Honduras Gets a New Voice in Storm’s Wake

As video footage in November showed survivors stranded on rooftops and new mud canyons cut through hamlets by the flood waters of tropical storm Mitch, U.S. news shows began ending their broadcasts with the question “What do you need?”

Usually, the reply was delivered in a soft, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-style voice speaking perfect English. Honduras’ Anglo first lady, Mary Flake de Flores, was on the job, getting help for her beleaguered country.

“Her personal appeals became the voice of Honduras,” said James Hogan, a Washington lawyer with ties to Honduras. When Flores asked for disposable diapers for hospitalized infants, Holly Coors of the Colorado brewery family sent down five planeloads. Civic groups in Louisiana, a state with historical and business links to Honduras, raised $225,000 for relief.

“Here was a woman who had not been on the world stage, her husband had been in office less than a year--and she had to face this incredible disaster,” Hogan said. “She’s done a magnificent job.”

Hondurans appear to agree. The first lady received a 78% approval rating--second only to her husband, Carlos Flores--in a nationwide CID-Gallup poll between Jan. 29 and Feb. 3.

Slender and attractive, with chin-length brown hair framing a fine-featured face and a penchant for wearing classic white blouses and dark pants, the 49-year-old grandmother makes an appealing spokeswoman.

A Cincinnati native who studied at Louisiana State University, where she met the future Honduran president, Mary Flake de Flores is well prepared to explain to an American audience the needs of this poor Central American country where she has lived for more than 20 years.

Still, Flores had not been grooming herself for such a public role.

“All through high school and college, I was always the shy one in the class,” she said recently. During the 1997 presidential campaign, she would “always say a little prayer--’Help me’--before I got up to the microphone.”

When Mitch struck, Flores found a strength that she likens to that of women who have reportedly lifted cars to save their children.

“We had to get our message out,” she said. “I was in shock. It was something that I just had to do.”

So she went on ABC-TV’s “Nightline,” and a deluge of interview requests followed.

Then came a month of greeting dignitaries at the airport, including U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore, and guiding them through damaged areas.

More recently, she has been overseeing the donations made directly to her own foundation, Fundacion Maria, which she started more than a year ago because she wanted to spend her husband’s term doing charity work without government funding.

Her involvement includes personally distributing toys and treats to children in remote hamlets such as Calpules, a tobacco-farming community in southern Honduras where Mitch destroyed five houses.

Here, 38 preschoolers assembled at the three-room school, dressed for picture day in ruffles and carefully pressed white shirts. They giggled softly as teacher Elvis Gomez called them to the front in twos and threes to talk with the first lady.

Drawing on more than 20 years of volunteer work in Honduran hospitals, Flores asked the 21-year-old teacher about anemia and malnutrition. A few children told her what they want to be when they grow up.

Still, most children were shy and puzzled until Flores and her military escorts began giving them model race cars, stuffed dolls, crackers and juice.

Outside, officials were tallying up the cartons of treats and toys that, for the next two hours, Flores would give to the children, and mothers lined up at the school gate.

“This is the kind of visit that poor communities never get,” Gomez said. “Not even the mayor visits us. We feel pleased that someone noticed us.”

Because of such a clear commitment to Honduras, no one here questions Flores’ decision to keep her American citizenship.

“My husband says that if I got up every morning and sang the national anthem, they would still call me gringa,” the first lady said.