Santa Lucia, Honduras
8 November 1998

Dear friends:
        When we moved to Tegucigalpa two years ago, we assured our families and
friends that compared to the other places we had lived in Central
America, the capital of Honduras was a tranquil and relatively safe
place, exempted by its location from earthquakes, hurricanes, and the
other natural disasters that plague much of Central America. And then
came Hurricane Mitch and proved us wrong.
        As hurricanes go, Mitch was a sucker punch. Rather than the hit-and-run
frenzy of normal Caribbean hurricanes, this storm–the fourth largest of
the century–moved just off the Honduran coast and then stalled, despite
computer models that kept predicting it would move away to the north.
For days it pumped rainfall, as much as four inches an hour, over
Honduras and northern Nicaragua. By the time the rain began to ease, the
devastation was widespread, immense, and tragic.
        In our mountain neighborhood just outside the capital, we watched
helplessly as several neighbors' homes washed away in the storm. The
house below ours filled with mud to the eaves. We moved out of our house
for one night when the bank below us began to crumble away.
        When the rain eased, our community was left isolated for three days,
the road washed away both above us and below us. Finally, Paul and a
German neighbor waded the river below us and rode their mountain bikes
over mudslides into what remained of Tegucigalpa. It was a despairing
scene. Entire neighborhoods along the Choluteca River had been taken by
surprise by the floods and well over one thousand people died or
disappeared just in the capital. Many of them had days earlier offered
their extra clothes or food for victims of Mitch on the north coast,
never imagining that they would soon become victims themselves.
        Yet there was hope among the ruins, incarnated by those who led the
homeless to shelter, comforted the mourning and fed the hungry. Many of
those who rescued others had themselves watched their own homes flood or
be jerked away by the violent currents. For all the stories of terror
that the international press has relayed so well in the days after the
storm, this disaster also produced thousands of untold stories of
personal heroism and sacrifice.
        The real death toll will never be known, for many of those who died
were poor people who lived at the margins of society, clinging to
hillsides or gullies around the big cities or carving out a meager
living on a small parcel of farmland in the mountains. When they were
alive they barely counted, and when they were washed away by the storm,
there were few to mourn them. The official death toll will probably end
up about 10,000 in Honduras. Counting the dead in Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, Mitch will have killed about 15,000 people.
Another million or so were left homeless.
        It has been a difficult week for a lot of us. The stress and workload
produced by the storm is immense. There are a thousand things to do at
once, all of them urgent. Yet it's been a privilege for us to work with
CCD, the Christian Development Commission, which has been responding
effectively and creatively to the crisis in several areas around the
country.
        Paul spent all this last week coordinating international communications
for CCD, which is the main Protestant organization here responding to
the emergency. Paul has written daily updates on the crisis for CCD's
partner agencies abroad, briefed arriving international journalists on
how relief organizations were responding, and drafted a successful
application for emergency aid from the European Union.
        Lyda finally got across the river on Wednesday and since then has been
helping coordinate CCD's assistance to emergency shelters in the
capital. In addition to material aid to the victims, Lyda is helping CCD
design a program of pastoral care for victims suffering from
post-traumatic shock syndrome. During this coming week, probably
Wednesday, Lyda will lead a one-day training program for pastors
responding to the emergency in the Tegucigalpa area. Once land travel
becomes possible, Lyda will travel to other areas of the country to
train pastoral personnel in responding to the psychological and
spiritual needs of victims.
        Although since Friday we can get our jeep across the river into the
capital, access from Tegucigalpa to the rest of the country is just now
being reestablished. Food, water, and gasoline remain in short supply. A
plane bringing relief supplies for CCD from the U.S., sponsored by
Church World Service, arrives tomorrow. Several more flights of material
for CCD will arrive later in the week. As roads are reopened, the
situation will improve. Meanwhile, CCD is gearing up for a rapid
deployment of food and other emergency materials. Several loads of
CCD-provided food have been transported by helicopter to isolated
communities this week, but soon we'll be able to start moving them by
land.
