Making Up For Mitch One Year After A Devastating Hurricane Hit Honduras, Spokane Missonary Reports On The Country’S Recovery

Since Hurricane Mitch flattened much of Honduras a year ago, missionary doctor Carole Denison has helped numerous Central American families put the pieces back together with donations from Inland Northwest residents.

Denison, a Spokane native, still practices medicine in the coastal town of La Ceiba in the mornings. Afternoons are devoted to rebuilding homes.

A Spokesman-Review photographer and reporter followed her last fall as she assessed damage from the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years. Now, in the following letter to reporter Jeanette White, Denison tells how she used the $36,000 that Spokesman-Review readers sent in response. The letter was edited for length.

Greetings, my dear: … I wanted to write sooner but I wanted to be able to send the final word on the use of all of the funds. Other funds have come in since (see newsletter) and so the construction goes on, but the original funds have been used to cover 12 homes. Here is how.

1. Vilma Flores Nunez has five children. One is married with a child. Another child lives with the grandmother and three - a boy 15; Ingrid, 8; and a baby, 2 - live with her. She came to me before the hurricane and asked for help to build her home as she had been given the property next to where she was renting. At the time I did not have funds so I suggested that she take out a loan and that I would try to find financial help. The hurricane washed the bank away up to the door of the rental, as you saw. So with funds from your article and the loan, we started. I paid off the loan ($2,076) after the house was finished, and the rest of the costs came to $1,646, for a total of $3,722. She now has water and lights.

Vilma was a cleaning woman at a hotel until the last child was born. She has not returned to work yet. Her son is supporting the family, and the father helps a bit, and as is so common here, has another woman and family. She is afraid to go back to work for fear that thieves will break in during her absence and steal what she has. Also, she has no one to take care of the baby.

2. Enma Herrera is 60 and has lived alone after her mother died 20 years ago. She does not know how to read or write. She has spent her life gathering firewood to sell and gives back rubs for a living. She has severe asthma and was living in La Masica when the hurricane took her shack. A family gave her this piece of property in La Ceiba with a lean-to shack on it.

She has been a patient at the clinic and I have tried to control her asthma, but it is very severe and she ends up in the hospital most months. We tore down her shack and built her house for $3,747. She has a septic tank, water and electricity and must now pay bills, so I am hoping to control her asthma enough so that she can get a job cleaning.

She was abused as a child by a stepfather, and then took care of her mother for years, a mother who treated her very badly. She had a drunk husband for a while, but she left him many years ago. So this house, which costs so much because I bought her a lot of furniture, towels, etc., is the first decent living she has had. Now that she has electricity, I was able to give her a nebulizer for home use.

3. Maria Lozano is 70 and cares for three grandchildren alone. She washes and irons for a living. She was living in the Montecristo section (by the sea) of La Ceiba when the hurricane filled her house with water.

As she is a moderately severe asthmatic, I have had her in treatment at the clinic for years. Her oldest daughter abandoned Maria, leaving her with a mentally retarded boy who is now 21. Then the youngest sister did the same and went to the states, leaving two young girls. The father of the girls followed the mother, but got stuck in Mexico where he worked for two years. He returned after the hurricane.

I met him, and as he knows how to build, he was the builder for the house.

Maria has a septic tank, water and electricity, and I have been able to give her a nebulizer for home use. She now has an iron and ironing board (from me) so she can do her work from her home. She is a real worker and sold a cow in order to plaster the house inside and out, and is now putting in a ceiling. She is very grateful for the house.

4. Jose Adonai Villalobo and his wife were living in La Ceiba because their house in San Juan Pueblo was destroyed by the hurricane. Jose is a friend of Maria’s and was the helper on building her house. So he was given a part of his sister’s property in San Juan Pueblo on which to build his new house.

But he is a common laborer in the fields and had no way to build. I went with him and Maria’s son-in-law to San Juan Pueblo to see the property and purchase the building materials. We went by taxi as it is one hour outside of La Ceiba.

These two men did the work, and the house cost $3,087. Now they are back in San Juan Pueblo, living in the house with their two teenage children. This is one very grateful family! They have a septic tank, water, but no electricity.

5. Berta Ruiz, 67, was living with her invalid husband and adopted boy when the hurricane filled their house with mud. Her husband was taken to the hospital here, and he died a couple of weeks later.

Berta still works at the government hospital where she has worked for 48 years in the laundry room! We built her home for $4,314, which cost more than the rest as she recommended a builder who turned out to be a crook and cost me about $500 more than was necessary. But one fiasco after another is the story of Berta’s life.

Her mental capacity seems to be arrested around a 4-year-old level, and so she goes from one problem to another.

Her daughter left her with debts and she cannot retire as she has pledged a year’s salary to pay off the debts, and they collect directly from the hospital.

When building the house I told her where I wanted the foundation, but she told the builder to make it larger. That cost me extra money, and then afterward, she wanted a barbed wire fence around the property to keep the drunks from urinating in her yard.

So I did that, but then the neighbor knocked down the fence because she had built on part of his property. Now she has to pay him around 2000 lempires (about $143) for the property that was his.

Costs were up in her case because I also bought her beds, stove and a plastic dinner set. She is connected to sewage, has water and electricity.

6. The Meraz family had a mud hut that they were living in but it was on someone else’s property. They were tending the property and had planted corn. The hurricane destroyed their house, so they moved into another mud hut which was being lent to them temporarily. So the husband, Francisco Emiliano, who is a night watchman for a hotel, was able to purchase part of the property of a neighbor woman with hopes of building his house. Mercedes is his wife. They have four children, and he has a daughter living with them from a previous union.

