Dateline ACT
Rebuilding after Stan: A rough challenge
By Linda Nordahl Jakobsen and Heinrich Ludwig Stachelscheid, ACT International
San Marcos, Guatemala, April 11, 2006--Six months has passed since heavy rains from Hurricane Stan lashed the whole Central America region, affecting Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and Nicaragua, and causing extensive flooding and mudslides.
The hurricane destroyed homes, crops and other property, putting many poor people already at risk before the hurricane under further threat. Guatemala was especially hard-hit by several hundred landslides and flooding that followed the hurricane.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, many of the country’s poorest citizens were desperately hoping for assistance. The majority of the population in the worst-affected areas in the highlands and southwestern departments of the Pacific coastal area is indigenous people living in extreme poverty.
In the small, rural communities of Ixchiguán and Tajumulco high in the mountains in the province of San Marcos, the scars left behind by the enormous amounts of rain from “la tormenta,” as the villagers call tropical storms here, can still be seen everywhere: little creeks turned into deep gashes in the earth, boulders as big as cars lying in what used to be maize fields, collapsed bridges, roads halfway destroyed, and many houses - especially those close to river beds – in ruins.
Doña Ana, a widow, and her seven children now live in the small kitchen beside the place where their house once stood. Only the stone floor has survived.
“The rain wouldn’t stop for four days. And when it eased off eventually, our house with all our belongings was just gone,” she explains.
Relocation in the mountains
Like Doña Ana and her family, some 500 families in the municipalities of Ixchiguán and Tajumulco (named after Guatemala’s highest volcano, Tajumulco, at 4,220 meters high) have lost their homes. Some of them have found shelter in barns or the remains of their houses or are living with relatives or neighbours.
Social Pastoral of the Diocese of San Marcos has started to relocate Doña Ana and another 359 families with provisional, but firmly built, transitory homes, while 175 new latrines are being constructed as well. Social Pastoral is a local implementing partner of DanChurchAid, one of several members belonging to the Action by Churches Together (ACT) International forum in Guatemala. (The ACT members have been responding to the needs following Hurricane Stan under an appeal issued in October 2005.)
The project team is also helping to improve hygiene conditions in the area by delivering water tanks and jerry cans as well as chlorine for safe drinking water. In addition, the community health workers from Social Pastoral are holding training sessions on water sanitation with the villagers.
All together, 4,275 people in Ixchiguán and Tajumulco will benefit from new provisional shelters, water and sanitation.
“It is good to know that people in parts of the world I will never be able to travel to are thinking of us,” says Doña Ana.
A rough challenge
The project team faces a considerable challenge in the transport of the building material. Not only are many roads destroyed, but there has never been a real road leading to many of the small farms that are scattered in the mountains and that often cling to the steepest hills.
Often the trucks have to stop miles away from the intended destination and the team then has to unload timber, roofing sheets and cement and call the villagers to these improvised “distribution centers.”
The villagers then carry the concrete, timber, roofing and other materials on horseback farther on. Sometimes it takes three to four hours to walk up and down the steep hillsides.
Fortunately, solidarity is a word that is well-known in this area. Doña Ana, whose husband died eight years ago, can rely on her neighbours, who even don’t mind carrying the materials on their backs to a new building site on a safer plain where her provisional house is going to be.
When the neighbors arrive, totally exhausted, some of Doña Ana’s older children have prepared a simple meal for them - “tortillas and frejoles,” the typical round maize cakes with mashed beans and a spicy sauce.
One of the two communities where Social Pastoral is rebuilding is the municipality with the highest elevation in Guatemala and the second-highest in all of Latin America. In Ixchigúan, the villagers live at more than 3,000 meters.
There are a few very bad dirt roads that lead to the houses that lie scattered on the steep hillsides of the volcano. In addition to the rough landscape, in the afternoons, clouds and mist roll in and cover the area and its inhabitants in a wet and cold blanket that reduces visibility to ten to fifteen meters.
The sun sets at around 5:30 p.m., and night temperatures often fall below zero, and in the mornings a thin layer of white frost covers the landscape.
Whether up mountains, on damaged roads or over rough land, the members of ACT and their partners responding to the needs of people affected by Hurricane Stan have as their goal to bring not only the means to assist survivors in the physical rebuilding of their lives, but to bring them hope for a better life as well.
Members of ACT working together in the ACT Guatemala Form and in this appeal are: Christian Aid, DanChurchAid, Guatemalan Evangelical Churches Conference, The Lutheran World Federation, Norwegian Church Aid and HEKS.
Linda Nordahl Jakobsen is a journalist for DanChurchAid (DCA), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT) International.
Heinrich Ludwig Stachelscheid is a logistics coordinator on the DCA-ECHO-funded project in San Marcos.
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