1st Weekend after Mitch
A boots in the mud report

   
Saturday, November 7th, was the annual Zapatera Fishing Tournament in Granada. Normally, this is one of the high points of the year for the former Colonial capital city, but this year tournament was canceled. 


Instead of fishing and drinking cold beer, the participants used their boats and money to distribute food and medicine to the river community of TePalona. The effort began a week before, when word was first received that the Rio TePalona had overflowed its banks and people living along the river were in grave danger.

"When we first arrived, we had to lift electrical wires - which normally are ten
 feet in the air - out of the water and pass them over our heads to get the boats
 through," said René Chamorro, one of the boat owners who had been working all
 week carrying people and food back and forth to Granada.
"I had 22 people in this skiff on one trip." he reported.
 Working all week, over 600 people were evacuated to Granada using the private boats of the Granadinos.

Once the homeless and injured were safe, efforts were made to bring food and  medicine to those left behind.
One week after the flooding, people were still living in ankle deep water. Only  food that did not require cooking was brought in. This week, private citizens are  buying propane stoves and gas bottles, so that the Nicaraguan staple of rice and beans can once again be cooked.

All too soon the food was gone and the need was not met.  People called us from the river banks.
A campesino stood in his field, chopping away at dead corn stalks to make way for the next harvest.  He stopped just long enough to wave and went back to rebuilding Nicaragua.

 


The next day, we went to Posoltega, where a volcanic mudslide killed over 2,500 people. On Friday night, October 30th, residents heard what some described as the sound of many airplanes. One survivor remembers hearing an explosion and then, minutes later, being engulfed in a river of mud, rocks and trees.

 

 
Stretched along the slopes of the Volcano Casitas, seven villages were destroyed:
Provenir, Velsaya, Ojochal, Maria del Pilar, Villa Sandino, Tolotar, and Torrion. We found local guides who had lived in Provenir to take us to the top.  We drove as far as we could and then walked the last three miles.

We arrived at the top of the slide, where the village of Porvenir use to be. The
drive up the sugar cane fields had me reminiscing about my former life on the
Hawaiian island of Maui. We walked for about an hour and a half to get to the top
of  the falda of the volcano, which is Spanish for skirt.  It did look just like a skirt.
Narrow at the top and wider at the bottom.

 


As we walked through a beautiful countryside, the only reminders that something
was amiss were the discarded latex gloves on the ground. Then, the body of a dead
cow that marked the beginning of the destruction. The rolling hills and verdant green
fields we had crossed, changed abruptly to a wide expanse of rock and gravel stretching
for 400 meters and flowing for miles downhill.

My diaphragm was convulsing and my eyes watering, as I tried to keep from vomiting.  The smell of the cow was all but overpowering.
"These were once rolling hills and sugar cane fields," our local guide told us.
"Over there used to be the health center,"  he said, pointing  at a large rock.  We had arrived at what had once been Porvenir.

We passed a plastic basket filled with clothes on the side of the path.  It was so odd to see anything of value lying about unattended in Nicaragua.

   

 

 

We saw our first corpse a few minutes later.  He was a large male, laying on top of the mud on his back, his arms outstretched as if in supplication. We were to see over 25 in the next few hours. We had arrived even before the Health Service workers had reached the top.  We could see the smoke of the Quemadores down the mountain.  The plumes of smoke got closer as they made their way up toward us, carrying out their grisly work. 

 It was after we talked with them that we understood the aplomb with which they soaked the corpses in gasoline and then torched them. With so many dead, the danger of disease outweighed the natural desire to give the victims a proper burial.  They had been burning bodies for 8 days.

One Health Service jefe read me the statistics, comparing the number of surviving
people with the last census.  The news was staggering:
Provenir 687 souls before 134 remaining, Rolando Rodriguez 1660 before and only 338 remain,  Versalles  337 people before and 65 accounted for, Maria del Pillar 1685 people reduced to 350. The list was long and the news sobering. This was the worst of the human tragedies from the damage done by Mitch.