Conversations about disasters: listening to Ecuadorian children

ABSTRACT

Young children aged 9–11 years, from a small coastal community in Ecuador, recount the everydayness of being prepared for the next earthquake. Their shared narratives contain distressing descriptions of their previous disaster experiences 18 months earlier in Canoa, April 2016: evacuation decisions, risk of separation from parents, witnessing injury and death of family members and peers in the 7.8 earthquake that took the lives of 63 members of their community and 675 in the general area. Listening to the children prompts consideration of how policies at the national level could be decentralized to identify locally relevant community-based risk assessment in isolated communities so that child-centred disaster risk reduction training might be taught at low cost in the community-based source of the school.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster risk reduction
• child-centred preparation
• decentralization of resources
• community based

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Matías Abad Merchán http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0248-2555

Narcisa Ullauri http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7132-8335