Innundaciones!

Honduras is flooding. The south coast has some really serious flooding going on. San Manuel, a municipality an hour away from La Campa has had some small mudslides that have damaged a lot and destroyed a few houses. This week has been pretty crazy because we´ve been running back and forth from San Manuel meeting with campesinos (as) and trying to reassure them. Currently I think the count is around 300 displaced people in San Manuel, which is a really big deal, about the size of a whole community. What needs to happen is people need to be given some land to live on and set up new lives with new cornfields and livestock and all that.

Moving like that is a really huge deal for people here. They are so connected to their communities. They don´t really know people outside of their communities and they rarely travel. Its interesting to think of the huge cultural importance that we put on travelling in the US, but how we miss out on close community life. Then again, there are plenty of American people who have never really travelled either. Anyway, for these people a move signifies massive change in their lives, even if it is only a few kilometers. It means new people, new land (which has likely been in their families for a long time) and a whole lot of uncertainty. The amount of land that I´ve heard people talking about for all of these people seems very small, definitely not enough to do more than have a house. These people rely so much on subsistence farming, I don´t know how that is going to be a realistic option for a new life.

All of this has been brought on by the now 43 tropical waves, they call them, that have brought rain into Honduras. The normal number of tropical waves was about 15 five years ago, but recently its been climbing.

This post is pretty rushed, but I´ll try to post some pictures soon!

¡Que le vayan bien!