Rain

You probably don’t know rain the way I do now. You definitely don’t know rain the way Hondurans do. It rains here. It really rains. Imagine the strongest thunderstorm you’ve ever experienced. Now, I am not talking about the thunderstorms you get if you live in the north of the US. I am talking Florida thunderstorms or the ones we get in Puerto Rico. Imagine it lasting five or six days in a row, non stop, not even for five minutes.

If you follow international news you probably heard about Honduras being affected by both Wilma and Gamma. We did not get hurricane or tropical storm winds, but we got rain. The kind of rain that roars; the kind that is so loud that it keeps you up at night. And while it is raining, the rivers grow, communities flood, bridges are damaged, houses get destroyed by mudslides, lives are taken. Meanwhile, all you can do is stay at home and wait… wait for it to stop, wait for the rivers to go down, wait for the roads to be passable… and worry… worry about your friends that live in mud houses, the ones that live next to rivers, the ones that have nowhere to go if something were to happen to their homes. And so we waited, and we worried, and it stopped, and the waters receded, the rivers went back to their banks. But communities were buried in mud, homes were destroyed, lives were lost.
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Our town, La Ceiba, was generally ok. There were flooded areas, but the waters receded fairly quickly and it was easy to rescue people. Our house was fine; we only got water dripping in several places. A major bridge between La Ceiba and the two other major cities (San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa) was down for a few days, leaving the city isolated, but almost no one wanted to go elsewhere anyway.

However, not everybody was as lucky. The Garífuna town of Rio Esteban was isolated for days, without being able to go out to purchase food or other necessary items. Government help was offered, but it never arrived. The town of Jocomico, where one of the MaderaVerde shops is located, it is said to have been completely destroyed when most of the mud hills came down (the town is heavily deforested). Most houses were destroyed and entire families killed when mud came rushing into their houses while they were asleep. We’d like to go and help, or at least go see how our artisans’ families are, but there is still no way to drive all the way up there (even though it stopped raining a week ago).
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Eventually the sun came back. The sky, previously our furious gray enemy, now presents us with the gift of its tropical beauty. Everything is green and the birds are singing again. People are slowly getting back to their routines. Yet, they have not forgotten, not the ones still in refuge, not the ones with the watermarks on the walls of their homes, not the ones with mud all over their belongings, and especially not the ones who lost the lives of their loved ones.