We're Alive!

Dear friends:

It's been an interesting day. In the morning we helped a neighbor evacuate her house because of the rising river below us, and she and her four kids moved in with us. Paul then went off to CCD (Christian Commission for Development) to get off a comunique about the hurricane, which he achieved just as the phones were failing there.

When he tried to come home, he navigated several half-eaten highways and flooded sections (thank God for four wheel drive) only to finally be stopped a kilometer down the road where the bridge at Chimbo had overflown, washing away a couple of houses, trapping a woman in the middle of the river, and finally taking out a ten-meter section of the highway. The woman got rescued.

After waiting in vain for three hours for the water to go down, Paul drove back into Teguz, navigating the same interesting sections, then up the winding dirt road to La Montañita, then over to Santa Lucia, and down the highway to our house. This route entailed the more circumnavigation of mudslides and crossing of rivers that had overflowed the road. A couple of places he was the last one through before it washed away. He had to finally hike the last five minutes because the last flooded section had giant tree trunks zooming across every so often. He just went out with a neighbor during a lull in the rain and they managed to somehow get it the last part of the way home. I didn't ask how.

I spent the day keeping kids alive, helping a family very nervous about their house to feel at home here, and trying to find flashlights, which all apparently crawled off and hid somewhere. The power went out in the middle of the day, but so far the phone line still works, and with laptop batteries (thank God for laptop batteries) we can check our email (as long as the batteries last). Yet it's started raining again, and the phone line could go at any time. If you don't hear from us for a while, don't worry.

It's obvious that we're trapped here for a while. There is so much destruction throughout the country that our road may not get fixed very soon, and it doesn't seem that they could even begin to do the job until the raging rivers go down. That may be several days.

We have water stored up, lots of candles, hopes of finding the flashlights, good neighbors, and plenty of rain for the garden. We feel fortunate compared with the half million people in Honduras who are homeless tonight because of the rain.

Shalom, Lyda