Day 9-10 and 11

Hey all sorry I haven't written in a few days, things have been complicated here. As you may know Guatemala had some pretty bad natural disasters over the past two weeks. For one, volcano Pacaya erupted and poured ash on all of Guatemala City. Right after that Tropical Storm Agatha came through and made all the ash super muddy. There was so much rain that everything overflowed and caused major damage. Because of the amount of rain the Agua Volcano had a MASIVE landslide. Tones and tones of rocks and volcano mud and anything that comes from the side of a volcano rushed down the side of the volcano and crashed into the towns below. My teacher's town got badly hit! It all happened Saturday night after the bad rain. My teacher, Teresa described it as bombs going off around her house as she could hear boulders go through the streets and rushing water from the overflowing rivers storm through every open crack in the town. She said that her and her husband were holding their little baby so tight and they were really scared that night! Many people died and others lost everything that they own.

CSA (my school) gathered bags of every day goods to bring to San Miguel (the town we have been working in) and hand out to families who lost everything! Many

of the CSA students, including myself, went out to help St. Miguel over the period of three days after classes were done. First of all we were told to go buy hefty rubber boots and face masks. We were also asked if we had all of out shots as who knows what we were going to find in the mounds of mud. On wednesday we loaded everything we were going to hand out in the bed of a truck and sat of the sides of the bed. It was hard to hold on as we're driving over crooked cobble stones through Antigua and over big speed bumps. HA! When we got to San Miguel we walked to this one street. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Imagine an old street with houses all along them. The houses are all built together in one line. The houses have balconies and garages. Now picture this road COMPLETELY covered in heavy, gooey, pooppy volcano mud that went all the way to half way up the doors. This means that the landslide was so big that the street got 4-5 feet of mud EVERYWHERE and more! To get to where we were actually going to work we had to walk through this street. We tried to walk on the big rocks and boulders that were stuck in the mud but we still managed to get mud all the way up to out knees. Also the mud was so heavy that it was kind of like quick sand that once stuck it was really hard to get out because the mud was so heavy! The street that our team was working on was just like the one we walked through and had a big yellow school bus smashed and stuck up against a line of houses. Our job first was to clear the way in front of the people houses so that when the big bobcat came it wouldn't take out the foundation of the houses. So with out pick acs and shovels we made way in front of the houses and moved the mud and rocks to the middle of the road. Many of the house got lots of mud and water all the way through to their back rooms. One house I was working in was covered in thick muddy water and we were just trying to get all of it out. Everything in that house was ruined and the muddy water level was a good foot high. There were SO many people helping! It was unbelievable how much English and French I was hearing around me! I met two girls from Neuchatel (a town in Switzerland close ish to mine) who are tourists and were out lending a hand. A couple of people who I thought I would never seen again and that I had met during the previous week were also out helping. On the way back to Antigua we had 19 people sitting in and on the edge of the bed. We also got stuck in traffic for quite a while so all of us were quite close by the end of the ride. The roads were being controlled by men with huge machine guns. There was a lot of traffic because there was a road closed due to another landslide

On Thursday we help a man out who was making water filters. This wasn't as messy of a job as the previous day! We simply checked to see if they didn't have any cracks in them by filling them up with water and then painting them. Many of the filters we were working on were going to go out to some of the people around Antigua who had been devastated by the landslides.

On Friday we went back to San Miguel and shoveled some more. This time we were in one specific area and all the people that were there had the goal of moving mud down to the main road to that the bobcat could pick it up and take it away. Again the mud was VERY heavy. It kind of looked like a big heavy mass of chocolate moose that you would never want to eat because it smells so bad! lol. My arms are really tired and sore from moving mud all day with a shovel. Again we were about knee deep in muddy, heavy chocolate smelly moose. A lot of the towns people were out helping. They have nothing else to do besides clean up their town. This one girl from school and I were the only girls there helping lol. It was definitely interesting scooping and moving mud with a bunch of Guatemalan man. lol. One little Guatemalan man who was about 75 or 80 years made sure I knew I what I was doing lol he was cute :) Later in the afternoon the rain came, which didn't make anything much better. We were told we had to leave because there was too much rain. Again, we road on the back of a truck back to Antigua. We were soaked !! HA! It was actually kind of fun to ride on the edge of the bed of a truck in the rain. Again we had lost of people in the truck. Helping out in San Miguel has been really great! Even though our efforts were little, since there is so much to do it felt good to help people who needed it! My heart just went out to these people who have lost their homes or are basically unlivable once cleared out. I managed to talk to some of the people by using my Spanish in asking them who they were. One lady was really sad and didn't know what was going to happen to her once everything was clear away since her house was trashed. There was so much team work between all of the people that were the helping. It didn't matter who you were of where you were from as long as you were helping. I got to meet so many people over the past few days!

In Antigua everything is fine. The town didn't have any problems with either of the volcanoes of Agatha. School has been great and I am using my Spanish all the time. I like to sit in the little French crepe place and my homework and use their internet. One of the guys that works here is French and he went to Les Roche, which is a hotel school in Switzerland, so that was fun to talk about. Since Lyle is gone I have no one who speak English in the house. I really have to use my Spanish with my family because that is all they understand. We keep the dictionary close by because we have to use it all the time :)