The area is in the city limits (in the hills behind the clinic), but the road is so bad that trucks can’t get in to deliver materials so they had to be packed in up a hill trail! It was monumental getting the materials to the site.

The constructor was very good and reported to me everything. He is the first totally honest builder I have had, so much so that I am going to try to keep him working for me on clinic repairs.

Well, he reported that Mercedes was charging him to help by carrying cement blocks up the trail and that the husband was doing absolutely nothing. So when the roof was on, I told the constructor that we were going to leave the materials with them and that they were going to have to find how to finish the construction. Well, they have done a very good job. Mercedes comes to the clinic frequently with her children. This house cost $2,933.

7. Some community leaders in the Colonia Suyapa asked if I would not be able to help Cristina Ochoa with her house as the roof was left badly damaged by the hurricane. The whole house was a disaster, so I used Maria Lozano’s son-in-law again to rebuild her home.

She lives with her unskilled son (who helped on the building) and a grandson, his wife and their twin son and daughter. They live in front of the school. We rebuilt half of the house, which is 10 by 22 feet, and put in a septic tank and outhouse (the indoors has no room for a bathroom). The cost was $1,352. Villalobo was a helper on this house.

8. Miguel Portillo was living with his son in a one-room shack which the hurricane took. He is 70 and was living off the help of his son, who sells clothes in the public market. A neighbor was allowing them to live in the shack on their property. The son has a common law wife and child who went to live with her parents.

The house cost $1,986, is 15 by 17 feet and has an outhouse with septic tank, water and electricity! Miguel worked on the place and was a great help.

It was a pleasure to help him. He survives with a 4-year-old’s mental development but he is honest and a hard worker. When the house was done, the son’s wife and child moved back in with them. But the property is in his name and so they can’t kick him out.

He has offered to help at the clinic, and I might just take him up on that.

9. I also helped two sisters, Norma Nunez and Amparo, who live across the street from each other in a very poor section of town. Norma’s house (one-room, 12-by-15-foot wood shack) burned in August last year and so she technically is not a hurricane victim.

We built a house for her for $2,295. It has an outhouse with septic tank but no running water or electricity. Norma has had so many fights with neighbors that they will not permit her to have water hook-up. The electric company says they are going to shut off service to this area as the residents won’t pay their bills!

10. Amparo’s house was an 8-by-10-foot concoction of cardboard and zinc, literally falling down. I knew we could not build a house for one sister and leave the other as she was. So Amparo moved into Norma’s new house while hers was being built.

Amparo is a nice woman who has the mental development of a 5-year-old. She has five children out of wedlock. One has an illegitimate child already, and the grandchild lives with them. Another daughter has two club feet that were never attended to, and she is now a permanent cripple. She is 10 and has never gone to school. Thus it goes.

But for all of this Amparo is doing her best. Her house, which cost $2,115, has an outhouse with septic tank, laundry basins, but no water or electricity.

11. Eusebio Evaristo Chirinos (wife Ana) was my constructor for the Meraz house and Miguel Portillo’s house. Through it all he truly amazed me with his honesty. When I asked about his own place, I found out that he built it but with a loan and for two years has not been able to pay anything on the loan. They sent a lawyer twice to say that they were repossessing the house.

I was made aware that this loan company is really a sham that tries to take away the people’s homes to resell and make a profit. If you miss a couple of payments they raise the rates so high that there is no way the people can pay. I could not let this happen to Eusebio. So I paid part of his loan, 26,000 lempires ($1,928) and now, working for me, he is back paying his monthly quota.

His wife just had their fourth child and so I paid for her tubal ligation, which she just had. His house does need work still (no running water inside), so when all is done I would like to help him improve the house (water, septic tank, inside toilet). I am going to have him be the clinic repair man. (I have more cracking walls and want to put in more cement benches in the porch.)

12. Luz Marina Ponce has been a patient of mine (asthmatic) for years. Her 9-year-old daughter also has it. She came to the clinic after the hurricane and was asking for help with the roofing. I went to look at the house, which was a 12-foot-square wood shack in deplorable shape.

I knew repairs were not the solution as she has eight children (seven live with her plus an illegitimate grandchild), no running water or electricity. So I told her to go house hunting. She did and found a Christian man who wanted to sell his part-wood, part-cement house and property for 38,000 lempires (now 14 to one dollar).

We bought it and had a lawyer turn over the property. Then I got the constructor from Amparo’s place to put in a cement floor and re-do the wood steps in front and side in cement and put in a barbed-wire fence. The total cost was $3,341. She has water and electricity but a regular outhouse.

Her daughter has never gone to school as she did not have a birth certificate, and so I paid the lawyer at the same time to do that and now she will enter first grade at 10 years of age (next January)!

As she has electricity, I gave her a nebulizer so that she can do home treatments. What a blessing this is for this woman who has lived in abject poverty her whole life. She was so proud the other day to have ironed her first outfit that she had to tell me about it.

Well, my dear, I don’t know if this will be of any help, but I did want to be accountable and let you know how the funds were used. The total of these homes comes to $33,750. Some was spent on clinic wall repairs and a bit is being held for any emergency in the future, but the majority of the donations from Spokane went for the rebuilding of homes for these hurricane victims and other just-as-needy cases. Hope you feel the blessing that I do in having been the primary person responsible for this work.

TO DONATE Dr. Denison Fund Donations can be sent to The Dr. Carole Denison Fund at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 705 W. Rayburn, at Porter, Ocean Springs, MS 39564. Checks should be made out to St. John’s Episcopal Church with a note directing the money to Carole Denison.