Life in Guatemala: A Slight Change of Plans

My plan for this week involved a visit from my dad and celebrating the successful finish of the latrines in Tuisquimak. Instead, I watched a volcano cover Guatemala in ash, ran for shelter from a tropical storm, and as a result spent 8 extra days in Antigua, all without my dad. Needless to say, sometimes things don't go as planned.

On Friday of last week I arrived in Antigua to say goodbye to a friend who was leaving for the US, however, the eruption of Volcán Pacaya covered the capitol city and airport in ash, grounding her for an extra day. Then hot on one disaster's heels, came another- Tropical Storm Agatha. Though she was much less powerful than meteorologists predicted, Agatha damaged something like 50,000 homes and left a death toll nearing 200 in her wake.

There were about twenty Peace Corps volunteers stuck in Antigua when we were put on "Standfast" meaning basically that we can't move from our current locations. Initially, we really had no idea what was going on outside of Antigua. The rain had stopped and all seemed okay. It took a while for the local news service to catch up on the story and by the time they did tales of giant sinkholes, whole towns covered in water and bridges out all over the country poured in. After a few days of sitting around feeling slightly helpless, we finally got an opportunity to help out with the clean-up effort.

We were brought to one of the Peace Corps staff people's houses to see how bad the damage actually was. Eduardo's house two story house was literally covered in mud up to the second story. As he explained to us the damage and the fear that his family faced when the landslide of mud poured down from off a nearby volcano he struggled to fight back tears. He then walked us through his neighborhood and showed us that many houses were in the same condition. The day was spent shoveling out hundreds of buckets of dirt from people's homes, working alongside people from all the surrounding towns who had come to help out their neighbors. The whole thing, really, was overwhelming. It's hard to know what to say to people who have lost everything. So we grabbed shovels and dug in.