Visiting Mel and Catherine Saucedo in San Juan Cosala

As I mentioned some weeks ago, I've started going sometimes to St. Andrew's, an Anglican church in Riberas del Pilar, between Ajijic and Chapala. Someone had introduced me to Catherine Saucedo my first time there, and when she learned that we lived in the same town, she invited me to come by sometime.

Well, then they were away for a while, and then the big waterspout storm was upon us. I wondered about their home, and almost a week after the storm, Kelly and I went by and had a nice visit with them. Mel is a Bishop in the Anglican church and he and Catherine met many years ago when he came to the United States for seminary. He's been instrumental in the development of St. Andrew's -- here's a page about the history of St. Andrew's which mentions him several times.

We talked about ways the church community can help the people of San Juan Cosala, the solar hot water system they've had installed in their home after having had one 40 years ago in Guadalajara, and various other topics. Their home had not been damaged, though there had been mud in the streets.

It was a real pleasure to get to know them better! I've met some other interesting people lately too. San Juan Cosala is taking on a richer texture of relationships for me as this happens.

A Wedding and a Birthday

Recently a young couple we know had a quiet civil wedding before going off to work on a large ranch in another state, where the groom has been working for some five years. They hope to come back around the New Year and have enough money by then for a bigger church wedding. She is from our neighborhood in San Juan Cosala and he is from a nearby town, El Chante.

The event took place in the bride's family's living room. Two women from the local government sat down at the table and had the bride and groom state a few things, like that the papers which had been prepared beforehand were correct. Then several copies of the papers were signed and thumb-printed by bride, groom, and family members of each. Here the two women from the government are leading the round of applause after declaring them married.

Then the officials left, and food and drink were brought out. It was still a pretty low-key event, since evidently the church one is the time for big partying!


The birthday was mine. I didn't want to do a big party, so Kelly and I ended up inviting a few friends over for dinner. We'd invited various nationalities but it turned out that the five friends who came were all Americans, all in our 60s or rapidly approaching that landmark, and all people who had lived in California at one time or another. Maybe we'd all even lived in the San Francisco Bay area , not sure about that. None of them knew each other beforehand (except the other married couple knew each other).

We were all rather alternative in our outlooks, and we had a lot of good conversation about that. We talked a lot about the restoration activities coming up for San Juan Cosala.

I told the others that at a birthday party I'd had a few years ago in Colorado, I had told the story of my life in terms of defining moments, and I invited everyone to do this, to whatever degree they wanted. Here, as the chicken cooked on the barbecue, we sat around the front porch table and listened to the tales. A great thing to do... try it!

San Juan Cosala Orphanage: Ninos y Jovenes

San Juan Cosala has an orphanage which has been in existence for many years. In the recent waterspout storm, it took on a lot of mud and the -- about 140 of them, boys and girls both -- were evacuated for a while to the nearby larger town of Jocotepec. I understand that they are now all back. Mexican children are sometimes in orphanages even when one or both parents are alive, if the family is desperately poor or other circumstances mean that they can't provide the basics for the kids.

There was already foreign involvement in this place, typically just called "the orphanage," and there may well be more as a result of more of us learning about it from the recent events. This would be a very good outcome, as things are minimal there.

We live a few blocks from it, and Kelly took the picture above a couple of days after the storm. No damage shows, but the side towards the mountains was very muddy.

Concerned foreigners have started a website about the orphanage, with information and various ways (including PayPal) that you can donate. It's a great cause.

The orphanage was started by a much-loved priest here in San Juan Cosala, Father Beto or Father Macias, and he is still very much involved, along with other staff.

Visit the website: http://ninosjovenes.dojiggy.com/

Doing Errands in Ajijic, as Life Gets Back to Normal

Yesterday was the first time I'd left San Juan Cosala since the big storm last week. Kelly had gone out once but I'd been busy that day. So today I thought I'd write a sort of "day in the life of" entry. It was a very nice day, mostly sunny.

Most of the roads in San Juan Cosala that we drive on still have dry or drying mud on them, or alongside. There's no problem driving, though. About noon, we drove along the highway east of San Juan Cosala and the line of restaurants along the shore called the Piedra Barrenada, places very popular with Guadalajarans on the weekends. As we continued east toward Ajijic, we noticed huge piles of dirt and rocks that had come from the excavations and been dumped on the lake side of the highway. I was interested to notice that they were not just in our municipalid (kind of like a county) of Jocotepec but also in the neighboring one, Chapala.

