Dear friends in our supporting churches:

As most of you know, for the last week Hurricane Mitch has assaulted
Central America, and although by today the wind velocity has fallen,
heavy rain (as much as four inches an hour) continues to fall on the
entire country, causing flooding and landslides throughout the nation.
Accurate information is difficult to come by, but at least half a
million people in Honduras are now refugees, their homes swamped,
demolished or swept away by the boiling flood of virtually every river
in the country.

Heavy rainfall, collapsed bridges, flooded roads and other hazards have
made it impossible to search for many of the victims, dead or alive. The
official death toll is well over 100, yet since more than 200 towns
remain incommunicado, with not even rumors emerging from several
isolated regions, the numbers will soar much higher.

CCD and other church agencies have been doing what they can despite the
limitations. Staff in all the regions are helping evacuate victims and
give shelter to refugees. Beyond the immediate disaster, recovering from
the storm will take years, as crops have been wiped away and much of the
country's infrastructure destroyed.

In our own neighborhood, yesterday morning we helped a neighbor evacuate
her home as the water rose, and she and her four kids moved in with us.
Paul then went off to CCD to get off a comunique about the hurricane,
which he achieved just as the phones were failing there. When he tried
to come home in the afternoon, he navigated several half-eaten highways
and flooded sections (thank God for four wheel drive) only to finally be
stopped a kilometer down the road where the bridge at Chimbo had washed
away, taking with it a couple of houses, trapping a woman in the middle
of the river, and finally taking out a ten-meter section of the highway.
The woman got rescued, and Paul finally drove back into Teguz,
navigating the same interesting sections, then up a winding dirt road
through the mountains to a high ridge south of us, then down the highway
to our house. This route entailed more circumnavigation of mudslides and
crossing of rivers. A couple of places he was the last one through
before it washed away.

Lyda spent the day caring for our kids and our guest family, who was
understandably very disraught about their house. The power went out in
the middle of the day, but the phone line remained somehow functional
most of the time.

This morning, as the rain continues, we have decided to temporarily
evacuate our house. The river below us, normally a small stream, has
turned into a raging torrent forty meters wide, carrying rocks and trees
downhill. The house below us is flooded by about three feet of water,
and the current is eating out the bank directly below our house. We can
no longer trust the steep hillside upon which our house sits. We have
moved our kids, pets, and jeep uphill and are now staying in the house
of some Dutch friends. The family we evacuated yesterday has moved in
with a German family next door.

We write this to let you know how we're doing, not to alarm you. We are
being cautious, and not taking any chances. Please don't worry about us.
Our situation is very comfortable compared to hundreds of thousands of
Hondurans--and Nicaraguans--who are sitting on their roofs or on
hilltops waiting for rescue that may not come, or who are crammed into
crowded refuges. But once the phone goes completely out we will be
incomunicado for an unknown period. The road both above us and below us
has been washed away in several places, and it may be days or weeks
until we'll be able to get to Tegucigalpa or anywhere else. At this
point we can't even hike out, as the rivers are uncrossable. So if you
don't hear more from us for some time, don't worry about us.

The United Methodist Committee on Relief has already responded with
financial assistance to CCD, and is preparing a shipment of food as soon
as transportation into the region is possible. A disaster evaluation
team from UMCOR is expected here as soon as the airports open. Your
contributions to UMCOR's hurricane fund will help make this critical
assistance possible.

Shalom,

Lyda and Paul