Honduran recovery offers lessons

CIUDAD ESPAÑA, Honduras -- Like many of his 7,000 neighbors in this gleaming planned community outside the Honduran capital, Ramon Antonio Medina never dreamed of owning a concrete house, much less one with electricity and indoor plumbing.

He has Hurricane Mitch to thank.

In its murderous three-day sweep through Central America in October 1998, the hurricane killed almost 10,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless, most of them in Honduras. The destruction from the storm, one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record, cost the country $4 billion; agricultural production had been slashed by 70 percent.

Then the world poured more than $3 billion into Honduras -- one-third from the United States. Aid workers said the response to Mitch was a record reconstruction effort in terms of funding levels and speed of reaction.

Seven years later, the country has some of the best roads in the region, dramatically expanded sewage and water sanitation systems, and dozens of new bridges and dams. Tens of thousands of poor Hondurans, whose wood and adobe huts were washed away in the flooding or devoured by mudslides, have moved into new concrete houses on higher ground.

The country's experience offers lessons about what works in such a huge reconstruction effort, and what can go wrong. When people were offered only emergency housing and nothing else, the projects often failed. Where the projects were comprehensive, with infrastructure and services such as water and sewer systems and job opportunities, they worked.

''I love my house," said Medina, 70, who lost a leg three decades ago and uses crutches. He flashed a smile as he tended to papaya and banana trees in his garden, with a view of pine-covered mountains.

His previous home, a shack clinging to a gully in Tegucigalpa, the capital, had no plumbing or electricity. Today, he and his wife share a four-room concrete house with a bathroom and a porch. In exchange for their homes, Ciudad Espana's residents worked on the area reconstruction project and finish work on other buildings.

Ciudad Espana, which cost $12 million and was funded primarily by the Spanish government and the International Committee of the Red Cross, is widely cited as a model for reconstruction because of its integral approach.

''Infrastructure is one thing, but building a community in people's minds is another thing," said Jose Ramon Oliva, the Honduran Red Cross official in charge of planning in Ciudad Espana. He said the project had earned the attention of aid workers in Asia who are working to rebuild after the Dec. 26 tsunami.

Like most of the projects, Ciudad Espana put residents to work building their own houses in exchange for food, as part of an effort to give them a personal stake in their new community. But unlike in neighboring developments, which are still struggling to provide basic services, the residents of Ciudad Espana spent an extra year living in shelters to allow time to install power as well as water and sewage systems in their new homes. The first residents moved in during November 2002.

Planners also focused on providing social services, including schools, a health clinic, a soccer stadium, a police station, and two community centers that help with vocational training and micro-loans.

There is one problem Ciudad Espana has yet to solve: access to jobs. Many of the residents were desperately poor before Mitch, making less than the daily minimum wage of $4.75 from what little work they could find in their old neighborhoods in the capital. Now they say they are even poorer, because they have to pay the 50-cent round-trip bus fare from Ciudad Espana, which sprawls across a valley about 18 miles northwest of the capital.

''This is the best place in terms of services. The only things we lack is work," said Santiago Matamoros, 50, an unemployed bricklayer whose adobe house had been sucked into the raging flood waters of Mitch. He said President Ricardo Maduro had promised to create jobs in the area while inaugurating Ciudad Espana in January, ''but that's all lies."

The community's planners had hoped that residents could find work in assembly plants nearby, which make clothing for export to the United States. But most residents lack the skills to compete for those jobs.

The economic problems underscore the difficulty of rebuilding entire communities from scratch, particularly in a country as poor as Honduras, where the per capita income is $2,600 a year.

Indeed, some residents of riverside slums in Tegucigalpa who lost their houses in Mitch chose to rebuild on the same perilous spot, rather than move out to Ciudad Espana. La Betania, a slum on the banks of the Choluteca River on the outskirts of the capital, was obliterated by the hurricane. Seven years later, metal and wooden shacks stretch for half a mile along the river's edge.

''After Mitch, everyone is afraid. But what can we do? We can't afford to go anywhere else," said Francisca Ramos, 43, standing outside the shack she built 10 yards from the river. She said she couldn't afford the bus fare from Ciudad Espana on the $2 a day she makes selling tortillas.

But the majority of Hondurans who lost their homes to Mitch have moved to the new communities, where they say they are benefiting from the investment in infrastructure and social programs.

''Our approach was to build it back better," said Christopher Tushing, supervisory program officer for the US Agency for International Development in Honduras, which has played a leading role in the post-Mitch reconstruction.

The efforts included preparing the country to cope with future natural disasters. Aid organizations have helped set up emergency committees in high-risk communities, which are equipped with satellite-operated flood detection systems.

''If it weren't for the aid workers, we wouldn't have anywhere to live," said Doris Barahona, director of the elementary school in Nueva Morolica, a planned community built on safe ground on a river bluff about 70 miles southwest of the capital. The town's several thousand residents, who lived between two rivers, lost everything when flood waters swept away all 300 houses.

Despite the town's remote location -- three hours by a potholed dirt road from the nearest big town -- aid organizations built a functioning community. Today, the residents live in modest concrete houses, laid out around a large plaza. They have electricity and indoor plumbing, as well as a new courthouse, a health clinic, a library, several churches, and a school with 15 computers.

''It's not the village where we grew up," said Barahona, who had previously lived in an eight-room adobe house. But she added, ''At least now we don't have to worry what will happen to us if we have to face another Mitch."