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I headed up to the north coast this two weeks ago to visit Andrea and Matthew in La Ceiba and to visit the Finca in Trujillo.  It was a nice trip, though a bit rushed and quite frankly a bit wet.  It rained the whole time which isn’t entirely unexpected this time of year.  

At the Finca I got a bit of nostalgic for rainy season.  If you’re a normal person rainy season isn’t particularly fun.  You’re wet all the time, clothes never dry hanging on the line, mud and mold become a normal part of your life.  But as a Finca volunteer it’s also a time of relief from the hot sun, you get to make daring rescues of trucks stuck in mud, electicity goes out and prompts candle lit dinners, water systems break prompting bucket showers, rivers rise and you see t he true power of nature and feel it’s effects in ways that just aren’t possible for most of us city dwellers.  So while I didn’t like getting soaking wet walking back from getting a beer with the vols, I certainly appreciated the chance to remember those times at the Finca with fond memories.  

As I took the bus back to Tegucigalpa on Monday I began to see the picture with a broader lens.  As we continued on I noticed more and more fields flooded, more rivers raging and more landlides being cleared from the highway.  I picked up a newspaper and began to read of the effects of 10 d ays of rain across the country.  knew that when I got to the office on Tuesday that likely we would be responding to an emergency.

So what happened?  Essentially we had about two weeks straight of rain which caused widespread damage across the country.  It just got to the point where the ground was so saturated that there was nowhere for the water to go and mudslides and flash floods were the result.  About 75% of the roads were damaged to some extent with 72 bridges or river crossings destroyed and another 169 damaged.  34 people were killed mostly when rivers rose and destroyed their homes (2,200 homes destroyed and double that many damaged. Thousands fled their homes for shelters and 250,000 acres of crops were destroyed.

COPECO (the government agency responsible for emergencies) coordinated both the national and international response and at least from my point of few had a decent handle on the situation.  As I had suspected I was busy at work on CRS’s response to the emergency.  We work entirely through local partners and in emergencies the partner with whom we work the most are the local Catholic dioceses.  My role during  the emergency was to take all the information funneled to me and turn it into money.  The dioceses would communicate with us and give us an assessment of the situation an our team here in the office would evaluate where, what and how much we needed to get into the field.  Within the first 24 hours we got out a situation report to our headquarters and another 6 hours after that we were working on drafts of the emergency proposals.  In all I wrote three proposals for things like blankets, mattresses, water, cooking kits, hygeine kits and medicine.  We were able to get the proposals approved pretty quickly and get the materials needed into the hands of the dioceses so they could respond to those in need.  

So worry not, I certainly wasn’t slogging through rain choked streets (the photos here are from the newspaper).  And while I spent most of the time in the office writing it was certainly an interesting experience.  We’re just hoping for no more rain any time soon.