings of Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission—designed by the Presidential Office for Special Plans and Projects (hence the acronym Opppe)—speaks of a definitive number of victims. Instead, sweat and tears tell the story as heavy machinery slowly devours what remains of the buildings, while public workers and military personnel clear away the debris.
Many hands
“We need water and ice.” That plea echoes through the tents surrounding these mountains of rubble that resemble a kind of Purgatory. People sleep there, keep vigil there, eat there, and talk there.
To reach the top of Opppe 26, you must steel your heart and look away from the baptism card of a little girl, the head of a brown-haired doll, a trampled belt, a young woman’s pair of jeans, the pink coat rack that once hung in a bedroom, a young man’s rubber shoe, or a law textbook. Objects seem to withstand earthquakes better than people do, and their silent presence speaks of a life that came to an abrupt end on St. John’s Day.
At the summit, small tents shelter people who look like dust-covered ants as they dig tunnels through the rubble and crawl inside. The narrow openings barely allow a person to enter.
One relative explains how the operation works: volunteers dig continuously while others form a human chain to remove debris. When they find a body, they recover it and call the Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC).
“Opening those passageways is the volunteers’ job,” another family member emphasizes.
“We need many hands,” says political leader Jonathan Patti, who has spent more than five weeks supporting recovery efforts in the area.
“They call us, and we come to help. We will not give up until we complete the mission the way it should be.”
Among those who remain at the Opppe complex—after enduring rumors and false alarms—the hope of finding their loved ones alive has faded. Their determination has not. They still want to recover their bodies and lay them to rest in a place where they can honor their memory.
