Baby’s Precarious Life Begins With Hurricane

When Hurricane Mitch swept through Central America, the areas it hit hardest were among those least able to take it. Thousands were killed and millions were left homeless in Nicaragua and Honduras, two of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. The storm pushed people already in desperate condition even further toward misery and starvation. The Associated Press spent time with one such family. Here is their story.

*

Finally, when the fiery sun was beginning its descent toward the banana trees and the swarms of flies were at their densest, Johanna stopped crying.

The 3-month-old had been wailing nonstop all day. Now, the only sign she was alive was her cream-colored, vein-streaked tummy, which rose and fell with each tiny breath.

Her mother poked Johanna’s cheek. There was no response. She tweaked the infant’s jaw, flapping her mouth open and shut. Johanna didn’t move.

On the highway in northwestern Honduras, there was no escape from the sun. Mother and daughter were waiting for food near a lean-to where they have lived since Hurricane Mitch filled their rented room with mud.

Johanna’s mother knew that if they went inside, the family might go hungry. But she sighed and returned to the 5-foot-high tent of sticks and plastic sheeting, scattering flies as she lowered her baby onto the torn, mud-caked mattress.

In the lean-to, it was even hotter, but the sun didn’t beat down. And they didn’t miss out on any food--the relief truck never came.

Johanna’s mother is 17. Her name is Maria Elena Aguilera, but everyone calls her Maria Magdalena.

Maria’s mother wanted her to be a nun. She took her to church every Sunday and made her sing in the choir.

But when Maria was 15, a man a decade older began coming by. To Maria, Jose Hipolito Burgosseemed worldly. He was from the same squalid neighborhood, but he talked of the plantation where he cut green bunches of Chiquita bananas.

His hands were rough and dirty, but they were strong.

Maria’s mother tried to run Jose off, but she couldn’t stop the two from meeting for walks on Saturday afternoons.

It was on one of their walks that Jose said to Maria: “I want to steal you.”

She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no. When he came for her, she went along.

*

The fights, Maria said, began almost immediately after she moved in.

“Trash!” “Good-for-nothing!” Jose would scream. Maria knew better than to talk back, but sometimes he hit her anyway, she said. (He said he didn’t want to talk about it.)

Sometimes she would cry herself to sleep. Sometimes she would flee to the house of her older sister, Guillermina.

Always, when she left, Jose would show up the next day. “My heart,” he would say, “Let’s go.”

She always would.

*

It was Aug. 3, and Maria was sweating with pain. Her belly felt like it was about to explode.

So although it was an entire day’s wages, her husband paid 60 dempiras ($4.50) for an ambulance to a hospital in the nearest city, San Pedro Sula.

Johanna Guadalupe was born almost as soon as the ambulance pulled up to the emergency room, a healthy 7-pound girl.

The next day, mother and child went home by bus. They had to transfer twice.

*

Separating the Chamelecon River and La Lima’s Sept. 23 neighborhood--known as “the 23”--are a barren dike and a soccer field, and whenever it rains hard the water overflows.

Twice before, Johanna’s parents had lugged their mattress, their threadbare couch, their two boxes of clothes and their radio up to the highway, the highest point nearby.

When the river began rising Oct. 29 after three weeks of rain brought by Hurricane Mitch, the family set out again, putting up a lean-to on the highway and figuring they would be back home soon.

As expected, the streets turned to mud, but the water didn’t stop rising. It covered the houses; only the leaves peeked out from the banana plantations. It reached the bottom of the highway embankment, then climbed that as well.

The people on the highway were terrified. With water on both sides, they had nowhere to go.

And then, although the rain still lashed down, the water stopped. The residents of “the 23” and their tents sat on an island of cement, surrounded by water.

They had been saved.

*

The day after the neighborhood flooded, trucks rolled in to carry people to safety. Johanna’s family went along, leaving Maria’s brother-in-law to watch their possessions.

