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Then I asked if we could see the areas where people had lost their homes. As it turns out six people in two families had been killed in their beds in that parish. The driver for the parish priest loaded the four of us and a couple of his friends and drove us to see the sites through the narrow little streets with houses stacked on top of each other on the side of a huge mountain. In one gully we saw how three houses were washed away. The hills were very steep and houses were built on the sides of the ravine, just hanging onto thin platforms against dirt cliffs. At the bottom of the gully the houses were built to the edge of the usually dry, but at most meandering, little stream. But when the torrents of water poured down from 1,000 feet above and carried all the garbage that fills the ravine from the top to the bottom, it simply clogged up against the houses which acted like a dam and swelled to 30 feet deep, enough to float the houses off their foundations and rip off the roofs. You will probably not believe that people use the stream beds as garbage dumps but this is the way it is all over places in the Third World. The one-lane road down to the bottom was paved, but we dared not go too far because the banks were shear cliffs of dirt that had slid just a day before, but had been cleaned up by the city. One house built on the side of the road on a sliver of ground had its doors pounded and gouged with the fallen hillside and had lost a lot of ground on its downhill side, but the lady still lived there. She came out to share with us her worries and clearly she wore her feelings on her face. We next drove up a very long incline for a mile over a dirt road that was squishy with mud and deep rutted toward the top of this mountain. How we ever made it is beyond me. There we saw a whole hillside that slid and took down several little lean-to houses. The people there came down to ask if we had any food, but we told them we had left it at the parish. The driver told us that they had delivered some food to an evangelical minister with a chapel just a little ways from there, but he did not distribute it to those they had hoped he would. We then drove down to the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary which is a very impressive statue about 25 feet high and visible from the parish and the whole valley below. It is set in a hillside garden with a plaza below made of rock implanted in cement and with benches and a vista all around. The driver then led us to a back alley where we saw the place the six people had died. There was a 40-foot cliff against which they had placed a 40-foot high wall made of only one cement block in thickness, which clung to it like wallpaper. The houses were placed only a foot or so from the cliff and apparently about 10 feet of the cliff above peeled off and took the whole block wall with it, falling on the small shacks below and crushing the families. One house was spared. The block wall was hanging in midair like curled paper, which could have fallen any moment. That family left their house and had taken the corrugated tin off their roof and used it to cover the open windows of an abandoned bus about 25 feet away from their house, where they now were living. There were 13 children in that house between the three families that had occupied it. The families came out to talk to us. They had received some help from the parish. As we left we passed a house where the six people had been placed for the vigil before the funeral. This was just one of many places here in Guatemala City where people
lost their lives and their homes. Continued in the February Newsletter. Triduum of Saint Martin de Porres How can you help? Find out how to support the Western Dominican Missions. |
