Mural in Cunlaj

Last week I spent three days and three nights in Cunlaj, a town on the other side of Tacaná. For three months I have been traveling there every Wednesday for a three-hour painting class, and finally we were ready to do a public piece. Our theme was Hurricane Stan, and each participant did months of thinking, drawing, and painting, until he or she arrived at a final piece. Thus, each section of the mural comes from a different painting. The first day we painted the kiosk wall white, designed the mural, and started sketching it out. The second day we started at 5:30 AM in order to evade the crowds that arrived at 9 for the multi-community sporting event and celebration. We had quite an audience, but this provided more support, publicity, and got even more youth involved. By the end of the second day, about 12 hours later, we had completed the bulk of the work and the third day was left for the details. The mural reads "EL FUTURO DE LA COMUNIDAD ESTA EN NUESTRAS MANOS," or The Future of the Community is in our Hands.



The large hands that flank each side of the mural came from a 16-yr-old female student named Minerva. During early conversations with her regarding her experience of the storm, she said she most remembered the image of her grandfather's hands in the grass, struggling to pull himself off the ground and away from the rising water behind his house. It took 2 months for her to focus just on the hands, but the final product was breathtaking. Another student focused on solidarity, showing the positive aspects that come from such a disaster. This student's brother worked on images of their vivero in Cunlaj, the tree nursery where they are growing saplings to reforest what was lost. A teenager named Hector did drawings of the construction workers rebuiling the homes that were lost. His painting is in the top middle of the mural, showing a celebration after the completion of one such home, complete with a señora making tortillas. Doranelia wanted to focus on women and their role in the after-effects of Stan. She drew women walking far off to the river to wash clothes or collect water for cooking. Cunlaj was without potable water for approximately three weeks after the storm hit.