ICKY STINKY MUD

After school was canceled due to the flooding, I wondered what I was going to do with another two days free. Luckily for me they were so busy I forgot to miss my kids.

Thursday afternoon, the pathfinder group went out to where the flood victims were staying and passed out food. Then we went down to where the water had been. I could see the line where the water had been. It reached just below the roofs of the one story buildings.

The whole flooding didn´t make very much sense to me. It didn´t rain that much in my opinion to make the water rise ten feet in the morning and go completely down by evening. This happened both on Sunday and on Thursday. I was thinking that if it flooded like this every time it rained 5 days in a row, that the people were pretty silly for building their houses so close to the river. I asked Jesse, she works at the school, how often it flooded like this. She told me that it hasn´t flooded like this before, not even when Hurricane Mitch came through. She told me that supposedly the government said that they didn´t let any water out of the dam but they are just saying that so people won´t get mad at them. So supposedly the flooding is because the government released a lot of water from the dams. Our area isn´t the only area affected. In San Pedro Sula, most of the plantations were covered in water and hundreds of thousands of dollars are lost.

Friday and Saturday, the youth from the church and another city, went down to a neighborhood to help them clean out their houses. The walls were covered in mud and the floors were covered in about 2-3 inches of thick, slimy, stinky mud. In the beginning it was hard to clean the houses because we didn´t have very much water. We would push as much mud out of the house as we could and then using buckets of water slowly but surely we would get the houses clean. Saturday afternoon, the cleaning process went much quicker as we had an ADRA water truck and were able to just pump water into the houses. I think that we were able to help clean out around 10 or more houses.

My hands are very sore and stiff from spending the day sweeping mud and I´m glad to spend the day relaxing. I´m hoping that I don´t get any weird worms or parasites from the mud as I didn´t have boots and was wearing Crocs. Whenever we went into a house that was really stinking, I thought I sure hope I don´t get anything to hard to kill.

I know several have asked for pictures but I left my camera in the states. I´m posting some pictures that my friend Claudia took the first weekend I was here.

The teachers meeting the parents

The School

Vivi and I with our pine needle crowns

Hugging a tree