Helping real people in Honduras
by Bill Worley

When natural disasters happen, the tendency of the press is to lump as much news to the event into digestible bites as possible. That is understandable. There is only so much information that we can absorb about people we don't know.

It's different when the disaster happens to people you know in places you've been.

In the case of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, the fury and floods of Mitch hit people we know and villages and cities we've visited. This time, the 500-word summaries weren't enough. My wife, Kathryn and I, scoured the Internet for more details. We made and received phone calls from our closest friend in Honduras, Ovidio Flores of San Pedro Sula.

What follows is some of what we learned that puts the whole thing on a more personal level.

San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second largest city, sits on the edge of a dual river valley in the northern part of the country. It is an industrial city of about 600,000 with a metropolitan region that includes close to a million people. During the siege of Mitch, this region received more than 24 inches of rain. That's two feet of water in about five days.

My hometown of Kansas City floods certain sections when it receives three to five inches in a fairly short amount of time. Two feet would have floated a good deal of this place down the Missouri River toward St. Louis.

Our friend, Ovidio Flores, was reluctant to tell us that he and his family were living in several inches of water during much of the deluge. He was much more forthcoming with news about people inside the city and out in the villages beyond who suffered much more than he and his family.

In San Pedro Sula, the newest arrivals to the city typically take up residence along the edges of the several tributaries of the Chamelecon River flowing just east of the city. It is not hard to imagine what happened to these folks.

We were personally quite concerned with the impact of Mitch on the residents of a "village" of about 10,000 named "El Ocotillo." This is a brand-new village. Four years ago, no one lived on the site. What concerned us is that most of the residents of El Ocotillo are former river bank residents inside the city.

In 1995, the San Pedro Sula city government started moving some of the river bank folks to a location next to the city dump. That is the situation of El Ocotillo-10,000 people consigned to living next to the city's massive refuse pile.

During Mitch, the people of El Ocotillo were cut off from the city by the stream which became a raging torrent. The people of El Ocotillo typically bring their food home with them when they cram onto the dilapidated former U.S. school buses which serve as public transit. When Mitch hit, people couldn't get to work and couldn't get food in the open city markets they normally used. No transit-school buses could get over the mud roads or across the torrent.

Finally, at the end of this last week, Ovidio was able to get out to El Ocotillo. What he found were people who banded together to survive. They managed to overcome the food problem by doing what many of them have done for years-radical underconsumption.

Water was a bigger problem, and one that will stay for days and weeks to come. Normally, they get drinking water [not purified] from taps at "street corners" [there are no streets as such in El Ocotillo]. Now it is even more contaminated by overflow from latrines scattered behind most of the huts. Cholera and malaria cannot be far behind.

Ovidio hopes that volunteers and residents can work together to limit the likely health problems, but it is going to take financial support [for medical attention and supplies] that the residents of El Ocotillo don't have. Then this afternoon, we heard from Ovidio about another village we had worked with during our visit a year ago. Buenos Aires is quite different from El Ocotillo. It is about an hour and a half up in the hills from San Pedro Sula by car-two hours on the ubiquitous school bus-transit systems that extend far into the countryside.

It is also different because the people of Buenos Aires are farmers, not factory workers. They grow coffee, pineapple, manioc, and yucca root. They also garden near their small houses. We were not as concerned about the people of Buenos Aires because they were in a better position to feed and protect themselves.

But, what we learned today, is that a neighboring village named Balin, suffered tremendously from mudslides. The farmers of Buenos Aires walk through Balin to get to their fields and hillside crop areas. The mudslides took the lives of 25 residents of Balin, and two more people are still missing. The mudslides also indicate the degree of damage to the crops of the two villages on the hillsides above them.

It is crop damage that will limit the ability of Buenos Aires to cope with the effects of Mitch. This crop loss is added to a drought they suffered during this past spring and summer which shriveled their crops before harvest. Now the replacement harvest is essentially washed away.

So, as Ovidio relates, the people of Buenos Aires have great challenges as do the people of El Ocotillo and hundreds of thousands of others across this flooded land.

There are ways to help. Most particularly, the people of El Ocotillo need medical attention and basic food supplies. These can be purchased, but it takes money these people don't have.

The people of Buenos Aires are helping the people of Balin clean out the mud and rebuild. Both communities will need financial help to buy supplies and replant.

While many impersonal funds have been set up, there is a way to help these two different villages cope with the disaster. Central Presbyterian Church, 3501 Campbell St., Kansas City, MO 64109, has set up an account that will go directly to Ovidio Flores to buy supplies for El Ocotillo and Buenos Aires. Contributions are tax deductible.

Bill and Kathryn Worley are related directly to Jon Worley, Matt Worley, and Chris Jungle. We leave it to your imagination to figure out the connection.

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