On the road again: Erupting volcanoes ans hurricanes.

It had been raining heavily for almost a week when Volcan de Pacaya erupted. It normally do erupt every now and then, but this time, it was a big eruption. For a night and a day it rained volcanic ashes over Guatemala City and the whole place turned black. In the villages close to the volcano people got evacuated fast. Unfortunately, not fast enough. Some people got stuck, and disappeared.

The rain didn’t stop. It felt like someone had opened the sky and was throwing water down over Guatemala with all their force. It soon became known that it was a hurricane that was sweeping across the country. Hurricane Agatha. The worst hurricane since Stan hit Guatemala in 2006.

I spent the next days with my friend Lili and her family in Patzicia, watching the news as the reality of the catastrophe became known. Guatemala City flooded because of all the volcanic ashes clogging all the cities drainage. All over the country rivers flooded, tearing down bridges, mudslides ruined crops, houses got caught in the slides and got covered under layers of mud, roads were blocked as the mud and trees piled up on the roads, some places the roads just simply disappeared. Over 200 people has died ( a number that I strongly believe is a huge understatement), thousands have been evacuated as their homes got flooded or were in risk of getting torn down. People lost everything they had. Hundreds were without homes, dry clothes and food for days. And as always, it is the poorest people that got hit the hardest and suffered the most.

My friends mom forbade me to leave their house for a few days until mother nature had settled, the roads got cleared and opened and things were somehow back to normal. As I left Patzicia and headed towards Lago de Atitlan ( supposedly the most beautiful lake in the world) I got to see with my own eyes the damages the country suffered. It was not a pretty sight that awaited me along the roads of Guatemala.