Fire and Water

[hey friends -- photos will be coming soon!]
"Deadly storm rocks Guatemala hours after local heads for home"
By Janae Hagen
(As printed in the June 9 issue of the Divide County Journal)

Torrential rains beat down on the plane early Thursday afternoon (May 27) as we prepared for takeoff from Guatemala City. Pacaya, one of the country’s many active volcanoes, was smoking in the distance. Once the plane took off, the 10-day service project months in the making was finally complete.

By the time our team landed in Minneapolis a few hours later, Guatemala City’s airport was closed due to a deadly eruption from Pacaya.

In the time it took me to make it back home to Crosby, all the work our team had completed in 10-days was drown out by an overwhelming need to help thousands more like those I met during my trip, which ironically ended only a few hours before Mother Nature unleashed her fury.

The rains never quit after we left.Antigua, Guatemala, was hit with 25 inches of rain in 24 hours the day after we made it back to the states.

I was part of a 15-person sociology class offered at NDSU that culminated with a service team experience through the GOD’S CHILD Project (GCP). All semester long we studied social, economic and political issues that have plagued Guatemala since their 36-year long civil war ended in 1996.

Our team spent our time working in nearly all of the facets of GCP – from visiting schools to serving at a homeless shelter to a clothing distribution in a rural area and constructing homes.

A few months before the trip, one of my teachers, Angela Mathers, began fundraising through marathon training to purchase land for the homes. The Williston native raised $6,500 – enough money to purchase three plots large enough to hold a 12 by 16 foot home.

We spent three days hauling concrete blocks, sand, gravel and sheetrock up the side of a mountain. With the building expertise and muscle power of six GCP staff, our team completed three homes on one of the most physically demanding build sites GCP has ever had.

The families our team built homes for was expected to move in Saturday; they fortunately were not on the hillside above Ciudad Vieja. We were the first ever service team to build for families from the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited and Missing Persons (ITEMP) division of the project, which meant that one or more people in the families had been in a deadly trafficking situation.

GCP social workers began working more than 18 months ago with two families who lived in Antigua’s landfills. Their livelihood revolved around finding as many recyclables in the smoldering trash as they could.

The kids were expected to help out as soon as they were old enough to run around. The 10 and 12-year old girls in one family were at a high risk of being kidnapped into prostitution.

The homes were finished less than 72 hours before Tropical Storm Agatha’s destruction. Current numbers show 156 people confirmed dead and 103 missing. Approximately 179,000 people have been displaced, more than 135,300 evacuated and 32,000 homes have been damaged.

Families living near the GCP Scheel School were devastated by the storm; the homes of 24 of the families were severely damaged or destroyed. Many of the families have shown up in a homeless shelter that is sponsored by GCP.

Classes have resumed at both of GCP’s schools to help reestablish some normalcy for the kids, said Chris Mathew, Assistant Director of GCP in Bismarck.

The 250 or so children that go to school at the Dreamer Center are the poorest of the poor around Antigua. Some are homeless and others call a dirt floor, ramshackle metal walls and a cornstalk-thatched roof “home.” The lucky ones have homes built by GCP – with a concrete floor and foundation, a roof that doesn’t leak, and a lock on the door.

Most of the children live on the countless hillsides surrounding Antigua. Unlike in the United States, the higher a family lives on a hill, the poorer they are. Rarely is water, plumbing or electricity sent that high up.

When the rains refused to cease, GCP acted as a first responder because of the staff’s extensive knowledge about rural areas. They began evacuating people whose homes were no match for a muddy slope.

Late Saturday night, a pool that had been collecting at the top of a volcano near Antigua burst and ripped through the mountainside destroying homes and picking up debris and mud along the way before inundating Ciudad Vieja in the valley. Ciudad Vieja is a city next to Antigua. My class spent most of our first day in Guatemala there admiring the Spanish-influenced architecture.

Now much of the city has been enveloped by six feet of mud. GCP staff and volunteers spent Monday digging and searching for missing persons.

“Sifting through the mud at one of the houses hit hardest…we found the bodies of a grandmother and her 11-month-old granddaughter. The mother of the baby came soon after we yelled for the bomberos (firefighters). I will never forget her wails of sorrow. The bodies were removed and the search continued,” said Megan Kadrmas, a two-year GCP volunteer, on her blog June 2.

