Guatemalan sisters in miracle escape from mudslide
Published: October 13, 2005
When a volcano slope above their home collapsed, sisters Rosa and Elena Quicain were swept from the bed they share into a raging torrent of mud and rocks.
Somehow, they survived it.
Rosa, 20, was sucked deep under the mud, pummeled by rocks and tree trunks, and says she felt herself starting to lose consciousness.
“That’s when I reacted. I pulled myself out bit by bit, climbing to the surface using only one arm, supporting myself with logs that were under there,” she said through swollen lips at the house of a distant relative, a nurse who has taken 16 landslide survivors into her home in a nearby town.
Elena, 18, said she finally came to a halt in the mudslide, buried up to her mouth with both arms trapped at her sides.
“When I heard voices, I did everything possible to free my arm. I dug the mud from my mouth with my fingers and started screaming for help,” she said, her eyeballs shot with blood.
Her elder sister recognized her voice in the chaos.
Eventually, a man who also escaped the river of mud returned with people from a nearby village and they pulled the sisters to safety with ropes and logs cut from trees.
“They laid me on a tin sheet roofing covered with coffee leaves as a stretcher,” Rosa said. “I don’t remember much after that.”
Medics say Elena almost perished even after she was pulled from the muck.
“The younger one nearly died, she had that head injury and she was so cold,” said Jacque Whitten, an American woman and one of about half a dozen volunteers who cleaned wounds and tried to keep survivors warm at a local clinic on the morning of the mudslide.
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