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August 1986 Newsletter
COLOMBIAN CHRISTIAN MISSION
Dale and Jeanie Meade
In the jungle and prairie of Southeastern Colombia
Volume 14, Issue 8 August, 1986
(PHOTO)
A tent city, nearly a year later and still no home.
ARMERO: EIGHT MONTHS LATER
This past week, I had the melancholy experience of visiting Armero. I was teaching at KCC when the volcano destroyed what was a thriving city of nearly 40,000 people. We watched in horror, as you did, the scenes of death and destruction. But time passed, as did the terrible memories of what we watched on the TV the 13th of November, 1985.
Exactly eight months to the day after the tragedy, I was walking across that great seas of ash and dried mud that was once Armero. The stench of rotting flesh and the spectacle of bloated bodies were gone. But the signs of a terrible destruction were everywhere. There were buses, cars, and farm machinery crumpled up and cast aside as though they had been children's toys. Most of the houses were totally destroyed. The foundations of six story buildings and a couple of bridge abutments were all that remained in the worst hit area. I was amazed to see the thick reinforcing rods stripped clean of their concrete and bent in the direction of the mud flow, as if they had been mere blades of grass blown in the wind.
Towards the edge of the mud flow, the destruction was less complete but no less dramatic. We walked by the remains of houses. Only a wall or two of each house remained standing. Strewn out in the course of the raging torrent of mud was the terrible evidence of what had happened. There lay a cutting board from one devastated kitchen. It was still heavily grooved from a mother's knife. Perhaps the last cut marks had been made as she had prepared supper for her family only minutes before the avalanche of mud hit the city. A few steps further along there lay an infant's shoe, a diaper bad, and the pot from a small child's potty chair. In the lee of a shattered house there was a bleached skull, the last earthly remains of one of it's inhabitants. It was nearly more than I could handle as I thought back to the time eight months ago when that person was walking and talking and making plans for the future. Surely they did not plan on losing their life so soon or in such a dramatic and devastating fashion. Finally the most depressing thought weighed down upon me. Many, in fact most, of those people had not thought about, nor had they prepared for eternity. The gospel had only lightly touched this area. The Bible stories of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah suddenly became far more vivid. And I sensed a new urgency as I remembered the Great Commission. We had not gone to Armero soon enough.
But let me end on a more pleasant note. I was in Armero not to see the ruins of this modern day Pompey; I was there to help distribute some of the funds sent down by American Christians. Some had come through IDES (International Disaster Emergency Service), while the rest had been sent down by our supporting churches. Soon I was talking about a new beginning with the families that still live in the tent cities. Instead of simply passing money, we were there to help them build a new life. For a lady dentist, we bought a new drill and some lab equipment. But what we really purchased was a new beginning for her children. (Her husband had been swept away on the terrible night.) We checked out other plans for viability and made arrangements to purchase farm equipment, build small houses, and start a salvage business. We were passing out hope, sent by you, through IDES and directly to us. May God richly bless you for your generosity.
LIVING IN COLOMBIA
Some things happen down here in Colombia that don't happen up in the States. I will tell you about one of them. One night my mom heard a noise. It sounded like someone rubbing their hands on tile. So she got up and looked. She turned on all the lights and looked out the window. She didn't see anything so she went back to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, I looked out the window and saw that part of our papaya was missing. (Editor's note: A papaya is a melon-like fruit that grown on a tall spindly tree.) I told my mom. She came out and looked. She said it could have been a monkey. Later on in the day we told the neighbor down below. She thought that it was a monkey too. So that night we stayed up to see what it was.
We stayed up till 10:00 p.m. waiting. But finally I went to bed. My mom stayed up watching. Then in the morning when I woke up and my mom told me she saw what it was. She said it was a bat. She said she tried to take a picture.
So that morning my dad came home from a trip and we showed him what the bats did to our papaya. So that night Wendy and I went to bed. Not long after that my mom woke us up to see the bats eating the papaya. Some things I see here, I would only read about in the States!