GOD’S CHILD was founded by Patrick Atkinson, a Bismarck native, in 1991 and is headquartered out of both Bismarck and Antigua, Guatemala.

The project has an emergency relief fund and is calling for help. “We are not only facing a horrible disaster, but a lack of resources due to the material and financial assistance we provided to Haiti. We are rationing our supplies for the most needy and most affected victims. We need your help and we need it now,” Atkinson said.

Chris Mathew, the Assistant Director, said the best way to help is with financial contributions – either by mailing a check to the Bismarck office, PO Box 1843, Bismarck, 58502, or donating online at www.godschild.org.

Farlang?

Alright, I better explain the title. Farlang means "foreigner" in Laotian or Thai (I don't even know for sure). I was inspired by a story I read about a couple who got a farlang roll on a sushi menu in a Laotian village. They were craving peanut butter like crazy, which I can totally relate to (see my Rome blog if you don't believe me), so they "invented" a sushi roll with peanut butter, bananas and a bit of honey all wrapped up in rice and nori.

I wanted a title that incorporated a word from another language, and given my severely limited knowledge of Chinese, that was tricky. So I went with "farlang." It's easy to say, easy to spell, and with any luck, simple enough to keep you coming back to read what I have to say.

I'm not crazy, I promise.

For the past few months I've had a reoccurring daydream that I'm running, running as fast as I can and I'm approaching a huge cliff that I'll either soar off of or take a nose dive.

Well friends, I'm about to jump.

 It's so cliche, I know. But I promise I don't actually try make it happen, it just comes to me.

As expected my last semester of school was a mad dash to figure out exactly what I want to do with my life. Talk about exhausting. I knew I wanted to go abroad, preferably to Jordan or a Spanish-speaking nation, after which I would move to Boston or DC, land a stellar job, get my Masters and live my dream. Instead I find myself going to China.

“You’re going to China?” Yes, I’m going to China. “Wow. That’s crazy!” Yes, I know it’s crazy. Then the dumbfounded look of awe from each newly informed friend usually lasts for up to ten seconds before breaking into more rapid-fire questions. That scene has been played out at least once every day for the past month and a half.

Yes, I’m moving to China. I find myself having to repeat that over and over in my head as I try to digest it. In all my endeavors, none have proven more emotionally draining than when I try to process the fact that I’m moving to a country that I only have vague generalizations of what to expect.

I have zero expectations for China. I never ever saw myself going to Asia, it’s not that I didn’t want to, I just had never thought about it. I guess that’s the beauty of this adventure. China to me is like a blind date, all that I really know about him [China] is what I was able to creep off his limited public profile on Facebook.

To me, China is Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Xi’an with a landmass the size of the United States lying in between them all. It’s the land of emperors and the world’s largest wall. It’s home to the most people in the entire world. And to my eyes the language is a tangled web of darts and dashes forming an incomprehensively beautiful script.

China also happens to be the last communist world power. I’ve studied their government and gained a solid understanding of the economic machine that keeps GDP growing at a rate of nearly 10 per-cent a year. China is also on the winning side of a nauseatingly large trade deficit with the United States. In this economic climate, that’s rather disconcerting.

Everything from my sunglasses to my water cups to the picture frames on my wall is made in China. I read last fall that one Chinese city makes only buttons. In fact, 80 per-cent of the buttons used in the clothes that are made in China (so like half of my closet) are made in that one city. It’s a thriving button-industry city – can you imagine!

Yet, the Chinese people I’ve met break every economic or government-laden generalization I have dreamt up about the country. By far they are some of the most friendly, kind-hearted people I know. My Chinese friends are fiercely patriotic and are thrilled I want to learn more about their home.

So off I go.

Off I go to the land where Facebook and Twitter are blocked. My best friend, Google, won’t be accompanying me either. Hell, I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to stream this blog since most blogging sites are blocked by the Great Firewall.

I’ve got three months to prepare for the adventure of my life. At this point, four out of five days are good ones when I think of the incredible people, the great university I’ll be working at, the beautiful cities and the millennia of traditions that still are proudly practiced.

But every now and then, the fear of the unknown envelops me. The language barrier, the humungous cities, and expansive government kind of freak me out.

When I go, I’ll be ready. And knowing me, after a month I won’t want to come home.

In the meantime, I'll get to practice my Spanish during a service trip to Guatemala. I leave the day after graduation (Sunday). My life is 73 levels of fantastic right now.