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November 30, 1998
By Paul Jeffrey*
Destruction along the Choluteca River in Tegucigalpa. (Photo credit: Paul Jeffrey/CCD.)
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Jessica Culley always thought of water as "a source of life." That was before Hurricane Mitch.
"I've never seen so much water in my life," she said, "water that turned incredibly violent and tumultuous, that brought destruction and suffering rather than life."
A 22-year old graduate of Allegheny College, Meadville, Pa., Culley came to Central America in September as a mission intern sponsored by the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries. She was assigned to the Christian Commission for Development (CCD), an ecumenical organization that works in scores of the poorest rural communities in Honduras. CCD sent her to Quimistan, a small town in the northern province of Santa Barbara.
When Mitch arrived quickly and unexpectedly at the end of October, dumping as much as four inches of rain per hour on the mountain valleys of Santa Barbara, people who never thought a hurricane would affect their remote villages fled in horror as their homes, farmlands, and animals were swept away in a raging torrent of water.
"When I moved to Honduras, my dad made me promise that I would leave if it ever got dangerous," said Culley, a native of Carlisle, Pa. "But this all happened so fast. There was no warning. There was no place to go."
By October 29, Santa Barbara was cut off from the rest of the country, the roads linking Quimistan to the rest of the world covered with mudslides, the bridges washed away.
Culley said that CCD staff in Quimistan responded quickly to the emergency, and began stuffing canvas sacks with emergency provisions of food and potable water for stranded families. Beginning on October 31, Culley and other CCD staff began to take supplies to isolated villages, both to lend assistance as well as to assess the needs of survivors. Culley said what they found wasn't pleasant. Displaced families, she reported, were suffering from fungal skin infections after living for days in water. Diarrhea and respiratory problems were widespread.
Several communities remained inaccessible for days, Culley reported. She and four other CCD staff spent one entire day trying unsuccessfully to get to one village, ultimately to be foiled by uncrossable rivers where tiny streams once flowed.
By November 3, homeless families who had escaped from the mountains began to gather in the village of La Laguna, and Culley pitched in building temporary shelters, helping survivors organize latrine construction, and carrying in chlorine to disinfect water. CCD brought in a truck filled with food donated by villagers further to the west.
Culley helped CCD staff do a detailed study of the 250 refugee families living in La Laguna, analyzing their immediate and long-term needs in the wake of Hurricane Mitch.
"I spent a lot of time listening," Culley said. "I was amazed at how calm many of them were, considering how their lives had just been violently interrupted. Some of that was shock, but some of it was also the patience of the poor, of people accustomed to having to struggle to survive. Yet with time some of them grew frustrated and tired, they just wanted to go home. But there's no home for them anymore, their houses and villages are gone."
The worst disaster in the modern history of the hemisphere, Hurricane Mitch killed more than 20,000 people and left more than half a million homeless throughout Central America. Honduras was the country hardest hit, with 60 percent of its infrastructure washed away and almost three-quarters of its harvests ruined.
Whether the disaster's impact is measured in human lives or economic damages, Nicaragua wasn't far behind.
United Methodist missionary Nan McCurdy has lived in Nicaragua since 1984. For the last nine years, she has worked with a group of peasant women in San Francisco Libre, a dusty community an hour north of the capital. In normal times the town is more than one kilometer away from giant Lake Managua.
On October 28, a group of three women leaders from the community made their way to McCurdy's home in Managua to warn her that the lake was rising. Yet as McCurdy and her husband, fellow United Methodist missionary Miguel Mairena, prepared to travel to San Francisco Libre to help evacuate families at risk, the road to the community washed away.
Well before dawn on October 29, the 12,000 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. The town's mayor, Jose de la Cruz Bermudez, used his truck headlights to guide townspeople to the Catholic church, which stood on higher ground.
Bermudez used his cellular phone to call McCurdy and Mairena. "He wanted permission to use some funds we had set aside for the women's health program to buy what gasoline and oil he could find in the community," McCurdy said. "We said yes, and he provided the fuel to small fisherfolks in the community so they could get to outlying villages in their small boats and pull people off rooftops and out of trees."
Bermudez also appealed to McCurdy and Mairena to mobilize what support they could in Managua. The couple came up with $20,000 after looting their savings, knocking on the doors of friends, and getting a loan from the Antonio Valdivieso Ecumenical Center, to which they are assigned. They started buying emergency food supplies and medicines, along with more gasoline and oil for the town's boats. They acquired chlorine and flashlight batteries, and they started calling anyone they knew who might have a boat.
On Sunday November 1, Mairena led a flotilla of eight boats carrying relief supplies to San Francisco Libre, the first assistance to arrive from the outside. The voyage took three hours on rough waters as Mitch-provoked rains continued to fall. Yet Mairena, who grew up in the remote Solentiname Islands in the south of Nicaragua, is an experienced pilot. "It got a little rough out there," he acknowledged. "If you're not used to it, it gets a little frightening."
On November 2, the couple bought a 21-foot boat and outboard motor, and began a daily ferry service to San Francisco Libre, on each trip hauling over a ton of supplies into the community, then bringing out wounded and frightened survivors. Mairena made one trip with medical students from the Nicaraguan People's University in Managua, who in turn set up an emergency clinic in the building that housed the women's health program. The missionaries' little boat became the only lifeline to the remote community.
