Marta's Story

The Garbage Dump in Guatemala City is known as an awful place. For one thing, there’s garbage everywhere.

Every morning before 5, hundreds of yellow trucks soldier out in all directions, and when they come back they’re full of everything nobody wants. The guys riding on the trucks sort through it before they throw it in; the guys riding in the trucks sort through it on the way; the people working down in the dump sort through it when it’s dropped off; then a bulldozer flattens it out to make room for the next truck. Anything of value is sold to recyclers or kept for personal use. So of course there’s trash everywhere - it’s raw material for the neighborhood industry.

In the neighborhoods surrounding the landfill, almost every family has at least one member working in or around it. It’s hard work, and it’s dirty, but it pays if you hustle. Not enough to buy property in a nicer part of town, but sometimes enough to get your kids through school.

The trash isn’t just in the dump. It spills onto sidewalks, gathers inside doorways, and it’s in the air. It’s underneath everything, too. The trucks unload into a ravine, and every so often, when the piles are high enough, people build shelters and start living there. Neighbors get to know each other. Huts become houses and alleys become streets. But when you dig footers to pour foundations, your shovel cuts through plastic bags by the hundred, and the pile you’ve pulled up looks like what an archeologist would study if she wanted to know what the world was like a thousand days ago.

The people who live in these neighborhoods know it’s a curiosity. They know it doesn’t look great, that opportunities are scarce, and that it’s not a safe place for them, for their kids, or for anyone. But they also know that as much as their
community is degraded by poverty and crime, it’s also home to kind, neighborly, hardworking and generous people, doing the best they can in hard circumstances.

There are a number of great organizations working in the area, helping provide education, nutrition, spiritual and psychological help. One neighborhood church set up a medical clinic to serve families around the landfill, and Vine has been working with Dr Layla Chanquin and her team for more than ten years. I’ve never been there when I didn’t see Dr Layla managing two or three jobs at once: attending patients, hosting visitors, managing the staff. Dr Bruce Allsop and I visited recently and we met a family who had used medicine provided by Vine.

The streets aren’t named, much less mapped, so Bruce and I would have been hopelessly lost without our guides, neighbors who work for the clinic. They told us as we walked that two bodies had been found murdered that morning, a few streets over. Their daily work wouldn’t stop, though, so they kindly led us to Marta’s house. 

It wasn’t a new house, meaning it wasn’t a shack built out of sticks and a tarp. But it also wasn’t concrete block, so they hadn’t managed to make the big improvements. It was small and dark. The stove, the bed, and the table were all in the same room, and the bed held the laundry, two girls, and a cat. Schools are still not open for in-person learning, so the girls were penciling through math worksheets while the cat looked for hand to pet it.

I asked Marta about her family, and how they came to need medicine. (Marta said she wanted you to hear this story. I’ve changed some names).

“My mother has a food cart that she rolls out to the corner at night, to sell people dinner. My brother, my daughter, and my son were helping her set up one afternoon, and some guys showed up and started shooting. They killed the guy they were after but they shot a lot of other people too. My mom died right there. My brother died. My daughter was shot but she did OK. My son was shot and it was bad. When they carried him to the ambulance they didn’t know if he was going to make it, he was bleeding so bad. They saved his life, but when they released him from the ER, his leg was a mess and it was a lot to take care of. They said we had to give him antibiotics or he would become infected.” Whatever the risk of infection would be in other neighborhoods, it was worse here, where the contents of three million trash cans were thrown every day. 

She looked over my shoulder and said “come in and let them see it.” I turned around and Joel, her son, maybe eleven years old, poked his head out from the other room. He didn’t want to talk, and he definitely didn’t like the look of the camera we’d brought with us. 

He said he didn’t want to be in any photos, and I promised he wouldn’t. When I put the camera away he came in, put his right foot on the table, and pulled up his pant leg. Most of his calf was gone, and what was left was scarred. “It took a long time. The guy at the hospital wrote us a prescription, but how could we fill it? My mother and brother had died, and my daughter was hurt” - María José, 16, raised her arm to show where a bullet had gone through. “But Doctor Layla took care of us. She gave us the antibiotics. And other things too. He never got infected, and he healed up. He’s doing great.” 

