María Suárez
Co-Director, Feminist International Radio Endeavor, Costa Rica

I have just returned from visiting some of the areas that were most affected by Hurricane Stan: Santiago de Atitlán in Sololá and Tecpán in Chimaltenango [in Guatemala]. I am so moved that I'm almost speechless. I couldn't stop crying at night as I hugged my pillow, because during the day I had to keep a stiff upper lip, trying to share my limited strength with the women from those horribly affected communities. They have lost everything except the will to survive and even that is hanging by a thread.

But these women are clinging to every scrap of hope that they find among the ruins. They are the ones who pick up the broken threads and re-weave the social and ecological fabric rent by the storm that brought five straight days of driving rain, which exposed, once again, the country's yawning political vacuum.

"The hurricane revealed the injustice that forces most of the population to live in misery and poverty; it underscored the State's inefficiency and corruption; it laid bare the need for environmental protection policies," writes journalist Ana María Cofiño in the newspaper El Periódico (October 22, 2005).

Santiago de Atitlán, Sololá

Santiago de Atitlán is actually part of Panabaj, which means "place of stone" in Mayan. It is deserted. The San Lucas Tolimán Volcano rises in the distance, majestic and apparently harmless. But its underground waters joined the rains and the swollen rivers, causing them to overflow as they had a little more than fifty years ago.

The ancient Mayans believed that natural disasters occurred regularly every half-century. If we also took into account the past five centuries of far-from-natural calamities, it might have been easy to predict that they eventually would coincide. But it is not quite so straightforward, precisely because in the context of crisis, the borders are washed away between what is natural and what is created socially and politically. They meld together, and no one can tell where one ends and the other begins.

Gladis Acosta, the UN representative in Guatemala, confirms this notion when she tells me that in this situation, "A national debate develops, and the authorities know that they must propose new policies, redesign the country. There is no turning back now that the crisis has revealed the need for change. The disaster areas are unfit for human habitation."

Leticia and Doña Chica, two Mayan women who direct the local women's health clinic, take us to the top of a hill of stones, sticks and mud in Panabaj that is now a cemetery. There, over 80 people died in their sleep in the early morning the day of the disaster. Others are still missing.

The campaign "Women to Women, with Affected Communities" channels support and aid through women and their organizations. If this visit to the affected communities has made one thing clear to me, it is that what is needed is not only a gender perspective, but an ethnic perspective in solidarity. Leticia suggests that, "It is not enough to give. Those who send aid must make sure that help reaches the people who need it most." The truth is that this requires placing the resources directly into the hands of the women and working with them.

For example, a foreign builder has launched a laudable effort to build a refuge for orphaned children in Santiago. They say that it is temporary and that the children soon will be put up for adoption. It seems like a marvelous project. But if you ask the members of the Mayan women's organizations, they suggest that it might be better to provide direct support to the children's extended families. "That way the children won't be isolated from their cultural and emotional environment," Leticia explains, "The families do not take the children in because they have no means to support them. But if they received help, the children could stay in our communities."

The women from the Santiago de Atitlán Health Clinic work to rebuild the lives of the communities in collaboration with the local midwives. These women are the threads that re-knit the devastated social fabric. Doña Chica, Leticia and many others run an incredible hospital that cared for the storm's victims from the very first hours of that fateful dawn on October 5 [2005]. People from far outlying communities arrived, making the long trek to the center of Santiago. "Early that morning, the volunteer firefighters woke us to tell us that wounded people had arrived and that we had to open the clinic because it was the only place where they could be treated. We immediately opened our doors to the wounded, the sick, women in labor, people who needed operations, amputees, etc. Thankfully, we were able care for them with the support of the entire community and our experience," says Doña Chica, a Mayan nurse who lost her husband in the war. The clinic has offered community health care through midwives (matronas or parteras) for 25 years.

One of the women's stories still strikes a chord within me. Doña Concepción Chopen, a widow, lifted her six children through the roof of their hut in the darkness of the morning of the 5th, while standing in a current of freezing water, filled with sticks and stones from three rivers that came together that day between 2 and 5 a.m. "By the time I realized what was happening, the water was already up to my ankles. There was a thunderclap so strong that it shook me from the bed. At first I thought it might be a truck or the volcano, but then I felt the water. I began to look for a way to get my children out (I had to feel my way; the electricity had been the first thing to go). The water was up to my knees by the time I managed to light a burlap sack so that I could see. Oddly, that night I had brought into the house the ladder that we use to pick fruit and fix the roof. The water and mud were up to my waist when I began to lift my children out one by one. They are all very small, except for the eldest. I got them out in order from the biggest to the littlest. There are so many of us, and the current was so strong that at one point I thought I would have to choose which children I would take with me and which I would have leave to the flood. I had no idea how to make that decision. My daughter saw what I was thinking and said, 'All or nothing.' As we escaped, we could see tables, chairs, dead bodies, television sets, and huge rocks floating by us, as if they weighed nothing. When I felt that we were starting to fade, I began to sing so that my children would have the strength to keep moving against the current." She is worried because her children are suffering from depression. Some of them sleep all day long in the little room in a town church that was assigned to them as a temporary shelter.

We went to see the temporary housing that the government is building for those who lost everything. It is "temporary" in that it will be used until government officials find a way to offer residents new lands upon which to rebuild their homes and communities. The government has donated only wood and canvas, the people have to provide the labor. But how? If they don't work everyday, they don't eat! The men leave their homes early each morning to gather firewood and then look for fruit and avocadoes or work as day laborers. The women have their long daily routines: washing their clothing in the dangerous river, searching for their pots among the rubble so that they can cook herbs, bathing the children, knitting what they can, mourning, comforting the depressed, caring for the sick.

