Hurricanes and hope in Honduras

A child approaches me eating powdered milk from a tin lid and asks for a dollar. I refuse. This is not a result of the hurricane. It is everywhere, in all third world countries. Children speak two words of English: "hello" and "money." The barefoot child wanders off dejectedly. Another woman approaches me and asks if she can have the baseball hat I have clipped to my pack. I'm not using it, she explains, and the sun is in her eyes. As I give it to her, she thanks me like I've offered her the queen's crown. Ahead of me looms a garbage pile 25 feet high and a full city block long; from the bridge, I can see that its contents include a woman's high heeled pump, a car door, a blue toothbrush, orange rinds, banana peels, the wrinkled pages of a book, a tire, a child's leg brace, corn husks, broken plates, food wrappers, tin cans, pantyhose, a fan blade, a purple satin dress and, in front of it all, a rotting dog's head, his lower jaw and body missing, and the remaining fur matted down with blood and dirt and sand. Flies and mosquitoes are prolific.

Walking here we see crumbled walls with pink and purple bougainvillea snaking over their tops. Inside one kitchen, the mud is solid to the tiled countertop. Workers in rubber boots and white face masks struggle to clear the debris, but it is like trying to sweep the sidewalk with a safety pin. Inside, the houses left standing smell oppressively like mildew. In one end of the city, Concordia Park has been destroyed, its temples and monuments -- small replicas of the Copan ruins -- lie smashed on their sides, the fountains empty and thick with spider webs. Two teenage girls were clutching each other inside one of the fountains during the storm, a man told me. When he came upon them, they were already dead. On the other side of the park are more house remains and beyond that a surplus of stagnant water. Large bulldozers are working to clear a channel, but it has been three months and the diseased water still stands. Some people still living under corrugated tin roofs on the mountainside use the filthy water. More than 140 cars are buried deep under the dirt, a passerby tells me, with the drivers still inside. Now, in the stagnant water, limbs have begun to surface, bloated hands and feet and arms.

Someday, modern explorers will come through this tiny corner of the world and try to explain what happened. They will find the skeletons of people and animals, the twisted metal of cars and chunks of painted cement or floor tile nuggets. They will find buildings and trucks buried under the hardened dirt. They will theorize on what provoked such heavenly wrath. They will think of other discoveries, other ruins: Tikal in Guatemala, Chichen Itza in Mexico, the Coliseum in Rome. They will think of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Pompeii. Of sudden furies, instant devastation and the decades of untangling the destruction wrought upon so many millions of lives.

In the shelters, where tuna, tortillas, rice, beans, corn, flour, coffee and powdered milk constitute the daily diets, things are different. Housed mainly in schools, the people will soon be moved to five massive shelters that are being built by UNICEF and the government. The folks at UNICEF hope the shelters will be necessary for only 13 months. Though sparse and temporary, each will have school facilities, a medical clinic, clean water, garbage collection, security, laundry and electricity. Food, so far, has been available through donations, and families are given six gallons of water a week to use for cooking and drinking. At the Olympic Complex, where 1,072 people live, hoses are used for bathing and washing clothes, and laundry is strewn over the manicured green bushes. A woman lies on her side on a bed breast-feeding her baby. Kids color with pencils on white paper next to two large blue bags stamped "U.S. Mail Foreign Air." One relief worker from Michigan says he has two jobs: to play with the kids and to wash the lice from their hair.

The hurricane has affected even those who came through the storm unscathed. Roatan and Utila, the two largest of the Bay Islands, are in surprisingly good shape. There is very minimal scarring on the landscape, but the tourist industry, on which the islands' economy relies, has all but vanished. Seaside restaurants with wooden tables and stellar sunset views sit like deserted ghost towns from wild West fables. Hotels and guest houses are empty. Divers are few. Mike Arellano, part owner of the Sueño Del Mar Dive Shop on Roatan, says he's called the U.S. media repeatedly to say the island is OK. Tell the tourists to come, he says. Kevin Braun, owner of the Sea Breeze Hotel, has given discounts on his deluxe suites and kayak tours for those visiting now. But everyone is afraid: The tourists are afraid to come and the islanders are afraid that the tourists won't come. Braun and Arellano know things will change, eventually. By summer the tourist traffic is expected to pick up again, but the time between now and then is an insufferably long sigh.