Traffic in Ajijic was slowed to a crawl, not unusual along the carretera in Ajijic, but it will be even worse when the snowbirds arrive in another couple of months! We continued through the center of town, along the tree-shaded boulevard as we passed through La Floresta, and made a quick stop at our favorite ATM. We went on past one of the most popular grocery stores for foreigners, Superlake, and on to the area known as Riberas del Pilar. There our destination was the Animal Shelter, where we often buy our pet food as all profits go to this worthy cause. They were out of the dog food we prefer (Diamond for large breeds) but that was okay, we were shopping for it before we really needed it. It might come in on Monday, they said. They did have my favorite clumping cat litter, so I got a couple of month's worth. Things being in or out of stock is a rather common occurrence in shopping for imported or speciality items, at all the stores here. Just a part of life.

We returned to Ajijic on the highway, and parked near several places we were going. We ordered lunch and I went to pay our internet bill at Lagunanet and get more minutes put on our Mexican cellphone before the food came.

We got to chatting with our waiter, whose English wasn't yet fluent but was pretty good. He said he finds English difficult and wondered (jokingly, I hope) if Chinese would be easier. We asked him friendly questions about his life, in English, and soon learned that he is 27 and has a passion for photography -- not digital as much as old black and white darkroom work. He is from Mexico City and has been here less than a year. He misses it but he does like seeing the stars and the mountains, which he didn't see there. When our food came, he politely withdrew but I was so much enjoying the interaction that I asked him some more questions. He was a very sweet guy, and chatting with him was one of more interesting bits of the trip. When he learned that Kelly had done a lot of black and white work years ago, he asked if Kelly would look at some of his work sometime. Kelly said sure and gave him his card.

While Kelly went to the hardware store, I stopped in at a well-stocked farmacia for dental floss, Q tips, and lip gloss. I didn't know all the words for these things but the clerk had no trouble understanding my descriptions and pantomime. Then I popped into a second-hand clothing store which has a lot of stuff from foreigners, but nothing spoke to me. I skipped the bookstore with its selection of books in English -- travel guides, books on learning Spanish, books about Mexico, some novels etc.

Noticing that my favorite beggar wasn't there, I wondered if she was over at Superlake. I hoped her stomach trouble wasn't any worse. I passed the other beggar I know, a friendly blind man who speaks English. There aren't that many beggars around here, and the usual ones don't have the desperate and whiny attitude that I've seen in Guadalajara and in cities all over the 3rd world. I suspect they have learned that you can catch more flies with honey.

I did our grocery shopping for the week at El Torito, right there with the other stores. It is another grocery store that caters to foreigners though it has fewer imports than Superlake. Since the weekly tianguis (market) hadn't happened in San Juan Cosala on Tuesday, we were about out of produce so I stocked up. A few things, such as Washington state apples, come from the US, but mostly it's Mexican. I also got meat and other odds and ends.

Kelly joined me, and when done we drove the car over to Prasad, a small shop on the other side of the carretera where we get our vitamins. This actually took some doing as it was about 2 PM, one of the times the highway is most crowded with Mexicans going home for lunch. There isn't a traffic light there. Eventually we got across and I bought some American and some Mexican brands of nutritional supplements from Gil, the Brazilian owner and a very friendly fellow. The imported things do cost more here in Mexico, as a general rule.

We had thought of going to Barbara's Bazaar, an interesting secondhand store, but they were already closed for their Mexican-style lunch break from 2 to 4. So we decided to head on home, about a 15 or 20 minute trip from Ajijic.

Back on the carretera in San Juan Cosala, we had to wait till we could pass a pickup truck stopped in our lane of the highway, with a large crowd of people around it. Packets of rice, beans, and other things were being given out.

Home, our Rottweiler puppy went wild with joy. We were pretty glad to be back ourselves.

An Old Timer Reflects on Waterspouts near San Juan Cosala

When this email by Gloria Mathai, who has lived in the Lake Chapala area since 1970, was forwarded to me by a friend, I wrote and got her permission to post it here on my blog. Gloria has seen a lot!

