In The Wake of Hurricane Mitch
by Paul Jeffrey
When Hurricane Mitch swept through Central America at the end of October, one of the hardest hit communities was San Francisco Libre, a dusty village in Nicaragua where local women, with the help of United Methodist Women, had made great strides in improving health care and caring for their environment. (See "Mission From Within Community," page 34, July-August 1998 issue of Response.)
In normal times, the town of some 12,000 people is more than one kilometer from Lake Managua. During the predawn hours Oct. 29, 1998, with rain falling at up to four inches per hour in the deforested mountains around the lake, residents of San Francisco Libre woke up to find their houses caught in rapidly-rising flood waters. Electricity failed, and in the darkness, neighbors pulled neighbors out of homes. Guided only by the headlights of the mayor's truck, townspeople made their way to the Catholic church, which stood on higher ground.
Not one life was lost in San Francisco, something Zoraida Soza, a former United Methodist international person in mission, considers a tribute to the organizational level of the community. "People helped each other; neighbors tied themselves together with ropes to get everyone through the waters to safety," said Ms. Soza, who works as a consultant to the United Methodist Women-supported women's project in the community. "The women's groups and other organizations worked well together to prevent an even greater disaster."
More than 400 homes in the community were destroyed by the flood waters. More than six weeks afterward, some houses still remained flooded, including that of Marta Jaime, the local director for the Women and Community Program.
Many who recovered their homes lost most of their clothing and household utensils. A majority of the thousands of trees planted by the women in recent years were swept away. Chickens, pigs and cows were washed away, their decomposing bodies provoking serious health problems. Almost all crops were lost, and many fields had the fertile topsoil scoured away, leaving only sand and rock.
While roads to San Francisco Libre were still impassable, Ms. Soza and United Methodist missionaries Nan McCurdy and Miguel Mairena helped bring emergency aid to the community by a small boat from Managua. The building housing the women’s program office was converted into a distribution center for beans, rice and powdered milk, as well as an emergency clinic where a brigade of medical students from the Nicaraguan People's University in Managua attended to hundreds of patients.
As the flood waters slowly began to recede, the women's program conducted workshops for residents, many still living in temporary shelters, on how to handle post-traumatic stress syndrome.
"This was an emotional disaster," Ms. Soza said in a mid-December phone interview. "Many of the women are having a hard time coping. They start crying easily without any apparent reason."
Many residents are thinking of migrating to the capital in search of economic alternatives, a quest that will in most cases fail, the migrants merely swelling the ranks of the urban poor, Ms. Soza said. Yet she understands how the women feel.
"There's not much hope these days," she admitted. "Many women feel like Marta Jaime does. She is the only economic support of her family. Much of her identity was in that little house she had built with her own hands. Now that her house and belongings are gone, she feels like she is nothing. A lot of women feel like she does. They just don't see any alternatives."
The women's program continues to bring food into the community, and will soon bring seeds to help families replant where they can, Ms. Soza said. But even with good weather, the first harvests are months away.
"We're also doing what we can to plant some seeds of hope," Ms. Soza said. "But it's a new context within which we're working. All the physical signs of years of work were wiped away almost overnight. We face some tough challenges in the months ahead."
Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He lives outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras.