Central America has been overwhelmed by Hurricane Mitch. Honduras has been worst hit ? a country swept away. Nicaragua has been devastated. El Salvador has suffered terribly. The report below was compiled and edited by Margaret Hebblethwaite.

THE worst disaster this century for Central America (Julian Filochowski, director of the Catholic aid agency, CAFOD). The deadliest Atlantic storm since the Great Hurricane of 1780 (Disasters and Emergency Committee). As the days passed, the scale of the tragedy of Hurricane Mitch became clearer, and the casualty figures escalated. The dead are now counted in five figures, and the homeless in seven figures. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, malaria and dengue are poised to explode on to a scene where sewers and latrines have flooded and safe drinking water is impossible to find. In terms of transport and infrastructure, 40 years of development have been washed away. Reports from the ground are increasingly distressing, and we print some of them below. Sally O?Neill of the Irish Catholic aid agency Trocaire writes from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in collaboration with CAFOD: Hurricane Mitch hit Tegucigalpa at 2 a.m. on the night of Friday 30 October with massive winds and unbelievable rain. It had already been raining since the previous Monday non-stop ? not nice soft Irish showers but hard, pounding tropical rain. The hurricane continued pounding the city all Saturday. I went out on foot the next day to see some of the damage. Of the five bridges that cross the city, only one was left standing. At one of the others the River Choluteca had converted the area into a lake and I could hardly believe my eyes as I counted 18 buses floating down the river. In another community, La Betania, where we work with a health project, 500 houses were just swept off the hillside. I met a man with his three-year-old dead daughter wrapped up in a plastic table-cloth ? he had been turned back from the morgue which has no power and is stuffed to the ceiling with dead bodies. The walls of the Central Prison collapsed and 2,000 prisoners tried to jump into the swirling river below. The police opened fire in desperation as I watched, trapped on the other side of the river. It looked like a set from a horror movie as the bodies of the dead prisoners rushed along in the river with fridges, televisions, bank records, wood, Toyota pick-ups and bits of houses. What is worse, other poor people were jumping into the river trying to pull out the fridges that floated along in front of them. The next morning the looting started. I was offered bottles of wine and whisky for ten pence. All the main supermarkets were stripped to the walls. The destruction from Choluteca inland to the two areas which CAFOD is helping is unbelievable. The force of the river there carried away 281 container lorries which are now wrapped around houses, surviving trees and mangled debris in the mud and sandbanks which have been deposited to a height of 15 metres. Seven whole in Choluteca town have been swept away as the river divided in two. Everywhere you look is desolation. The rains have stopped and now we have the broiling sun combined with a horrid muggy feeling as the water evaporates. If only I could send the smell down the e-mail. . . . The big fear here is that this story will be over this week. Then, given the magnitude of the disaster, where will the funds come from to rebuild homes, lives and projects? Archbishop Oscar Rodr?guez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa has been one of the most outspoken voices in the wake of the hurricane, and his words were directed both to those inside the country and those outside. At a press conference on 6 November he said: Foreign aid may flow in over the next few weeks because of the natural disaster but people out there should also know that Honduras is paying over one million dollars a day to service its debt and that is an unnatural disaster of even greater proportions for the poor in Honduras than is Hurricane Mitch. In a homily on 8 November, he chastised those who altered prices to make a profit or who hoarded food because of the rationing: They are playing with the hunger of the people. Remembering the corruption after the 1974 Hurricane Fifi, when many Honduran officials grew rich from pilfering relief supplies, he issued a warning to those tempted to steal: These funds and this aid from abroad are sacred, and those who dare to steal it will not have pardon from God. They shall be cursed. There are moving stories of the solidarity shown by the poor towards the destitute. A Christian in Tegucigalpa took three homeless families into his house, so that 20 people were living in two rooms. A pastor in the northern rural area of La Mosquitia in Honduras inflated a rubber tube and risked his life by diving into the swollen waters and swimming two kilometres to the nearest town to raise the alarm. A young Catholic lay missionary, Sean Hawkey, has also written an eyewitness account: In Bajo Aguan on the north coast of Honduras several dozen people were rescued from the mud. They had spent four days trapped up to their chests. Their legs were swollen to double their size and several suffered from gangrene in their feet. As they had drunk water that was on top of the mud most had dysentery. Their chances of survival are slim. The mayor of Morolica spoke on the radio. He had walked 103 kilometres. Weeping, he told how his town had been destroyed, it no longer existed. The hurricane travelled from east to west along the Honduras-Nicaragua border. When it reached the Gulf of Fonseca, instead of carrying on into the Pacific, it turned round and returned northwards over Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. While El Salvador was less badly hit, with 250 dead ? Honduras has 7,000 dead bodies recovered and 12,800 missing presumed drowned ? conditions were still extreme, as can be seen from this report from a priest in San Salvador, Fr Thomas Greenan: The Red Cross advised the people of La Canoa, especially the women and children, to spend the night in the community centre, a sturdy building with the floor raised high above ground level. There was going to be a flooding of the River Lempa. The authorities were being forced to open the flood-gates of El Salvador?s three reservoirs in the wake of the whiplash of Hurricane Mitch. Failure to do so would have meant the bursting of the dams. Night was falling. Gingerly, I bade good-night to the people congregated in the community centre and retired to my tin shack. My sleep that