Hopkins villagers turned church into ark
On Friday, News 5 ran the story of a church in Southern Belize whose members believed a religious prophecy that their village would be destroyed by a series of disasters not heard of since the days of Noah. They were so convinced, they barricaded themselves inside their church with enough supplies to last three days. But whether by divine intervention, or something of a more earthly nature, nothing earth shattering happened and the police ordered them out of the building. Patrick Jones spent the day in Hopkins trying to get to the bottom of this strange story. But as he discovered, the damage to that southern community is more psychological than physical.
Patrick Jones, Reporting
Driving through the heart of Hopkins Village today, there was nothing out of the ordinary as residents went about their daily lives. But a dooms day prophesy of earthquake, fire, and flooding threatened to cause turmoil in this laid-back fishing village on Friday. Rudolph Coleman, who lives near to where the epicentre of the disaster was supposed to have been, says he and his family watched in amazement.
Rudolph Coleman, Hopkins Village Resident
“The whole village was uneasy because of the incident, what occurred, and people begin to wonder, people begin to stand on the road in crowds. We had more than about five to eight hundred people standing on the road Friday afternoon and watching these people running groceries into the church. Because I was here in my yard and I can see wheelbarrows passing with groceries going into the church before four-thirty Friday evening.”
That was the appointed time, according to some residents, when their village was to have stated to experience the terrible destruction.
Patrick Jones
“Today there’s a sense of normalcy in the village, a far cry from the way things were on Friday evening when a group of worshippers of the Evangelical Mennonite Church, numbering anywhere from twenty to fifty and led by their pastor, locked themselves up in this building for what members say would have been an evening of worship and fasting. But just as soon as the doors were locked, more than as few onlookers of the village gathered to witness the spectacle.”
Rudolph Coleman
“And the people who are involved in the church were running through the village asking people to leave their houses if they want to survive, to go and take shelter in the church. And the church they said was going to be the ark. It was something like a deluge that happened during the time of Noah and their church was going to be the ark. And if you are not going to be inside of that church four-thirty Friday evening that you were going to die.”
News 5 spoke with several members of the church, all of whom declined on camera interviews, who said that they were totally misunderstood and that they were just going about the Lord’s work. Which left us asking, where did the idea of fire, flood, and earthquake come from?
Rudolph Coleman
“That is a question that nobody, not even they know where they got that information from. This is why the whole village, you know, people were annoyed because somebody to come with information like that without having good grounds to tell the people, hey this is where we get our information from. So I don’t know, its for them to answer that question because at this point and time I believe not even them can answer that question.”
While none of the worshippers would venture to comment on their bizarre behaviour, this man who calls himself Ayatollah has an idea and full force of his condemnation is aimed squarely at the pastor of the church Hurdie Castillo.
Ayatollah, Hopkins Resident
“To me like the person is just trying to make himself believe that hey, he has the power to control the uncontrolled. So to me, it’s a cult, and the thing is at the time when they did that he went and close up the building.”
Patrick Jones
“Were you concerned that because he closed the building the people might get hurt in there?”
Ayatollah
“Yeah. Because you never can know what he would do to his people in there because a church is a church that is never to be closed. If a church is closed, ain’t no one there.”
Friday’s event has taken a toll on the village, which appear to have been split right along religious lines and tarnished the image of the area, which is fast becoming a tourist destination.
Rudolph Coleman
“I knew from the beginning that they are false prophets and they do not have the intuition of a prophet to be passing on news like that because if they want to be prophets I believe they are way behind time. And they have to straighten up themselves and come back an apologise to this community for what they have done because even the school children were scared and it was very, very serious, it was damaging; it has damaged the image of this village.”
While an apology might not be forthcoming, Chairman of the village council, Mario Augustine, says the work of restoring that image Hopkins has begun.
Mario Augustine, Chairman, Hopkins
“Definitely Hopkins is safe. Hopkins is safe. I believe they had certain perceptions and they made an alarm, an undue alarm out of it. But the whole community knows that it wasn’t anything that was intended to cause confusion within the community, which it actually almost did, but the people who went out there, they were not really alarmed about the rumour, they went out there to see what the people in church were doing.”
Augustine says that when he and the police went to the Church on Friday night to check on what was happening, the spoke with Pastor Castillo. While that interview yielded little by way of answers, Augustine says he and the police were convinced that everyone on the building was there of their own free will. Today, teachers at the Holy Family School were on alert for signs of trauma among the children who were subjected to the incident.
Clyde Martinez, Vice Principal, Holy Family School
“I think for right now they are feeling better, but in the beginning, because some of them came to ask me questions if anything is going to really happen as they had heard. And they are very fearful, frightened, scared, not that they were from the same church but it really affected them. So I think now since nothing has happened they are feeling much better from the incident that happened.”
Martinez says the concern now is that because the children were misled by people they trusted, it will be difficult for them to now take heed when there is a real emergency. The events of the last seventy-two hours are not likely to fade from memory anytime soon. Patrick Jones, for News 5.
News 5 was unable to speak with Pastor Castillo today because he was being interviewed by police in Dangriga.
