Click to play videoSantiago: In Chile, 33 miners have been stuck underground for nearly 30 days. Rescue operations are on in full swing with an escape route being drilled. But it could take months before the men are completely rescued.
This ordeal means that one of the miners who is stuck inside won't get to see his daughter's birth. But his family is trying to make sure he doesn't miss this moment.
The wife of the miner Elizabeth Segovia is due in less than two weeks. A scan on August 4 confirmed she and husband Ariel Ticona were having a girl. The very next day the mine where he was working caved in.
Elizabeth says, "My world just collapsed. I couldn't react I just cried and cried." But her husband Ariel Ticona and his 32 comrades are alive. "I've been talking to her and telling her daddy's ok. I can't cry because if I did the baby would feel everything."
However, Ticona’s father has just come from the mine and he brought a letter sent from the depths of the earth by Ticona to Elizabeth.
Before the accident the couple decided to name their daughter Carolina. But as he survives against the odds Ticona has been thinking he will come up with a better name, Esperanza Elizabeth. In Spanish, Esperanza means hope.
“Hope because we never lost hope, second because it's the name of the camp where the families are living, and third because the 33 miners never lost hope either,” said Elizabeth.
The rescue is expected to take up to four months and there is no chance Ticona will back on the surface for the birth.
A relative of the family plans to video the new arrival and drop a mp4 recording half a mile underground so that the miner does not miss the birth of his daughter.
"We have to record the birth in great detail as well as everything that happens to my baby day by day so we can show him," added Elizabeth.
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