Starting over after Mitch

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – While the exact death toll will likely never be known, it is estimated that 6,500 people died in Honduras as a result of hurricane Mitch in 1998. Perhaps more haunting is that four years later, nearly 8,000 Hondurans are still missing. Whole families, entire villages were swept away by mountainsides that turned to tombs of mud.

In the storm’s fury lies the origins of the migration to the United States of men seeking ways to make money to support their families, who remained back in Honduras and other Central American nations. Fourteen of these men, including a group of Guatemalans, drowned in the Allagash River on Sept. 12, when the van in which they were speeding to work plunged off John’s Bridge.

As the Category 5 storm swept across Latin America in late October 1998, it stalled over northern Honduras and then for five days followed the east-west tropical mountain range, Sierra de Merendon, pounding the country with catastrophic rain. It was the 35 inches of rain more than the 180 mph winds that wreaked the most havoc.

Seventy percent of the country’s agriculture, its main economic livelihood, was wiped out at a cost of $900 million. Fifty of the largest rivers flooded, knocking out nearly 100 bridges and crippling the beleaguered nation’s transportation system.

Countless communities were cut off from outside help. More than 25 villages in northern Honduras were swept away entirely. President Carlos Flores Facusse declared that in five days, Mitch wiped out 50 years of progress, virtually destroying the entire infrastructure of his country.

Mitch so changed the landscape of Honduras that in 1999, The National Geographic Institute redrew its maps of the country to reflect how the damage “changed the course of rivers and disrupted the geographical situation of numerous highways, railways and the location of human settlements.” It is estimated it will take Honduras 15 to 20 years to rebuild.

A quarter of the Honduran population of 6 million people was left homeless and jobless. These people are referred to as “damnificados” or damaged ones, left in the wake of the deadliest Atlantic storm in two centuries.

The Red Cross and Honduran government, with $1.5 billion dollars in donations from countries worldwide, built temporary villages in and around the capital.

Travelers arriving at Tegucigalpa’s airport can’t help but notice El Trebol, a refugee camp of sorts packed atop a hillside overlooking the city. It’s a place where “campesinos,” or country folk, have unwittingly become city dwellers after their villages were ravaged by Mitch.

They include people like Narissa Caballero. The 52-year-old woman wiles away her days doing common household chores in a two-room fiberboard unit she has a hard time calling home. Each unit in the housing compound is part of a string of 10 or 12 dwellings, many crammed beyond the intended capacity. Dozens of rows crown the hilltop.

The smell of beans cooking in large, steaming vats waft together with the stench of open streams of sewage flowing from units along each alleyway. Piles of litter clog some of the drainage ditches, creating small reservoirs of filth.

Blue plastic tarps tied over chicken-wire windows slap in the breeze. They are used to keep out bugs, especially mosquitoes, that may carry any one of the diseases plaguing the region.

Naked toddlers, their feet coated in dirt, dart past Caballero as she rocks back and forth, working a pair of soapy pants over a laundry stone at one of the communal sinks.

Caballero’s smile is soft and sweet. Her tired eyes drift toward her 4-meter by 8-meter home that she shares with her husband and their nine children. “Being so close together took some getting used to,” she said. “But little by little you become accustomed to it.”

Originally from the northern coast of Honduras, several years ago Caballero and her husband decided to move closer to Tegucigalpa in hopes of finding greater economic opportunity. Those dreams have faded.

Now, “I make doughnuts and my husband sells them on the street,” she said.

For many fathers and husbands, the only way to rescue their families from a life like Caballero’s and so many others, is to find work in the United States.

Baldemar Ramon, owner of Ramon Forestry Service in Clinton, Maine, has hired many Hondurans to work thinning trees in the Maine woods in the last few years. He recalls an obvious spike in Honduran men looking for work in 1999. “At first it was just a few,” he said. “Then more and more began to come.”

Prior to Mitch, most of Ramon’s workers came from Mexico. In contrast, this year’s crew, which returned home last month, consisted primarily of Hondurans.

Ruben Cruz, one of Ramon’s workers, still winces when he thinks of the damage Mitch wrought on his home in El Baranco. “When Mitch came we had no idea what a storm could do,” he recalls. “We’ve had storms before, but this one took everything away.”

Cruz and his family lived with friends while he rebuilt his home. The money he earned working in the United States is paying for the reconstruction.

Cruz said he is excited about returning to his wife and three children this year. “This trip will finish my home,” he said with a broad grin. His callused fingers fiddle with the brim of his ball cap.

At 48, Cruz is quite a bit older than the average foreign worker. But according the Ramon, “If they want to work and they can, I will give them work.”

And there seems to be no shortage of those hoping to find these kinds of jobs in the United States.