Santa Lucia, Honduras
8 November 1998
A woman and her two children in Colonia Soto. Their house disappeared in a gigantic mudslide provoked by Hurricane Mitch. They're now living in a makeshift hut at the edge of the mudslide. (Photo credit: Paul Jeffrey/CCD)
Dear Friends,
When we moved to Tegucigalpa two years ago, we assured our families and friends that compared to the other places we had lived in Central America, the capital of Honduras was a tranquil and relatively safe place, untouched because of its location by earthquakes, hurricanes, and the other natural disasters that plague much of Central America. Hurricane Mitch proved us wrong.
As hurricanes go, Mitch was a sucker punch. Rather than the hit-and-run frenzy of normal Caribbean hurricanes, this storm (the fourth-largest of the century) moved just off the Honduran coast and then stalled, though computer models kept predicting it would move to the north. For days it dumped as much as four inches of rain per hour over Honduras and northern Nicaragua. By the time the rain began to ease, the devastation was widespread, immense, and tragic.
In our mountain neighborhood just outside the capital, we watched helplessly as several neighbors' homes washed away in the storm. The house below ours filled with mud to the eaves. We moved out of our house for one night when the bank below us began to crumble away.
When the rain eased, our community was left isolated for three days, the road washed away both above us and below us. Finally, Paul and a German neighbor waded through the river below us and rode their mountain bikes over mud slides into what remained of Tegucigalpa. It was a scene to inspire despair. Entire neighborhoods along the Choluteca River had been surprised by the floods, and well over one thousand people died or disappeared in the capital alone. Days earlier, many of them had offered their extra clothes and food for victims of Mitch on the north coast, never imagining that they would soon become victims themselves.
Yet there was hope among the ruins, incarnated by those who led the homeless to shelter, comforted the mourning, and fed the hungry. Many of those who rescued others had themselves watched their own homes flooded or jerked away by the violent currents. For all the stories of terror that the international press has covered so well in the days after the storm, this disaster also produced thousands of untold stories of personal heroism and sacrifice.
The real death toll will never be known, for many of those who died were poor people who lived at the margins of society, clinging to hillsides or gullies around the big cities or carving out a meager living on a small parcel of farmland in the mountains. When they were alive they barely counted, and when they were washed away by the storm, there were few to mourn them. The official death toll will probably come to 10,000 in Honduras. Counting the dead in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Mitch will have killed about 15,000 people. Another million or so were left homeless.
It has been a difficult week for a lot of us. The stress and work load produced by the storm is immense. There are a thousand things to do at once, all of them urgent. Yet it's been a privilege for us to work with CCD, the Christian Development Commission, which has been responding effectively and creatively to the crisis in several areas around the country.
Paul spent all this last week coordinating international communications for CCD, which is the main Protestant organization responding to the emergency here. Paul has written daily updates on the crisis for CCD's partner agencies abroad, briefed arriving international journalists on how relief organizations were responding, and drafted a successful application for emergency aid from the European Union.
Lyda finally made it across the river and since then has been helping coordinate CCD's assistance to emergency shelters in the capital. In addition to material aid to the victims, Lyda is helping CCD design a program of pastoral care for victims suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome. Lyda will lead a one-day training program for pastors responding to the emergency in the Tegucigalpa area. Once land travel becomes possible, Lyda will go to other areas of the country to train pastoral personnel in responding to the psychological and spiritual needs of victims.
Since Nov. 6, we have been able to drive our jeep across the river into the capital, but access from Tegucigalpa to the rest of the country is just now being reestablished. Food, water, and gasoline remain in short supply. A plane bringing relief supplies to CCD from the U.S., sponsored by Church World Service, arrives Nov. 9. Several more flights of cargo for CCD will arrive later in the week. As roads are reopened, the situation will improve. Meanwhile, CCD is gearing up for a rapid deployment of food and other emergency materials. Several loads of CCD-provided food have been transported by helicopter to isolated communities this week. Soon we'll be able to start moving them by land.
