Four weeks now since the ground moved. The news cameras have mostly gone. But drive through Risaralda, through the towns around Pereira, and the tents are still standing — not because no one cares anymore, but because the part of this that gets attention is over, and the much longer part is just starting. Nationally, the numbers are no longer abstract: over 1.2 million people across fifteen departments need humanitarian assistance right now. More than 30,000 homes are gone completely, and over 134,000 more are damaged enough that families can’t simply move back in. Seventy-one temporary collective shelters have been set up so far, holding a few thousand people — a fraction of what 1.2 million people actually need. Locally, the numbers I hear are different from what makes the national reports, and that gap is its own kind of truth: assessments are still catching up to what people already know standing in their own neighborhoods. That’s where we actually are. Not in the emergency. In the after, where the real math starts.

What got people through the first days was love, plainly — neighbors pulling neighbors out of rubble, strangers sharing what little food they had, whole communities singing in the dark because it was the only thing left to offer each other. I don’t want to minimize that; it was real, and it was beautiful, and it’s the part of us I trust most. But love alone doesn’t rebuild a house on ground that can no longer hold one. The harder, less photogenic love — the kind this next stretch actually needs — is patience: the willingness to do this slowly enough to do it right, for years, long after it stops being anyone’s headline.

And it will take years. Not months — years, and unevenly. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, families moved through prefabricated temporary housing for roughly five years before permanent public housing was ready. After Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, most families had rebuilt within about five years too — but the ones without land titles, without savings, without someone to advocate for them, were still living in bamboo and tin shelters at the five-year mark, some of them widows, some of them simply poor, all of them proof that “recovery” isn’t one clock ticking at one speed for everyone. Chile spent years after 2010 openly wrestling with the same tension we’re going to face here: rebuild fast, or rebuild better — as if those were the only two options, when the honest answer is usually neither, on schedule. The government’s own three-phase plan admits as much just by its shape: Phase 1, evaluation and emergency subsidies, is only now wrapping up; Phase 2, recovery and rental support, is budgeted at roughly six more months; Phase 3 — actual new housing, “Vivienda Milagro,” urban renewal — doesn’t even have an end date yet, only a start. The total cost estimate is around 30 trillion pesos, close to 9.5 billion dollars. That is not a number you spend well in a hurry.

Part of why it takes this long, and should, is that rebuilding fast on ground you haven’t actually understood is how the next disaster gets built into the first one’s replacement — and Pereira doesn’t have to imagine this abstractly, because we already have proof underneath our own streets. The Quebrada Egoyá isn’t a myth. It’s a real creek that used to run openly through the center of the city before it was channeled underground and buried under decades of fill to make room for the city we built on top of it. Microzonification studies have documented, plainly, that the ground above Egoyá is soft fill, and soft fill shakes differently — and worse — than solid bedrock. It’s not a coincidence that the 1999 earthquake concentrated its damage in exactly that zone, and that this August’s quake did it again. We have known, in writing, in maps, for decades, which parts of this city sit on ground that behaves badly under stress. So when I hear “let’s just rebuild it the way it was,” I think of Egoyá and I have to ask: the way it was already failed twice. If we’re going to talk about envisioning a new city instead of just replacing the old one, this is exactly where that starts — not with a slogan, but with the subsurface maps we already have and have not always built around.

Rebuilding also isn’t only about walls and foundations. UNICEF estimates 796 schools affected across the earthquake zone, and behind that number are children whose actual education — not just their shelter — has been interrupted for a stretch none of us can promise will be short. A city that gets housing right in ten years but let a generation lose a year or two of school along the way hasn’t fully recovered; it’s just finished the part that photographs well. Continuing education for displaced children has to be counted as reconstruction, not as an afterthought to it.

The people I keep thinking about are the ones in those shelters for whom “temporary” isn’t a minor inconvenience — older residents especially. The research on this is consistent and a little haunting: the stretch between temporary shelter and a real home again is when older survivors are most at risk — physically, from falls and inadequate conditions, and quietly, from isolation, as the community they knew scatters into shelters spread across a region. With thousands of families still in collective sites and tens of thousands more homes still to be assessed or rebuilt, that stretch is going to be long for a lot of people. A displaced retiree isn’t just waiting for a house. She’s waiting to be around people who know her again.

Here’s where I land, and it’s not a comfortable place: the local reality is that Risaralda and the other affected departments don’t have anywhere near the resources to do this alone. The federal government stepping in with real money — that 9.5 billion dollar plan, the Ministry of Housing coordinating with mayors, governors, banks, insurers, and international partners — isn’t optional, it’s necessary. But scale without management is its own risk. Nepal’s experience is the warning here again: when aid gets distributed equally instead of according to actual need, the households with land titles and connections recover in five years, and the households without them wait far longer, quietly, off the news. If the federal money moves in fast and undirected, we could end up with a faster version of the same inequality instead of a better one.

I don’t think there is one right answer to any of this — not a single blueprint that transfers cleanly from Tokyo to Kathmandu to Concepción to Pereira, because the soil is different, the poverty lines are different, the politics and the histories are different everywhere. But I do know what isn’t an answer: “it’s been done like that for years.” That sentence has never once fixed a foundation, mapped a soft-fill zone, or housed a widow faster. We don’t get to say we weren’t ready when the warnings — Egoyá included — were already written down, in Pereira, in maps engineers have had for years. The tragedy already happened. What’s still undecided is whether we let the recovery repeat the same blind spots, or actually correct them.

So here’s the timeline I actually want to hold myself to: not “when does this look finished,” but where is this city in ten years — not for the people making decisions right now, but for the ones who’ll inherit whatever we build. Ten years from now, did we use what we already knew about Egoyá’s ground to zone this city more honestly than before? Did the last family in the last shelter — likely someone without documents, without savings, without a name anyone in an office recognized — get home too, not just the ones with the easiest paperwork? Did the children who lost a year of school get given back more than a building? That’s the only version of “did we do it right” that means anything to me. Not us. The ones coming. Roma es amor. This time, love looks like staying long enough to still be here for the answer.

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Sources

• UN News, Colombia earthquake: 1.2 million need aid as some communities remain out of reach
• Vanguardia, Reconstrucción tras el terremoto costaría $30 billones: así será el Plan Milagro
• UNICEF, Support for children and families affected by the earthquake in Chocó and Buenaventura
• Save the Children, Children at Risk After Strongest Earthquake in a Decade Strikes Colombia
• Tardeando, La quebrada Egoyá: el río que corre bajo Pereira
• El Diario, Egoyá, el león dormido que ya no ruge
• The Asia Foundation, A Decade Later: Lessons from Nepal’s Earthquake Response
• Earthquake Spectra, Rebuild Fast but Rebuild Better: Chile’s Initial Recovery
• CARE, Colombia Earthquake 2026: What you need to know