In my time here, there have been four serious trombas (waterspouts) in El Limon/San Juan Cosalá. The alluvial earth, when it's saturated, is unstable. That area was studied by ecologists in the 70's and deemed unsafe for building but, because of the gorgeous view, people acquired permits to build.

One week after one tromba hit high on the mountain in SJC,, my husband and I walked up the crusted river of mud. Looking for the path of least resistance, the river looked like a huge toboggan slide, up one side, down the other, carrying big trees by the roots. Rocks, the size of Volkswagons, were washed down and blocked the access road. Our friends couldn't leave their house for 4 days. They had a meter of mud throughout the house and the swimming pool filled. The huge vertical scar remained up the mountain for years.

In Mescala, east of Chapala, there was a killer (people drowned in their beds) that struck in the night and washed out the access road. People in Ajijic and Chapala sent canned foods and blankets in by boat.

In 1982 a small tromba hit our house in San Pedro Tesistan after taking off roofs of houses by the lake. It came up our boundry line breaking huge branches, sounding like a train, opened up the corner of our 2nd story studio and deposited chayote vines from the farm next door inside. We couldn't help but laugh when we saw it, the greenery hanging down prettily. Over 200 tejas (ceramic tiles) which capped our adobe garden wall just completely disappeared. We were fortunate to have such minimal damage.

National Geographic did a study of climates some years ago and declared ours are to be the 2nd best in the world! The 1st? Kenya, Africa. I feel I am fortunate to have lived here happily since 1970.

My Own Sense of Community Grows from the San Juan Cosala Disaster

When Kelly and I bought our house here in San Juan Cosala, by Lake Chapala, a year and a half ago, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to be in Mexico. We had been living for close to ten years in an unusual small town in Colorado -- Crestone -- and I loved being so deeply a part of the community there. I'm such a people person, once I turn off my computer anyway!

We've talked and talked about what to do... bi-locational lifestyle? Not so hot if you want to live a reasonably tranquil and ecological lifestyle, let alone all the logistics involved in living with dogs and cats and in loving to garden. Add a Rottweiler puppy to the mix, as we did recently, and two homes are suddenly much more problematic.

So we decided a while back not to decide anything till we had lived here for at least two years. We still own land in Crestone, we get back there regularly, and we stay in touch. But when we got back here in July from a long trip to the US, I realized that if I was going to give the Lake Chapala area a fair trial, I needed to work at connecting more here.

So I've been doing that, making new friends amongst both foreigners and Mexicans. There's a great monthly brunch gathering of mostly foreign women who live along the west end of Lake Chapala, at a restaurant or coffee house, where we have a chance to share. I'm online with other friends, and get to potlucks sometimes.

When the big storm hit San Juan Cosala the other day, with all the damage I've been blogging about, our phone started buzzing. Lupita, who had lived in our house when we were away, wanted to check and be sure we were okay. Sally, who will be living above us when her family's new house is finished, called to touch base. Linda, a close friend in another Lakeside town, checked on us. Maria from El Limon called. I called my neighbor Rosie, my friend Paula who could also give me news of Brenda, Brian and Anne Marie, and others.

One day recently, as we were walking around San Juan Cosala, we ran into several of the above. When we stopped by the Cultural Center on the Plaza, there were Leticia and Verena, Mexican and German respectively, involved with the aid efforts going on:

It's beginning to feel more like home to me, disaster and all.

Keeping up with San Juan Cosala: What I Plan for This Blog

It's been a week now since the waterspout hit San Juan Cosala and filled many parts of the town with mud, rocks, and other debris. There was a tremendous outpouring of help at first, but it's inevitable that it will taper off.

Many of us foreigners who live here by Lake Chapala, whether in the town itself as my husband and I do, or in other Lakeside towns such as Ajijic, Chapala, and Jocotepec, have decided that our help will be ongoing, in various ways. Needs assessment has been going on quietly behind the scenes. We are lucky to have people here who have been involved in disaster relief in many parts of the world.

Kelly and I have talked about our own plans. I intend to continue blogging a lot about the ongoing projects, to interview different people, and to keep reporting on the parts of the situation that I can get access to. Kelly's role as photographer will continue too.

We've been able to help some people, both Mexicans and not, who live far away, to get in touch with people they care about or at least to get word back to them that those folks are okay. This has been very gratifying.

