"At three or four in the afternoon we saw this huge cloud toward the
northwest, and certain rumors began floating around that the volcano had erupted. Patients
from Pichucalco had been telling us about earthquakes they'd been feeling. So we had our
services that night and went to bed thinking about the volcano, but not worrying too much
about it. But around midnight we began hearing something falling on the tin roofs, like
rain. It was very fine ash. We went outside and looked, and lightning was coming out of
the big cloud above the volcano. Well, I'm not sure if it was lightening. Maybe it was the
molten lava shooting into the sky and falling back. It made a sound like thunder, but
instead of the light being white, as in a storm, it was red."
"On Monday morning when we left our house, everything had a thin covering of
white ash. During our 7:00 AM worship service we began seeing hundreds of people from
below fleeing the volcano in trucks, mostly heading for Tuxtla, but some coming here. When
we finished services that morning people told us that it was a bad eruption and that lots
of people were burned and buried in the ash. So we got together and decided to go below to
help, to offer first aid. There were three men beside myself and three nurses who went.
So we went to Pichucalco. Hundreds of burn victims from near the volcano were
gathered together at the Municipal Building. Chiapas's governor already had flown in, and
soldiers had come to help. We told them that we'd come to offer first aid so they let us
take the road that carried us right to the volcano's base. The sand and ash was over two
feet deep and it was still hot; we passed many people fleeing toward Pichucalco, carrying
nothing but their money. They were covered with burns and wounds from the falling molten
rocks. Everywhere there were dead birds and in some places people and animals were buried
under the sand. You could smell burned things and the odor of sulfur. We passed some
villages where everything had been buried beneath sand. Now there was simply nothing there
to indicate that once people had lived there. We were in the big gravel-hauling truck but
even it hardly could push through the deep sand. At that moment, however, the sand had
stopped falling."
"Climbing up a hill, we found some old people and their children, and they
were all burned very badly. We brought them down and put them in the truck. One old woman
died on the way back to Pichucalco and just when we arrived at the hospital in Pichucalco
another died. The others we left at the hospital, and I don't know whether they lived or
not. Now the officials refused to let us go back for more wounded because they were afraid
of another eruption. Well, when we were going in, the thought that we might ourselves get
caught in a second eruption simply never had occurred to me! At about ll:00 PM we returned
to Yerba Buena."
"Here we continued our eight days of prayer. Then the next Saturday, at about
6:30, the volcano erupted again. Ash and sand from the first eruption fell to our north;
we only got a little of it here. But this time the wind carried ash and sand here. It was
heavy sand, too. That night we got all the student nurses together and spent the whole
night in the Casa Grande praying, asking the protection of God. Some people cried, others
just sat and worried, and some of the children slept. When we got up on Sunday morning, we
didn't see any sun. At midday it was like midnight -- completely dark. My son Hans was
coughing bad. We talked it over and decided to evacuate everyone to Tuxtla, including the
patients. Only about four workers stayed here, to watch over things. The sand was two or
three inches deep. Usually between here and Tuxtla you need about three hours but with the
sand on the road it took about seven. We had to stay away for three or four weeks."
"When we left, everything was white -- sad, the color of death. Many people
thought that this whole area would never return to normal. People were thinking about
simply abandoning their land, and going someplace else to restart their lives. But other
people said that the sand would fertilize the land and that soon there'd be good harvests
here better than anyone ever had seen. In many places houses collapsed because of the
sand's weight on the roof. At Yerba Buena we shoveled off the sand as it fell, so that
didn't happen. After about a week, a rainstorm came and washed the whiteness off the
trees. Curiously, the trees didn't seem to be hurt much."
"The eruption didn't change my concept of God, but it did cause me to think a
great deal about how God has tremendous forces there inside the earth. Scripture tells us
that once the earth suffered a great flood. Now it awaits another flood, but this time it
will be a flood of fire. Before the arrival of Christ, the whole earth will stagger like a
drunkard and it'll rain fire and sulfur in order to purify the earth. The inspired books
speak of God's forces inside the earth waiting for the final day. During the eruptions we
thought a great deal about this and meditated on the meaning of it all."
"Many of our Catholic neighbors thought that this was the end of the world
that we Adventists had been talking about, and many of them fled into the Adventist
temples, and some even asked to be baptized into our church. But most of them, after the
eruptions stopped, went back to the way they were before."
