wfn.org | In dust of devastated village, volunteers help rebuild houses, hope

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

March 23, 1999 News media contact: Thomas S. McAnally*(615) 742- 5470*
Nashville, Tenn. 10-32-71BP{158}

NOTE: Photographs are available for use with this story.

A UMNS News Feature
By Joshua Lewis*

DOCE DE FEBRERO, Honduras -- The area's nickname is "El horno del
diablo"-Satan's Furnace. It's so blazing hot in the Choluteca region of
Honduras, there's a joke that when people die, if they go to hell, they ask
for blankets.
 
Easterly winds constantly whip the silt-like dust that remained after
floodwaters receded in the wake of Hurricane Mitch nearly five months ago.
Work in the little community of Doce de Febrero, hunched near the border
with Nicaragua in the southeastern part of the country, is hot, dusty,
exhausting.

"It's the most fantastic thing I ever did in my whole life," said Steve
Wright, a member of a work team from Wesley United Methodist Church in
Bloomsburg, Pa.  The group was tired but enthusiastic as it prepared to
board a bus back to Tegucigalpa after six days working to build new,
concrete block homes with residents of the community whose adobe houses had
been largely obliterated by the storm.

Group leader Bill Wise recited the litany of activities that filled their
days at Doce: "Digging, digging and more digging. Digging foundations,
pouring concrete, carrying rocks, eating dust, carrying rocks..." 

"Eating more dust," Melanie Usry chimed in, laughing.

"If we didn't have the dust, that meant that there was no breeze and we
would have had mosquitoes. So there was positive and negative to that," Fred
Odgen said.

The group found many more positives in its experience at Doce. "The physical
conditions were absolutely brutal, but it was made up (for) by the people,"
said Jeff Hill.

"We got far more out of it than they did. Smiles, hugs, laughter. They have
such a positive spirit, full of giving and joy," Wise said.

The group was the second team to work at the site through a coordinated
effort between Church World Service (CWS) and the Honduras-based Christian
Commission for Development (CCD) to provide relief to the country's battered
population. 

CWS is an arm of the National Council of Churches, an ecumenical partnership
of 33 Protestant and orthodox Christian denominations in the United States.
The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) had been working directly
with CCD to provide relief supplies and volunteers for the recovery efforts
until turning over the relationship to CWS, said Joe Moran, a CWS regional
coordinator. CWS personnel coordinating the relief effort continue to work
out of the UMCOR Sager-Brown Depot in Baldwin, La.

The majority of the teams sent to Honduras thus far have been United
Methodist, because the denomination has such a strong infrastructure for
sending volunteers, Moran said.

Reconstruction is Phase Two in the planned relief effort, he said. "We want
to reconstruct not only their homes, but their lives," said CCD President
Noemi de Espinoza.
Phase One focused on providing emergency medical assistance, Moran said.
Phase Three of the plan will work to restore agricultural production.

For the reconstruction phase, CCD has set the goal of building 2,000 homes
in two years - not all of them by itself but through coordination with local
churches and other organizations.

CCD has outlined six regions of the country in which it will concentrate its
efforts over the next two years. Many are areas the organization worked in
before Hurricane Mitch, and the relief efforts are a continuation of those
community-based aid projects, said Norma Elisa Mejia, CCD project
coordinator.

Choluteca was the first area to receive CCD work teams. Work there is
scheduled to be completed in three to four months, though some volunteers at
Doce speculated it would take longer. CCD has also begun sending teams to
the mountainous region around Santa Barbara in the northwestern part of the
country.

Teams will be deployed soon in the capital, Tegucigalpa, as well. Volunteers
working here may have the easiest time in terms of accommodations, as they
will stay at CCD's Monte Carmelo retreat center which, though humble, looks
like Club Med compared to 'Hotel Doce,' the wry name painted on a wooden
sign in front of the two floorless tents where volunteers sleep. Three other
regions around the country are slated for future work projects.

Though the conditions at Doce were tough, Odgen said the environment
afforded an opportunity to better know the residents, because volunteers
remain at the site around the clock. "The relationships that you build are
much greater in this environment," he said.

Hill said that before he came to Doce, he wondered whether sending American
volunteers down to Honduras was the best way to spend mission dollars.

"I questioned whether it would be better just to send the money," he said.
But the trip resolved the issue for him. "It was not the work but being with
the people," Hill said. 
"Relationships," Wise added.

"I really think that those people enjoyed us being here," Hill continued.
"Not that we're so great, but it was something different for them, exciting.
And so I came away with a very positive feeling about it."

Hill said the experience transformed his concern from the abstract to the
concrete. "You really start to care about these people as people. You care
about these particular people. You're not caring about Honduras as a
country, but now when I go back, I care about Severino's family, his sons. I
think about those particular people and wonder, 'What is going on?'" he
said.

 "John made one of the best statements last night and it sums up the
children," Wise said. "He said to Maria, who is one of these beautiful
little children, 'Your eyes light up the sky.' And it's just so true."

"I see Christ in them, and I'm convinced they've seen Christ in us," Odgen
said. 
The group also developed "an appreciation for how lucky we are, how blessed
we are," Hill said. The physical and material differences were obvious, he
said.
 
"This is by our term an underdeveloped nation, and we're not so sure that's
bad," Ogden said.

"They're happy and content, and the materialistic American never seems to be
happy and content," he continued. "Maybe the situation ought to be
reversed." And with the sweat and dust of their days in Doce still heavy on
their skin, the others quickly began to demur.
 "At least for one week anyway," Wise added. Someone made a crack about
telling Odgen's wife what he had said.

 "Can I have your Ford Explorer?" Hill asked Ogden.

Several members of the group expressed their intention to continue in some
way their relationship with the people of Doce. In fact, though none of the
group volunteered the information, members left with CCD enough money to
purchase for the village two oxen and a cart for hauling sand and other
building materials, Marta Pendrey, national coordinator for groups, later
said.

"We all agreed that it's impossible to put this experience into words. We
were talking about how we are going to talk to our spouses or our families
about this, and we don't think we're going to be able to adequately explain
it," Hill said.

And despite their upbeat attitudes, in the course of its work the group had
dubbed a particularly stubborn patch of earth 'The Hole from Hell' and 'The
Pit of Despair.' Several members had labored for five days with pick axes
and large crowbars to carve a foundation for a house out of the hillside
and, by the time they had to leave, were only about halfway through. A new
group, arriving as the Wesley United Methodist Church team departed,
inherited the job.

The next morning several members of the new team - an ecumenical group of
college students from two universities in South Carolina - learned for
themselves why the site was called "The Pit of Despair."

But the Rev. Tom Wall, the campus minister from the Wesley Foundation at the
University of South Carolina, Columbia, offered a different view. "You could
also call it the Pit of Hope."

United Methodists and others interested in sending volunteer teams to
Honduras in coordination with CCD  may contact Glenn Rogers of CWS at (888)
283-6113.

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