We told Marta we were sorry about her mother and her brother, and we were so glad her kids were doing well. We told her there were people she’d never met who worked to get her that medicine, and did she mind if we got a photo for them? Without Joel of course. She said she’d love for you to see her and her girls, and would we please pass on to you her gratitude for the medicine. So: thank you, from a woman who lost people she loves, and could have lost more. But she didn’t. You, Dr Layla, her staff, and everyone who supports Vine played a part. Thank you!

The Vine story goes like this: there’s a street no name, because it was built by on top of a landfill, by hand, by the people who live there. There’s a family there who had a medical emergency, and they needed help. A local doctor gives them so much - her care, her skill, and a safe place. But a key part of surviving the emergency was using medicine that was out of reach. They had a prescription they couldn’t fill, and you filled it for them. It happens all over Guatemala. In the city, in the woods, to all kinds of families and all kinds of clinics. There’s a person with a medical need, there’s a professional willing to administer it, and you send the medicine. It only works with your help.

One last thing that may be worth noting. Every organization who receives medicine from Vine is required to keep a current physician’s license on file with us, along with current legal documents that define and formalize their mission. We know, in other words, all of the professionals who are administering the medicine we send, and we know which communities they’re serving. We just have to know that they’re doing good work, we don’t distinguish based on why they’re doing it. But over these thirty years together, it’s clear that the vast majority of our partners are doing it because they want to be a tangible expression of Christ’s love to people around them. That’s why we at Vine do it, too, and we’re grateful to do it together with you.        

- Brady Greene 

Music To Go

Ronal has music now. 

That’s important. He’s 15, and when a guy like Ronal has work to do, it’s good to have some music in the air. 

The music didn’t come from Vine, at least not directly. But you are responsible for what’s carrying the music around. Without Ronal’s PET cart, his construction projects would be quiet, solitary, and much less cheery.  

When I met him he was home alone, digging post holes outside his house. He was sitting down, ramming the sharp end of a 6-foot piece of rebar with into the dirt in front of him. When the hole was deep enough, he would lift a 4x4 into the hole, and he or maybe someone else would nail old roofing sheets onto it, making a kind of fence. Then  he would start the next hole. 

I wasn’t going to ask why he was on the ground, but it was the first thing he brought up, as if the whole thing was a kind of surprise. 

“I could walk around fine until I started gaining weight. Then I had to crawl. So…” and he smiled. 

A few minutes later a man called Don Lalo took me aside and said he’d watched it all happen, and that Ronal had explained it like a teenage boy probably would, which is to say not very clearly. 

Ronal, Don Lalo told me, was a healthy baby born into a tough situation. He was not taken to be vaccinated, and an early sickness left him with something that looks a lot like Post-Polio Syndrome. 

“He got around OK when he was little,” Lalo said. “Dragged that one leg but it didn’t slow him down a whole lot. I’d lift him and his brother up into the cab and they’d make the rounds with me. They’re both good workers. I’m training his brother to be a driver.”

Dr Bruce, Brady, Ronal, and Don Lalo

Most of our partners are doctors, 

nurses, disability specialists, or they’re working in some direct way to provide health care to people who have no other way to get it. Lalo does not fit the profile. He drives a truck. He’s got the cowboy hat, the big belt buckle, the boots, and the pressed oxford shirt to look the part of a man who sees a lot more places than just this neighborhood of shacks scattered outside of town. Lalo is not on our list of partners, and we we would never have gone looking for him. But he passes by Ronal’s neighborhood every week, and when he thought the boy needed help, Lalo found us. 

Specifically, he found Nacho, who has volunteered in Vine’s warehouse in Guatemala for fifteen years and who now helps direct our distribution. Nacho met Ronal and thought he could use a special mobility device called a PET cart.  We import PET carts in addition to the hundreds of  traditional and specialty wheelchairs we help deliver to families every year. The carts are sometimes a handier way for a person with a disability to get around, depending on the terrain in the neighborhood and maybe even the terrain inside the house. A bike chain carries power from a hand crank down to a drive wheel, and the driver goes where he pleases. 

