Behind that cloud up there right there is the volcano of fire.
And as you can tell from these ruins, it lived up to its name.
When the village of San Miguel Los Lotes died on June 3rd, 2018. It died loud.
The volcano above town exploded into a flood of liquid rock and ash so hot it melted your skin before it even touched you.
1600 degrees engulfing the town in seconds. An entire village locked in a mass grave they once called their home.
But these were not trees falling in some soundless forest.
This was a scream you could hear all the way to the capital. Technicolour primetime death, national news.
Journalists scurried in from all corners to pose solemnly near the still-smoking ruins.
An entire country tuned in to watch the carnage. In a way, everyone took part in this.
Yet, by doing so, they changed it. Watching this town turned to dust, together, as a nation,
they ensured that something new would be born in its place.
This wouldn’t just become another forgotten ruins but instead, at least for a time, a ground zero.
An unsanctioned monument to the collective national grief. A pilgrimage to the story that everyone knows.
It’s now over three years later and virtually everyone who survived that day has moved on somewhere else.
After all, wouldn’t you? What would you be staying for?
How could you possibly live a normal life with those eruptions of memory still looming over your head?
This town will likely never return. There’s just too much hanging in the air. Yet despite everything,
up the road there, as close to the volcano as the plots go, in a small shack on the far edge of all this destruction
a single person has refused to leave. Her name is Eufenia. She’s the last one here.
Today, when Guatemalans come to see the ruins of the town they watched destroyed on live tv,
Eufenia is here to tell them her story. On a good day she’ll entertain dozens of visitors,
repeating again and again the pain of that June morning, letting them relive her traumas with her.
She’s like Charon, ferrying tourists across the river Styx for a few coins.
She’s so sought after that she even announces her hours on her house like a storefront.
You could almost call her a tour guide for the national soul.
If nothing else, her presence offers a value just by itself. These ruins feel empty when she’s not here. They have no emotion. No life.
But when she speaks, you can almost feel the heat of those ashes. Not in her words, necessarily, but in her.
You can sense the humanity that was lost between these walls.
She feels genuinely like the last living memory of San Miguel. Even if she isn’t.
Even if there are others spread across the country, she’s the shack in the corner. She’s the one you’ll going to meet.
But that’s where the story stops being so simple. Because I’m absolutely certain that she’s lying.
I met Eufenia presumably like everyone does, walking up the central road that once served as the backbone of this town.
She stands out here. Everything’s dead except her.
It didn't take her long to put down her phone and come over offering to tell me her story.
After all, I’m a foreigner with a big camera, I’m obviously a whale to this women.
I understand that. She knows exactly what I represent. She even tells me five, maybe six times
that I’m not the first foreign YouTuber who has been here. She is a big deal.
One of them even, apparently some Mexican vlogger, even wronged her somehow.
Promised her money or something that never came, she was adamant that I shame him in this video.
Which I’m not going to do because frankly I don’t care. But point being, this is her job, and she knows how to spot a mark.
But it’s fine. This isn’t my first day on the road, I understand this trade.
In many ways she and I sell the same thing.
After all, she’s right, I do want to hear her story, and even more than that, film it, and then sell it to you.
And I’m happy to pay for that. It’s a pre-packaged episode written like a psalm.
And what's more, she’s an absolute pro at telling it. Three years of visitors - this routine is well practiced.
She takes her time, she walks me around the property, talks about the town, her long-dead husband,
she shows me what little she has left before she even says a word about that day.
But when she does get to the eruption, she talks about it it with force.
She dabs away her dry tears, she wields her bible like a weapon as she lays out the experiences for our camera.
Although it takes her thirty minutes to tell her story, at its core, it’s very simple.
On that day in June, when the volcano exploded, God himself reached down with his actual physical hand,
picked her up and set her down across town behind a particularly sturdy wall.
She experienced what was without question a literal Catholic miracle.
Which I for one do not particularly believe. And standing there in disbelief it got me thinking.
In reality, I don’t really know anything about this woman. Who’s to say that she was here on that day at all?
Who’s to say she was here before the volcano, even? And actually, now that I’m picking it apart?
Who is to say she actually lives here now? It’s her shack, I get that, but who knows, maybe it is just a storefront.
A little camp where she comes to make her money.
She’s obviously telling a fake story. That much is clear. She’s not half a saint.
She might have survived that day behind some wall, I can’t say she didn’t do that. But it wasn’t the hand of God that set her there.
That said, if I was there that day, I’d probably lie to me too. I wouldn’t want to recount my actual trauma
dozens of times per day to strangers. Imagine telling that many people
face-to-face the most intimate, raw pain you’d ever experienced, and then they toss you a nickel?
That’s not fun. But, this is Guatemala. It’s an extremely poor country and there are very limited opportunities here.
Especially for a widowed old woman. What if she was at the grocery store that day but still lost her house?
The truth won’t get donations. That won’t help people feel the raw energy of the day.
So she has every reason to lie here, no matter where she’s from, and nobody visiting is ever gonna probe that deeply into her pain anyway.
What they want is the story.
The way I see it, regardless of her authenticity, the memory of San Miguel truly benefits from her presence.
Her story serves a purpose. Granted, its primary purpose is getting a donation from me,
but just her being here is still the most memorable feature of these ruins.
She breathes life into otherwise dead buildings. And visitors don’t really care about the Schrodinger’s reality of her miracle,
they’re just happy to meet someone who can tell them that story.
To have the experience direct from her to share with others as their own, or in my case, to sell it to you.
In a way, it would almost be better if she was lying.
Because none of us down this line are actually hoping to see her in pain. I doubt you are.
We just want to witness the emotion. It’s useful in helping us feel the story. To understand what happened here on a human level.
So, is a believable lie not better? And I get that her lie might not sound particularly believable to you,
but remember that it wasn’t built for you.
It’s tailored for somebody else. The vast majority of people coming through here are Guatemalan.
They’re good Christians and true believers in miracles. She’s telling a story for a community that she personally understands,
a community that serves as her daily bread and butter.
It's for them. And as far I can tell, it’s working just fine.
She knows this audience and both sides are getting exactly what they want.
So even if she is lying, is it not a good thing that she’s doing it here?
And on top of all of that, this story has one final twist.
Because back in Antigua, some people I interviewed told me that they were happy San Miguel was gone. To them it was a gang town.
The people who lived there extorted the nearby villages with violence, and their death was a positive.
They believed that the volcano was an act of God that had wiped them away for their sins. And they would not be convinced otherwise.
That's why the government left those hundreds still buried, they say.
Nobody wants to pay for criminals to have a proper funeral.
And while I don’t believe that’s entirely true either, it is what those people say.
So in that instance, what's Eufenia? A diamond in that rough? A Christian so pure that God personally saved her from the volcano?
A saintly face for this town that might save its posthumous reputation? Or is she just an extension of what it already was?
A scammer who set up shop to make money off of someone else’s misery.
I paid Eufenia forty dollars for her story. It was a lot more than the one or two that she normally gets.
But at the same time obviously far less than the thousands that I’m going to make in return.
I can't tell this story without her, really. And she can't really tell it without me. Without you.
We're the audience purchasing the product that is that misery. So I guess it doesn't really matter if she’s lying or not.
It doesn’t really change the outcome. Everybody here is getting what they want.
Well, I suppose except them.
This is Rare Earth.
She said that people like what we are doing today, certain people have come. And they take the story
and they promised things, but nothing, as you can see, nothing has changed in three years.