We spoke too soon

                Magyolene, the Global Ministries volunteer from Chile who serves in Nicaragua, arrived on Sunday.  I was thrilled to be facilitating again with her, as we had many times over the years at the Shalom Center of the Pentecostal Church of Chile: environmental education projects, youth mediation trainings, and the Roots in the Ruins: Hope in Trauma post earthquake recovery program. We spent the evening decorating the old meeting hall at the Institute for Intercultural Studies and Research in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, México, for the "Four Winds of Healing: Hope for Traumatized Communities" course which would start the next day.  We caught up on our lives, the changes and the dreams, and remembered friends and family spread across the globe. 

                The course began Monday morning with 6 participants from Mexico, Nicaragua and the USA and continued all day, along with a continuous rainfall outside, until 9:30 pm when everyone when home. Just past midnight, I awoke to another aftershock.  I calmed myself down with the hand massage I teach in the emotional first aid courses and went back to sleep.

                The neighbor of the Institute, whom I greet every day as I walk by her shop, stopped me in the street, wringing her hands and shaking nervously.  "The wall between the Institute and my house fell last night!  It made a terrible noise.  Please tell the administrator to come see me as soon as possible!"  I was the first to enter the Institute grounds, arriving early to set up the details for the next session of the community trauma healing course.  I reported a couple of weeks ago, after the two large earthquakes in Mexico, that the Institute buildings had not suffered any damages.  Well, this is no longer the case. 

                When I open the doors to the old colonial adobe and tile-roofed hall, a bright beam of sunshine greeted me through a gaping hole in the wall.  The roof sagged precariously.  The two monuments the participants had made the night before out of cardboard rolls and magazine cutouts to commemorate community grief and trauma, resilience, and the path to healing had been gently pushed away from the falling adobes and sat, unharmed, the middle of the room.  A corner of the "grief process" flip chart poked out of the rubble while the cheery yellow cards stating the elements of dignity, some buried and others mud-streaked, wrinkled or wet, decorated the moist, brown earthen heap.  Normally I reuse my flipcharts and signs.  Not this time.   But the guitar, piano, violin, computer and projector also in the room suffered no damage.

                As the other staff and participants arrived, we quickly moved everything out of the meeting hall, and Magyolene and I set up the course again, now in the dining room.  By the time we ended the course that afternoon, the administrator had already called in a work crew.  The roof has been propped up and the massive amount of mud (even 200 year-old adobes turn back to mud when wet since the blocks are cooked only by the sun) is being removed from the hall. The board of the Institute has begun to try to figure out how and when repairs will be made, including the neighbor's wall.

                It is probable that the wall of the Institute's old meeting room cracked during the two previous earthquakes allowing for the rain to seep into the adobes.  Then, the saturated wall crumbled with the smaller aftershock.  Many other buildings and homes will disintegrate across Chiapas and Oaxaca as the rains soak through deep fissures in the adobe walls and the tectonic plates continue to settle.  Meanwhile, we are grateful to have a new meeting space at the Institute, and even though it is not completely finished, we are rushing to clean it up and begin using it during the next workshop.

                We ended the community healing course by sitting in a circle and sharing food and drink, giving thanks that the wall caved in while we were gone and that the neighbors were not harmed, remembering all those whose suffering is compounded by the rains, and committing ourselves to continue to be a part of the healing of the communities we are accompanying .

Elena Huegel

Chiapas, México, 2017