Along with hundreds of people, the family was dropped at a convent in San Pedro Sula, where each was assigned a spot on the concrete floor.

There was no food the first day and not much after that, so for the first time in her life, Maria went with her sister Guillermina to beg.

A friend who went with them rang doorbells, and a fat man gave her some beans and a little milk for her baby.

Maria and Guillermina watched, but couldn’t bring themselves to try. Their children went hungry.

After three days, the family returned to the highway. There was nothing to eat, and Jose joined other men in swimming into the nearby field to drag back bunches of bananas.

Some he sold to passing trucks. The rest the family ate.

It was all they had for a week.

*

Home is the northern side of the divided highway between San Pedro Sula and El Progreso.

Traffic in both directions shares the south side of the highway for a half-mile. Drivers gawk at the filthy children playing between the tents, and at the horses grazing in the garbage on the highway embankment.

Rotting banana peels, plastic wrappers and human feces litter the area and wash into the tents when it rains. Flies are everywhere.

Little aid has arrived since Mitch struck. When aid comes, the scramble is frightening.

One afternoon, a truck pulled up to the edge of the settlement to hand out bananas. Hundreds of people--including Jose--lined up, jostling one another for the food.

In the line, one gang member elbowed another. The rival gang member drew a gun and took a shot, grazing his enemy in the leg.

“They wanted to kill each other over a banana,” Jose scoffed.

The driver sped away. There would be no aid that day.

*

Guillermina, who has two children, was criticizing Maria again.

“Hunger is what that baby has. And not for that juice you give her. She needs milk.”

Maria started to protest, but quietly set water to boil for powdered milk.

“If that baby is sick, what are you doing bathing her?” Guillermina said. “You’re young. You don’t know anything about suffering. You’re just beginning to know what suffering is.”

Maria clutched Johanna tighter and gave her a long kiss. When she brought her face up, tears were streaming down her cheeks.

She blew on Johanna’s face to cool her, then wiped her own eyes with her forearm.

“It’s hard here for the baby,” she said. “I think she’s in bad shape.”

The next morning, Johanna was still crying and her forehead was wet with sweat.

So Maria put black shoes on her baby’s tiny feet and flip-flops--her only shoes--on her own and headed for La Lima’s health center, a government clinic staffed by two medical students.

At the clinic, the waiting room and the porch were crammed with women and babies. The receptionist weighed and measured Johanna: 11 pounds, 23 inches. Small for 3 months.

After an hour, Jose showed up and sat down to wait with his family. He soon dozed off. The sun rose in the sky. Maria chatted with other women.

Occasionally, Maria checked with the receptionist. Wait, she said, 67 women are ahead of you.

After six hours, a nurse told Maria to take Johanna inside. Medical student Bianca Sandoval asked a few questions and listened to Johanna’s chest with a stethoscope.

She said she wasn’t sure what was wrong with Johanna, but prescribed some antibiotics, as well as something for fever and some rehydration packets.

She told Maria that Johanna should have only breast milk.

Maria said OK and looked at the floor, too ashamed to say that she had stopped breast-feeding a month earlier.

*

Jose is building a new house.

The landlady of the tiny room the family rented wanted more money, but Jose couldn’t afford it--he still owes $22 on a sickly horse.

So he made a deal with a friend: They would build a one-room, wood-slat shack against a row of concrete houses the friend owns, and Jose would pay $9 a month rent.

They started by chopping down the fruit tree that stood in the middle of the lot. Jose said he could turn the stump into a table.

Maria hasn’t been to the site, but she’s excited anyway. Anything to get out of the tent.

“The highway is dirty and full of sickness,” she said.

Jose continues to work odd jobs, renting a cart to sell bananas to little restaurants or to collect garbage for tips. He knows he’ll never be rich, but he’s confident his family will survive.

“No one humiliates me. Any job they give me, I say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Jose said.

“Thanks to God my family has never had to go hungry. I pray to God that they never will.”