Half a Year After Mitch, Rebuilding Process Continues at a Crawl

Carolina Suazo named her baby Brian, but everyone here calls him Mitchito--Little Mitch--for the hurricane that pummeled this island the day he was born and for two days afterward.

The 6-month-old baby’s nickname is just one reminder of the drubbing this tiny island off the coast of Honduras took during the most powerful Caribbean storm in two centuries. Besides the naked tree trunks on the hillsides and the driftwood from smashed houses that still washes up on the beach each day, there are the lives that have been changed forever.

The months since the storm killed 9,000 people across Central America, eight of them here, have brought a mixture of blessings and hardships, nobility and skulduggery, along with the bittersweet hope seen in the foot-high pine saplings growing at the feet of once-majestic trees that are now leafless trunks.

Inland, a new, 120-family settlement called Las Brisas del Mitch--Mitch’s Breezes--is growing on an abandoned airstrip. Two of the island’s three main tourist resorts have reopened, providing much-needed jobs.

But poor fishermen are struggling to repair or replace their boats. Those who still have their vessels--the basic transportation on this island without roads--worry that they will be the next victims of the wave of outboard motor thefts that has swept over Guanaja.

And the distribution of donations has deeply divided islanders, leading to accusations of corruption and disorganization that echo those heard across Honduras and Nicaragua, the two nations most devastated by Mitch.

Islanders Improvise Distribution System

In mid-April, islanders impatient with the distribution system run by the Guanaja Ladies’ Club, a local volunteer group, broke into 22 cargo containers that lined the shore and carried away what lumber, glass and nails they could. Family members in the Cayman Islands and the United States say they have collected donations that few people here have received.

“All the materials they have been sending have disappeared,” said Marcelo Webster Moore, pulling nails from the scrap lumber of his old house, which was destroyed by Mitch, to use in building a new home.

The Moore clan has begun to rebuild the settlement of Mangrove Bight with help from a U.S. church group, but funds have run out. They have completed fewer than 20 of the 135 houses lost in the hurricane.

Like dozens of Mangrove Bight families, Moore and his wife are staying with friends. Those less fortunate are in tents.

Finally, a Home of Her Own

Eveline Moore, a 58-year-old grandmother, lived in a tent until three weeks ago, when she moved into a new house built by the volunteers from Global Challenge, a nondenominational assistance group founded by a Bozeman, Mont., minister.

“I put that tent in a bag and told my husband I didn’t want to see it again,” she said, happily gazing around her single-room house, about the size of a two-car garage. Hers was one of a dozen houses built by 200 high school students on spring break from Seventh-day Adventist boarding schools in Oregon, Michigan and Wyoming.

Work had stopped because building materials donated by hardware stores in Bozeman--a town of 22,660--and a German construction company ran out, said Dan Abbott, a building contractor who is overseeing the effort. Volunteers from Friday Harbor, Wash., arrived last week with their own lumber and nails, ready to build one house and help finish others.

The Honduran government promised to build 60 houses here, but so far it has barely begun restoring the public school. Confident of receiving more donations, Global Challenge plans to help out in the settlement of Savannah Bight and in Las Brisas del Mitch as well, Abbott said.

Projects based on volunteers working with local people seem to be those that turn out best, said Joaquin Wahl, one of about 100 foreigners who live on Guanaja. His hometown of Schwaebisch Hall, Germany, sent three containers of donations, including tools and an electric generator.

Wahl has helped with that effort while he rebuilds the bed and breakfast that he and his wife, Selena McLaughlin, once managed. The two have also been kept busy with a new addition to their family, McLaughlin’s 4-year-old sister Lila.

She has been living with them since her mother, Miss Florentina, was killed and her father seriously injured when a house fell on them during the hurricane. Now they are in the protracted process of adopting her.

“Lila always has ideas,” said McLaughlin, whose 3-year-old daughter, Angie, loves to follow along. One of Lila’s ideas is to play hurricane. The girls jump on the bed they share, scattering their toys and clothes all over the room.

