Carrying on….

We stopped for lunch at Pollo Campero (Country Chicken), where team member Annette Trelfa was presented with a birthday crown and a small cake. After a brief visit to Walmart for incidentals, we proceeded to Antigua, the old capital and second oldest city in Central America, and on to Nury’s family guesthouse in a nearby suburb.

We had had a long day and were more than ready to settle in. The guest rooms proved very comfortable. We enjoyed a meal of fiambre, a traditional salad of beets, sausages, and many other good things, capped off with a large birthday cake for Annette. By mutual agreement, the cake was saved for Saturday evening. We had devotions and a team meeting, sorted our supplies for our first project day, and fell gratefully into bed.

Today has felt like a week compressed into one day. After a delicious breakfast of crepes, granola, and fruit prepared by our cook Berta, we rode along the highway where the June 3 eruption of the El Fuego volcano had carved new canyons, torn away bridges, buried villages, and turned a lush green landscape into an ash-covered wasteland. Months after the disaster, rains had restored growth in the wondrous way God renews His creation. “For all this, nature is never spent,” wrote poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, to be sure, flowers bloomed among the ash deposits and ruined trees–but the impact on human life was incalculable. Nobody knows for sure how many bodies have their final resting place beneath the congealed lava. Adjacent to a public school that housed evacuees immediately after the disaster, a shelter village has been built for survivors– row upon row of tightly spaced dwellings with clotheslines crisscrossing the narrow spaces between them. The dwellings are clean and new, with common bathroom facilities and a dining area where meals are provided and our water filtration/ health and hygiene programs will be set up on Monday. (Posters warn children to have trusted adults accompany them to the restrooms; one shudders to think of the potential predation that might otherwise occur in such a setting.)

Nury related how a Catholic church in nearby Alotenango had purchased huge cooking pots for a festival on the Saturday before the disaster. When El Fuego poured its fury on the area on Sunday morning, the church women marshalled local cooks to provide meals for those who had escaped. We visited the health center and plaza in Alotenango, where small boys were flying colorful paper kites.

In a nearby cemetery and high against the backdrop of the mountain, more kites were airborne. The cemetery was abloom with cut flowers, cedar wreaths, and artificial arrangements on every grave and cross: it is customary on and around All Saints’ Day to gather among the graves, decorate them lavishly with flowers if the family has means or scatter marigold petals if it does not, fly kites and picnic. Rows of five or six identical markers, each with the death date of Junen3, 2018, testified that whole families had met their demise under the volcano.

Here we had come to offer pure water and the Living Water of God’s comfort. What were we among so many? We moved on to Santiago Zamora and the Lutheran Church there. After lunch prepared by the church women, we would provide our literal and figurative drops in the bucket.