Gabriel M. Ortega Photography + Multimedia

Working for AmeriCares

This past weekend, I was on assignment in Angol, Chile for AmeriCares, the US-based humanitarian organization. It was the final visit to the field hospital that AmeriCares donated to the city of Angol, thanks to the financial support of the GE Foundation and MetLife. The assignment consisted of documenting the six modular tents that house the maternity and pediatric ward of the town’s public hospital which was left heavily damaged after the massive earthquake on February 27th.

It was my third time heading to Angol, a town of roughly 50,000 nestled beside the Nahuelbuta National Park. On the first visit, the earthquake damage was apparent simply walking down any of the central streets; rubble piled on sidewalks in front of buildings and houses that had cracks running throughout the walls. It had the air of a town that had been shook fiercely and even over a month after the earthquake, still found rubble to expel from collapsed structures. My job then was to document the technicians from BluMed, the company that fabricates the field hospital, who directed a small team of Chilean military recruits in the rapid deployment of the tents.

The second visit occurred a couple of months later and Angol started to regain its lively small-town bustle as the capital of the Malleco province. Life was seemingly back to normal despite large fenced off areas and new construction sites to replace fallen buildings. Much to the surprise of myself and Claudia (my lovely assistant and fiancée), the pizza place we had enjoyed on the first visit had been demolished and only a zinc-plate fence hid an empty property space between its neighbors. We had eaten at a place marked unsafe and ready for demolition… and lived to tell about it! This visit was about documenting the hospital for its inauguration while important local figures met with AmeriCares staff to discuss the present and future of the donation.

This visit aimed at photographing, filming, interviewing and gathering multimedia material of the field hospital running in almost full capacity. A few pieces of equipment were still being shipped, but overall, babies were being born, doctors were caring for patients and one tent had even been transformed into an Intensive Care Unit.

Below, a short selection of images taken in Angol’s field hospital dedicated to maternity and pediatric wards and an ICU.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at %I:%M %p. It is filed under Blog and tagged with AmeriCares, humanitarian, humanitario, NGO, ONG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.