Now, for some video today. Here's a link to a Youtube video showing some of the San Juan Cosala damage. It's very nicely done.

Conversation with Roberto Villa Lobos about San Juan Cosala and Waterspouts

Kelly and I got lucky when we hired Roberto Villa-Lobos last year. He's one of the most civic-minded people I know, and a great resource for us in learning about San Juan Cosala. He's worked for many years at the large balneario (hot springs) here in town, and his tasks include overseeing the crew caring for the pools.

He moonlights at our place, caring for our little pool, which as you can see above, took in some mud during the big storm. (He's got it almost fixed now.) Anyway, when he came by the first time after the storm, I had lots of questions for him. We speak in Spanish and he's quite good at understanding our fractured grammar. First off, I wondered about his experience because he normally arrives at work around 6 a.m.

"If I had been 10 minutes late, I don't think we would be having this conversation," he told me. "I could have been in the rockslide." He drives his truck along the highway, past the steep uphill road that is the main entrance to the Raquet Club, before turning downhill to go to work. He had already arrived, and so he was one of the relatively few people wide awake and out of doors when the storm hit just before dawn last Wednesday.

He was at the hot springs, when the rain became extremely heavy and loud. Then he heard a rumbling sound and saw the rockslide coming down that steep road from the Raquet Club. A lot of mud soon arrived at the balneario and went into some of the pools, which they were just about done cleaning up when I talked with him on Saturday.

"One of the Guadalajara weathermen on TV doubted that it was a waterspout and thought it was just from an accumulation of so much rain this year," I said to Roberto.

"I believe it was a tromba (waterspout)," he said. "It behaved like one, with that immense amount of water. And it was like the other two that I have been in, here in San Juan Cosala." The first one I think was in 1981 or so, and the second was eight or ten years ago. They were also early in the morning, and I think also in September."

He pointed up into the mountains behind us and showed me a couple of places where there were new slashes in the landscape that hadn't been there before. He thought the main hit from the waterspout onto the mountains had been perhaps half way up the mountains, which rise something under 4000 feet above us. That had given the rocks, trees, mud, and other debris roaring down the mountain in the water plenty of opportunity to pick up speed and carve out some new bare spots. The most dramatic new gash was long and vertical. Here is one that Kelly got a picture of:

This is a closeup, so you can't really see the context overall.

Roberto and I chatted more. He remembered one tromba had hit the town of Mezcala, east of Chapala, when he was a child some 35 years ago. (He's 45 now.) He recalled the adults in his family talking about it and saying that much of the town had been destroyed and many people had died.

"Gracias a Dios," he said, "that didn't happen here, even though this is the worst one we've had." He thinks it is dangerous up there in the mountains because of all the water and the instability.

I asked about his truck. He had had time, after the first rockslide, to move it from where it was parked in a low area directly in front of the balneario to further down the street on La Paz. That saved him from having to deal with water in its engine.

"What about Ajijic or Chapala?" I asked. He either said they don't have waterspouts or that they are rarer, I'm not sure which, because the mountains are not as close to the lake there. I asked him about the south side of the lake, and he said the moutains rise so gently that he had never heard of a tromba over there.

A Prayer for San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club after the Storm

Almighty God, You who know all things,

May those who lost their homes last Wednesday be able to have new homes, and may those whose homes were damaged receive what they need for repairs. May everyone who has been lacking in the basics of life receive the food, water, and other essentials that they need.

May those of us who were frightened receive a deeper sense of Your presence and comfort.

May those of us who have been providing assistance be given further strength to continue working as the story becomes old news. May all in government, all in San Juan Cosala, all in nearby communities, and all who live far away be guided to assist in whatever ways are appropriate to their abilities and situations.

Thank you that there is no loss of life yet known, and thank you that those with injuries are receiving care. Thank you that the deluge happened at a time of day when few were on the streets. Thank you for the loving assistance that has come and will continue to come to San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club.

May everyone who has been connected with this event learn from it whatever lessons are appropriate for them. Help us to remember that distinctions such as rich/poor, male/female, Mexican/foreign are small beside the fact of our essential Oneness and connectedness.

Understanding that the powerful forces of nature which we saw this week are a part of the spiritual laws by which all operates, we offer our prayers for the further safety of our community as the rainy season continues.

