It wasn’t even raining when the ground gave way. Two days before the Guardian’s visit, a landslide had gobbled up another chunk of the neighbor’s coffee crops just 50 meters or so away. Of course we want to leave, but we’re poor and don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Mirna Martínez, 19.īarefoot children, skinny dogs and noisy chickens mill about the partially collapsed structure, which is held together by wooden beams and crumbling concrete blocks. The house could crumble at any moment or a rock could fall on us while we’re asleep. But there isn’t room for everyone, and so her four youngest siblings are back living in the derelict house.
Photograph: Daniele Volpe/The GuardianĪlmost a year later, Martinez and some of her extended family are living in temporary rickety houses built from corrugated metal sheets and wood, far from the river. Yesenia Martinez in her provisional house. The season’s bean crops were ruined, the soil too sodden for replanting. It took almost a week for neighbours to rescue Martinez and her family using ropes, sticks and planks of wood to cross the flooded river. We didn’t lose any lives, thank god – but we lost everything else,” said Martinez, 38, wiping away tears. “We tried to fill the cracks with stones and plastic sheets, but the earth just gave way. Children screamed as cracks opened in the floor and rain poured infrom all sides. It was around 9pm on a November evening when the concrete walls in Martinez’s own home started to collapse. What a disaster,” said Yesenia Martínez, the village mayor. “We always worried about not enough water, and then this abundance came.
After years without enough rain, two powerful hurricanes, Eta and Iota, struck within a fortnight of each other, causing flash floods and landslides that left dozens of people trapped in partially collapsed houses. In this parched region, communities rely on rainfall to feed their families, and in 2019 worked together to build water reservoirs high in the mountains in order to better cope with increasingly frequent droughts and unpredictable rains which caused their maize and bean crops to fail.īut the following year brought the opposite problem.
F or the Indigenous Maya Ch’orti’ people of La Unión in eastern Guatemala, the daily struggle for water involves catching every drop of rain that drips from sloping metal roofs and walking long distances to fill plastic containers from overused streams.
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