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
