Staying at home despite Allagash tragedy, some workers are eager to return

Because of his family, especially his hope for a better life for his children, Rene Flores, 39, has made the long journey to the United States each year to work. Ironically, it was due to those family concerns that this year he did not return to the United States. It may have saved his life.

Flores, a native of Caridad, Honduras, has been making the exhausting trip to work in the Allagash region of northern Maine for the past four years. “This year I did not go because of her,” he nods toward his wife, Berlin Isabel, who is holding their 3-month-old baby, William. “Since she was pregnant and the hospital is far away, I had to be here in case of an emergency.”

Flores relishes the time he spends with his family, which includes Berlin Isabel, her mother and his seven children. They live in a modest cinder-block home near a stream that flows along the northern edge of town. As they sit and chat in the main room, Flores’ glance shifts back and forth between his loving wife and the vintage television set perched on a bookshelf across the room.

The clamber of voices comes to an abrupt halt when a news report about the funerals of some of the victims from September’s van accident in the Allagash flickers on the screen. Every eye is fixed on the images of steel caskets being lowered into hand-dug graves and of weeping widows collapsing into outstretched arms. And everyone knows that it just as easily could have been footage of Berlin Isabel wailing Rene’s name.

Nonetheless, Flores is hopeful he will have the opportunity to return again to Maine in the coming year.

“We are poor,” he notes, and the money he earns working the timberlands provides his family with a better quality of life than most of his neighbors in the small town tucked amid the dense jungles that separate El Salvador and Honduras. But not having gone this year may have hurt his chances to return.

“I do not know if I will be given preference [because of having worked there in the past], but I was a good worker, productive, and I was never any trouble to the firm. I did not go this year because I could not, but besides that I never had any problems with anyone.”

The heightened security measures in the United States could pose a problem also. He knows between 10 and 15 people who were refused visas this year. He doesn’t know exactly why, but agrees it could be a result of the post-9-11 measures.

In the meantime, he remains hopeful while he awaits notification from his connection at Evergreen Forestry Services, the Idaho company that hires foreign laborers. “For me the work was good. I cannot complain. Any job, whether here or there, is going to be hard but [the money from] working there helps more.”

For most of the foreign workers, life in Maine presents many surprises. The temperature, for one, was difficult at first for Flores to get used to.

“The weather when we arrive [in March] is cool. Later comes the heat. And the last two months, it is cold.” He remembers being “surprised” at seeing his first snowfall. “I did not know how I was going to survive. I was afraid to go outside.”

Flores belly laughs when he describes seeing his first moose. He holds his hands high above his head gesturing to those riveted by his tales of Maine and its enormous creatures. And then, of course, there were mosquitoes. “Everybody talks about the mosquitoes.” He shakes his head with disdain. “When we would plant, we had to use repellant. But when we were cutting, the smoke from the machines kept them away.”

For now, though, Flores doesn’t need to contend with moose, bears or bugs as he toils on a couple of acres of cornfields he leases to support his family.

Each morning, often accompanied by one or two of his older sons, Ren? Fern ndez, 17, and Johnny Omar, 15, he walks the rugged dirt road connecting Caridad to the lush hillsides that seem endless in every direction. The mile or two, strewn with crevices a foot deep or more, must remind him of the timber roads in northern Maine he used to negotiate on his way to work. The backbreaking job of cultivating the land and fertilizing his crop also must remind him of his long days in the north woods.

Hard work is a reality, and Flores knows his sons will likely follow in his footsteps.

“They are studying, but they will probably have no other choice but to work the land also. It is difficult to find work, and this way, working the land, at least you have corn all year and do not have to buy it.” Ren? smiles and adds, “Here the tortilla is everything,” referencing corn as the primary ingredient of their preferred dish.

Ren? and his friend and neighbor, Juan de la Cruz Izaguirre, have much in common. Izaguirre, 32, tends his father’s plot of land just a few miles down the road. He found work with Evergreen in the United States after Flores had recommended him to the company. Izaguirre labored in pine plantations in Louisiana and Texas last year. And like Flores, he is still waiting for a visa to return this year to work in Maine.

Until then, Izaguirre will continue the daily trek along washed-out roads to his father’s fields, his two dogs in tow. He is a sinewy man who is soft spoken, only occasionally letting a modest, half-smile steal across his face.

He climbs a steep hill to the farthest point of the field. A sack of fertilizer half his size is flung over his back. He spends hours tracing up and down the rows of corn, throwing fistfuls of granulated fertilizer at the roots. Down and back, back and forth, the routine is mindless.

“It’s been raining a lot and the plants start to turn yellow [if you don’t fertilize],” Izaguirre said.

On average, hired help is paid 50 lempiras per day – roughly $3. “Sometimes one looks for workers when there is a lot of work,” but not this year. This has been a poor year for most farmers and Izaguirre works alone. A backdrop of successive hillside farms unfolds behind him. He is merely one of a countless army of men struggling to put food on his family’s table.

The ability to just walk into a supermarket to buy what he wants at relatively little cost seems foreign to him at home. It is something he misses about the United States. “Because we earned a little more there, we’d eat well for the week, and here maybe we cannot do that,” Izaguirre said.

But like all the men who make the journey, Izaguirre missed his family of four. Now he cherishes the time he spends with them, especially in light of the tragic accident in Maine.

Izaguirre knows the sacrifice these men make trying to provide a better life for their families. After all, his cousin Carlos Humberto Izaguirre was one of the 10 Hondurans who lost his life in the Allagash trying to provide for his family.

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.