Each time it rains now, on the islands or inland, people feel a twinge of fear, and wonder if or when it will happen again.

But even with all the terrible reminders, the arduous task of rebuilding, the threats of disease, economic depression and housing shortages, many people in Honduras have hope. Long-term hope. It is a chance to rebuild better, they say, a chance to form communities, to fix what was wrong before. "Based on other things that've happened in this country, I thought things would go slower. But this thing has unified us," says Lesly Aravjo, a 17-year-old college student who helped drain water from a barrio near the airport several weeks after the storm. "Right after the hurricane, my first thought was, 'How are we going to get out of this?' We were just starting to grow and in one day it was all over. But when I saw that so many other countries were helping us, I thought, 'OK, we can do this. It's going to take a lot of time, but we can start all over again.'"

Dozens of women rinse mud and debris off furniture salvaged from homes near the worst sites. In shelters children play as if offered eternal recess with their friends. Twenty thousand college students across the nation converged into a mighty army of volunteers two weeks after the hurricane struck. On Roatan, foreigners and natives cleaned the beaches together and shared phone lines, lodging, food.

When the hurricane first hit, Tegucigalpa had 6 p.m. curfews. Authorities feared looting. Alcohol was banned. Now the curfew has been lifted, the alcohol is back and the old, familiar dangers have replaced the new. We are told to be in by 9 for safety, 6 for extra assurance. "Peligroso," everyone says. Dangerous. There is peligro everywhere. Stay out of Comayaguela altogether, one Internet source says. Do not climb to the Peace Monument at sunset. Do not walk around at night. Do not walk around alone. Every Honduras man has a gun and none fears using it. The day we arrived -- on Christmas -- six shots were fired into the United Nations building in the dead of night. Four days later, we were due to drive to San Pedro Sula with a UNICEF worker, but canceled the trip due to scheduling conflicts. On his way home, the driver was robbed at gunpoint, the truck stolen. Peligro everywhere.

Some believe it is no different in the urban zoos of the United States, and this may be true, but coming on the tail of a national tragedy makes such events stand out like vortexes of despair. Bruises over bruises are always more painful.

The government, too, is in a bind. So many of the villages that were leveled, the entire barrios that slid down the mountainsides and crashed into roads and bridges below, were squatter neighborhoods, housing poor rural families who had moved to the city for a shot at a better life and had found only the same scenarios of poverty they had fled. The government fears an influx of more such migrants if it announces plans to rebuild those devastated squatter villages. So it announces no such plans, while understanding that complacency is clearly not an option.

In spite of all the overwhelming problems, most everyone in Honduras agrees that the hurricane brought people together like nothing else in recent history. Hector Espinal, another student volunteer, says, "I saw all these people in my community offering bread, coffee, things for people. This [hurricane] spontaneously unified people. It's a positive change." Communities energized one another, neighbors helped neighbors, strangers helped strangers. Those who came out all right offered food, clothes, beds, toys, money and time. Friendships were born from tragedy. Nothing brings people closer than war and natural disaster. And nothing solidifies that bind more than hope. This, among all the things that this country lacks now, is what Hondurans everywhere seem to carry in abundance.

In Comayaguela, it is 5 p.m. and the market has begun to close for the day. The music stops. The stalls close. The food and clothes and toys are packed in burlap sacks to cart home. The woman with my baseball hat walks across the bridge holding the hand of her young son, another child held on her hip and one trailing behind. On a distant mountain, the Virgin Mary stands illuminated by an amber glow, a monument somehow untouched. The setting sun casts mirrors of color into the Rio Choluteca below, rainbows of pink, blue and green walls that look, in the shifting water, nearly whole. The sky is full of colors and clouds and crows; the moon rises overhead. Orange hibiscus tower over the walls and intertwine with pink bougainvillea, nearly big enough to hide the scarred remains below. Soon, all in the city will be quiet.

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