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Man has been digging a hole for last 18 years because God told him to

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BY KEVIN SAWYER – A man in El Salvador has been digging a hole for the last 18 years because he says that God told him to do it. Santiago Sanchez, 69, gets up early every morning and continues to work on the hole he started almost two decades ago. He begins every morning precisely at 3 AM and he doesn’t stop digging until sundown.

A reporter recently went to the hole and went down into it trying to figure out how truly huge it is. The reporter never found out as he had to come back up because he had trouble breathing after a while. At the end of the day, Santiago is usually dragging nearly 100 pounds of rock and dirt out of the hole. He has no plan to stop, or to even reconsider what he has been doing for the last 18 years. All he knows is that God told him to dig a hole so he will dig until he dies or God tells him to stop.

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Santiago, a devout Christian, told the local media that, “What I am doing is a spiritual revelation from God.”

Many believe him to be insane and he is regularly laughed at but he doesn’t care. He does it because, he says, “Nobody really knows what God will demand of you.”

He believes his situation is similar to what Noah went through when, according to the Bible, God spoke to Noah and demanded that he built this ark. To say that Noah suffered similar derision and had his sanity questioned would be an understatement apparently. Santiago will readily tell anyone who asks that he has no idea why he has been digging a hole for the last 18 years. For him, that is irrelevant. God told him to do it and that is good enough for him.

In the country of El Salvador, his project is known as The Tunnel of God. No one but Santiago knows how big it is because no one has been able to go all the way to the end. The lack of oxygen forces them to turn back. All except Santiago. The lack of oxygen doesn’t seem to affect him. So, only he knows how deep it really is. He says that God has promised him some manner of reward, or gift, once the project has been completed.

PHOTO CREDITS: Premier Impacto