Washed Away – by Pinar Istek
Pinar Istek, MU masters candidate, photographed how the people of Guatemala are trying to rebuild their lives after hurricane Agatha.
Disasters are about people. They are not about earth. After hurricane Agathá and Pacaya volcanic eruption hit, 25,000 acres of land loss in Guatemala wouldn’t mean much to us, if it didn’t influence human life directly or indirectly. The most direct effects of Agatha and Pacaya were maybe on people who lost theirs lives or their belongings. However, it is not limited to that. It is a chain in ecological and economical systems, which we are certainly a part of.
Since Agatha hit Guatemala at different locations, there are so many coverage of the disaster, itself, and cost of it. There are so many words, said about the closed roads, which would take us to people and to their individual stories of the disaster. Forgetting the fact that it is not about the cost of the disaster, or it is not about number of this or that, there are so many words, said so far.
What about the people? Who were they? What were they doing before a tropic storm washed away their lives and took them back to zero? What are they going to do after? What about the stories of Encarnacion, Jorge, Colonia, Fabricio, Magarito, Jennifer or Lucia?
One of the heavily affected areas in Guatemala was the department of Quetzaltenango. Shortly after these double disasters, a provisional home was started at Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Comerciales (ENCO) of Quetzaltenango by some organizations such as CONRED, SESOP and Boy Scout. Run mostly by volunteers, ENCO served more than 400 people by providing food, clothes, blankets, rooms to sleep in, medicine and medical treatment.
The following week of this double disaster, Guatemalan government had closed down the schools for one week for safety purposes. Therefore, meantime, ENCO was able to serve the victims of the disaster. However, on June 2, ENCO evacuated last seventeen victims, who were still residing at the provisional home, to clean up the building before the schools start again. La Casa de Cursillo, which is normally a facility of Catholic Church, opened its doors to them for a limited period of time, which ended on June 10, with an extra one-day extension.
Among the victims, there is a 3-month pregnant woman, a 10-month old baby girl, who is severely suffering from malnutrition, a 46-year-old man who just had his cast taken off his fractured leg and a 39-year-old Mexican man, who had brought his mother to Guatemala 45 days before the disaster, for the treatment of her respiratory disease.
Check out more photos on Pinar’s blog.