For those of us who are of the Christian faith, we ask this in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ and in the name of our beloved Virgin of Guadalupe. For those of us other faiths, or of no particular faith, we ask this in ways that are appropriate to us.

And may we go about our days with a sense of joy in Your presence. Amen.

You are welcome to copy this prayer, link to it, modify it, share it with others in any way you wish.

Photo and Blog Sources for San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club after the Flooding

Here are all the links to blogs and groups of photos that I know of. If you find more, please add the link in a comment to this post. Thanks!

My husband Kelly has a lot of photos at flickr. Here is a link to all his waterspout-related pictures, both San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club:
http://flickr.com/photos/kellyhart/sets/72157602013524791/

Another man, Steve Miller, took a lot of photos of the Raquet Club too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shmiller/sets/72157601993828026/

Here are photos from a woman who lives in San Juan Cosala, in a part of town that got a lot of mud:
http://community.webshots.com/album/560684212

And thanks to reader Viki for adding these blogs in a comment. I've moved them up here, where they will be easier to see, and added some description.

http://www.mexico-insights.com/judysblog/blog.htm
Judy King is one of the most reliable sources of information on all aspects of life in the Lake Chapala region. From her monthly online magazine about the region to her weekly newcomer's seminars to her column in the Lake Chapala Review, and no doubt other things, she really has her finger on the pulse here. While I'm covering what we see and learn about here, she is a major source for a broader picture.

http://mainetomexico.blogspot.com/
Bill and Pixie Frayer live in Ajijic and have been reporting too.

http://www.chapalaforum.com/phpBB/
A place that people share news and rumors-labeled-as-news (see my rant about rumors in a previous post; this forum is probably no worse than other groups.) It was one of the first places I turned after the floods.

So What Really Happened in San Juan Cosala? A Rant about Rumors

Our town of San Juan Cosala has been digging out from the mud and rocks that came down from the mountains on Wednesday, September 12, before dawn. San Juan Cosala is a town of maybe 5000 people, on the north shore of Lake Chapala, between the larger towns of Ajijic and Jocotepec. This whole region is developing as a Mecca for foreigners, with one development after another going in, both on the lake side and above the sole highway (carretera) which runs along the north shore.

We live in San Juan Cosala itself, above the carretera. Fortunately, our house is located between two watersheds that come down from the mountains above, so when arroyos filled with rocks, large and small parts of trees, mud and other debris, it happened near us but did not affect our home. We've spent a good bit of our time since then taking photos, uploading them here and at flickr, and answering some email queries from Mexicans, Americans, and Canadians eager for news of what's really happening here and whether their homes are okay. We've also gotten to know more of our neighbors, from being out and about so much.

We have known what we've seen: there's been a huge muddy mess in places while most homes have been completely unaffected. The highway has been closed to buses and private cars, though people are now getting through to a degree. Generally it has not seemed as agonizingly tragic as the rumors and news reports might make you believe. Yes, the grandparents of our friend Gerardo have lost their home as have many others, yes, there have been quite a few people hurt, yes, hardships will continue after the outside world stops paying any attention (and I'm not sure how much attention it did pay!)

We have been keenly aware that we did not have the whole picture by any means. But man oh man the rumors I've heard or read online. Right off the bat, we heard 40 people had been killed. Well, I have been asking and asking and so far nobody I've spoken with, Mexican or American, has personally known anyone who has been killed because of this. There may be some, but when that rumor was going around -- I saw it several places online -- I doubt anything had been verified. Injuries, yes, people have been hurt. If nobody died, it could count as a miracle considering the awesome forces of nature in play here.

That first morning, when we were out on the muddy highway, we ran across some other foreigners who had driven as close as they could get to San Juan Cosala, trying to go see the Raquet Club which they had heard was "80% destroyed." Not so. I don't know what the final percentage will be over there, but Kelly spent hours there yesterday and he felt that nothing like 80% of the houses were badly damaged.

Another persistent rumor has been that the residents of the Raquet Club had been ordered to evacuate. Well, it may be true that some were, as I did see firemen and other workers going around our neighbor, checking on the homes. But this was being done on a house-by-house basis where we are. I have seen nothing online to verify this rumor about the Raquet Club and I have personally spoken with several residents there whose homes are fine and who have had no such order.