One great feature of a PET cart is that there’s room under the seat to carry things around. The day I visited, Ronal had a bottle of water, some tools and grease for the chain, some face masks, and a big speaker. You know, for the mobile music. For a boy digging holes in the ground, alone, the work goes quicker when  when he’s got something he can sing along with. 

COVID is still a hard reality in 

Guatemala. As I write this, not even one percent of Guatemalans have been fully vaccinated.  The stories in the news are bad, and the stories from friends and partners are worse. 

Getting around Guatemala is more difficult than it used to be (and if you’ve been there, you know that’s saying something). 

It’s been hard for patients to travel to doctors, and hard for doctors to travel to patients. We knew that peoples’ medical needs wouldn’t go away in a situation like this, but if we wondered about our partners slowing down, we didn’t have to wonder long. Through Vine, you’re still getting millions of dollars worth of medicine and supplies to providers treating  people who need it most. In the last 12 months, we’ve distributed about $16M in medicine, food, supplies, vitamins, wheelchairs, and the occasional PET cart. The medical providers in our network are doing what they’ve always done - taking care of people who need it. And because you’ve continued to give, we’re doing what we’ve always done - give them the means to treat, not just diagnose.  We think it’s a concrete and meaningful expression of God’s love for people.  

The wonder of it is that 

in a time when Vine’s staff can’t make it all the way out to where the medicine you bought is given to the families who need it, it hasn’t really mattered. Our old relationships run deeper and longer than this pandemic, and we’ve even met some new friends like Don Lalo, folks who have an eye out for people who’ve been overlooked. The best of what we do is happening anyway. And of course it doesn’t happen without you. Thank you!

Not long after I met Ronal, Nacho told me that he and Lalo came up with a plan to pour a concrete patio onto the little dirt alley he made when he put up the fence. It would be cleaner, and it would make it an easier roll for Ronal. 

Don Lalo pours concrete

The two of them bought the steel and the concrete,  Nacho brought his mixer, and friends volunteered all the labor. They bought Ronal a bed, and even brought a tablet that Ronal could use for school. Lalo checks in on Ronal and his family every week. 

It still works, in other words. 

Your gifts are still turned into real help for people all over Guatemala.  Including guys like Ronal, who doesn’t have to crawl or be carried anymore. He cranks himself up the hills and brakes his way down, and he even has the benefit of a mobile sound system as he’s going about his day.  Thank you for making it possible. 

-Brady Greene, for the Vine team

2020 So Far

Donate here.

A Beautiful Complexity

A new chair and a happy family in Rancho Viejo

There’s a group of families who grow coffee on the steep hills where they live. The coffee gives them a shady side to walk on, but it’s a long road from their houses to the nearest village. The village at the end of that road is called Rancho Viejo, which has a school and on Saturdays has running water. Rancho Viejo is another dirt road away from the town of San Antonio Huista, which is a six-hour bus ride away from Huehuetenango, which is the center of a remote department of Guatemala. 

It takes some time, a good map, and a horse or a four wheel drive to get to those families. One stretch of road on the way curves almost into Mexico, and it’s a convenient place to send illegal drugs up, and  to bring guns and money back down. If you’re not involved in that business, and you’re not involved in coffee, people wonder why you’re there. Federal police stopped us, in fact, and asked us what we were up to. Our habit is to drive by checkpoints unless a gun is pointed at us, or  a man is standing in the other lane; this man was standing in the other lane. The three of us - a medical doctor, an entrepreneur, and a driver, none of us Guatemalan - did our best to seem friendly, helpful, and utterly out of cash. 

We went through the formalities of an armed roadside checkpoint, and we tried to keep the conversation light: How’s work? How’s your family? It’s pretty this time of day. If someone’s going to shake me down, I at least want to make it as personal as I can. That strategy has kept us from being robbed more than a few times over the years. 

