Five University of Maine students have been pummeled by Tropical Storm Agatha and pelted with volcanic ash since arriving in Guatemala City on May 21 to participate in a music exchange program.
Agatha made landfall near the Guatemala-Mexico border Saturday with winds up to 45 mph. It dissipated Sunday over the western mountains of Guatemala, but flooding and landslides have killed at least 150 people and left thousands homeless in Central America.
The storm hit two days after Guatemala’s Pacaya volcano started erupting lava and rocks Thursday afternoon, blanketing the country’s capital with ash and forcing the closure of La Aurora International Airport. President Alvaro Colom declared a “state of calamity.”
The musicians, all women, are scheduled to perform Thursday with the Escuela Municipal de Musica in Guatemala City, Camille Pierce, 20, of Houlton said Tuesday in response to e-mail questions. All five UMaine students are staying in Guatemala’s capital with a member of the local orchestra.
“The volcano eruptions impacted the entire city,” Pierce wrote. “It disrupted traffic, closed down schools, closed the airport for a week [because of the time it takes to clean ash off planes and runways].
“The ash is difficult to sweep and clean up,” she continued, “and there is still lots of it to clean up. There is ash all through our clothes, suitcases, beds, houses, cars, and hair.”
The group had headed out of the city Saturday for a two-day white-water rafting trip on the Rio Cahabon and to explore the caves at Semuc Champey in eastern Guatemala when Agatha hit, Pierce said in an e-mail.
“We had been on a bus for 6½ hours when we got the call that the tropical storm was coming,” she wrote, “and we could no longer go rafting. So, we turned around and drove another 6½ hours back to Guatemala City. The rain was so intense that it caused many rockslides, landslides, flooding, and, in some places, washed half of the road away.”
Pierce said the ash that people had been cleaning up and putting into garbage bags to be picked up was redistributed back through the streets of Guatemala City after the storm.
The student musicians are in the Central American nation representing the Maine Music Organization, a student-run group, she said.
The students are scheduled to return to Maine on Friday.
The exchange began in 2006 when Anatole Wieck, a professor of music at UMaine since 1986, traveled to Guatemala as a Fulbright senior specialist, according to a story published two years ago in UMaine Today magazine.
He said in an e-mail Tuesday that in September 2007 conductor Bruno Campo asked him to continue with the project. After Wieck’s second visit two years later, a formal exchange program with the university and the orchestra was established.
UMaine students first went to Guatemala in May 2009. The next October musicians from there performed in Orono with the University of Maine Orchestra.
In spite of the weather challenges, Pierce said she and her fellow musicians “love the people and the program we are part of.”
“We are amazed,” she said, “by the importance they place on music here in [Guatemala] City. This is important to us because it helps to develop ties with music schools in other countries.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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UMaine students in Guatamala
Sophia Wilkins
Age: 20
Instrument: violin
Hometown: Farmington
Major: English-creative writing
Year: Class of 2011
Michelle Dempsey
Age: 21
Instrument: violin
Hometown: Stockton Springs
Major: Music performance
Year: Class of 2012
Hannah Schriefer
Age: 20
Instrument: violin
Hometown: York
Major: Music education
Year: Class of 2012
Molly Flanagan
Age: 19
Instrument: cello
Hometown: Farmington
Major: Marine science
Year: Class of 2013
Camille Pierce
Age: 20
Instrument: oboe
Hometown: Houlton
Major: Music performance
Year: Class of 2012