Okay, there will always be rumors, but let me beg you to think for at least ONE FULL MINUTE before posting something online, or forwarding it, if you doubt its truth to any degree. Please remember that people far away will be following the online forums and blogs especially, perhaps desperately trying to find out if their families or homes are okay. Rumors of deaths are particularly pernicious.

By the same token, DON'T BELIEVE everything you read... including my stuff!

I understand that people's imaginations run away with them, and also that there is something in people that can make us scatterbrained in a disaster. But still, it's my blog so I can rant!

By the way, a good source for blog reading is Google's blogsearch. But again.. I just went there to get the url and so I searched San Juan Cosala. I read in one blog that everyone who lives in this area lives on a hill (not true) and that this storm was hurricane-related, also not the case to the best of my knowledge, and I had been to http://www.weatherunderground.com/tropical/ the night before.

Still and all, I love the blogosphere and love the ability we now have to be in touch with each other so quickly and easily. Let's use it with as much wisdom as we can muster!

More Digging Out Photos from San Juan Cosala after the Waterspout

These photos were taken by my husband Kelly yesterday, September 13, as San Juan Cosala (by Lake Chapala) dug out from the mud and mess in the aftermath of the waterspout the day before, and we walked around our town.

I doubt I'll forget the word for mud: lodo.


Below is Calle Cardenal, just below the plaza, heading toward the coffeeshop we like so much, Cafetto Saga, and Lake Chapala.
Heavy equipment working on the carretera, the one highway in and out of town:

You're never too young to help out:

And grownups were busy too:


Aid and medical workers had a number of booths set up around the plaza. In the background, supplies await distribution under the Ayuntamiento (City Hall) porch. In the lower left there is a glimpse of some attractive new artwork recently painted on the cement.

Storm's Aftermath at the Raquet Club, San Juan Cosala

This afternoon, my husband Kelly explored the Raquet Club, camera in hand. It seems that yesterday's massive storm with a waterspout (a small twister filled with water from Lake Chapala) brought massive amounts of rocks, tree, and mud downhill, doing damage en route.

He's going to put up quite a lot of the images -- he took over 100 -- on flickr, and after he does, I'll post a link here.

The Raquet Club is a hillside development, very steep in places, on the east of San Juan Cosala. It was created as a development many years ago, but a lot of the houses are quite new.

Kelly noticed quite a few houses that looked totally fine, some with minor damage, some with major damage, and some that appeared too damaged to fix. Kelly has done a lot of building and remodeling over the years, so he had a good eye for such things.

He talked with various people in his meanderings. The most amazing story was told to him by a woman whose house was in really bad shape, with her car pushed and thrown into her house right where her bed was. A friend had encouraged her to spend the night away, for reasons not related to the storm. After she encountered a scorpion in her house, she felt like she would get herself out of there and she had left. So she wasn't there when the storm came, and this may well have saved her life. Kelly said to her that the scorpion seemed like a sign to leave, and she agreed.

Here are a few of the photos he took in the Raquet Club. He walked in, up what is usually the main Raquet Club entrance. It's quite steep and you can see that it is covered with rocks. Above him, people are approaching the guard house.


This is taken from above the guard house, looking down; it's steeper than it looks. While this side of the street seems drivable, the median is piled high with rocks, and the other side of the road doesn't show.




Kelly said that the house below appeared to be fine, but they've got a lot of rocks to remove.

This downed tree had come from up higher, as had the large boulder on this side street. The other side of the house looked much worse.


The man on the left and another man were shoveling mud out of this place.

San Juan Cosala, One Day after the Waterspout: Digging Out, Drying Out

Kelly and I walked to the plaza in San Juan Cosala a couple of hours ago, to see how things were looking since the waterspout dumped huge amounts of water on the hills above the town, before dawn yesterday. He has gone on to the Raquet Club to take pictures there... many of the photos on this blog, and all from yesterday, were taken by him.

We noticed that everything is drying out in the warm sunshine. Yesterday I splashed around in mud over the tops of my walking shoes; today, my plastic sandals are barely dirty.