The officer steered the conversation toward us: who are we? What do we do? Why are we here, in the middle of nowhere? I wish I could have gotten a picture of us together, the three of us and these policemen. But in a place like that, it’s a fair assumption that it’s not the police who controls the roads; the drug traffickers control the roads and the police. We didn’t want to be robbed, but didn’t want to get a young policeman in any trouble, either. So no photo.

We told him who we were and what we were doing:

We don’t actually have anything. We’re just middlemen. People from outside of Guatemala [I was talking about you, by the way] give us medical supplies, and they give us money, which we turn into more supplies. They pay for us to ship it, import it, and put it into our warehouse just long enough for our friends here to come pick it up. They are doctors and nurses from all over Guatemala , and they take care of anyone who needs help. When they have patients who can’t afford medicine and supplies, our friends use or give away what they were given. Antibiotics, syringes, eyeglasses, ultrasound machines. Today, we’re just driving out to meet some of the people who got supplies. 

“I know there are a lot of organizations who come to Guatemala to help,” he said. “And, you know - there are people here who do need help. You see how people live out here.” I said I did. 

“I guess most people stick to the big places, though. I don’t see people come this far out to help.”

He asked if he could email if he knew of a pressing medical need somewhere, and I penciled my email address into his notebook. We suggested we’d better go before we lost too much more sunlight, and he let us. We shook hands and were glad to drive away. 

But back to those families and their coffee. In one of those houses there’s a woman I’ll call Silvia, whose body is unable to fully support itself. Silvia’s father and brother work, her mother tends a small plot of coffee trees, and sometimes Silvia is alone at home. The family was somehow able to find an old institutional wheelchair, which made it easier for everyone to move Silvia around, but it was not designed for her. She needs a system that is designed to support her. 

Here’s where it gets complicated, but stay with me because there’s great beauty in this complexity: Felix Camposeco grew up in Rancho Viejo (the village with the school) and lives in San Antonio Huista (the closest town). He works with two organizations that support small coffee-growing families, ACODIHUE and 410 Bridge (both are great and you can probably look them up). Felix told Mike Mannina at Thrive Farmers (coffee suppliers to Chick Fil A - you can definitely look them up) that Silvia and others needed specialized care, but of course nothing like that was available within two days’ drive of where Silvia lives. 

Mike and I had coffee at Thrive Farmers’ Atlanta offices a day or two after Felix had told Mike of the need. Mike showed me  Felix’s pictures of seven or eight families who needed wheelchairs. A few weeks before that, our friends at Joni and Friends/Wheels for the World had asked if we knew where 200 wheelchairs could be given to families who needed them.  We knew plenty of families, so when Mike told me about Felix and Silvia, those chairs were already onboard a Dole Ocean Cargo Express ship plowing through the Pacific ocean, in a container that was on its way to to our warehouse in Guatemala. 

Dick Rutgers (last piece of the puzzle, I promise) gives everything away. He gives away wheelchairs; he gives away dinner most nights to neighborhood kids; he gives away all his time and his skills as a disability specialist. When Dick picked up those chairs at our warehouse, we told him about Silvia and others in her area. He  packed the trailer that bounces behind his four wheel drive with specialty chairs and tools, and he met up with Felix. They spent a week together visiting families and customizing chairs. As far as I know, Dick is the only person in Guatemala who has the skills, experience, and willingness to go past the paved roads to put chairs together, and that’s what he did for Silvia. 

I met her the day after we shook hands with the police, which was a few months after Dick had given her the new chair. Felix went into the house and found her alone and doubled over in her old chair. He was mad. Why was she alone, and why had no one helped her into her new chair? The only word Silvia used was “mama,” so we didn’t know. Silvia’s sister in law walked in out of the trees and explained that the rest of the family was away working. Silvia’s mother and brother knew how to use the new chair, but in their absence, the sister in law had been afraid to try.  

Felix went back into the house. Silvia had been quiet all morning, but when when he rolled the new chair out, she yelled. She screamed. She moved her hands, she laughed, she said “mama” over and over. She was thrilled just to see the thing. 

Felix put her in the new chair, her back straightened by the pads and supports Dick had built. He strapped her in and made her secure. She talked and laughed and smiled. 

