“This was going to be their Pompeii.”

 

Patrick Atkinson’s description of the blasts from Guatemala’s Volcano Fuego in early June is heart-wrenching. 

 

The first blast on June 3 brought “a massive cloud of extremely fine volcanic ash” that affected the air in Antigua, seven miles from Fuego as the crow flies. Atkinson’s ministry, The God’s Child Project, is there — a walled oasis of greenery, with offices, a school for poor neighborhood children, a clinic, playgrounds, kitchen, chapel and a hospital nursery for malnourished infants all built on a former garbage dump.

 

“Finer than baby powder,” he says, such ash “gets into, and eventually ruins, everything — hinges, drawers, sterile medical equipment, wall paint, pumps and compressors.” Four hours into the cleaning and the covering of infant faces with clean face masks a second eruption came from Fuego.

 

“With a loud blast and earth-shaking rumble, (the volcano) sent a large pyroclastic cloud tumbling into our valley at 100 mph; a 1,600 degree mix of super-heated gas, steam, ash, sand, and stone,” Atkinson says.

 

“Villagers up and down the valley were caught wherever they stood ... People were instantly buried in ash ... The lucky ones had one, maybe two, minutes to jump into a fleeing vehicle and leave. Those who tried to outrun it on foot, or to hide behind trees or in their homes, didn’t survive.”

 

Workers and volunteers with God’s Child quickly turned the Santa Madre Homeless Shelter, which Atkinson also founded (one of only two homeless shelters in the entire country), into an Urgent Care Emergency Disaster Shelter, and “minutes later ambulances and trucks filled with screaming, terrified, ash-covered survivors began to arrive.” 

 

Serving dinner at that homeless shelter was on the schedule but got cancelled when I visited God’s Child this past March for eight days. At that time, Fuego was merely burping out a little cloud now and again, and sometimes a stream of smoke rose up from its peak — a narrow, white column against the blue sky. 

 

Late in the week, a group of us volunteers rode in the back of a pickup truck out to one town, Alotenango, in the fertile valley between Antigua and Fuego. There we met a family that received a one-room house built the next week by some of those volunteers. Fuego loomed large as we drove on the four-lane, paved highway, and we got an even better view after turning into that town and up a steep, narrow dirt road, where the family resided in a makeshift hovel.

 

Alotenango was one of the towns covered in ash. I think of the little family we met, their neighbors, the women selling colorful produce along the town’s street, and the two wizened men patiently leading laden donkeys up the road (looking a lot like “Juan Valdez” in that long-ago coffee commercial). 

 

I don’t know if some of those children we saw were “burned, buried and died in their backyards ... mothers in their homes ... fathers were caught where they worked in their fields,” as Atkinson describes it. I picture God moving through the area, tenderly bringing to Himself the souls of young and old at the moment they died.

 

The survivors have it harder. Atkinson mentions two: a woman who lost her husband and five children who said, “People were screaming at everyone to run, but no one knew where to go,” and Kevin, a 15-year-old who ran with his baby brother, but then tripped as the pyroclastic cloud overtook them. “He searched with his hands but couldn’t find his little brother in the darkness and heat,” Atkinson says.

 

He adds that the agency continues to provide beds, meals, showers, medical care, trauma and psychological care, family reunification efforts and clothing to the survivors along with  face masks, medicine, medical supplies, clothing, solar chargers and food to other affected families and first responders.

 

Information can be found at http://www.GodsChild.org or call 701/255-7956 or 612/351-8020. Donations can be sent to: The God’s Child Project, P.O. Box 1573, Bismarck, ND 58502-1573.

 

Spiritual as well as financial support is needed, he says, after this Guatemalan version of Pompeii’s long-ago disaster.

 

Let’s be sure to pray for them.