Another tremor, eruption and clean up from Agatha

After having spent a week together in field based training and feeling like things were getting back to normal, we spent this week back with our host families. It was a rough transition, but we got through it. In other news, thursday night I was awoken by my room shaking. I didn't think too much of it during the night and the next morning I had forgotten it had even happened until other people mentioned feeling it too. I still don't know if the shaking was tectonic or volcanic because the local volcano was spewing ash with lava flowing down it in the morning. That was about it for the natural activities...oh wait.

This saturday we spent the day helping out in a community close by that was hit hard when the last volcano erupted. There were mudslides in this town that buried numerous houses including one of the language teachers for Peace Corps. His house had over 8 feet of mud in the ground floor and he lost everything. We worked for a few hours shoveling out mud and water and furniture and moving it to the street where 2 huge tractors were moving the dirt to dump trucks that then hauled the mud to the other side of town. The entire block was buried and Liz and I went to a different house around the corner that had about 4 feet of mud throughout it. The feeling there was very eerie as we shoveled and picked through this family's possessions that were now all completely ruined. For the most part the work felt just like that, work. That is until we were finally able to move the mud out of the hallway of this house enough to open one of the bedrooms.

When we were able to pry to door open, mud poured out and as I was standing in the room with one of the guys I had been working with all day, I noticed that he was taking a lot of interest in the contents. When I asked him whose house it was he said it was his family's and that this was his room that he shared with his little brother. It was the first time he had been into it since the mud claimed it over 2 weeks ago. He picked through his now ruined chest of drawers and was able to salvage his old backpack but almost everything else was caked or soaked and was unsalvageable. As we stood in the doorway watching him pick through all his earthly possessions, I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of this tragedy and the effects of this natural disaster took on a very real and human toll. I thought of the things that I had been complaining about earlier in the day...my hard bed, my new mud boots that were a little uncomfortable...none of those things seemed important at all and I felt pretty silly about my own pettiness.

The boys' bed was in the middle of the room and had raised with the mud and when we were finally able to get it out of there the little boy saw some of his things. He hopped on the pile of mud and grabbed his stuffed rabbit which he looked at for a second and then decided to throw away since it was destroyed with the rest of his things.