The spiritual guide preaching hope to trapped Chile miners

Mario Gómez is all too familiar with the hardships of prolonged confinement. While still in his 30s, he survived as a stowaway on a ship for 11 days, living below deck on little more than bits of chocolate and drops of water collected in a shoe.

Now, at 62 years old, Mr. Gmez is the oldest of the 33 Chilean miners trapped nearly half-a-mile underground and has become the spiritual guide to his men, government officials said. He has organised a small subterranean chapel and is serving as unofficial aide to psychologists on the surface.

Mr Gmez and the two other men leading the group come from traditional mining families and together have more than 90 years' experience underground.

Aside from Mr Gmez, there is Luis Urza, the 54-year-old shift leader who organises their work assignments, helps map the path of their rescue hole and even insists the miners wait until everyone gets food through the narrow borehole to the surface before anyone can eat.

Then there is Yonny Barrios, 50, the group's impromptu medic.

He is drawing on a six-month nursing course he took about 15 years ago to administer medicines and tests.

"They are completely organised," said Dr. Jaime Maalich, Chile's health minister. "They have a full hierarchy. It is a matter of life and death for them."

After the cave-in on 5 August, the 33 men were thought lost until Chilean engineers found them 17 days later.

On Monday, workers began boring the rescue hole. It is expected to take up to four months to complete.

The miners will play a critical role in their own escape - the men will need to clear 3,000- 4,000 tons of rock that will fall as the rescue hole is cleared.

Mr Barrios started working in the mines when he was only 16. But it was the nursing course he took at a mine in the 1990s that has proved essential to officials.

He is taking the miners' temperature and blood pressure and monitoring their weight. He is also administering tests to prevent infection and malnutrition, as well as vaccinating the miners for flu, tetanus and pneumonia.

"He has become a precious thing for us," Dr Maalich said.

Mr Urza began his 31-year mining career in his early 20s. Several uncles were also miners, said his mother, Nelly Iribarren, 78. "His passion was always topography," she said, adding that he loved to sketch roads and landscapes.

Mr Urza is now using that skill to aid the miners' rescue, officials said, helping prepare a map of the chamber and the adjoining tunnels where they are holed up some 2,300ft down.

He is also helping to order the men's lives, insisting the miners wait for the rations for all 33 - sent four times a day through the borehole - and the men eat together, Dr Maalich said.Mr Gmez, meanwhile, is encouraging the miners to pray and counselling many of them.

A miner since the age of 16, Mr. Gmez learned the trade with his father. As he was turning 30, he and his older brother Reinaldo struck out for Brazil, working on the docks and boats for about a year and a half before coming back to Chile, by stowing away on a ship and hiding in the cargo hold for 11 days.

"I call them the cats of San Jos," Reinaldo said of his brother and others who survived accidents here. "I figure he is on about his fourth life now."