Silvia!

Silvia lives a long way from any place with resources to help her, and without a remarkable group of people, she would have stayed inside her house, alone, or in a chair that hurt her body rather than helped it. But think about that group of people: There’s Felix, who lives nearby and keeps his eyes open to the needs of his neighbors. Dick Rutgers has made a life of giving away what he doesn’t own in the first place. Mike and the folks at Thrive are dedicated to doing more than just getting good coffee at a good price. Joni and Friends/Wheels to the World arranged the donation, refurbishment, and distribution of that chair and thousands more just like it. You, the friends of Vine, sent chairs to Guatemala and put them in Dick Rutgers’ hands. 

And of course nobody could have done it alone. In fact, take just one person out of the story, and the story disappears - Silvia and dozens of her neighbors with disabilities would still be stuck without the care they need. But together, Felix, Dick, Mike, Joni and Friends, and you were the Body of Christ, working together to express how God loves people. He moves and reaches all the way out to where the cops say nobody goes - to people up in the highlands, past the village, away from town, under the coffee trees, at home, sometimes by themselves.

-Brady

On the Ground Report

Dennis and Cindy McCutcheon manage Vine's distribution system in Guatemala. This is Dennis' report from the first two weeks after the Fuego volcano erupted on June 3. 

-

Sunday, June 3rd, we noticed how dark it had become.  No thunder or lightning.  We went outside checking news on phones.  Volcano Fuego had erupted with a column of gases, and super-heated ash shot over 30,000-feet into the sky, casting a 33-mile shadow.  When that column collapsed, pyroclastic flows shot down the side of the volcano following the valleys at 1300 F and a flow rate of 400 mph.  No flesh in the direct path survives.  Two rescue workers, in their vehicle with their climbing gear, simply disappeared in one of these events.  They haven’t been found yet.  The numbers are conflicting: over 100 confirmed dead, 190 missing, 5,000 displaced, according to government officials.  Local school teachers report 10,000 students are without classrooms now.  One teacher reported they are looking for over 300 students.  Fire/rescue teams believe the number of people buried in the ash may be greater than 1,000.

From our medical aid warehouse near Guatemala City, Vine International quickly moved all appropriate aid into the hands of the bomberos working at ground zero.  That included dressing material, tape, and burn dressings from a donation from DeRoyal in Knoxville TN.  We were blessed with a cash donation from a US family that happened to be in-country and went to work being specific in our response.  Vine’s daily work is to supply and donate tons of medical aid to over 100 partner medical projects throughout the country, and several responded immediately.  One of these, a US doctor, was turned away by authorities and has met continued resistance to his offers to help.  However, just this morning, we connected him to a ‘back door’ with one of our national partners.  Another offer by a national doctor (and one of our partners), along with his team, were accepted.   Still another from 4 hours away was there ahead of the government and they couldn’t make him leave.  He’s quite been quite a force to be reckoned with.  That first afternoon, he was one of 3 doctors actively treating patients, triaging, and providing appropriate medical aid in the central square of Alotenango -- located on the skirt of the volcano.  Bomberos (volunteers mostly) came from all over the country.  To help them, we purchased baby food, bottles, and diapers, medicines specific to the acute need, hard hats, work gloves, back packs, basic climbing gear, and ropes.

Help came from Japan, Israel, and I saw a team from Honduras arrive with ice cream (impressive).  A climbing team of Mexican bomberos raced to the site from Chiapas before the government closed the border to aid early in the week.  I understand it’s now open.  Cuba sent medical help and the Shriners Hospital (TX) received some burned children.

Saturday we made another delivery to the bomberos.  They asked us to take the baby food and children’s things to a church on the corner of town square church.  The pastor’s first concern was that the food be delivered to areas where the need was greatest and the distribution would be effective. His town had some food but was struggling to get it out to the right people.  So we pressed on, around the mountain, and put it into hands that would get it to a point of need.

