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October 15, 2005
Worse Than Mitch
It hasn’t rained now for two days.
The fact that Hurricane Stan hit a week and a half ago doesn’t mean that this country is less at risk now. In one night alone this week, the number of landslides shot from 400 to 900, and with every day that it rains, the damage becomes greater, and the more lives and homes are lost. Although in Antigua, we’ve been relatively unaffected, to the south of this town, there’s a very large and beautiful volcano called Agua (Water) – and for over a week now, we’ve received warnings that its crater is full, and any further rains will make it overflow. When that happened a few centuries ago, the then capital of the country was destroyed. The villages around Agua would be evacuated, but even still, we’re really not that far away, here in Antigua.
In a way, it’s been frustrating being here – effectively trapped here in town for most of the time, with the main roads damaged or submerged under landslides – away from the damage and flooding. News can only reach us once people manage to reach an affected area, which means that it’s been very slow to receive information about the worst-hit areas; worse still has been the lack of media coverage, which is primarily what we’ve had to depend upon to find out how the rest of this country is faring. In the meantime, we’ve had electricity, phone lines, internet access (less functional than normal, admittedly) – the devastation of Sololá, Xela, San Marcos and the coast are so remote from our own experience.
I’ve been anxious for my London friends, my brother and father to understand Guatemala better. I came across a 47-page story I wrote ten years ago, describing working in Costa Rica and then travelling across Central America to spend a few days here, and I’ve been so tempted since I moved here to email it out, to help bring this region more to life for them. Better still would be if some of them would visit – flights to Cancún are cheap, and I’d settle for that – but essentially, this region is so different from England, Europe or California, that I want them to see it and appreciate this country for its beauty and character, and to understand why I’ve always been far more at home here than ever in England or Ireland.
Part of the appeal of this country has been the simplicity of life – rather than investing in new stock, we instead use retired American school buses for public transport; houses are built simply, roads are hacked out of the sides of mountains, and the jungle is never far away. And that has been the problem. This country is mountainous in the south, flat in the north, and the majority of the population live in the former; under heavy rains, the mountainsides give way, and suddenly fields, houses and even entire villages are no more. The other problem is the hurricane season in itself; whenever a hurricane is formed, we suffer the effects of it, either dry storminess or unnaturally heavy rains. And with this year’s hurricane season being far stronger than any preceding it, the issue has not so much been Hurricane Stan as the week or so of heavy rains beforehand.
Every week we go to Lake Atitlán. Before I started working, we’d go there on a Thursday or Friday – one week, after a lot of hassles from London, I decided on the Wednesday that I’d had enough of reality and wanted to go there – returning on the Monday. It’s a beautiful house, very peaceful and relaxing. Since I started my new job, my mother would leave early Friday mornings, and I’d catch the last shuttle of the day. And we’d drive back on Sundays, risking the rain and cloud as an alternative to a bloody early start on Mondays.
The road to the lake is stunning, and yet perilous. Our first drive there, after my mother bought her car, was so scary for both of us, that not only did we have to stop part-way to have a stiff drink to fortify ourselves, but I started counting near misses, acts of stupidity and dead dogs (since renamed ‘ex-dogs’) in an attempt to distance ourselves from the many times we’d nearly end up in an accident each time. It’s a journey through the mountains – for almost the entire journey, there’s a mountain to one side and a valley to the other, and although the road surfaces have been significantly improved over the years, there are no barriers on the valley side of the road. Or anything to restrain the mountains on the other side. The newspaper recently reported it as the bus route most affected by attacks and shootings, and given how tourist shuttles have become prime targets, you’ve got to really want to go there to risk all that. Also consider the near absence of any straight roads over a 3 hour drive, and the typical Guatemalan impatience when it comes to overtaking.
A week and a half before Stan hit, I’d counted thirty-one landslides of varying severity between Panajachel and Antigua. There’d been a major landslide between Panajachel and Sololá – an incredibly steep and narrow road – shortly before I arrived, and thankfully none of these approached its dimensions. A week later, on returning to the lake, the shuttle dropped us off at a restaurant ‘for ten minutes’ which became longer, and longer, and longer still, without any explanation for why. Finally, after an hour, the driver told us that there’d been two major landslides, and he was awaiting notification that it was safe to continue. By the time we finally left, it was long after dark, so I couldn’t see how bad these landslides were. It continued to rain all weekend; though I slept for about half an hour on the drive back to Antigua, I still counted over 130 landslides (I stopped counting rigorously after about 100), 5 – 10 of which were extremely serious ones.
And that’s before the hurricane ever hit.
