Hurricane Update

Well, it has been a week since the hurricane passed over Tegucigalpa, and I feel like a detailed account of everything that has happened is due. So, here I go.

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Well, that about sums it up. Nothing. Remarkably, miraculously, nothing. At this time last week I was having to think in terms of how I was going to survive this. In Florida we are used to hurricanes, but we think of them in terms of inconvenience. "It will be difficult to be without power for awhile." "I have to board my house." "Will I really have to take cold showers?" "How long will the phone lines be out?" But after hearing the truly horrifying stories that everyone has from Hurricane Mitch and the 11,000 people it killed (of which there are still reminders on every damaged building/bridge/shantytown that has still not fully recovered 9 years since Mitch wreaked havoc on the country), I began to feel scared. Real scared. This hurricane was a strong category 5 coming right for us, and in a city where a few inches of rain mean lives lost due to flooding and mudslides, the forecasted 25 inches in 24 hours was terrifying. Suddenly I was having to think "What will I do if my first floor of my house is flooded out and I am trapped on the second floor with bars over all of my windows?" "How can 3 girls possibly protect themselves by themselves when there are people desperate and willing to do anything that is necessary for their own survival?" "What will we do without weeks and possibly months of clean water since there is no sanitation or waste system in the country?" Probably the scariest thought though was those involving the children from the feeding center in the poorest part of the city, which is also the area most susceptible to landslides and least accessible to emergency services. When I began thinking about them, my heart began to break. How are people expected to protect themselves by buying extra supplies when they can't even afford the necessities of daily life? How are people expected to somehow buy clean water to drink when they don't even have that luxury during everyday life? How are they ever to be expected to "hunker down" (what does this word mean anyways? People only use it in times of hurricanes, and yet I really don't know what that means...) and ride out the category 5 hurricane when a simple storm during rainy season could wash away their shack of a home? To say that I was scared is an underestimate...

Before ever coming to Honduras to live the one deal that my parents and I had was that if a major hurricane was coming my way that I would get on the first plane out of here, and things happened so quickly to where the night before it was a category 2 storm that was going to barely skim the coast and hit Belize to a full-fledge stronger than Hurricane Andrew & Katrina storm coming directly for me. There was no time to react, only enough time to chase down a water truck with our car to buy some of the last bottled water available in the city.

We prepared ourselves, had a great little pre-hurricane party, and went to bed expecting that when we woke we would be within the midst of a life-altering storm. But as we woke in the morning, there was no noise. There was no rain. There was, in fact, even a little bit of sun. The storm somehow split into a "V" to where the top half remained along the coast, and the bottom half trailed into the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing, and completely puzzling at the same time. Tegucigalpa was spared from having its 2nd completely devastating act of nature in 10 years. Thank you so much for those who prayed for us. I just recently found out that the night of the storm all of the area churches opened their doors to anyone who needed shelter, and that they held around the clock prayer vigils for the impending storm. I think God knew that there was no way that poor little Tegucigalpa could handle something like this, and praise Him that the only thing that came raining down in the hurricane was his mercy. And this nasty smelling fruit from our neighbor's tree that hangs over our patio...but that is a story for another time.

Thank you for your prayers.