The climbing gear was received with emotion.  At last check yesterday the two missing bomberos had not been found.  Dr. Jose took some donation funds we gave him for his transportation and instead bought Kevlar gloves and asbestos reinforced protective sleeves.  Even a week after the event, the ash, 2-feet down, was burning the arms of the bomberos as they worked to retrieve bodies.  Ash depth in ravines was estimated at 20-feet in places.  It will take weeks, maybe months for the mass to cool.

The Big Picture:  Vine is working a 3-part plan.  (1) Keeping our ear to the ground and responding by purchasing items we can procure in Guatemala in order to quickly meet specific medical needs from our project partners.  (2) Restocking our nearby distribution warehouse and continuing to respond to partners’ urgent needs by replenishing many of the supplies they need. To do that, Vine will be shipping 40-foot ocean containers from our Knoxville, TN warehouse.  Currently, one is loading on June 20, with another scheduled for June 28.  From a multitude of US resource partners, we’ll be loading tons of aid, including, rescue worker back boards, dressing supplies, ace wraps, orthopedic splints, IV supplies, stethoscopes, blood-pressure cuffs, oxygen tanks for treatment and transport, and nebulizers, along with exam and surgical gloves and dust masks. We’ll also need surgical masks, suture material (3-0, 4-0 nylon, absorbable), and betadine, just to mention a few of the needs.  Two of our largest resource partners -- Samaritan’s Purse and MAP International -- are also working with Vine to fill these huge containers to ship.  This part of the story alone could be a full-length action adventure book.  (3) We are planning to cache materials to be able to respond with immediacy at the next event somewhere in the Central America region. Vine knows that in this part of the world, it’s not a matter of “if” – but just a matter if “when.”  Older Guatemalans remind us that the last major Fuego eruption preceded (by 2 years) one of the worse earthquakes in the country’s history when 20,000+ people died in in the Capital in 1975 .  For 25 years, Vine has been doing medical relief in Guatemala, in Christ’s name, and we intend to be ready, whatever comes – so stay tuned.

Fuego Volcano Eruption: What you're giving

Dr Jose Amezquita needed Pedialyte. 

He needed Petzl helmets. Stethoscopes. Hartmann solution, backpacks, baby shampoo, hydrocolloid dressings, snap links, syringes, infant formula, Enalapril, static line, and lots of gauze. 

None of it was for him, of course. And he used to have a small supply of most of it, in a little room at his house in Totonicapan. When the Fuego volcano exploded last Sunday, Dr Jose and his team of volunteers drove to the mountain and went to work.
 

Dr Jose has a paying job as a physician. The little room in his house where he kept that small supply of medicine is actually a clinic he opens up on Saturdays for any neighbor who needs medical care and can’t pay for it. Ever since he started the clinic, you - the people who give to Vine - have been keeping him more or less stocked with medicine, equipment, and supplies. In addition to whatever he can fill his car with, the Vine staff adds bear hugs and prayers when we see him, and Jose always leaves us with an order to thank you for all of it. 

When a rescue worker on the volcano needed climbing gear, the most natural thing for Jose to was to give his away. It didn’t take long for him to run out of medicine, and there was a time when the rescue crews were short on food. Tennis shoes didn’t last the day with ground temperatures close to 200 degrees. As naturally as it came for Jose to give away his equipment, and to administer all of his medicine, it was just as natural for him to get in touch with Vine to see if we had anything he could use. Your regular gifts make it possible for him to serve his neighbors in need, which means together, you and he are working in disaster situations all the time. The difference after the eruption is the scale and the horrible urgency. 

We had given away most of our burn and wound care (read that great story here) and we’ve never kept rescue equipment in stock. But you - friends of Vine and now friends of Dr Jose - you have been sending money. We've been turning it into Pedialyte. Helmets. Stethoscopes, Hartmann solution, backpacks, shampoo, proper rescue gear, baby formula, 15 different kinds of essential medicines, and 20 other things I don’t want to bore you with. Plus a night in the McCutcheon’s guest bed and $30 worth of Taco Bell. All for the tired and hungry doctor, for his team of rescue pros, and for their patients.