Tuesday was the day that the hurricane hit; Wednesday was so very reminiscent of the London bombings. Several colleagues couldn’t make it into work whether due to flooding or landslides; others were meant to go to the capital, the lake or other areas, and couldn’t do so for the same reasons. The Accounts department had their radio on, and someone would often pop in with the latest news – Jocotenango, the town immediately outside Antigua, was flooded; Pastores, the next one along, was under water – and so it continued. People left work early, either having to tackle drowning houses, or difficult journeys home.
As I said earlier, you can only get news when there’s someone there to report it; word of mouth has almost been more useful than the news itself, especially when the foreign media hasn’t deemed this important enough to pick up. For obvious reasons, I’ve been frantically looking for news of the lake, and decided one day to search blogs for information. I found one (it was American) which said, ‘Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have been badly hit. Where are these places?!’ The magazine I work for has contacts throughout the country, so if I manage to hijack the main computer often enough, I can see photos of the devastation in various parts, or read updates from the lake, where isolation has led to obscene inflation for basic commodities such as pure water, vegetables and cooking gas.
Each day, little by little, more news has seeped in. The newspaper – Prensa Libre – is delivered every morning, and after mentioning a particular article one morning when I arrived at work, I’ve been bringing it in every day, for me to read while I smoke, for Mercedes and Silvia to read while they have lunch, and for José to read if and when he has the chance. When I couldn’t find information on Prensa’s website, I started reading another national paper online – finding out about the State of Emergency, among other things – and then, as BBC News wasn’t interested enough, reading Google News, both American and Mexican versions to find out whatever I could. Eventually I found the link on Prensa’s website for last-minute news, but even still, in a country such as this, when it’s raining every day, and it gets dark at 6, there’s only so much information you can get. Watching the news on TV has only confirmed why I prefer getting my news online – apart from the odd clip, it’s a very long time to wait for not a whole lot of information.
Thinking back, the only real news has been the ever-changing death toll; I was chatting with a friend a couple of days ago when I read that the death toll in Guatemala alone is now 2052, although that has yet to be recognised as the official figure. The news has been about the damaged roads – 52% of this country’s main roads (17 of them) have been damaged; the statistics for deaths, ‘damnificados’, houses destroyed, villages affected, bridges destroyed, villages at risk continues to increase daily – as the rains continue. The information from the affected areas is as scarce as ever – four zones in Xela (Quetzaltenango) have been collapsing, Pana is isolated and the north part of town has been badly affected; San Marcos La Laguna has been partially buried; the road to San Lucas Tolimán, where my mother has long wanted to take me, has been destroyed; fourteen people died at the turn-off to Pana and Sololá, Los Encuentros; the ruins of Iximché, where my mother took my sister for a picnic but has never found the time to take me, has been ‘badly affected’; the port towns of Puerto San José and Puerto Quetzal, in addition to other towns on the Pacific Coast, have been under two metres of water since before the hurricane hit; our extended family lives in Tapachula, Mexico, but the nearest border crossing has been – understandably – closed, and the only other border crossing has been taken over by gangs, charging $100 to let people cross. And still it continues raining.
And while it continues raining, we risk a major landslide courtesy of Agua, which is around 3,000m high. Because of the damage to the fields and roads, we only had our first delivery of fresh produce on Wednesday after a week and a half of ever-rotting vegetables. Prices are at least double now for basic vegetables, and where certain crops have been badly hit, we won’t see them again for a long time. On Tuesday, we went into the capital to stockpile food – being fresh food junkies, my mother and I will be the first to starve – reluctantly eyeing up frozen and canned food to sustain us until either the prices stabilise, we leave the country altogether, or adapt. Although the capital has more food than a smallish town like Antigua, because of the condition of the roads, the produce wasn’t much fresher, and with the ports being drowned, we’re unlikely to be restocked for some time.
Because Antigua wasn’t badly hit, life is going on as normal, but we’re among the lucky few. I only felt the hurricane lightly at work; it was stronger here at the house; Antonia, who I work with, didn’t even notice it, but nevertheless, we got off very very lightly indeed. The editorials in Prensa say that this country – trying so hard to progress – has been set back twenty or thirty years alone by the storm damage, and that by the social conditions alone, it can be classified among the world’s poorest countries, and have its debt cancelled.
It’s been a very long fortnight. At least with the London bombings, we were being overwhelmed with information, however inaccurate, unlike the lazy trickle here. So far, I’ve only been to the capital, but having heard Antonia’s mother talk about boulders in the road, and nearly being hit by a falling tree, I’ve appreciated how slight the damage is on that road compared to the others in this country. I’m anxious to get to the lake, to see how badly affected that road is, but as another section collapsed last night, I’m unlikely to get there anytime soon.
Since the sun returned, I’ve not been reading the newspaper as thoroughly during my fag breaks as I normally do, but yesterday the cartoon was of a man pinning up a sign about Hurricane Stan; a little boy pops up, and says, ‘I think you’ve missed something.’ The little boy scrawls an ‘a’, turning it into ‘Hurricane Sa
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