Miner continues to spread the word
Later this month, when Jose Henriquez reviews a movie script about the ordeal he and his friends shared, he won’t be satisfied unless it tells the whole story.
Not just how 33 Chilean miners prayed after they concluded that rescue from a copper mine might never come, but how they formed a little community as they “faced this giant called ‘Death’ hanging over us”.
How they agreed actions would be taken only after a majority vote — and how they refused to despair.
“The important thing is that there was a good reaction among people to overcome our situation,” said Henriquez, speaking through translator Rev. Alfredo Cooper, on a visit to Regina on Friday.
That the miners survived is well-known because their ordeal was broadcast all over the world 18 months ago.
Less well known was how they survived.
Henriquez, a veteran miner, was not only the drillmaster, or drilling supervisor, on the “terrible, shocking, terrifying day” when the men were trapped by a rockfall later estimated to have been the size of the Empire State Building. The part-time evangelical preacher was comfortable talking about prayer and God.
It was to him that the others said, “Teach us how to pray.”
That he did, though he told a hushed Regina & District Chamber of Commerce luncheon Friday that he wouldn’t have them praying to “a dead God”, but a living one, who could be working and roaming among them.
The men formed a little community down there, bringing order and dividing up the work of finding lighting, searching for food and making space to sleep.
Some men joked about suicide; Henriquez doesn’t know how serious they were, but he notes none carried through.
They even joked about eating each other. “The one who was in the most danger was me — because I was the fattest!” he quipped.
To pass the time, they prayed, talked and prepared menus of the most extravagant meals imaginable.
And so, they held on, praying and hoping until a drill bit — aimed from a point a half-mile above them — broke into their space on Day 17 and they were able to send back a message that all were alive and well.
Fifty-two days later, they went, one by one, to the surface — first the young and impatient, then those needing medical care and finally “the old guys” like Henriquez, who’d survived earlier brushes with cave-ins and poison gas.
That drill bit — part of a remarkable international engineering and scientific effort that mobilized to help them — shouldn’t have found them. Analysis later indicated it had struck a particularly tough area of rock above them and “deviated” to precisely the right spot. A miracle? Henriquez has an answer. “Even the atheist geologist told me it was pretty weird.”