`How could The River do this to us? We never thought it would'

The sky is starting to turn dark, just before 6 p.m., at a relief shelter in the hills above Tegucigalpa, Honduras. This place used to be an outdoor market, one tiny 10 ft by 10 ft stall after another, where vendors sold fruit and produce at decent prices.

Now these stalls are "albergues", shelters. One in particular is a new home for three families, 15 people in all. They have no place else, and they are told they should expect to live here for six months. Pieces of plastic sheeting cover the fronts of the stalls.

Just outside, Mareta Isabel Cepade is cooking tortillas and black beans for her four children. Her husband was killed in a mudslide 10 days ago. There are no tears. She cannot afford them at this moment. She has to survive. She has lost everything but her children.

"All washed away. I don't know what I will do," she says to anyone who happens to be listening.

Water is boiling in black cast-iron pots over open fires outside the stalls, fuelled by pieces of scrap lumber. There is the smell of smoke and tortillas and urine. And there are the sounds of children coughing.

Right now, 385 children, some newly orphaned, are at this shelter alone. Many are giggling or playing. They do not know what has happened. There are 139 women and 73 men here.

A small medical clinic seems reasonably well stocked with antibiotics and syringes. But many of the children seem sick, their eyes red and their foreheads hot with fever. The single bathroom that serves these 597 people is overflowing and the floors are awash in dirty water. Six months is a very long time.

The leaves are still on the trees in downtown Tegucigalpa, the devastated capital of Honduras. In fact, the vegetation here which would normally be starting to show the first signs of the dry season is lush and green. The hurricane that this already impoverished country hosted two weeks ago didn't leave the typical hurricane signature of houses rendered roofless and a landscape sheared by winds. At first glance Hurricane Mitch appears to have behaved with the cruel discretion of a tornado, touching down here or there, choosing to destroy one family's home over another.

Rationality tells us that a disaster does not intentionally choose the poorest of the poor as its victims. It just looks that way. Winds speeds measured 180 mph at one point, but by the time the storm touched down, the winds were a mild 60 mph.

Instead, it was the rain, torrential unceasing waters, that swept through Central America two weeks ago, cutting a swathe of destruction through four countries. Today, both Honduras and Nicaragua are in ruins.

The storm didn't sweep the region with a fervour. It loitered and teased and toyed with Honduras, literally hanging over the country pouring two feet of rain a day for 48 hours. Over the Bay Islands, the storm stalled and the rain did not pause for 39 straight hours. The island of Guanaja, one of the few places in this Third World country that attracts tourists to its beaches and reefs, was almost completely destroyed and stripped of vegetation.

After the hurricane seemingly departed the northern part of the country, it chose to boomerang back a day later, this time classified as a tropical storm.

The problem was that the landscape of Honduras conspired with the heavens to wreak destruction. Tegucigalpa is a city of 800,000 bisected by the massive Choluteca River. Dotted with colonial style buildings, it is in a lush valley some 3,000 feet above sea level. The city is surrounded by mountains, hillsides that are covered with houses and shanty towns, home to too much of the population.

At least that is how it used to be. The floods that came changed everything.

The sky has closed and the rains have stopped and the relief efforts have started in earnest, but the mudslides and the avalanches continue. Half the country's bridges have been washed out. Shoddy construction has taken a nasty toll.

Soil that should never have been built upon was filled in with sand by construction companies cutting corners. As the soil saturated, and the mud flood increased, the houses just collapsed into the mud and slid down the hillside, piling up on the bottom of the hill, one on top of another.

And there is no longer any difference in colour between the few paved roads and the dirt roads that lead up from downtown into the hillside communities. All the streets are now covered with a layer of blood-red mud, dark and thick.

"How could The River do this? We never thought The River would do this." That is what you hear in the rural villages from the people whose lives depend on the Choluteca River. They have lived this way for centuries, fishing, bathing, washing their clothes against its rocks. The river gives Hondurans their lives.

Until now.

"The river rose up in the night on Friday October 27th to take her." Miguel Parreles is standing on the spot where his home used to be. He is talking about his sister who lived beside him and was drowned. He has gone to two morgues but has been unable to find her body.

"She is lost, lost forever," he says.

Mr Parreles, his wife and eight children lived in a house in San Jose, about an hour from the town of Choluteca. Just after 6 p.m. that Friday night, the river began to rise as the rains continued. Mr Parreles and his family could not imagine it would touch his house, which is set on a hill just above the banks.

But, by midnight, the flood of water rushed though his house, sweeping it completely away. His sister and two nephews, ages 18 and 23, had no chance to escape. They were inside when the house itself was carried away. Mr Parreles says his nephews are angels now, but he has been left behind.

