I have been in Santiago/Panabaj for two weeks now and haven't found the words to describe what has happened here. I know people have been anxious for information and so I am including the observations from my personal journal to give you some insight in to what has happened in this community and how it has effected me on a personal level.

Aftermath of a Disaster
Panabaja/Santiago Atitlan

To the unknowing eye, it doesn’t appear that anything adverse has happened here. That is until you arrive at the small village of Santa Lucia, about 60 km from Santiago Atitlan/Panabaj, where the road I am driving on, simply vanishes into a yawning, muddy depression 200 metres long in an otherwise normal two lane black top.

Further down the road families wielding pickaxes, desperately attempt to free their homes from the now dried, cement-like mud. Tangled tree roots and boulders crowd the houses and roadways near the bridges and creeks, as though the thunderous muddy waters heaved themselves onto the roadway and lay these huge rocks where it made its new bed.

Driving through the town of San Lucas Toliman, the main street suddenly ends and 500 metres of paving stone roadway, is, quite simply gone, leaving an abrupt stop to the otherwise normal roadway. There are no danger signs warning people away, simply the visual destruction.

I arrive in Santiago Atitlan and though the streets are very quiet the mood of the people appears, normal, but subdued. I notice the signs on the fronts of the schools and churches ¨30 families 150 people¨ or ¨120 families 600 people¨ in an effort to let aid workers know the requirements inside the hastily converted shelters.

The next morning I walk to Panabaj with Atun, Marta and Yousef, Indigenous friends of mine from the community of Santiago. For 2 1-2 hours we picked our way through the devastation that once was the bustling community of Panabaj. We stopped at four of our weaver´s houses, some only visible by two feet of wall protruding from the now hardened mud. We crawled through what appeared to be bushes, but what I later realized were the tops of trees, now made brush-like by the elevation of the mud around them.

We stop at the house of the weaver, Mercedes, the top bunk of their new bunk bed broken off, the only thing that would have been out of harm´s way in her home, broken off and salvaged, by the family. Behind the house a lavatorio, with only 1 foot of the building evident but still crowned with a ventilation pipe standing sentinel over a hardened sea of mud.

Notebooks, mattresses, clothing, and hair comb strewn in violent disarray either coated with mud or perversely pristine. I see the top of a door frame painted with the slogan jesu cristo vive aqui ¨Jesus Christ Lives Here¨, an ironic message given the scope of the tragedy.

There are very few people here, some villagers coming back to survey what is left of their homes, and to try to come to grips with what has happened. One brave man, lonely in his efforts, stands on a ladder attempting to shovel out the mud that his filled his home. He is the obvious exception as most people are still too traumatized or too afraid to return to the community. It has recently been declared a cemetery as there are as many as 1200 people entombed under 20 feet of mud.

We continue walking through the rubble and debris when we are struck by a horrible, pungent stench. Not having had experienced death of this magnitude before I assume it is the smell of death. We try and cover our mouths and noses as best we can and move on.

Coming upon the main area of destruction it appears a swath approximately 1.5 km wide has been completely covered with mud, earth and rocks. I see no evidence of habitation here, no protruding walls or trees, no lamina roofing, simply a shoe here, a CD there and man´s t-shirt, laying flat as if waiting to be folded. The community here has been erased.

We continue walking and I see a lone, green orange tree, its fruit, now hip height for easy picking. There is more activity in this area; small children are collecting wood and small rocks in sacks in the hopes of selling them in the market.

My eyes follow an enormous crater up the centre of this flow area to its origin, a nearby mountain. It stands innocently enough, its only evidence of wrong doing a large brown scar, marking where the earth broke free from its anchor, in stark contrast to the vivid greens surrounding it.

A small boy of about 10 years walks by, bent nearly double by the weight of the wood he has gathered, his scrawny yellow dog by his side. There are not many dogs here now due to the successful poisoning campaign of stray dogs by the municipality in the days following the disaster.

We now move back to the periphery areas of the slide and once again see signs of habitation. A hand woven huipil snagged in a tree, a t’shirt hanging from the limb of another and small child´s dress, half buried in mud. A lone dog is curled up, waiting on a pile of debris for his family to return.

It is 3 days after the La Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and we find several makeshift memorials near the mouth of the slide. Tin lamina panels retrieved from the debris create little shelters strewn with grass, pails full of flowers, empty liquor bottles, crosses and candles, as is the tradition here, and now dot this now lifeless landscape.

Further away from the slide, the prison, largely intact but enveloped in mud, stands defiant, empty of its inhabitants. Its neighbor, the Hospitalito, only recently re-opened lies abandoned, half filled with mud.

The house of our weaver Delores, is abandoned also, no evidence of her desperate escape through chest high mud. Delores, was due to give birth and was miraculously plucked out of the mud by the local volunteer firefighters, delivering her healthy baby boy two days later. She is one of the very few good news stories to come out of this tragedy.

We walk past the local school and once again are hit by the stench of decay. Here the mud isn’t as deep, but many bodies had been moved along by the flow of mud and deposited here. I see numerous brown paper bags, once containing lime hydrate lying on top of the mud. There has been so much lime spread over the earth here that it for a moment makes me think of the snowfall in Calgary the morning I left, a world ago.

We continue making our way through white powdered streets and begin to see population again. Wide eyed children sit near a hand painted tin panel with a simple message ¨Prohibido No Pasa Contaminación¨.

I look down at my brown leather hiking boots, which are now white-grey and thickly coated with the dust of death. I weep for what must be the hundredth time this day.

The people here in Santiago Atitlan continue to linger in the shelters, but soon they will be forced to leave the churches and schools that have been their homes the past month.

Life goes on here and rebuilding is very slow. These people who had nothing have lost everything.

Nothing is simple about the simple life these people lead, and it will likely take years for these families to regain their footing.