night was sound in the pitch blackness, until water lapped and gurgled beneath my canvas bed. By torchlight I could see that dirty, coffee-coloured, river water was flowing fast throughout the room. I plopped both feet knee-deep on to the cement floor and got dressed. Picking up my passport and residency papers, I waded 20 yards to the relative safety of the community centre, feeling dazed and a little foolish. It was 3 o?clock in the morning. Within the next few hours, the water level inside the community centre rose steadily. We stayed for more than 11 hours without food or drink, in impossible conditions with respect to hygiene. It was distressing to watch the people like frightened sheep under threat, wondering if help and salvation were ever going to come. Dogs swam around seeking something firm, and people pushed them back into the flood waters. Old Francisca, frail and thin, her hands and feet gnarled by arthritis, sat on a bench, her feet steeped in the infested waters. Two mothers, who had recently given birth, cradled their babies. Around three in the afternoon, we heard the sublime sound of the first motor launch as it cruised through the water to our rescue. It seemed like a surreal dream, watching cows outside swim around in a frantic effort to tread dry earth. In about half an hour we reached the island of Tasajeras, where the inhabitants received us with dry clothing, rice, tortillas and coffee. One old man carried in his arms his sole possession ? a pink piglet. Unlike cows, it seems that pigs cannot swim, explained Julian Filochowski, the director of CAFOD, on his return from visiting El Salvador. In the wake of the hurricane he visited the village of Nueva Esperanza. Besides some of the cows, other livestock to survive were those chickens which managed to climb up into the trees. The trip of the CAFOD team began before the hurricane started, and Clare Dixon, head of the agency?s Latin America section, spoke of how they received a telephone call from Guatemala City to tell them that the community they had visited a day or two earlier had disappeared into a ravine. Another report from a rural area of El Salvador comes from a volunteer with the Chigwell Sisters, Marianne Johnson: Today the sun is shining over Tamanique. The water pipes have been mended and the people have water to drink. Unfortunately, what many do not realise is that in amongst the usual muddy flow are some hidden extras: bacteria from rotting animal carcasses and germs from broken latrines that now pour their waste directly into the water supply. The glorious sunshine which has reappeared will help to dry up the rain, but it will also multiply the bacteria. Every day a steady stream of people arrive at the convent seeking medical treatment. And like the river during the four-day deluge, it will soon become a swirling and unstoppable torrent of infections that cannot be treated. One of the first to arrive was Roberto, an 11-year-old boy, malnourished and small for his age. He was brought in by a man who saw him crawling along the street, unable to walk, his bare feet swollen and bloody. He was suffering from the fungal infection that has become the first epidemic to hit Tamanique. Left untreated, the toes will rot away. The one thing that is abundant here, apart from mud, is good will. The 20 Red Cross volunteers who serve this area have been working around the clock since the crisis began. They are full of enthusiasm, despite the fact that they are exhausted and suffering from the same fungal infections as everyone else. Struggling through this mountainous and soggy terrain, all they have is two lengths of rope and a few ancient stretchers. Laughing, they joke about having to communicate with smoke signals and drums, having no walkie-talkies or telephones. But ask them about the family that died, and their faces fall, and they struggle not to cry with anguish and frustration at having no proper equipment to do their work ? no medicine, no food, no ambulance. But the spirit of solidarity has not been washed away. Last weekend, at a special Mass, those who still had a little food made donations for those who had none, despite their own desperate poverty. Those gospel words sprang to mind: She, out of her poverty, has given everything she had to live on. In Nicaragua, Sr Margarita Navarro said the situation was being described as apocalyptic. She had been in the country since 1983, and said the war in the 80s was horrendous, but this is worse. One fear is that land mines planted during the war will have floated to unknown areas and may still be active. From Le?n, Sr Marion of the Maryknoll Sisters said in a telephone interview: We had nine days, almost ten days of continuous rain. The helicopters that they had were not even able to get up into the air and the ones that did had very poor visibility and could not land. What the waters did not take, the wind swept away. There are many pictures in the local papers of people who sat on roofs in the Matagalpa area. It looks very like Bangladesh where I used to work, all waterway, but the difference is, the people here do not have boats. Posoltega, near Chinandega, has a big volcano and a large crater lake and with the pressure of the water inside increasing, and outside being flooded with mud, the whole area caved in and ten communities were affected. People are really working hard, and people have been very good at donating, from within the country and outside. Cardinal Law flew down two days ago and presented $6 million from his archdiocese of Boston. Luis Amaya Mesa, executive director of the Movimiento Comunal de Nicaragua, said on a visit to London: In three days we had the equivalent of one year?s rainfall in Nicaragua. As the river burst its banks in Ocotal, in north-west Nicaragua, families sought refuge in trees, but as help did not come their arms grew tired and their children fell to their deaths in the torrent. The population is in trauma, and we are looking for ways of rehabilitating the children who have lost their parents. And there is the threat of an epidemic. I have news from Nicaragua that my wife already has malaria. Donations to the Disasters and Emergency Committee can be made at any High Street bank or post office or sent to: The DEC Hurricane Appeal, PO Box 999, London EC3A 9AA. Credit card or Switch donations can be made on: 0870 60 60 900. Donations can also be sent to: CAFOD Central America Crisis, FREEPOST, Romero Close, Stockwell Road, London SW9 9TY. Credit card donations via CAFOD can be made on: 0500 85 88 85.

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