Tecpán, Chimaltenango

The next day we go to Chimaltenango, on the other side of the country. It lies on the Tecpán side between two other devastated communities: La Giralda and La Argentina.
The mountains that surround the towns have been stripped by rain and erosion. Underground rivers ran together with flooded streams and brought terror to the little homes on the river's edge. The devastated inhabitants had come to this place where no one else lived when they were running from the war ten years ago. It was and is an uninhabitable wasteland. The residents rent land on the slopes of the mountains in order to harvest maize.

Our visit is facilitated by Estela and Francisca, who work in the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (UNAMG, National Union of Guatemalan Women), which channels the support and aid of the "Women to Women, with Affected Communities" campaign. Estela and Francisca are also our interpreters. This time, the language and culture are Cachiquel, and these Mayan human and women's rights activists spend their day off taking us to see the women in the communities in which they work.

We meet Doña Petronila, Doña Lencha and Doña Rosa, all of whom survived the war. We talk with young women, girls, older women trying to rebuild their lives and communities that have been torn apart by so much tragedy. They will not give up. Once again, family members are missing, this time disappeared by the mud and water. Two weeks have passed, and the survivors continue to search for their belongings. Amid the rubble, they light candles for the victims. Even though the river and mountain thunder at night, they will not leave this place until they have buried their dead. They say that when the home becomes a cemetery, you cannot build another until you have mourned and honored the dead. I don't know how long the process lasts. I don't dare ask.

They are truly happy to have someone visit and listen to them. They tell us this in Cachiquel, and I don't know how many other languages. I can tell what they are saying before Francisca translates it. I can decipher their gestures. When they bring their hands to their chest, they are talking about their dead. When they hold their hands up to the heavens — as if invoking I don't know how many gods and goddesses -— they are talking about the rain that comes from the sky. Doña Petronila says that she doesn't understand how rain, a divine gift for the harvest and life, can have become a punishment. Their deep and penetrating stares are a sign of shock. These are the same looks I saw in New York on September 11, 2001, in El Salvador during the war, in Somoza's Nicaragua, in South Africa under apartheid. The countless disappeared, this amazed disbelief, which has a face but so often cannot be expressed in words, exists in so many parts of the world.

Doña Rosa lost her three daughters-in-law. She is left with her grandchildren and children, all of whom are suffering from depression. She is the center of the family. She asks a favor of me on behalf of all of them. "The President came to this community a few days after the disaster. I spoke with him myself. He publicly promised to secure new lands so that we could leave here. I have no way of reminding him of his promise. Please do it in the city. He must be pressured."

I observed a delivery of aid from the "Women to Women, with Affected Communities" campaign. They really do choose the neediest families: the widows, those who live in the most remote areas, those who were left with nothing more than the will to survive. I also see a government food shipment arrive. The police come, drop it off, and then leave again. The effort is admirable, but it is not effective. There is lack of organization. Some people take the food even though they don't need it. We can see it from a distance. The government does not understand the community's needs the way the women do. Bags of food and other products are distributed according to a list of the first and last names of the people who removed the mud from the access roads. They are, of course, all men. I ask myself how this is supposed to benefit the town's many widows.

Meanwhile, in the city, the government makes promises and, in some cases, implements actions that lack a gender or ethnic perspective. With the help of the UN, it has put together $21 million of aid for the six months that the agency's special humanitarian aid program will last. And it seems like after the first few weeks most people who live in the city don't care about what is happening in the altiplano. I hope I'm wrong. I heard someone say that they have donated food and other products, although they don't know what the Mayan population needs. Perhaps they have lost their roots among the neon lights and cheap entertainment and find it difficult to connect with their people.

The specialized agencies work from sun up to sun down. The Red Cross, the United Nations, CONRED none of them rest. You can see them working. They make statements to the press and deliver aid every day. And there are others who do not rest, though they don't appear in the media: the urban women's groups that work with rural Mayan women.

The voices of the affected communities could not have been heard so clearly if it were not for the untiring communications efforts of La Cuerda, CERIGUA, the women broadcasters of Red Mujeres al Aire (Women on the Air Network) in the affected communities, FEGER, and the Asociación de Radios Comunitarias (Community Radio Association) and similar groups that organized the Chain of Solidarity during the first weeks following the tragedy.

We must work together to fine-tune how women and men from other parts of the world can come together harmony and offer their solidarity with a situation that is also ours in this globalized world. You and the women from those communities have to tell us how to do so effectively.

We cannot expect the aid agencies and organizations to contribute in an effective manner unless we organize interconnected networks: North-South and South-North, country-city and city-country, women with women, with members of all communities. But we must do so in a manner that focuses on women and their communities and envisions them as our guides.

That is why the Feminist International Radio Endeavor brought me here. That is why we are here together: because no one can do it alone.

This trip was a collective effort from the very beginning. It was made possible by Laura Asturias and La Cuerda and Ana Silvia Monzón and the Red de Mujeres al Aire in Guatemala. I also am grateful for the steadfast efforts of all of the women of the urban and rural NGOs who work against violence and for human and women's rights. And I would like to thank the media for bringing those of us who live in other countries close enough to this situation to be moved to take action.

I also would like to thank the "Women to Women, with Affected Communities" campaign, the Gender Program of World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Association of Women in Development (AWID), the Global Fund for Women, and the Feminist International Radio Endeavour / Radio Internacional Feminista (FIRE/RIF).

Thank you,

María Suárez Toro,
FIRE/RIF