The reason Dr Jose does this, and the reason Vine exists, is that we hope we can express God’s love for people this way. If you give to Vine regularly, you put a lot of lifesaving supplies in the right peoples' hands in the first days of this disaster. If you are giving to Vine now, your money is there on the mountain today. It's being used to heal people, to find family members, to protect rescue workers, and to feed families whose communities were destroyed in an instant. Thank you!

Dr Amézquita distributes rescue supplies. You bought the supplies! Thanks!

Fuego Volcano Eruption - Tuesday June 5

Last year I got a call from a family who said, "We're giving a boat for a boat."

I asked what they meant, and they explained that they had decided to sell their ski boat. The kids didn’t use it much anymore, and they thought that money could be put to better use. So they sold the boat, and with the proceeds they sponsored an entire 40’ container - the medical supplies, the shipping, the importing, the taxes, everything. Our containers arrive in Guatemala on cargo ships, so: a Boat for a Boat. 

Some of the most important boxes in the pickup truck in this picture came on that container. We don’t usually have many burn dressings in our warehouse in Guatemala, but this week, when the Fuego volcano erupted and buried entire communities, we had these. DeRoyal Industries had donated a significant supply of burn and wound dressings to us, and the Boat for a Boat container got them to our warehouse. The pickup in the photo is the supply truck for a firefighter/EMT unit that is currently deployed in the disaster circle around the Fuego volcano. Vine’s Dennis and Cindy McCutcheon have a long relationship with the unit, and were able to supply them with 25 cases of masks, those DeRoyal burn dressings, antiseptic wipes, zinc oxide tape, and all the alcohol swabs we had in the warehouse. We keep a few cases of bottled water in the warehouse for when the work gets sweaty, but Cindy thought they would better off in the hands of her neighbors, the rescuers on the mountain.  

Somehow, Dennis and Cindy are also buying supplies in Guatemala and preparing recovery kits for families and ministries who will have to return to damaged and destroyed communities in the coming weeks. Your regular giving (like the Boat for a Boat!) has made immediate relief supplies available to the guys who are wading through ash right now, finding and treating victims. Any donations you mark “volcano” will go to help the recovery work in the days to come. Thanks. 

Thanks for thinking of Guatemalans in need.

Brady
Vine International

Fuego Volcano Eruption - Monday June 4

If you've ever been to Guatemala, you probably visited Antigua. 

And if you were in Antigua, and if the weather was clear, you were fascinated to watch the Fuego volcano puff gray clouds of ash all day, and glow orange at it’s tip at night. 

Maybe you’ve seen some news - here it is if you haven’t - but Fuego erupted in a big way and for 16 hours yesterday. There was some slow-flowing lava like my sons used to poke sticks in when we lived there, and like I’ve seen on the news in Hawaii neighborhoods. But yesterday Fuego exploded with fast-moving pyroclastic flows, which can’t be outrun and which buried entire villages. The death toll is at 65 as I’m writing on Monday afternoon, , and at least 3000 people are living in shelters. It will probably get worse in the next few days as the army and EMTs finally reach all the affected areas.

We’ve learned over the years that Vine International’s role in emergencies is about the same role we take in development: we figure out who is doing good work in hard places, and we try to get them what they need. We know people who were working around these communities the day before Fuego erupted, and who will be working in these communities next year and the year after. We want to get them what they need so they can help people. 

Guatemalans are helping each other. Supplies are coming in from Guatemala City and soon from neighboring countries. We’re putting together disaster relief kits for some ministries we work with in the affected areas. We’ll hear from our partners what they need the most, and we’ll either pull it off our shelves or go buy it. Masks, medicines, diapers, formula, bandages, burn dressing, brooms, sponges…a few years ago we used money you gave us and bought a brick making machine so that a village in Honduras could rebuild after a terrible earthquake and landslide. Today, on the day after the disaster, we don’t know exactly what our partners will need the most. But we’ll find out soon, and with your help we will be ready to help. 

If you would like to help the thousands of people whose lives have been radically changed by this explosion, write a note on your donation and of course all of it will go to buy what they need.

Thanks for thinking of Guatemalans in need.

Brady
Vine International