        The United Methodist Committee on Relief has also responded, and this
last week sent a disaster response specialist for two days. He reviewed
what CCD is doing and what it needs to carry out its ministry over the
coming months, and returned to the U.S. to make his report. Yet while he
was here he also helped folks in CCD look at some issues of pastoral
care and long-term planning that we hadn't paid attention to because we
were all caught up in the initial crisis response.
        We have been overwhelmed by the messages of support and the offers to
help. All week long we've been swamped by phone calls and email,
including messages from many of you, asking how you can be of help.
We're sorry we've been unable to respond to many of the messages. While
there is an immediate need for specialized bilingual volunteers, the
main assistance you can offer is by raising money for UMCOR or other
responsible relief groups and pressuring the U.S. government to respond
more adequately. CCD's webpage (online sometime tomorrow at
www.gbgm-umc.org/honduras/ccd ) will carry up to date information about
contributions and volunteers.
        Mexico and several European governments responded quickly to the
disaster, but the U.S. government's response was rather slow and
tentative at first. The U.S. decision to withdraw more than 200 Peace
Corps volunteers working throughout the country was particularly
short-sighted and sent the wrong signal about the desire of U.S.
citizens to lend a hand here during the crisis.
        The Clinton administration is dispatching former Presidents Jimmy
Carter and George Bush, along with Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton, over
a ten-day period. The U.S. final response to the storm won't be
determined for several weeks, and we urge all of you to let your
representatives know that the U.S. needs to respond as generously as
possible to the disaster, which has left 60 percent of the country's
infrastructure in a shambles and destroyed 70 percent of its crops. The
U.S. spent $2 billion in Honduras during the eighties fighting the
"communist menace." In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, we'll see whether
the U.S. can be just as generous in combating a real threat to human
life and liberty.
        It's also critically important that the foreign debts of Honduras and
Nicaragua be immediately forgiven. A third of the national budget in
Honduras goes to serving the debt. With the massive reconstruction that
we face here, to continue paying that money would be even more sinful.
Honduras and Nicaragua have been so completely devastated that the only
way they can recover is through generous international solidarity
coupled with complete forgiveness of the debt. Church leaders here are
taking the lead in calling for action on the debt, and we believe church
leaders in the U.S. and Europe can respond by pressuring their
governments to forgive completely both bilateral debt and that which is
owed to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.
        Like all disasters, Mitch served to magnify existing contradictions of
class. Before the rainfall lessened, a wealthy neighbor of ours–a
retired army colonel who spent time in prison for drug
trafficking–insisted people on our street form an armed militia to
protect us against a poorer neighborhood down the hill. "When food gets
scarce, it will be the law of the jungle around here," he proclaimed,
"and we need to prepare to defend ourselves." No one else in the
neighborhood signed up for his militia, despite his offer to teach us
how to shoot straight. Yet his fear is shared by many wealthy people
here. The government's imposition of a strict curfew and suspension of
constitutional rights emerge from a fear that the poor might grow
desperate enough to cross the tiny but deep chasm that separates the
classes here.
        There are other issues that Mitch throws into sharp relief, including
environmental degradation. The lack of meaningful agrarian reform has
forced peasants into the mountains to slash and burn the jungle, and
when the rains come the denuded hillsides can't hold all the water, so
the rivers flood. It was thus not completely a "natural" disaster. The
nascent process of democratization is also highlighted by the storm and
the emergency response. How civilian government and the military get
along during this crisis will give indications of whether Honduras is
headed toward building a truly democratic society.
        There are also theological questions posed by the hurricane and the
resulting crisis. Part of Lyda's work is helping create a safe place for
people to share their grieving and confusion and sadness. Too many
people in the church want to offer easy answers about what has happened
here. Some conservative evangelicals, for example, want to assign God
the responsibility for this as a way to frighten people into believing
in a vengeful God. Along with our sisters and brothers in CCD, we
believe the church's task is to help people understand that during the
storm God was to be found suffering and dying in the neighborhoods and
villages that washed away.
 

                                        Lyda and Paul