Coupeau: The story of the reconstruction of the school from the first moment
Coupeau: The story of the reconstruction of the school from the first moment
Duisburg / Carrefour (05/10/2010). In Haiti there is in terms of rebuilding an extremely strong urban-rural divide: the State, UN agencies, private companies - but also the most non-governmental organizations focus their new beginning and reconstruction efforts and humanitarian aid projects on the urban conurbations and medium-sized cities. Even before the earthquake of the 12 January remote rural areas in Haiti were in extreme disadvantage, but in the past nine months the imbalance worsened. A few days after the earthquake Kindernothilfe therefore decided, to put one of the focal points of engagement conscious, after the most devastating natural disaster in the history of Latin America, on villages with small farmers and rural zones, that are a long way away from any assistance flows and lay in the shadow of media interest.
Picture: Jürgen Schübelin, Kindernothilfe The École Communautaire of Coupeau is the first school project, which has been completely rebuilt and designed with the support of children's emergency donors. The process, in which the parents of the children, but also the girls and boys from Coupeau rendered himself most of the work, was accompanied and supervised by the three Chilean architects, Alvaro Arriagada, Alejandro Alvarez and Pablo Guzman from the team of the Santiago professional organization HABITERRA - commissioned by the Kindernothilfe. Since their first visit into the mountains of Coupeau, the process of rebuilding the village school was documented detailed in different articles, reports and on the blog of the Kindernothilfe homepage.
Picture: Alvaro Arriagada Now HABITERRA released - along with Kindernothilfe - an unusual statement of accounts, which makes the story of the rebuilding of the Coupeau School from the moment the first planning meetings with children, parents and community members took place, painstakingly pass in review - with all its ups and downs. This document is not only a testament of the complexity of community self-help processes - but also a testament why these projects are often the only conceivable perspective to overcome poverty and extreme poverty.
Picture: Katja Anger, Kindernothilfe Reading this extraordinary document is so exciting because not only feelings of happiness and a sense of achievement are showed, but also straightforward all weathered difficulties, setbacks and lessons learned are disclosed. It shows that even good participation and self-help efforts are not running smoothly, but must be laboriously worked out step by step and fought for. Precisely for this reason, the reconstruction of the destroyed school in Coupeau has become for Kindernothilfe a symbol for the entire Haitian involvement - and also the evidence that it would not have been possible without the active participation of the children, their parents and the whole community - neither in Coupeau nor elsewhere!
Report Execution Works - school in Coupeau 2010 (4,4 MB)
Construction plan 01
construction plan 02
construction plan 03
If we receive more donations than we need to realize the project described above, we will invest your donation to support a similar project.
Picture: Jürgen Schübelin, Kindernothilfe 
Picture: Alvaro Arriagada 
Picture: Katja Anger, Kindernothilfe 