Neighbors fend for themselves in wake of storm

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – School principal Aroldo Jerez Celada understands the importance of trees in the prevention of disasters like the one brought by Tropical Storm Agatha. He’s also seen, first-hand, the human disaster that keeps the obviously needed reforestation from happening.

“Of course we at the school worry about this, located as we are at the base of these volcanoes. We’ve done more than worry; we’ve actually tried to do something about it.”

A couple of years ago he organized a group of community volunteers and students from the school he directs to do a tree planting on the steep slopes surrounding this town, consulting with the experts to find out which type of tree was the best for these situations and raising the money to buy the seedlings.

The group was proud and exhilarated with their first planting of 500 trees. They had a plan for follow-up maintenance, taking turns to go up and check on the trees and water them through the dry season. But one day the team went up and discovered the area they had planted had been fenced off. The steep incline had been slated for development.

In many cases, local governments tend to be more a part of the problem than the solution. Here, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods was a government housing complex built on one of these hillsides. The day of the storm, however, and even the day after, government officials were notably absent, Jerez and others told me.

“Our government, unfortunately, needs to be more organized,” said Jerez. “They didn’t have a plan, nobody knew what to do or where to go.”

I began my day with Rony Lec, from the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP), and other members of a coalition of community groups meeting in the municipal hall, mapping out an emergency plan, assigning tasks, without any apparent input from the municipal government, which was largely absent. Rony was running the meeting. Like most of the others on this committee, he is working full-time without pay to help organize the response. I left the group at their gargantuan task and headed over to the shelter called Anexo to interview Jerez.

Saturday morning, after some 12 hours of intense and driving rain that was continuing unabated, Jerez ventured out into the downpour to rent a mototaxi and take a look around.

“I realized at 9 a.m. that we had a disaster,” he said. “Already there were many families in the area of the football field whose homes were underwater.”

A few hours later, the first landslides came, and then the people started pouring in. As of today, six days later, he is caring for 40 families, a total of 72 people.

Nobody showed up from the government until the next day. Aroldo had sick children in the shelter, including a small girl with pneumonia, and he took it upon himself to contact an organization and ask for donated medicine, and it arrived 24 hours later. He showed me with pride his ample stock. He had no idea if any of the other shelters had sick people.

Emergency supplies had finally been delivered by the federal government on Tuesday. But there was no one to coordinate the distribution, and the food and other supplies were grabbed by whomever was there.

Suddenly, a knock came at the door. The mayor was finally here.

Here was my chance to get an interview, I thought, and I went out with Jerez to find the mayor surrounded with the shelter’s inhabitants, each trying to tell their story, pleading for help. As the camera rolled, the mayor listened intently, tears in his eyes. He promised to do what he could and headed for the door.

I stopped him to ask for a few minutes of his time, and he told me to meet him in his office in half an hour. “He won’t be there,” one of the men in the shelter laughed.

He was right; the mayor wasn’t there. I waited for an hour. Finally I saw him approaching the central park, flanked by a crowd, talking to many, and then he prepared to leave. I approached, got his attention, his apology and his phone number, and agreed to call him in the afternoon. There was no answer, and his voicemail was not accepting messages, so unfortunately I can’t give his side of the story.

Felix Gomez, a representative of the Fundacion Guillermo Toriello, a community development organization, chairs the committee. He had been instructed in risk assessment and was working in the community to prepare people for disasters like this one when Agatha fell with all her fury, and he was trapped here.

“We heard from news reports on Thursday that the storm was on its way,” said Gomez. “Unfortunately we don’t have a culture of disaster preparedness.”

Gomez had already warned government officials that people should not be living in the high-risk areas at the foot of the mountains but his warning went unheeded.

Volunteers put together a form and went from shelter to shelter conducting a census on the first day and the second day, and I accompanied them. On the third day, we began to go out to the neighborhoods on the periphery and contact the leaders to get a sense of how many had been left homeless but had not come in to the shelters.

Yesterday in Pavarotti shelter, the Sicay family, Juan and Petrona, invited me to their home to see the damage. They lived near the family who had been buried in their home, and they agreed to show me the place.

The Sicays were one of the families who lived near the football field, and their home filled with water on Friday from a flash flood, long before the landslides began. They grabbed their two little ones and the two bigger boys and fled, running down the street in chest-high water. They had nowhere to go, and walked through the downpour until they arrived at the home of a family who took them in until the shelter opened.

They showed me the kitchen, which had only a single piece of furniture – a hutch, that had once held her dishes. Most had been washed away in the storm. I asked where the stove had been.

“I never had a stove – I made my tortillas right here,” said Petrona, kneeling in the mud next to a pair of cinderblocks, where she used to build her fire. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is how we live.”

A huge hole in the back of the kitchen floor showed where the river had found its way through their house.
Next they all filed into the small bedroom area, where mattresses were tightly packed into the cramped space, and a dresser overflowed with wet clothes. A clothesline stretched the length of the room, where ears of corn had been hanging to dry, and were now beginning to cover with mildew.

“We would take our clothes out and try to save them, but we have nowhere to take them,” Petrona explained.
The older son, Juan Antonio, was out back, trying to rescue what was left of the tiny corn patch, but there was little left to salvage. Most was covered in mud.

Finally I asked them to take me up to the place where the family had refused to leave their home and had been buried, the father and mother and three children, together with a neighbor who had been trying to rescue them.

The day ended with a ray of hope from a source higher than the government. The night before, I noticed a crowd gathering in the streets to marvel at a bright light that was shining from the hills above. It was so far up that there was no way someone could have climbed up there to place a light.

On the other side of the landslide gleamed something else – a white image of the Virgin Mary, gleaming from a patch of barren stone.

I went to the foot of the hill with Emilio and Eliazar, who had been canvassing the shelters and neighborhoods with me, to get a closer look. A campesino was in his backyard when we passed, and I asked him what he thought of it. “Well, the good book says there’ll be lots of signs in the last days,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I think we’re seeing them.”

Emilio and Eliazar had another take on the situation. “I was seeing it as more of a sign of encouragement, like it was saying things are going to be all right,” said Emilio, hopefully.

Today, as I made my way back from the destroyed homes, people were gathering in the streets to witness another marvel – a group of young people making their way up the mountain to pay their respects. My friends Emilio and Eliazar were among them.

Here are a few images from my second day in San Lucas.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.