After the flood

Hurricane Mitch nearly wiped Honduras off the planet last week. Now with 18,000 dead

or missing, millions homeless, its crops ruined and roads and railways devastated, the

country is gritting its teeth for the reconstruction. Phil Davison reports from Tegucigalpa

Fatty is our friend, Fatty is our future," sings a group of smiling and dancing Honduran schoolchildren, survivors of last week's devastating floods, to a catchy melody even refugees are now singing along to. The kids are featured in a TV spot shown several times an hour, and are referring to the man affectionately known as El Gordito (Fatty), Dr Cesar Castellanos, who until last weekend was the mayor of this now-devastated capital.

It may seem odd to sing that he is their future, since Dr Castellanos died last Sunday, just one of possibly 20,000 Central American victims of Mitch, "the hurricane that wouldn't go away." But Dr. Castellanos, whose Air Force helicopter crashed in bad weather while he was trying to rescue survivors, has become something of a martyr for change, and a posthumous symbol of this country's determination to survive, despite what it considers to be a tardy response from most of the world.

Tributes to "Fatty" - even his widow called him that in a TV speech thanking Hondurans for their sympathy - still appear daily in local newspapers, full-page ads carrying pictures of the socialist who weighed in at well over 20 stone. "Burger King misses Fatty," said one, with no hint of sarcasm.

"Because we loved him so much, we must now start the reconstruction and create the new capital Fatty dreamt up," said his widow, Vilma de Castellanos, in her TV address. There is now a growing movement in the capital to name Mrs de Castellanos mayor, without an election.

With most of the 7,000 Honduran bodies now cremated or buried in communal graves, and with 11,000 missing, unlikely to be found alive, reconstruction and national solidarity are the catchwords here, a week after Mitch criss- crossed the country on what one newspaper called "the tourist route."

Mitch first hit the English-speaking Bay Islands off Honduras almost two weeks ago, as one of the worst hurricanes in history. Although it tapered off into a tropical storm, it then moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, dumping torrential rain, turning rivers into deadly torrents that swept away riverside homes and bridges as though they were made of cardboard, and converting fertile, inhabited plains into coffee- coloured lakes where hundreds of thousands of homes disappeared under water.

The government says that some 7,000 are confirmed dead, 11,000 are missing, and 2 million of the country's 6 million people are homeless or otherwise seriously affected. Added to more than 2,000 dead in neighbouring Nicaragua, and hundreds more in Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica, it has become a disaster on a par with the volcanic mudslide that buried the Colombian town of Armero in 1985. More than 23,000 people died there, most of whose bodies were never uncovered and now rest in what was declared a national cemetery.

With their own government able to do little, in a country whose roads, bridges, airports and ports have been destroyed, and with foreign governments slow to respond, Hondurans have come together in a show of solidarity that has grown out of their disillusionment over the slow arrival of vital aid in the form of basic foods, medicine, clothing and, above all, water. Only yesterday did the pace of aid pick up, particularly from the US, after CNN had transmitted the first touching pictures of ragged, starving, thirsty and homeless families, sleeping on a highway in an isolated northern town.

Hondurans appear to have seen an opportunity to throw off a long-time sense that they are lackeys of the United States, whose armed forces have for many years trained, advised, influenced and armed the Honduran military, and whose big corporations have long controlled the country's mainstay industries - particularly bananas, coffee and citrus fruits. Many, if not most, Hondurans were offended by the prevalence of American troops here in the Sixties and Seventies, essentially to prop up pro-American governments here in the region; and in the Eighties supplying and supporting the so-called Contra guerrillas who were trying to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.

As for the big corporations, poor Hondurans - even before Mitch, this was one of the three poorest nations in the Americas- were forced to accept low pay and often inhuman conditions, simply because they needed to feed their families. The Chiquita Brands international banana corporation - which is ruined for this year by the floods - still dominates the industry here through its local subsidiaries.

In a clear dig at the US, a top TV commentator on Channel 7 here listed the amount of aid Mexico had just brought in - 16 helicopters, four transport planes, engineers and rescue personnel, sniffer rescue dogs, tractors,and tons of food, then added: "The Mexicans are showing us who our true friends are."

So it is perhaps not simply disappointment over the slowly arriving aid, but years of resentment, which have sparked an atmosphere of "we can do it alone" this week, even though that is patently impossible. The Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid

plunged in popularity, along with the ruling PRI party, in November 1985 when, after Mexico City's devastating earthquake killed up to 10,000 people, he went on TV to say Mexico could handle it alone. It could not, and Mexicans from all walks of life dug survivors from the rubble while the government fiddled. Mr de la Madrid had to admit his mistake, and aid and rescue personnel poured in.

The Honduran President, Carlos Flores, though discreet, made his point in an emotional TV address to the nation. Telling his countrymen that 72 hours of Mitch had destroyed 50 years of development, he made a Kennedy- like speech in which he said: "This is not a time to expect the nation to help you; it is a time to help the nation.

"We have to change our attitudes, change our mentality; we have to radically change many things. Fatherlands never die when their sons have the desire to live." Mr Flores said his country's history would for ever after be broken into two epochs: ante-Mitch and post-Mitch. Apart from two TV speeches, the President has kept a low profile since the disaster, leaving public appearances to his American wife Mary who, despite broken Spanish, has mastered such phrases as "Honduras saldra adelante" (Honduras will come out in front).

TV slots placed by the government to lift spirits, and ads by Honduran banks and businesses, now push the same theme. "We are not alone; we have each other", goes a nightly TV ad by the Ficohsa bank. "The waters will go down, the sun will return, and our children will go back to school", says another by the Bancahorro bank, with dramatic images and moving music.

Honduran sports and entertainment personalities have also lent their images to keep spirits high. The national football team, whose stadium was badly damaged, appears in an ad in which individual players give V- signs and say, "Honduras will get back on its feet!" University students have launched task forces to help with the clean-up effort in worst-hit areas. Stranded in an isolated northern town the other day, after the Honduran Air Force helicopter I arrived in crash-landed and ended up stuck in a muddy river, I hitched a ride back to the capital in a small DHL plane that had just unloaded vital supplies.

After local TV showed images of refugees, including young men, lounging and playing cards in shelters, a TV commentator said: "Look at these louts. They're waiting for the state to help them. They should be out there clearing mud, helping others, repairing bridges."

Notable in Mitch's devastation is the fact that it hit rich and poor alike. Or at least poor, less poor and middle class. After touring the devastation in such poor villages as La Sosa yesterday, where hundreds of cinder-block and concrete homes slithered into the river and broke up, formed accidental dikes or were washed into the sea, I visited the upmarket El Prado suburb of the capital. It looked like something out of Saving Private Ryan.

The 10ft-high concrete bridge had survived, but was still under several feet of thick, dark mud. The river had risen 120ft, the height of a 10- storey building, something that seems inconceivable. It carried away half of the big Yip supermarket.

A string of car showrooms was destroyed, its vehicles tossed downstream like Dinky toys in a muddy Jacuzzi. Inside the popular Bingo Queen restaurant, staff were shovelling mud outside, where soldiers moved it on into piles to be picked up by rubbish trucks.

To prevent looting, soldiers lined roads and the bridge, ordering residents to cross in single file. The line stretched for hundreds of yards, including some old women trying to balance flagons of water on their shoulders or heads. Although it took them a long time to cross, no one broke ranks.