The carretera has a few private cars but mostly dump trucks full of mud, heavy equipment, and emergency personnel. No buses are running. It's not officially opened yet, and I have heard conflicting stories about whether it is even physically passable by the entrance to the Raquet Club. Letitia had come over from Ajijic very early this morning to work at AMSIF, the women's organization that she is very active in, located in the Cultural Center in Ajijic. Maybe she got through before the heavy equipment started up, as someone from here who tried to go TO Ajijic later in the morning said that he couldn't even turn around to go back home for half an hour because of all the mud and heavy equipment at the main entrance to the Raquet Club.

The Raquet Club, an older development of dozens of home owned mostly by foreigners but also by Mexicans, goes up into the hills very high (spectacular views of the lake) on the eastern side of San Juan Cosala. We've heard that many of the houses there were damaged, and friends from there whom we just saw at the plaza in San Juan Cosala confirmed that quite a few were. One figure I heard (note this is not fact, just someone's guesstimate) is that maybe half the houses sustained some damage, including exterior free-standing walls.

We did hear from people who live there that they were told it would be a week or two roughly until the streets are restored, and nobody seems to know how long till electricity or water come back. If you have been trying to phone someone in the Raquet Club and they only have phones which require electricity, you may not reach them even if they are there and fine.

The plaza is the control center for all the help that has been amassed. There are boxes by the city hall, and numerous canopied tables with labels as to what they are. Lots of workers. I didn't see many people there who needed help, but I was told that the church housed about 150 people in a building by its side and that a school had housed 120. Plus there were two shelters in Jocotepec last night, where people from here were taken.

People who should know told me just now that no deaths have been confirmed, but there have been various injuries.

On my walk home, a 12-year-old girl I know begged me to teach her English, I bought dry cat food in a grocery store, said hi to various people I know by sight, and got a royal welcome from our 8-month-old Rottweiler who's still uncertain whenever we leave her. Life is getting back to normal.

Kelly or I will add photos and any more news later today.

Post-Waterspot Thoughts in the Night from San Juan Cosala

It began raining gently as we prepared for bed last night. Then it picked up a bit,and there was a little distant thunder. Kelly was soon sound asleep, but not me. The rain, with always such a sweet and welcome sound, had become enemy as well as friend.

I lay awake for hours, thinking, thinking. Those beautiful steep green mountains behind us seem to move over our house in my imagination till they formed a steep cliff, almost a tidal wave, ready to engulf us and the whole town.

I am no stranger to post-traumatic stress and caught myself here. Okay, you're over-reacting, I said to myself, really our house is not in the path of the arroyos. That was abundantly clear when we were out and about.

I still had personal fears off and on (What if we had to evacuate? Couldn't get all the animals in the Jetta... etc.) but as the hours passed, my mind moved more and more to the big picture. How many people here were wet, cold, or far more frightened than I about their futures? What would come out of this for San Juan Cosala, a town we've come to love, with its many resilient and deeply caring people?

I thought of the many millions of people all over the world who have lived through disasters of all kinds, whether they became the kinds of victims you see on the news ever so briefly, or the ones like us who were just there but not seriously affected. I was briefly grateful this hadn't been an earthquake.

Certainly nature has ever been erratic but I couldn't help but mull over the many ways that we humans have changed the face and the climate of the earth. I thought ruefully of my neglected website, simplegreenliving.com, that hasn't quite become a top priority for me. Maybe that will change sometime soon. I thought about the 8,000 mile road trip that Kelly and I had taken. We'd felt bad about the effect on the environment, and after we got home here, I found a website -- driveneutral.com -- where I could choose the distance driven and make and model of car, and make a donation to offset our carbon emissions. I had been suprised that the cost had been less than the cost of one tank of gas. Not that I recommend this approach as a reason to drive a lot, but we had felt better after making that small donation.

Finally, after my mind rattled on and on, and the rain subsided, I turned to prayer. I have recently been reading several books about quantum physics and how it ties in with the power of our individual awareness. I'd become so stoked that I'd registered yet another website, exploringinnerworlds.com -- nothing there yet but it too is rising up my list!

So I prayed and prayed, giving thanks, asking for guidance, and holding the situation here in San Juan Cosala in the Light. That's a Quaker phrase I have always loved (I became a Quaker during the Vietnam war) and my new readings of quantum physics made the phrase even more powerful. Feeling the Light in and around all of us, I finally slept... not long before Kelly woke up and was awake for hours doing his own inner processing.

