Hand-me-down lives of El Meech victims

AS USUAL, Rosa Janet Gomez and her three young daughters were in the San Francisco church this Christmas. But this year, they were not there for the Christmas service. They were sleeping, all four of them, on a single mattress on the cold, dust-covered tile floor of a church hall.

The mattress is their home, four cardboard banana cartons full of donated clothes their only furniture. A dozen other women and children sleep around them in a draughty, unheated, windowless hall the size of a suburban living room. At night, they are bitterly cold, huddling together for warmth under charity blankets.

Rosa and her daughters - Francia, nine, Suma, eight, and Jacelyn, three - are among 100 people, 33 of them children, left homeless by Hurricane Mitch and now living in the colonial San Francisco church or the unfurnished halls of what used to be an adjoining military museum. They are among 500,000 people Hondurans - almost 10 per cent of the population - still homeless two months after Mitch's floods washed away their houses. Hundreds of thousands of others are living with relatives or roughing it in the remains of their battered homes, many without roofs.

"The government has done nothing for us. No one has come here," said Janet, a 28-year-old street vendor.

"Someone came from the mayor's office but they just counted us as if we were animals. We want them to give us hope. I told them we want to work. If we work, we can pay a monthly rent. All we want is a little casita [house]. If they don't give us a house, we'll have to go back to Barrio Abajo and build one ourselves," said Janet.

Barrio Abajo (Low District), by the Choluteca river, was among the worst hit by the floods that swept through here on 30 October. The government fears thousands will return to dangerous riverside zones but has so far done little or nothing to provide housing that would give them another option.

Thinking I was an official, and that I might help them get homes, dozens of femalerefugees surrounded me, with their children clutching my legs, and insisted I write down all their names. When I asked them what happened to their homes, several answered with a stock phrase that has become a black joke here: "Gone with the itch." Pronounced in Spanish, the hurricane will always be known here as El Meech.

Sprawled on his mattress with his crutch beside him on the floor, Marcos Amador, a one-legged 68-year-old tailor, begged me to find him a job so he could pay for food and some Christmas presents for his children and grandchildren. He lost his right leg in a football accident at the age of 18. "Work is what I miss most. I feel inadequate here. I didn't want to leave my shop but I had to run when the water got up to here," he said, drawing his hand across his shoulders.

The 100 refugees, most of them poor from the nearby La Olla district, share a tiny kerosene stove on which to cook donated food and a single water tap to wash themselves or their laundry. Forty per cent of La Olla houses, made of adobe, were swept away by the floodwaters. Another 40 per cent, built of stone, survived but lost roofs and are uninhabitable. Residents have returned to the remainder but would be in grave danger if the river rose again.

Angela Maria Ardon, a 41-year-old Honduran Red Cross volunteer, got on to her tiptoes to point to the mark, 10 feet high, where the muddy river reached in her living room. The only furniture that remains in her house are two faded black-and-white family por-traits on a wall in the hall.

Angela, who now helps to look after her fellow refugees in the San Francisco church, was one of the quiet heroes of Mitch. "We got everyone out of La Olla just in time. We walked around the neighbourhood, roped together like mountaineers, to get people out. When the water got up to our shoulders, we left, too, and headed for the church," she said.

When I visited them before Christmas, keeping a promise made when I left after reporting the devastation of Hurricane Mitch, the San Francisco church refugees were preparing for a visit by Santa Claus and a Christmas party thrown by well-off foreign teenagers from Tegucigalpa's cosmopolitan American School. The refugees had strung up strands of red-and-green crepe paper around the patio of the flaking Spanish colonial building that houses the church and a former Spanish military barracks, which later became a museum. As they waited for Santa, children clambered over a 1942 Browning machine-gun and a 37mm field cannon, the latter captured from Salvadoran troops during the so-called Soccer War of the sixties.

Rodrigo Banegs, a 44-year-old portrait and landscape painter who had lost his home in the hurricane, had decorated a tiny Christmas tree with silver paper and painted cardboard shapes, alongside a sign saying Feliz Navidad (Merry Christmas). "Come into my apartment," he said, pointing to his mattress, surrounded by paintings he used to sell to tourists for pounds 15 to pounds 20. As his bedhead, he used the one thing he salvaged from the floods - the sign outside his home, advertising "Portraits".

And then came Santa. Somewhat surprised by his young eyes - not unlike those of 18-year-old American School student Jorge Espinosa - children prodded his bulging belly to check whether it was real. In sharp contrast to the ragged refugee children, the boys and girls from the expensive American School - mostly the sons or daughters of diplomats from around the world - wore crisp uniforms, the girls in white blouses and navy pin- striped frocks.

But they were carrying gifts: doughnuts, sweets and two dozen giant Domino's pizzas, so they were most welcome. And they belted out Christmas carols in English as Santa handed out the presents - mostly hand-me-downs from the rich schoolkids who had held a "toy drive" for the storm victims.

"This is so sad. Honduras was badly off before Mitch. And look at these kids' conditions now," said Linda Taylor, 16-year-old daughter of an American diplomat. "But at least we're doing something for them, giving them something resembling Christmas."

She was right. Away from the crowd, in her "home" - on her mattress - little Jacelyn Gomez could not have cared less about Mitch. Her face painted by the remnants of a slice of pepperoni pizza - her Christmas dinner - she chatted contentedly to her new friend, a second-hand, Chinese- made doll called Sporty Jennifer. Jennifer once belonged to a rich girl but Jacelyn neither knew nor cared about that.