Dear Readers:
With heavy hearts we
would like to share with you the reasons why Guatemala should be in your
prayers again. We are at the middle of
the rainy season and the heaviest of the rain is yet to come in November.
Nevertheless it has already rained a lot and the ground has already absorbed a
lot of water.
Last October the 2nd,
at 9:30 pm we faced the first disaster related with the rain in this year, a
huge mudslide, in an area pretty close to the city. El Cambray 2 is a small village located at
the base of a mountain. This community
was completely vanished in a matter of seconds as the big mountain collapsed
over them. This was a small community of about 125 houses, families of about 5
members in each household. At the moment
of the landslide they lived terrible moments because many of them were trapped
in their houses under the rubble sending text messages on their phones, asking
for help.
This is just one of
many sad stories that we have been hearing: Maria is a taxi driver. At 9:00 pm,
after a long day of work, her grownup son asked her to go get some pizza in a
nearby place to celebrate her grandson’s birthday; her daughter-in-law and
granddaughter accompanied her. While she
was on her way back home after getting the pizza she received a phone call from
a client asking her to pick him up. She then had to decide between making some
extra money or making her family wait for the pizza. She decided to make the
trip. Her decision saved her life but by
the time she got back, her neighborhood was gone and she had no idea whether
she would be able to see the rest of her family ever again.
At this moment,
October 6, 2015 at 7:00 pm, 140 people have been reported dead including a
number of children and an approximated 450 are still missing. A group of rescuers specialized in these kind
of disasters came from Mexico to support the work that the firefighters, army
and Police Department are doing. Rescue
workers said that after 72 hours the possibilities of finding somebody alive
are very low but they still are working very hard to find someone or to recover
all loved ones from the mud.
Please, we are asking
you to keep Guatemala in your prayers especially because CONRED [National
Commission for Disaster Reduction] announced that there are at least another
300 communities facing the same kind of risk in our country and as it was said
before, the hardest of the rainy season is still yet to come.
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