wfn.org | United Methodists help Central Americans rebuild after Mitch

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

Nov. 30, 1998  Contact: Linda Bloom*(212) 870-3803*New York.  (698) 

By Paul Jeffrey*

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (UMNS) -- 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."

Lifeline to a stranded community

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.

Crisis quickly accelerated.

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."

Picking up the pieces

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.

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."

#  #  #
*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Honduras.

United Methodist News Service
(615)742-5470
Releases and photos also available at
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