05401
August 5, 2005

Morass of misery

Future holds little promise for family
of minister killed in Guatemala mudslide

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE —  Delia Pop Caal’s voice stays steady despite the crackling telephone line.

     “They don’t have anywhere else to go,” Pop says, speaking of the survivors of a massive June 15 mudslide in San Antonio Senahu, Guatemala. “The government says it will help them … but not yet. … It is raining still, every day. Rocks and stones keep coming down.”

     Yes, the mud is still sliding.

     Pop, 19, speaks Spanish. She must wait for a translator at the other end of the line to turn her words into English. Pop herself must translate for her mother, Elvira, who speaks only Kekchi, one of about two dozen indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala.

     Pop and her mother survived the mudslide, which swept away nearly 100 cinderblock houses and killed 22 people, including Pop’s father, Jose, a Presbyterian pastor with six children. Another of the victims was Pop’s 8-year-old sister, Anna Teresa, the baby of the family.

     One family in San Antonio Senahu lost eight members, most of them children. About 10 of the displaced families are Presbyterians who worship in Selarac, at the church her father pastored; it’s about two hours away from remote Senahu.

     Her father died, Pop says, while trying to pull her from the house, which is now split wide open to the weather that ruined it. Half of it is smashed; the other half teeters above an avalanche of debris, including smashed water pipes, steel beams and tree trunks. It was a steel beam that instantly killed Pop’s kid sister when the first wave of mud hit the house.

     The second wave swallowed her father, who had managed to get his wife and four other children out.

     “People here want to move because it always rains. The dirt here is always moving,” says Pop, remembering that it was pouring when her father insisted that she leave the bookstore where she works and ride home with him that day in the family car.  He’d wanted to hurry because Elvira was in their hillside home with the other children, and it was raining buckets.

     The line goes dead.

     Pop stays put at the desk in the Senahu bookstore, waiting for the phone to ring again. It jangles and dies, then rings again. She’s able to talk for about 10 minutes before her voice breaks into staccato syllables, then disappears completely.

     Her silenced voice is eerily symbolic of the isolation of Senahu, a mountain town of about 3,000 impoverished people that once was a center of coffee and cardamom spice production that is about 150 miles northeast of Guatemala City. Several of the big coffee plantations folded when the price of coffee dropped on the international markets. Coffee is being produced more cheaply in new regions, undercutting one of Guatemala’s historic cash crops.

     It’s hard to stay connected to the outside world from Senahu, whether the disaster under discussion is the collapse of its coffee economy or the desperate straits of its poorest residents.

     “There were no more jobs in this place,” says Carlos Cardenas, a Nicaraguan consultant who works with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA). “Nobody has a job.”

     Cardenas visited Senahu last month. He’s trying to put together the pieces of Pop’s story that keep getting lost in the telephone line.

     The Guatemalan government, he says, is negotiating with local landowners, trying to secure enough land to accommodate 200 to 300 displaced families. “But that’s going to take time,” Cardenas says.

     The terrain is forbidding, rocky and mountainous.

     The highlands are home to many native Guatemalans, who still wear the colorful hand-woven fabrics that identify them as Mayan. Most survive by farming small plots of beans and corn.

     When the line finally connects again, Pop says her 36-year-old mother cries every night, wondering how she is going to support her now six-person family. Jose had managed to put a little money in the bank, but it won’t last long. There are no government funds. And the church doesn’t have a widows’ fund.

     The food gifts, customary in times of mourning, will eventually stop. Money donations from poor congregations hardly amount to anything.

     “My father was very good to my mother,” Pop says. “She’s not going to be able to forget him.”

     The family is now using Jose’s savings to rent a house, where they are storing whatever they can grab from their half-flattened home, which they owned. They have salvaged a table, some dishes and pots, some clothes. They are grateful that they no longer live in one of the plastic shacks relief workers have provided.

     The oldest son, a 20-year-old, is in college. The others, 17, 15 and 13 years old, are still in public school, and must pay tuition.

     Elvira has a small plot of land near La Tinta, about two hours away by car. But it is next to a river that floods from time to time — the perilous kind of property usually occupied by Guatemala’s poor.

     Now, Pop says, her mother wonders whether the bank will let her borrow the money she needs to support her family.

     There are a few pigs they can sell.

     Pop has a cardamom crop that will produce a little money.

     She knows how to cook.

     “Some of the widows have sons who will take care of the family,” she says, “but to tell you the truth, sister, I really don’t know” what Senahu’s new widows will do.

     “My mother says right now there is no solution,” she says. “She would like to go to a safe place.”

     When asked if that is possible, her answer is simple: “No.”