Their immediate efforts included providing safe water, food and plastic sheeting for temporary housing. As the days passed, it was clear that the number one challenge facing the people and CRS was reconstructing houses of a more permanent nature than before. Since St. Anthony Messenger s visit in late January, each subsequent earthquake or aftershock has only complicated relief efforts, but housing remains the primary and pressing concern. Likewise, the earthquakes and aftershocks have generated increasingly grim, though imprecise, statistics. All told, the temblors left an estimated 1,500 people dead, at least 6,000 persons injured and more than one million people homeless.
Many people remain unaccounted for.
All told, about 20 percent of the Salvadoran people, mostly the poor, were rendered homeless by this series of earthquakes and aftershocks. Hundreds of churches and chapels, vital gathering centers in El Salvador, also lie in ruins. Reaching Out for Help Trauma and catastrophe are nothing new in El Salvador, a country where almost 50 percent of the population was living below the poverty line before the series of temblors struck. In the past, Salvadorans have turned to faith, family and neighbors and, as needed, to the worldwide community to see them through difficult times. But this time direct help from the international community is an essential ingredient to help them recover and rebuild, according to Gino Lofredo, country representative for CRS in El Salvador.