CHAMELECON, Honduras -- In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch last fall, Emilio Medina was wondering how to get aid for the workers at his coffee business, almost all of whom had lost everything to the floods the big storm produced.
His wife, Lastenia, suggested taking advantage of friends and family connections. And that's how Mrs. Medina, a mother of four, found herself in charge of organizing a hurricane-relief effort in Chamelecon, a suburb of 9,000 people on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula, Honduras's second-largest city.
She called an old school friend, another homemaker and mother of two, Gioconda Diaz del Valle. Within a week, the two women had organized a work committee dubbed "Solidarity Pro-reconstructing Honduras," composed of six homemakers and two Roman Catholic priests.
Medina's husband provided an empty coffee warehouse to receive donated goods sent by international relief efforts, and by New Year's Eve, 12 containers of unsorted goods shipped from Texas were delivered.
Lesson one in relief work came when the women tried to distribute food aid from the thousands of unopened boxes. A mob formed and plundered the containers while aid workers and two military guards watched helplessly.
Aid distribution is bogged down throughout most of Honduras. More than 1,000 containers of international aid remain unclaimed at the docks in Puerto Cortes because of cumbersome official bureaucracy. But aid is flowing now in Chamelecon.
The Rev. David La Buda, an American Maryknoll missionary who has been working in Honduras for 12 years, teamed up with the homemakers. His crew of local volunteers works with survivors of Mitch's destruction, while 12 university students help the women go through the boxes and pack the emergency relief bags.
La Buda created a medical brigade that has treated more than 10,000 people. He set up a local bed-making factory, paid a mud-cleaning squad to dig or bail out the homes of single mothers and older people, and fumigated entire neighborhoods against ants and cockroaches. Together with a nurse, he has created a homemade recipe for treating fungal infections. Ungi-Mitch has worked so successfully that it is now listed on the Internet.
The priest also organized a census of the population to distribute food fairly. Medina and her team process the data in a computer and oversee the process.
On a rainy morning, del Valle stands next to La Buda working with the university volunteers and two armed guards, supervising them as they open boxes, sort the goods and create emergency food bags -- up to 200 or so a day.
A tanned, barefoot girl of 7, muddy from head to toe, flashes a smile as she drinks a chocolate milkshake from the United States. All the children are barefoot -- in fact, almost everybody is barefoot. They risk infestation from footworms, but they do not want the mud to ruin what for most of them is their only pair of shoes.
Children play naked in mud puddles. Today's rain has made the streets an uncrossable river of soupy ooze that brings back memories of the great flood. Mitch brought seven days of intense rain to Chamelecon.
As the people fled for higher ground, the floodwaters rose as high as 9 feet. "My dog survived because he stayed on the roof of the house," says Carlos Acosta, a father of five who lost all his belongings.
When the water eventually receded, it left 3 to 5 feet of mud. Residents hastened to return to their homes, where youth gangs had begun looting, floating television sets and refrigerators out of the homes on makeshift inner tube rafts.
"I lost everything," says Maria Diaz, mother of five. She had to remove 5 feet of mud from her house. At least she had a house -- many dwellings were simply washed away.
Four months later, for the privileged it is as if nothing happened. Luxury cars cruise the boulevards of San Pedro Sula, and the casinos are filled on weekends.
But in Chamelecon, the road that once passed fertile sugar cane and banana plantations now runs between miles of plastic tents and dying animals. Youth gangs, with hand-made weapons, exact tolls from those who walk "their" streets. The sewage system is broken and clogged with mud; in places, it spits raw sewage into the streets.
Schools and sports facilities serve as makeshift dormitories. The soccer stadium houses 1,400 people in squalor, including Roni, age 7. He says it is the best place he has ever lived: "Here we get food twice a day."
At the housewives' distribution center, one of the volunteers, Alberto, is awe-struck by a bag of pink strawberry sugar that he is repackaging into smaller bags for the poor. "I see things I have never seen before," he marvels.
The boxes contain pacifiers, diapers, canned meat, beans, vegetables, soups, tuna and sauces. There are shoes, clothes, toys, water, paper cups, medical supplies, can openers, medical gloves, children's books, toaster ovens, shampoo -- even instant cappuccino.
What surprises del Valle, whose husband owns a plastics factory, is the quality of the goods. "I find things that I can't even buy at the places where I shop."
She used to have more workers.
"I offered food for work, but they ended up stealing from me," she says. "I am not a policewoman.
"Once workers arrived with machetes, so I told them to take what they had and not come back." She would rather "work slowly with people I trust."
But the work can be overwhelming, especially when food is distributed at the warehouse gates. A barefoot crowd jostles the aid workers, grabbing for bags. "They cut in the line, cause fights, and lie to you to get more food," says del Valle.
She has put Sonia Paz de Valerio, a wealthy homemaker and mother of three and longtime friend, in charge of sorting clothes. To desperately poor children who live near her family's beach villa on the Caribbean, she brings toys donated by American children. She brings pacifiers, baby food and baby clothes to women in the maternity ward of the public hospital of San Pedro Sula.
De Valerio's husband is a physician and part-owner of two modern private hospitals in San Pedro Sula, where better-off patients go. But at the public hospital, bloodstains dry on hallway floors and women about to give birth have to share a metal bed with no sheets.
What started out as a simple desire to help has become one of the largest international aid distributors in the hurricane-devastated region. The women are proud of their efforts. Del Valle offers some practical advice to American donors:
"Don't send water. If it breaks or leaks, it rots the food that comes with it," she says. "Sometimes I open boxes, and I can tell a family has put it together with what they had. I am touched. As long as the people of Chamelecon need help and aid is available, I will have the will to help."
Pub Date: 3/13/99