Betina's survival story
By Paulina Cáceres, Juana Promenzio, Camila Del Moro and Katia Kovach
The ruins of an old memory
The reason why we chose to make Betina's testimony and story visible is because we were touched by the way in which she gradually immersed herself in the memories of her beautiful, but tragic, childhood. We hope that you end up touched as well when you read this report so we can respectfully commemorate all those children whose childhood didn´t have the happy ending they deserved to have.
“The pool we had was a total luxury for the time, it had three islands, a waterfall and slides” Betiana said while introducing us to the fun and friendly stage she used to live during summers in her hometown: Epecuén.
When we asked Beti how did they experience the flood in Epecuén in 1985, she told us that, fortunately, her family already had a house in Carhué where, with the only things that they could rescue from their Epecuén's original house, they could reestablish their life in a safer way than those families who had to stayed at firefighters stations or schools. Then, Betina told us that a few weeks later the municipality of Carhué built some houses, a little precarious, for those people who had not found a house by then.
“The people suffered a lot”, Betina highlighted, before telling us about how her neighbor from in front of her home, a hotel owner, sat outside in the street through all the evacuation and broke down in tears as he saw how the firefighters rescued the few things they could from his hotel, in the middle of the chaos. “It was terrible”.
“Even in the atmosphere you can feel the desolation”, she mentioned. That's why nowadays she doesn’t usually go to Epecuén, because it makes her feel really sad and emotional. She also told us that her parents had met and married in Epecuén, and together they had built their home and an ice cream shop where Beti and her sister used to work as kids with their dad.
She said that her mom had to experience the evacuation almost on her own, with help from her neighbors, because her dad was recovering from an illness. So when her mom went back to Epecuén after 30 years, it was really shocking for her to see everything she had built with her husband destroyed.
One of the hardest parts, she narrated, is the moment of realization of having to leave everything they owned behind and even having to move out indefinitely. She stayed at a university as a resident while waiting for the possibility of moving to another place. Gladly, during the disaster, she received a bunch of help from people living in Carhué, who helped her to move her and other survivors luggage. She tells a story about how her mum wasn’t able to open the door due to the water overflowing and people from Carhué heard her cries and lent her a hand. “Everyone showed solidarity”.
She remembered how the paths she walked by were full of water and, because of how salty Epecuén lagoon was, everything looked as if it was frozen in time. The flood did not strike everything. Actually, if you go to Epecuén, you will be able to see how the wood from the door frames of many houses are still intact. “That's impressive, because it didn’t bring them down or even destroyed them, it just left them.”
Even though it was known that the disaster would arrive, sooner or later, the water came first from the peripheries. Betina and the people from the center of the village were the first ones to face the situation, despite thinking that they would be the last ones. It occurred so unexpectedly that even some people just woke up with their feet touching the water.
Even Carhué was at risk of flooding in 1992, the problem is that these are a chain of several lagoons and Epecuén is the last one, where the water comes in but doesn’t come out, and besides there were plenty of rains during that year, and there weren’t proper projects made to solve the problem.