For the past five days it hasn’t rained. The catastrophe that was hurricane Stan has disappeared leaving its mark of death and destruction. “A sound was heard in Rama - Rachael weeping for her children because they were no more . . .

The entire world seems to be experiencing a tragic phase and one has to wonder what is happening or has something gone terribly wrong. Is it global warming or are the gods angry with us?

In picturesque Guatemala the regions most severely affected by the hurricane were the ten provinces in the north and southwest. As always, it seems that the poor are the most severely affected - and in the case of Guatemala the Mayan people.

All the data isn’t in yet. It will be weeks before people reach the most isolated areas. We know that several thousand people have lost their lives and hundreds have disappeared and are presumed dead. Whole villages have been destroyed and one village was totally buried in a massive mudslide with more than 800 dead. That area, near lake Atitlá n, has been declare a cemetery - there was no hope of recovering the bodies.

The damage to the infrastructure is unimaginable - roads and bridges gone. The Pan American highway has large sections destroyed. The school system - 772 schools severely damaged, 34 destroyed completely and so far no word of 200 other community schools .

I suppose on the world scale the magnitude of this disaster is not that significant. It certainly is not a Darfur or Afghanistan or Iraq but in a small country like Guatemala it is massive.

The good news is that the local people are responding. Thousands have volunteered to help in whatever way possible. There are campaigns for food and clothing. In our neighborhood of Jocotalas we collected enough food and clothing for two truck loads. The cardinal and the bishops have made statements asking for rice and beans and bottled water to be given to the starving indigenous people.

The call for solidarity is loud and the people of Guatemala and the world seem to be responding, but it will be years before we get back to anything like a normal situation. My fear is that the attention span of most is quite limited and in a few weeks the poor will be forgotten again and the world will continue to turn. There are several factors that this country must address as it attempts to rebuild, i.e., the lack of respect for the environment and the massive poverty of the Mayan people. These are the ongoing challenges that will not be solved by rice and beans and bottled water.

Bill Farrell, S.M.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence
of our friends."

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)