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Part 2 of a 4-part series
A solitary church is located just over a knoll created by a decade of mudslides. The one-room, cinderblock building is a 30-minute walk from the Honduran village of Santa Lucia. Usually it’s quiet, but not tonight.
The non-denominational chapel overflows with forlorn faces. From the shadows, wails are heard. Strangers and friends have traveled from communities near and far. Many arrive on foot or piled into the beds of pickup trucks.
There is no priest or minister assigned to this rural community. Only a few of the families are Catholic. The majority practice Evangelical Christianity, and their faith is strong. It sustains them through times like these.
“I suppose God is testing us,” said Juan Alcantara, the father of 28-year-old Alexis, one of the tree thinners who died tragically in a van crash in the Allagash River in northern Maine on Sept. 12. His words are not spoken with bitterness.
“God says He must ‘punish and discipline’ those He recognizes as His children. Scripture tells us,” he said, “that the Words of God are right and true, and we must find our strength in the support of the Words of God. He knows my weaknesses and He helps me.”
Alcantara not only grieves for his son, but he deeply misses the occasion to share that grief with his wife. She recently died, leaving the 54-year-old man utterly distraught.
“Thank you for sharing our grief, even though this is the first time we have met,” he explains to strangers attending the all-night vigil for three of the crash victims. “In these moments, one is grateful for and recognizes the caring of others,”
For days after the funerals held in the nearby town of Aramecina, the tiny village of Santa Lucia swells with those offering strength and tenderness. But a bright, green house in the center of the village that had been buzzing with activity just nights before, is quiet again.
In the darkened family room, Delkin Padilla Alvarado’s grandmother, Benicia, takes up the same corner in which she sat the night of the vigils. Her eyes lock on something that is only visible in her mind. Two nights ago she was grieving the 22-year-old’s death. Today, her concern mounts over her daughter Miriam.
Miriam is not home. “We sent her to the doctor. She has not eaten or slept in days.”
The grandmother is clearly distraught by her daughter’s inability to cope with her grief. Suddenly, tears begin to flow. “If she gives up … if she goes, then I will go, too, because I cannot live without her,” she says.
She has known this pain and suffering before. Another daughter lost her young son just two years before, and only recently have her spirits revived. All of the family fears that Miriam will suffer as greatly as her sister did, so they have been rallying around her.
Next door to the house in which they all live is a plot of land. It’s large by Santa Lucia standards. Miriam’s friend Sofia Gomez says it is the place Alvarado planned to build a home for his mother. But without him, the wood piled under a rain-soaked, red tarp will likely go unused. And Miriam’s dream of owning a home is washed away in a torrent of sorrow.
The entire town seems paralyzed with grief and fear. Now that more than half of the working male population is gone, the hope of a prosperous tomorrow seems as distant and unfamiliar as the place where the men lost their lives.
An hour’s walk from Santa Lucia, perched precariously on a mountainside, is a community of a handful of huts. This is El Cantil.
Wandering high on the hillside, where she and her husband Alcidez Ch vez Herndez, another victim of the Allagash, planted a modest milpa or banana plantation, Angela, fixates on a leaf she wraps and unwraps around her finger. This is where the 32-year-old widow spends most of her time these days, imagining what could have been.
The muddy soil makes it hard to walk the steep incline, but Angela seems to have only one concern: How will she feed her family?
She has no one to help her tend the land – the children are too young and she has no relatives living close by. She cannot expect assistance from her neighbors, as the other men in the village have their own lands to tend, and women generally do not work the fields.
“There is not enough to sell, just to eat,” she explains. Her plot of land has two dozen or so banana trees, several rows of corn and beans. The crop yield this summer, unfortunately, was poor.
She says little. Even lifting her eyes to acknowledge what is said to her seems almost painful. A friend tries to coax Angela to return home.
“No,” she says softly to Sofia Gomez, “I feel weak from so much sadness.” Angela prefers to remain where she is, feeling somehow closer to her deceased husband, who used to work this land himself.
But Sofia, like any good friend, knows Angela should not be left alone. She tells Angela to consider the widow’s five young children, to be strong for them. Eventually, Angela gives in and they return to the small two-room home with dirt floors and no electricity. The family gets water by running a hose from the ravine.
Back at her hut, several chickens flitter around an outside pen. Several dogs, their skin pulled tightly over their ribcages, watch with hunger – too weak to chase what would otherwise be natural prey. A lone rooster sporadically shatters the quiet. Angela remembers how Alcidez would tell her to “feed the children eggs every day” so they would be sure to get some protein.
In the half-light of the hut, Delia, her second-oldest daughter, labors over a small mill grinding corn for tortillas – a traditional staple in the Honduran diet. The pile of dried corn is spreading across the floor of the family room. Along with a small bag of beans, this is all the food the family has to get through the coming rainy season.
“The only hope of help was my husband who had to work far away,” Angela says.
But the family isn’t quite as poor as its members believe. As Angela searches through a powder-blue Rubbermaid bin filled with her husband’s personal effects, she finds slips of paper she doesn’t recognize. They are deposit slips from a savings account Alcidez set up at a bank in Caribou, Maine. Alcidez died just two days before he would have sent his usual monthly wire transfer to her via Western Union.
A flurry of questions fills Angela’s head. Who has the money? Where is it? Why was the money not sent with his things? Will she and her family even receive it?
Her excitement wanes quickly and the blank stare returns as she realizes how foreign the world her husband used to work in really is to her. Consumed with grief, she concentrates on slips of paper she wraps and unwraps around her finger.
Michelle M. Falck is a bilingual freelance writer. She works as the Director of Project Management at the Institute for Public-Private Partnerships – an international training and consulting firm – in Washington, D.C.
Stephen M. Katz is the assistant photography editor for the Bangor Daily News.
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