Message
from Angangueo
October 19, 2005
Dear friends joining the Monarch South Migration this
year:
Yes, no butterfly at sight yet. The rain has stopped for the moment,
although in the southern part of the country we are awiting for another
tropical storm which we hope will be not as desastrous as Stan. The news
say that none can imagine the suffering of our people there as well as
in the border with Guatemala.
We in my family were wondering what might happen in Angangueo if a natural
calamity, such as that desastrous storm would come to us.
Angangueo is a town laying at the bottom of several mountains. The
town itself runs North-South in a long stripe and both sides of this "stripe" are
surrounded by mountains. The stripe inclination is such that, in case
of disaster, the mountains would protect the town from outer in-flows
(I don´t have the exact words in English to describe this), and
because of the inclination itself, the water would run down, so that
there would be no real flow in the town.
Different from decades ago, nowadays, we worry, since, because of the
high forest logging we have had in the last decade --at least--, our
mountains guarantee no real protection, but on the contrary, might be
a big danger, since big areas on them are loose earth and even erosion
in some parts. Such a natural disaster like a storm like Stan or others
ocurring in other parts of the world would cause big disasters in our
area since we have not enough consistency and strenght in our mountains
anymore.
Few people up to now, we think, really stop to reflect about this. But
we hope that the grief of our co-nationals in the south will touch our
consciousness on nature preservation more and more.
Until
next week, Maria Estela
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