Then Lila directs: “Now we have to cry, because after Mama died, we all cried.” She is the only one in the family who can tell the story of the hurricane without tears.

Shadra McLaughlin, 22, recounted with a catch in his voice how he and his older brother, Armando, 27, cut the beam that crushed their mother in order to get her body from under the rubble.

“With tears in our eyes we had to do these things,” he said.

He carries his mother’s identification card in his pocket and recently had his first dream about her since she died. In the dream, he walked her home from church.

Shadra now works at the Posada del Sol Hotel, which in the past had bought the fish that he, his father and uncle caught. Having started on the maintenance crew, he is now the dive master’s assistant. For the moment, he and his girlfriend have put off marriage plans.

“Since Mitch, we haven’t been talking so much about the future,” he said.

Painful Memories of Death Linger

A few days after the storm, Armando McLaughlin built a shelter out of scrap wood. But the structure was right next to the place where his mother died, so every morning he was reminded of her violent death. He drifted into depression.

In early April, his cousins helped him get a job restoring the Bayman Bay Club, on the other side of the island, where he can try to get away from the memories. Still, they often find him by himself, crying.

“Some days, I’m working good, and it just come through my mind: my mama,” he said, in lilting Caribbean English. “It hurts me that she is gone like that--the condition she went in.”

He has found some joy in teaching English to his wife’s little sister and in playing defense for Bayman in the island’s seven-team soccer league. He also is pleased to have rescued two pictures of his mother from the debris.

All four McLaughlin siblings miss their father, Alsonm, who has been on the mainland recovering from a broken collarbone and a head wound he got in the hurricane. The head injury has brought memory loss, and he recently got lost walking back to his mother’s house, where he now stays.

“If I could get out and work, I wouldn’t feel so worried,” said the 61-year-old McLaughlin, whose first job--when he was 9--was picking coconuts. But doctors have told him not to lift anything for the rest of the year.

By that time, the Wahls expect to have taken Lila to Germany, where they will work to earn money so that they can return to Guanaja in a few years. For now, they are living on savings while they finish up with her adoption.

“I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t do any better,” patriarch Alsonm McLaughlin said. “I can’t take care of her.”

Carolina Suazo said she often feels the same way about her own three children. She returned to work a month after Brian was born, as soon as the seafood packing plant was reopened, earning $73 a month. But by the end of April, she was out of work because the lobster season had ended and the plant closed down until July.

“We’re the same as ever, working hard,” she said. Her mother, Hipolita Castillo, persuaded their landlord to let them rebuild the house where they had lived, in exchange for a year without rent. They owe the carpenter $1,200.

A six-chair dining room set, a love seat and couch still covered in plastic, two TV sets and two portable stereos were crowded into an area smaller than a one-car garage. Castillo said that the furnishings were sent from the mainland by a daughter whose house had burned.

The only donations they have received have been disposable diapers and a cradle delivered personally by a man who had heard about Brian’s birth, she said. Mitch, however, did bring them one bit of luck: When Brian was only a few weeks old, blotches that looked like acid burns spread over his skin. Suazo took him to the Cuban doctors who were on the island to help after the storm.

People from all over Latin America go to Cuba to be treated for the skin disease that Brian had developed. The lotion the doctors gave Suazo cleared up the condition in a few weeks, she said. Had the Cubans not been in Honduras, Brian might have been scarred for life.

Similarly, the McLaughlins grope to find a positive side to their tragedy in the sisterhood that has grown between Angie and Lila, or the advantages that Lila will have with a German passport.

“There is nothing we can do now,” Selena said. “We have to go on.”

Darling first visited the families of Guanaja last year, after Mitch struck. To read her stories on the storm’s aftermath, visit The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/mitch.

An extensive list of organizations helping victims of Hurricane Mitch is available on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/relief.