McCurdy said that thanks to the quick action of Bermudez and other community leaders, not a single life was lost in San Francisco Libre. That wasn't the case in several nearby villages along Lake Managua. By the time rescuers from San Francisco Libre arrived in Cuatro Palos, McCurdy reported, they found several people who had died of hypothermia awaiting rescue in trees, their dead fingers still wrapped tight around the branches.
As the flood waters began to recede, McCurdy and Mairena began helping townspeople return to homes that hadn't been destroyed. Yet with 223 homes washed away and 43 having suffered major damage, about 1500 people in the community remain living in school classrooms or with neighbors. McCurdy said a major rebuilding project confronts San Francisco Libre. Yet she promised that she and Mairena "will continue to accompany the people as they remake their community." McCurdy said the years of organizing the women of the town will make the task easier. "The women have been working together for years to educate themselves, to struggle for life in the midst of poverty. The storm hasn't changed that, it's just made the challenges greater," McCurdy said.
More than 4,000 people reportedly died in Nicaragua. Mairena said the death toll would have been less if the nation's political leaders had responded more quickly. "The mayor of San Francisco Libre was out there in his underwear and rubber boots working with the people to save lives, while President [Arnoldo] Aleman was trying to take political advantage of the storm," Mairena declared.
Aleman has been widely criticized by church leaders and aid groups for his response to Hurricane Mitch. Even the nation's Comptroller General, Agustin Jarquin, the official in charge of auditing government spending, accused Aleman of "political manipulation of the emergency aid."
When the rain began to wash away highways and bridges, Aleman stubbornly refused to issue a state of emergency, a move that would have allowed rural farmers to default on loans they owe to banks. A state of emergency would also have loosened the government's stranglehold on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of which Aleman sees as ideological enemies. For months before the storm, the Nicaraguan government had impounded several containers of material aid in customs, demanding taxes of 40 to 100 percent from churches and NGOs to which they were destined.
Aleman also initially insisted that all hurricane relief aid from abroad be channeled through the government, a decision that slowed down the arrival of international assistance. A full week after the storm, after being booed during visits to affected communities, Aleman ceded to widespread criticism and finally allowed aid to private organizations, including churches.
To confound his critics, Aleman also turned management of almost all government aid over to the Catholic church, even though church leaders hadn't sought the task. It was a neat trick that "threw the hot potato into the church's lap," said Donna Vukelich, a political analyst in Managua. "It allowed Aleman to avoid responsibility for the government's failure to respond adequately." According to Gilberto Aguirre, the executive director of the Nicaraguan Council of Evangelical Churches, putting the Catholic church in charge "created discrimination and serious division" within many Nicaraguan communities.
"We faced the biggest disaster in our history," Mairena said, "and the government was playing politics rather than helping people. The government's response was more of a catastrophe than the hurricane."
As the rain fell steadily on Honduras, our family helped several neighboring families out of harm's way in the mountain village outside of Tegucigalpa where we live. We evacuated our own home for one night when the river below us threatened to tear down the hillside. When the waters began to recede, the house directly below us was left filled to the eaves with mud and rocks.
After three days, a German neighbor and I managed to wade the river below us and ride our mountain bikes over mudslides into what remained of Tegucigalpa, where entire neighborhoods were wiped away and over one thousand people killed. After two more days, my wife Lyda Pierce was also able to get out. We spent the following days helping CCD respond to the crisis.
Pierce was assigned to work with a committee coordinating church assistance to people living in hundreds of emergency shelters around the capital. She spent days visiting the schools, church buildings, and government offices that have been converted into temporary living quarters for the poor families left homeless by Mitch.
Homeless children in the Soto neighborhood of Tegucigalpa enjoy a puppet show during a cultural event conducted in a temporary shelter for victims of Hurricane Mitch. The November 21 event was coordinated by CCD pastoral staff. (Photo credit: Tina Manley/CCD.)
In addition to providing material aid to the victims, CCD is coordinating a program of pastoral care for victims suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome. Pierce planned and helped lead a training program for pastors responding to the emergency in Tegucigalpa. Once roads are reopened to the Honduran countryside, she will travel to other areas of the country to train pastoral personnel in responding to the psychological and spiritual needs of victims.
Working with a coalition of Catholic and Protestant leaders in Tegucigalpa, she also helped put together a series of concerts in the emergency shelters, featuring songs, popular theater, puppets, and comedy. The performances involve both shelter residents as well as people living in the immediate neighborhood.
The church in Honduras faces an immediate task of "helping people find hope somewhere amidst the mud and struggle," Pierce said, "wherever that hope may be, whether it's in a vision, a symbol, or a relationship. Often hope can emerge from a simple caring relationship, in knowing you're not alone. With that knowledge, people can often find the strength they need to get up and go on with their lives, even though their loss is otherwise so devastating."
Pierce said it was essential that "people have a safe space to share their grieving and confusion and sadness. In the church we've got to help people refrain from offering easy answers about what happened here. Some conservative pastors want to assign God the responsibility for this as a way to frighten people into believing in a vengeful God. I think it's important that the church help people understand that during the storm God was to be found suffering and dying in the neighborhoods and villages that washed away."
Pierce said she was amazed at the outpouring of solidarity from people in other countries. "We've personally received calls and email from hundreds of people asking how they can contribute financially, how they can volunteer their services here during the emergency and during the period of reconstruction," Pierce said. "It's encouraging. It helps me remain hopeful when I think about the overwhelming task of reconstruction that await us in Central America."
*Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Honduras.
Source: United Methodist News Service.