The United Methodist Committee on Relief has also responded by sending a disaster response specialist last week for two days. He reviewed what CCD is doing, projected what it needs to carry out its ministry over the coming months, and returned to the U.S. to make his report. He also helped folks in CCD look at some issues of pastoral care and long-term planning that we hadn't addressed during the initial crisis response.
We have been overwhelmed by the messages of support and the offers to help. All week long we've been swamped by phone calls and e-mail, including messages from many of you asking how you can be of help. We're sorry we've been unable to respond to many of the messages. While there is an immediate need for specialized bilingual volunteers, the main assistance you can offer is by raising money for the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) or other responsible relief groups and pressuring the U.S. government to respond more adequately. CCD's webpage, http://www.gbgm-umc.org/honduras/ccd/, will carry up-to-date information about contributions and volunteers.
Mexico and several European governments responded quickly to the disaster, but the U.S. government's response was rather slow and tentative at first. The U.S. decision to withdraw more than 200 Peace Corps volunteers working throughout the country was particularly short-sighted and sent the wrong signal about the desire of U.S. citizens to lend a hand here during the crisis.
The Clinton administration is dispatching former presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush, along with Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton, over a ten-day period. The final response of the U.S. to the storm won't be determined for several weeks, and we urge all of you to let your representatives know that the U.S. needs to respond as generously as possible to the disaster, which has left 60 percent of the country's infrastructure in a shambles and destroyed 70 percent of its crops. The U.S. spent $2 billion in Honduras during the 1980s fighting the "Communist menace." In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, we'll see whether the U.S. can be just as generous in combating a real threat to human life and liberty.
It's also critically important that the foreign debts of Honduras and Nicaragua be immediately forgiven. A third of the national budget in Honduras goes to serving the debt. With the massive reconstruction that we face here, to continue paying that money would be even more sinful. Honduras and Nicaragua have been so completely devastated that the only way they can recover is through generous international help coupled with complete forgiveness of the debt. Church leaders here are taking the lead in calling for action on the debt. We believe church leaders in the U.S. and Europe can respond by pressuring their governments to forgive completely both bilateral debt and that which is owed to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.
Like all disasters, Mitch served to magnify existing class differences. Before the rainfall lessened, a wealthy neighbor of ours (a retired army colonel who spent time in prison for drug trafficking) insisted people on our street form an armed militia to protect us against a poorer neighborhood down the hill. "When food gets scarce, it will be the law of the jungle around here," he proclaimed, "and we need to prepare to defend ourselves." No one else in the neighborhood signed up for his militia, despite his offer to teach us how to shoot straight. Yet his fear is shared by many wealthy people here. The government's imposition of a strict curfew and suspension of constitutional rights emerge from a fear that the poor might grow desperate enough to cross the tiny but deep chasm that separates the classes here.
Mitch throws other issues into sharp relief, including environmental destruction. The lack of meaningful agrarian reform has forced peasants into the mountains to slash and burn the jungle; when the rains come the denuded hillsides can't hold all the water, so the rivers flood. Ours, therefore, was not completely a "natural" disaster. The nascent process of democratization is also highlighted by the storm and the emergency response. How the civilian government and the military get along during this crisis will give indications of whether Honduras is headed toward building a truly democratic society.
There are also theological questions posed by the hurricane crisis. Part of Lyda's work is helping create a safe place for people to share their grieving, confusion, and sadness. Too many people in the church want to offer easy answers about what has happened here. Some conservative evangelicals, for example, want to assign God the responsibility for this as a way to frighten people into believing in a vengeful God. Along with our sisters and brothers in CCD, we believe the church's task is to help people understand that, during the storm, God was to be found suffering and dying in the neighborhoods and villages that washed away.
Lyda Pierce & Paul Jeffrey
| Paul Jeffrey | Lyda Pierce |
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