San Juan Cosala and the Big Storm, Continued

We went down to the main highway, or carretera, where this picture shows mud, large equipment, people and trucks. We went several blocks along there, getting our shoes wet and muddy, in my case well over my ankles due to a bad guess about the roadway. After that I stopped worrying and walked anywhere.



We chatted with a number of people, including a friend of ours. He said that his grandparents had lost their house. It was this one that we had just walked past on the carretera:



Water was still flowing through it, though not a lot by this time. I asked where they were, and he said they had gone to the plaza, where bedding, food, diapers, and other things were being distributed. I wanted to go down there but it would have been quite a muddy walk and we decided not to.

We've heard that a number of people were hurt, but nobody we spoke to knew of anyone who had died, though there may have been some. No way to know from here at this point.

I asked several local people if this had in fact been a waterspout, and the consensus was yes. There was one some ten years ago in this area, but nobody remembered any since then.

I have been very impressed with the government response. Quite early this morning, a helicopter landed in our neighborhood and I talked with the two officials, who were there to assess the situation. They were able to tell me that San Juan Cosala had borne the brunt of the storm, though they hadn't yet been to Jocotepec to our west, where it was still raining. I heard the helicopter take off over an hour later, and in fact there have been helicopters around all day.

Here, a truck of firemen is following an ambulance which had come out from the city of Guadalajara to help. There are many, many firemen and other officials, as well as many local people, helping out. The general atmosphere is friendly. We've chatted with a lot of people in the streets.



Kelly and I feel very grateful that we suffered no damage. The night before this, we'd had a leak directly over my side of the bed, and I'd put a raincoat and towel over my spot and slept on the sofa until the rainstorm passed. Yesterday Kelly had been able to find and replace a broken tile that was the cause of the leak. Not a drop came through there this morning.

Well, that's about all I know at this point.

Water Spout Said to Hit San Juan Cosala, Lots of Damage

This morning around 5:30 it got to raining extra hard for a while. I was semi-awake, listening to the sound of the rain on our roof. It's a sound we've heard a lot for weeks now, in this unusually wet rainy season. I dozed off again. It was raining more lightly when we got up, and Kelly and I commented to each other on the roaring sound we heard, like a river nearby. We decided we'd go out with cameras a bit later. The ground was already saturated before this.

Then a young man we know came by to borrow our wheelbarrow and a shovel. He said a number of houses a little further west had been badly damaged and he'd be over there helping. (We live above the highway in San Juan Cosala, on the western side of the town.)

Our house and yard are just fine, other than a couple of minor leaks and some mud in our overflowing swimming pool. But once we started walking around, we realized that the river-like roar we had heard was indeed a river, albeit a temporary one, running down a street near us. People told us it had been a couple of feet deep.

Here, men help to dig out a truck as a its owner watches. (I'm behind her.)



Further down this street (Calle Vicente Guerrero Norte), there's an arroyo that comes into the street, normally quite a lot lower than the street. It had over two meters of debris completely blocking the street. The people walking down the street were in several inches of water.



The water coming down the street had met this debris from the arroyo and backed up to form a temporary lake on the street, which then flooded some homes up to about a foot. Here, shoes are drying out on a car:


We walked uphill to go see a house which had had its foundations were dug out from underneath it by the river of water coming down. We weren't permitted to get close enough to get any photos, but I did ask if the people were okay and was told yes.

So then we walked around more or less directly below that house to a new development, Yesterday, you would have seen attractively cobbled streets with sidewalks:



There's a tiny white speck in the hills to the right of the lampost. That's a waterfall that isn't usually there.

We had power early in the morning, lost it for a few hours, and then regained it. From talking with people on the street and with a couple of friends on the phone, I learned that there was heavy rain and flooding all along the north shore of Lake Chapala, but San Juan Cosala evidently had the worst of it.

Water Spout?

There is a phenomenon--relatively rare, I believe--where a waterspout of water from Lake Chapala comes over to the mountains and dumps its load... a LOT of water in a short time. It seems that this was the case between 5 and 6 this morning. The Raquet Club, which is east of us and generally higher up, evidently got quite a hit, but I don't know how many houses were affected. Some of the waterspout water may have also been what hit our area and further west.

I want to get this post up in case the power goes out again, will continue with more in another post shortly.