German Reyes
La Lima (Honduras), Dec 15 (EFE) .- Thousands of victims in La Lima, northern Honduras, where Queen Letizia visited a shelter on Tuesday, continue to ask for help to recover from the damage caused by tropical storms Eta and Iota, in November.
“We lost everything, we only went out with what we were wearing, our clothes,” José Evelio Vargas told Efe at the Patria Institute shelter in La Lima, where some 131 families are living, with more than 500 people, including children, women and men, some of them elderly and others with physical disabilities.
DAMNIFIED PEOPLE ASK FOR HELP FOR A HOUSE
Vargas indicated that he lives in the Municipal neighborhood and that his wooden house “is on its side”, after more than a month submerged in water, since November 4, when the first major flood occurred due to the torrential rains left by Tropical Storm Eta.
Less than two weeks after the Eta pass, the Central American country suffered other huge floods due to Iota, to which was added another rainy storm that ended up submerging the extensive and fertile valley of Sula, where the municipality of La Lima is located. , and San Pedro Sula, the second most important city in Honduras.
The north and west of Honduras are the regions most affected by natural phenomena.
Over his house, Vargas, a worker who earns a monthly salary of 3,800 lempiras ($ 156) has no hope of getting it back, “because the wood rots in the water.”
Vargas, with his wife and a ten-year-old son, are living on the second floor of the shelter, in a school classroom, sharing with three other families. They all sleep on mats.
The problem with the Municipal neighborhood is that the first flood due to the rains that Eta unloaded, which was previously a category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which entered through Nicaragua, is that one of the containment edges was broken by the mighty Chamelecón river, which with its overflow flooded all of La Lima.
Leticia Gómez is also living in the Patria Institute shelter, where there are still stagnant stinking waters, who recalled that “we were flooded, we lost everything,” and that the Municipal neighborhood “cannot be entered yet.”
“Everything is flooded, we are very affected, the other one came full (Iota) and it also filled up again, we did not get anything, we lost everything, the water does not come out of there, I do not know if they can help us, we need them to come to check those places because all those little houses are flooded, now we cannot leave here, we are all without anything, “he stressed.
Gómez, like Vargas, want some authority to guarantee them a new house, because they are afraid of returning to the Municipal neighborhood “because it is dangerous” and “how treacherous the river is.”
No less serious is the situation of María Lourdes Vázquez, who, carrying her four-year-old daughter Iliana Raquel Torres, told Efe that the girl suffers from microcephaly.
“My daughter does not walk, she does not speak, but we are fighting with my husband,” added the woman, who also pointed out that she had four children, of which two still depend on her and her husband, because they are minors.
Little Iliana, who has received treatment at the Telethon Foundation, barely moves her head and hands, and with her expressive eyes she cries out for help.
MOTHER WITH TWO CHILDREN DOES NOT KNOW WHERE TO GO
Dunia Gómez, mother of two children, aged six and four, does not know where to go and on the 12th, she left the shelter that operates in the private Guadalupano Institute, also in La Lima, near the Homeland.
For now, she is housed in a small cellar in her father’s house, which was also flooded, but in the area where he lives, the water level, in the Municipal neighborhood, has already dropped.
“It was flooded here on November 4, the corridors here where we live were rivers,” Dunia says, pointing to what remains of her house, almost entirely submerged, for more than a month.
In the same sector there are other flooded houses that seem to have fared better than Dunia’s, who also said that he does not know where he will go with his children, “because they say that the area will not be habitable, because they are going to repair the edges.”
“I don’t know where we’re going to go,” said Dunia, who survives with one of her sisters, “selling tortillas” made of corn and wheat flour, “because we’re not going to die of hunger and we have to work whatever there is because we are working women. “
GOD BROUGHT THE QUEEN
Adjacent to the Municipal neighborhood is Rivera Martínez, which is also still flooded, despite the fact that an engine, provided by a sugar company, has been extracting stagnant water for several days for more than a month.
The Rivera Martínez neighborhood is also close to the Chamelecón River and located on the banks of the highway that connects San Pedro Sula, La Lima and El Progreso.
The visit of Queen Letizia of Spain today transcended in the shelters of La Lima, even in the improvised camps with plastic, tarps and sticks, on the banks of the highway, and in some cases in two of its four lanes.
Celia Medina, 70, a resident of Martínez Rivera, along with two of her children, married, told Efe that about the flood that did not give them time “to get anything out,” and that is why “we are living on the highway.” , of which 20 meters away, in a hollow, is his house.
“There are my house and those of my children, they are not destroyed, but we cannot enter because they are still full of mud,” he added.
Celia commented that “the news is saying that the Queen of Spain is here” and that she is “glad that she is visiting us”.
“Let’s see what brings us, we thank God, because it was God who sent her to our country,” he said.
Queen Letizia, who arrived in northern Honduras on Monday with humanitarian aid for the victims, learned in La Lima part of the pain suffered by the victims who left Eta and Iota in less than two weeks in various regions of the country. EFE
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