‘Ash Began to Fall From the Sky’ : Family Survives Eruption, but Hard Life Gets Harder

Berenice Albadan survived Colombia’s volcanic disaster last week, and her hard life suddenly turned harder.

An unemployed, single mother, the 45-year-old Albadan lost the one-room house where she lived with seven of her eight children. The destitute family is now on its way to Bogota, where it plans to crowd into a two-room house with in-laws of Albadan’s married daughter.

Poverty is widespread in Colombia, and such bleak prospects are not unusual among the survivors of the devastating mud slide that followed the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano last week. Beyond killing more than 25,000 people, the disaster left 4,000 people injured and more than 60,000 homeless, according to estimates by the Colombian Health Ministry.

Albadan and her family lived in Armero, a city of 25,000, where the devastation was worst. More than 23,000 people are believed to have died there and in surrounding villages when the avalanche of mud destroyed the place.

Soldiers were patrolling Armero on Monday with orders to shoot looters, and five more survivors, including a 7-year-old boy, were found in the sea of mud covering most of the Andean farming community.

The three-mile-high volcano continued to spew out steam and ash, and the Associated Press quoted a European scientist as saying that tremors were increasing in frequency Monday.

The government had indicated Sunday that rescue efforts might be abandoned, but the searches were continued after reports that many people were believed still alive in the mud.

Many of Armero’s homeless came to Guayabal, five miles away. Here, they have been given food, medical treatment and transportation to other cities.

Berenice Albadan and her family sat on the concrete porch of a green house facing the Guayabal plaza, weary from their experience and uncertain about their future.

The mother, her brown hair done up in a straggly bun, was barefoot and sun-burned. She talked quietly about the disaster and her difficult life that preceded it.

Her husband abandoned her years ago, she said, so she took in laundry to pay the rent and feed her children. More children were born, but she found a job potting plants in a nearby nursery.

A month ago, the nursery laid her off, giving her about $1,200 in severance pay. She used the money to buy a one-room, cement-block house with a concrete floor and a zinc roof.

In the Wrong Place

Albadan and six of her children, ages 4 to 17, were in the tiny house last Wednesday when the volcano began to erupt, melting the snow on its slopes. Her two oldest daughters were in Bogota, where one of them lives with her husband.

“At 4 in the afternoon, ash began to fall from the sky,” Albadan said. “The kids went out and picked it up in fistfuls.”

The mother was alarmed, but “on the radio, they said not to be afraid, that nothing would happen,” she recalled.

Five blocks away, the parish priest spoke over a loudspeaker atop the church. “He said for us to stay calm, that everything was all right, that we should go into our houses and put cloth over our faces to breathe,” she said.

Her family went to bed about 9 p.m. “When I woke up, it was because I heard people shouting out on the street. They said to run for the hills--the Lagunilla River was coming up.”

The river roared. “It was a noise like it was coming to get you,” she said.

People Already Running

Albadan hurried her children out of the house, and the family ran through the dark.

“When we went out, there were already a lot of people running. There was a noise like houses crashing down. We got to a hill that was nearby, and when we were climbing it, I cut my foot.” She removed a bandage to show a deep gash in her left arch.

The hill was crowded with frightened people. It was dark below.

“After the noise went away, we heard screams for help from down there,” she recalled. “When dawn came, it all looked flat and smooth, like a highway.”

Armero was gone, buried under a plain of dark mud.

Albadan learned later that her two sisters were killed, along with two nephews.

After sunrise, she took her children to a higher place in the foothills west of Armero. Later, they walked toward the village of Maracaibo and found shelter. Saturday morning, a helicopter took them to a school in Maracaibo, where a medical team treated Albadan’s cut foot. Then they got a ride to Guayabal.

Albadan has been joined here by her two oldest daughters, Doris and Marta, who left Bogota on a bus Thursday, the day after the eruption, to find their mother.

Eventually, Marta said, the family will settle in her house in Bogota. She and her husband have three children, so there will be 12 people in the two rooms, one of them dirt-floored.

Her husband barely makes enough money to pay the rent, she said. “He works collecting paper and cardboard to sell to factories.”

Berenice Albadan visited Bogota once and found its Andean climate too cold for her liking. She will miss the lowland warmth of Armero and her little house there.

“But I don’t have any choice,” she said. “I have to resign myself and go.”