La Vida Idealist

There is a certain eeriness to feeling every joint in one’s spine. A mere wave is enough to make an arm shake. And a tetanus shot will render one’s favorite sleeping position out of commission for a couple of days.

Shoveling is hard work. You bury the shovel in a mountain of mud, lift, dump into a bucket and repeat for hours on end. An odor lingers – a blend of death, decay and destruction. There are those rare moments when life resembles one’s favorite novel. In the past week, Love in the Time of Cholera has had more of a literal effect on my life than I ever would have expected literature to effect.

Relief workers aid the clean-up in San MIguel Escobar, Guatemala after Tropical Storm Agatha.

On May 15, I climbed my first active volcano, marveling at the sight of lava flowing down slopes. Less than two weeks later, with very little warning, this very volcano erupted and rivers of fire destroyed nearby villages, while blanketing Guatemala City with ash. Then Tropical Storm Agatha arrived – and did not stop pummeling our rooftops until, as of June 3rd, it had taken the lives of 150 people in Central America. The dawn of June 3rd found 108,000 homeless, 136,413 evacuated and 32,000 destroyed homes. 

The sun shone with an incongruous brightness on the morning after the storm. Armed with galoshes and shovels, aid workers poured into the hardest hit villages. Rescue workers pull out a grandmother and her child – both, unfortunately, dead because of a sudden mudslide. Mud reaches the level of the kitchen counter and buries wiring, computers, furniture and children’s toys underneath it. Health teams administer tetanus shots. Two days later, we add surgical masks to our uniform – an ominous sign that disease has arrived. Typhoid fever outbreaks and rumors of cholera, the results of a limited and contaminated water supply, complicate the act of shoveling.

With a specialty in conflict management, capacity building and women’s development work, I was a stranger to relief work. Relief work requires both empathy and the ability to distance oneself from the overwhelming pain. It demands every ounce of physical energy and every last grain of positivity. It is a quintessential team sport – one whose results will not show until days or months, making every lift of a shovel at turns disheartening and frustrating.

And in the disarray, hope emerges. The determination of the aid workers, the resilience of the locals, the random acts of kindness, the relentless teasing of one another about who smells worse or whose mud stains look more like face paint lighten up the load. Knee-deep in mud, inspired by the optimism, energy emanating from the shoveling crowds, it is hard to ignore the grave reminders of the storm – and even harder to not feel one’s own faith in humanity surging to new heights.

For a photomontage of relief efforts in Guatemala and information on how to donate to the victims of Tropical Storm Agatha, please visit Roxanne’s blog.

Latest posts by roxannekrystalli

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