He says he is trying to be grateful that the river did not rise later at night. He and his family would have been asleep in their beds and would all be drowned now.

As it is, they are living in two Red Cross tents next to a friend's house. That house is made of criss-crossed sticks and branches and a roof of Spanish tiles. Mr Parreles will rebuild his house in the same spot.

"Where else would I go?" he asks.

There are three international flights a day into Honduras. A popular route is American Airlines Flight 953 from Miami, a one hour and 52 minute flight. One day last week, the flight was filled nearly to capacity with a planeload of the saddest, most worried faces you have ever seen. Heavy-set men and women laden with far too many suitcases, carrying supplies for brothers and mothers who have been without food or water or medical supplies.

But 10 minutes before departure time, with about 30 passengers still at the boarding gate, the pilot leaves the cockpit. He comes to the gate to use the phone. The pilot is sweating, his blond hair matted down. It is disconcerting to see an actively agitated pilot, devoid of the cool demeanour they normally seem to adopt.

On the phone, the pilot tells his supervisor he wants to load more water on to the plane. Already there are boxes and boxes being taken aboard, but the pilot wants to know exactly how heavy the plane is and what cargo can be left behind.

He engages in a long discussion with his supervisor concerning the length of the runway in Honduras, the weather, the exact specifications and requirements of a Boeing 757, and whether the plane will be too heavy to gain altitude and land. He thinks it will be OK. He will drop some extra fuel along the way. The passengers at the gate, listening to the pilot's conversational voice, seem to hold their breaths.

Back on the plane, flight attendants are bringing boxes and plastic bottles of water aboard and strapping them to the few empty seats. The plane is now delayed, but nobody complains or seems annoyed. The passengers break into applause as the water is loaded. Later on, we learn that some luggage and one television station's heavy camera equipment have been left off the flight.

Aside from relations, there are a few journalists and some aid workers aboard. There are people like Rachell Andress. A middle-aged American who is a fluent Spanish speaker, she had been reading about the disaster and wanted to help. Now she is meeting a Mexican K9 Corps, with trained dogs that specialise in finding corpses. Ms Andress will travel with two dogs, their handlers and a nurse into the remotest regions of the country, searching for buried bodies. She will act as a translator for the next two weeks. She has never done anything like this before.

She is dressed in bright red pants and a multi-coloured jacket. She is wearing boots and is carrying a black canteen and a black knapsack.

"I'm ready for anything, to sleep outdoors or do whatever comes up," she says.

Actor Edward James Olmos is one of the people getting off this plane in Honduras. The 51-year-old gained fame with an Academy Award nomination for the film Stand and Deliver and also for his starring role in the television series Miami Vice. Now he is part of a UNICEF delegation that is here for four days.

UNICEF, however, has been here for years and was one of the first major aid agencies to act after the hurricane. Even before the disaster, some 1.5 million of country's six million people were without access to clean water. Now, 4.5 million have no access to a safe water supply.

UNICEF estimates that it will cost $300 million alone just to rebuild the country's water supply. It delivered 126 water tanks of 400 gallons each to 90,000 people. It has moved medical teams and drugs and blankets.

"We have got to get the word out," Olmos says en route to a shelter in the northern part of the city. He has already been to the UNICEF offices, shaking hands and boosting morale. There he also spoke with a group of doctors frustrated by a lack of information about where their services were needed. He encouraged them as best he could, though he too seemed frustrated by a lack of co-ordination among the aid agencies.

In fact, a flooded country is now being flooded with foreign aid. Japanese-based charities were responsible for clearing an important north-south access road. The Red Cross is here, British charities are represented and Europe as a whole is gaining much praise for its help. Irish aid workers are more familiar with the country than most and are unusually effective. And although the US military has in the last three days mounted a publicity campaign that is at least as intense and effective as its disaster assistance campaign, it is well to remember how important Central America was to Western military interests back in the 1980s.

The Contra-Sandinista war in Nicaragua was covertly funded by the US. The staging base for the US-supported Contras was Honduras, and it was rumoured that the US had 13 military bases here. During the Cold War, these countries were a political flashpoint. Since the civil war ended in Nicaragua in 1990, American interest in the region has decreased. Since 1990, a country that was so important to the US has been ignored. Its levels of poverty and unemployment are higher than they were in 1985.

But for this month, at least, the US military is back. The C-130 cargo planes are back roaring in the skies above, and the Chinook helicopters are dropping food and water. Some 700 military personnel are here. Medical clinics are being set up. Roads are being cleared.

A hurricane, however, is not a war. The damage caused by the rivers goes to the soul of Honduras.