wfn.org | Episcopalians reach out to Nicaraguan victims

[Daphne Mack <dmack@dfms.org>]

99-2294
Nightmare in Nicaragua: A dark roar, and suddenly hell was upon 
them

by Nan Cobbey
(Episcopal Life) Calixto Palacio said it sounded "like an 
earthquake, like rocks rumbling."

Napoleon Narbaez described "a noise like helicopters right 
overhead."

Maria Adriana Munoz saw it. "The clouds were low and it was 
dark, but it looked like a monster up to the sky."

The three survivors of the massive mudslide at La Casita 
volcano in Nicaragua told their stories to Phoebe Griswold, Bishop 
Sturdie Downs of Nicaragua and those accompanying them on December 
14 visit. Six weeks had passed since Hurricane Mitch had sent a 
nightmare of scalding water, mud, boulders and uprooted trees 
crashing into the communities at the base of the mountain, and 
still the people who had survived searched every day for bodies of 
their family members.

"It hurts not being able to find my mother," Munoz told 
the visitors. "I would have been comforted if I could have found 
just her bones to bury." With one hand on the reins of her horse 
and the other holding the hand of a boy about seven, she wept. "I 
couldn't find the body of my son ... I loved my son so much."

A canyon to the sea
She has come back to the scene of her tragedy, a scene shorn 
of all but memories. Nothing of the village of Rolando Rodriguez 
remains. The landscape that must once have held school and church 
and market is now a level plain of silt, sand and dirt dotted here 
and there with boulders five, six, seven feet high. The flat 
desolation stretches a mile in either direction where the 
thundering flow came through.

In this Pacific Coast area, Hurricane Mitch brought not 
winds but rain. It rained for nine days straight before the 
mountain, an active volcano, collapsed under the pressure of 
accumulated water. With an almost unimaginable force, those 
waters, heated to a temperature witnesses can't estimate, came 
crashing down the slopes. The churning rock and mud moved with 
such power it carved out what looks like a canyon all the way to 
the sea, a distance of about 30 miles. In some spots, that canyon 
is 35 feet deep and as wide as a football field.

^From the time the volcano collapsed until its torrent of 
gouging destruction reached the sea, only 12 hours passed. Jorans 
Lopez, 25, a volunteer in the mayor's office at nearby Posoltega, 
described the aftermath of the mudslide in detail for the 
visitors.

"It started at 11:30 in the morning," he said. "At first 
we thought it was only a little flood, but then the dead started 
arriving in Posoltega and in the harbor. They had 85 bodies 
floating there and we began to realize it was more than a flood."

No warning
For those right at the foot of the mountain, there was 
almost no warning. From the time they heard the rumbling until the 
slide was on them, only five minutes elapsed, according to Lopez. 
The horror did not end when the torrent met the sea. The rain 
continued for three more days and bodies continued to turn up 
toward the coast.

According to Francisco Sanchez of the mayor's office, the 
mayor called the government for help. "It is a total disaster. 
The population is dying," she told them. "They did not believe 
her. They thought she was crazy."

In fact, more than 1,500 people were killed and three 
villages wiped out entirely. It wasn't until three days later that 
the first army helicopter was sent to Posoltega to pick up would-
be rescuers and make the trip to the volcano.

"When the people jumped [out of the helicopter], they sank 
into the mud, some up to their necks," said Lopez. They hadn't 
known the mud was still hot. There was no way to get them out for 
four days. Most of that team died.

Symbols of life
As Griswold, wife of Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, and 
Downs walked over the site with the other members of their party-
Ann Vest, interim director of the Presiding Bishop's Fund for 
World Relief; Isolina Downs, wife of the bishop; the Rev. Canon 
Ricardo Potter of the Episcopal Church's Anglican and Global 
Affairs Office; Bishop Cornelius Wilson of Costa Rica, primate of 
the Church of the Central American Region, and George Porter, 
diocesan administrator in Nicaragua-they found reminders of the 
tragedy.

A rough-crafted cross, pieced together out of debris and 
tied up with flowers, now wilted, marked the spot where the torso 
of one body had been pulled from the mud. The name written on the 
wood could no longer be read.

Maria Adriana Munoz told Potter that people came back every 
day to search. "In our hearts we keep hoping to find the bodies." 
She said people climb up on the biggest of the boulders and just 
sit there and cry.

Before the visitors returned to the van that had driven them 
up the mud flow to the foot of the volcano, they joined hands to 
pray, asking for help and sustenance for the people who had 
suffered so deeply. As Griswold climbed into the van she held in 
her hand a four-inch shoot of maize. "I found it growing out of 
the mud," she said.

--Nan Cobbey is features editor for Episcopal Life, the national 
newspaper of the Episcopal Church.

Episcopal News Service
Kathryn McCormick
(212) 922-5383
kmccormick@dfms.org
www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens