Oklahomily Oct 14 2005

From SANTIAGO ATITLAN.COM

SANTIAGO ATITLAN - Days after several mudslides from volcano Toliman washed away populated areas of Santiago Atitlan, expressions of grief and despair are engrained in the faces of the people. Many cry open on the streets in center of town as they are waiting to identify their loved ones. Every now and then a vehicle arrives with bodies that have been recovered from the mud. They are carried into the municipal building for a quick identification before they are placed in roughly hewn wooden caskets. Men, with faces covered by protective masks, carry the coffins on their shoulders up the long hill for mass funerals at the cemetery.

Seventy-two hours after the first mudslide hit this Maya Tzutujiil town of 37,000 inhabitants in the early morning of October 5th the death count is 71, but the death toll is bound to rise as the mud lies several hundred feet wide and fifteen feet deep at places. The first mudslide happened close to the soccer-field. It took houses and people down the steep cliffs and relentlessly continued its path through homesteads, coffee-plantations and cornfields. People were wading through knee-deep mud to retrieve what still could be saved.

Panabaj, a village a couple of kilometers south of the center of Santiago Atitlan, was in the path of the biggest mudslide. The landscape invoked eerie feelings as the debris from the volcano replaced all familiar features. The roads are covered with mud. People are using wooden posts, sheet metal and whatever is at hand to build temporary walkways in order to avoid wading through the mud that at places is chest-deep.

Right after the slide, people moved slowly forward by holding on to ropes. Telephone posts are broken and cracked, a two-story rock-house is not to be seen anymore, the simple houses have been washed away or in the lucky cases, are still standing but full of mud. Instead, the landscape is transformed into a flat vastness of mud, sand and water. Huge boulders and tree trunks have rolled off the volcano and once the water recedes, the clean-up process will be immense.

The smell of death, of decomposing bodies, not yet retrieved. Several thousand of local men are digging through the mud, looking for bodies, but the work is overwhelming with only a hoe and a spade at hand.

A compound, with 14 family members that laid in path of the mudslide, is eliminated; here a widow died along with her ten children, one grand-child, her brother, his wife and their child. The only trace left is some cooking utensils and a chest with the traditional clothes. Desperate relatives have been waiting for days for their bodies to be found. In other cases, families have been decimated with half its members gone, young children have lost their parents.

The caskets come in all sizes.

The ones that only lost their homes consider themselves lucky. Juan Tacaxoy is a volunteer fire fighter from Panabaj. He woke up around midnight as a two-meter deep river of mud came towards his home. "I started to scream to my brothers," he recalls, but they could do little as the house was surrounded by mud. "About ten minutes later came the water and sand, and a little later the rocks and tree trunks."

He never had time to get scared, as adrenaline pumped in his body. He was among the lucky ones. Although his house is gone, all 30 members in his family compound survived. "It was a miracle, but the children are traumatized," said Juan Tacaxoy.

A fellow fire-fighter encourages him to sing to his children, to hold them and laugh with them. He has moved his family to one of 15 shelters that have been put up in schools, churches and government building in the center of Santiago Atitlan.

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