Ten years after Mitch, Central Americans remain vulnerable

Santa Maria Manicera, Nicaragua - Ines Vanegas is a survivor. Whether it was good fortune or an accident, she escaped death when Hurricane Mitch sent a wall of mud and water racing down the slopes of the Casita volcano Oct. 30, 1998, burying two villages and killing more than 2,000 of her neighbors in about five minutes. Badly injured, she survived, as did her husband and three children, although all bear physical and emotional scars from the event.

Ten years later, she and her family live in a cramped dirt-floor house on a small lot far from the small field they still farm on the volcano's fertile slopes. Rising costs for everything from fertilizer to school notebooks leaves her at the mercy of a local loan shark; she worries about the next payment she has due. Her husband went to Costa Rica as a migrant worker but was so humiliated by his treatment there that he came home penniless.

"If we're going to suffer, it's better to do so at home," Vanegas told Catholic News Service.

Vanegas and her neighbors became the poster victims for the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, which left more than 10,000 people dead throughout Central America. For news crews from around the world, the five-mile-long mudslide became ground zero for the pathos of the killer storm.

Yet Vanegas says no television cameras have come to record her life for several years. Everyday poverty simply doesn't make news, yet church workers and other development experts in the region believe it provides the foundation for much of the destruction dramatized during the hurricanes or earthquakes that frequently plague the region.

"Our society continues being highly vulnerable. Unemployment is high, there is no credit for rural farmers, and people continue to migrate from the countryside to the cities. Not much has changed in the 10 years since Mitch. The structural problems are still there that make families and communities vulnerable when disasters like this occur," Maria Lopez Vigil, editor of Envio, a regional political journal published by Jesuit-run Central American University in Managua, told CNS.

Rains in nearby Honduras in late October brought back painful memories of Hurricane Mitch. Some 20,000 people were left homeless by this year's flooding.

"Rather than commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Mitch in Honduras, they're simply reliving it, at times making the same errors as they did 10 years ago," said Ralph Merriam, an official with the humanitarian agency CARE who worked for years in Honduras after Mitch.

Guido Eguigure, a development specialist with Denmark's DanChurchAid in Tegucigalpa, said Honduran President Manuel Zelaya this year took some positive steps, including dispatching his Cabinet ministers to the affected regions. Yet Eguigure said a more efficient government response is not enough if people remain poor.

"Since Mitch, the people know more about risks and are able to respond quicker and more appropriately, especially the poor, who are always the ones most affected when the floodwaters rise. But it remains hard for people with few material possessions to willingly leave those possessions behind and flee for their lives. They prefer to take the risk to protect what little they have," he said.

Eguigure said the region's focus on disaster preparedness in the last 10 years has had the ironic effect of lessening outside help when emergencies do occur.

"It isn't necessary to have another big-name hurricane in order to produce a disaster. In fact, disasters are more common now, but because people are more prepared than before, less people die. If there are no dead bodies to be seen, however, CNN doesn't come. The everyday disasters that afflict the poor majority aren't telegenic enough to attract attention and assistance from the outside world," he said.

One development specialist in Nicaragua said climate change dwarfs the positive changes that have been achieved.

"It's clear that we're more vulnerable now than we were then, though not because we haven't done a lot of work on prevention, mitigation and capacity-building at the community level," said Conor Walsh, the country representative in Nicaragua for Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops' international relief and development agency.

"A lot has, in fact, been done. A lot of new infrastructure has been built, land has been reforested, watersheds are better managed now in most cases, and communities are better prepared, with contingency plans in case an emergency hits," he told CNS. "The problem is that all of this has been insufficient faced with climate change that makes the threats so much greater now. The frequency and intensity of the storms have increased every year. The threat has grown faster than our capacity to respond to it."

CRS works with diocesan Caritas aid organizations in three regions of Nicaragua, providing training in disaster prevention and response. Walsh said the church-based groups have proved invaluable, reacting quickly to Hurricane Felix in 2007 as well as to flooding caused by a tropical depression in October of this year.

"The church has played a valuable leadership role, helping form local response committees, training villages in contingency planning and risk-mapping. During Hurricane Felix, within hours the Vicariate of Bluefields had teams out on the rivers (and) quickly reported back with assessments of damages and needs. With the rains this year, we've seen all the training pay off as local communities assume those responsibilities directly," Walsh said.

"The Catholic Church is an effective partner, as it has an extensive grass-roots network and a commitment to meeting the needs of the most vulnerable. It's the preferential option toward the poor at work," he said.

By Paul Jeffrey
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service (CNS) www.CatholicNews.com. Reprinted with permission of CNS