NEWS FEATURE: After Mitch: New Unity, New Houses, New Problems in Rebuilding Effort

c. 2000 Religion News Service CATACAMAS, Honduras _ Looks like iguana for supper. Two youngsters sat cleaning an iguana outside one of the new houses of Colonia Donald Hawk on the outskirts of Catacamas, a dusty town where the paved roads end in the Honduran state of Olancho, about three hours northeast of the nation’s […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

CATACAMAS, Honduras _ Looks like iguana for supper.

Two youngsters sat cleaning an iguana outside one of the new houses of Colonia Donald Hawk on the outskirts of Catacamas, a dusty town where the paved roads end in the Honduran state of Olancho, about three hours northeast of the nation’s capital.


What was unusual was less the iguana than that there was no Colonia Donald Hawk two years ago. The more than 70 concrete-slab and concrete-block residences in the new housing development were built in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which ravaged Honduras in October 1998.

After the torrents of the swollen Catacamas River swept two local neighborhoods downstream, religious leaders from a number of denominations joined other local organizations to direct relief and, later, reconstruction efforts.

While the leaders at first organized shelters, the idea soon emerged to build permanent housing, according to Jose Manuel Martin, pastor of Central Holiness Church.

The development was named after Donald Hawk, a pioneering North American missionary who opened the School of the Sower outside Catacamas in 1954. His son, David Hawk, oversaw the construction of the development named for his father, who died in 1981.

Key players on the Inter-Institutional Committee were Central Holiness, the St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic parish and two Christian health-care organizations, the Good Shepherd Clinic and Mission Predisan. The mayor’s office and Lions’ Club also helped.

Especially appropriate for its work with the poor who lost the little they had to Mitch, the committee’s Spanish acronym is “CAITE,” the word for a sandal-like shoe worn by Honduran peasants.

The houses in the new neighborhood line up in neat rows. Though the majority are made of multiple concrete slabs, 32 funded by Baptists and Roman Catholics use concrete block as the main material. Doris Clark, assistant director of Mission Predisan, said some donors preferred blocks because they were produced locally.

While all the houses have been assigned owners, Donald Hawk resident Rosa Margarita Romero said about 40 families had moved in. Romero runs what she said is the only pulperia, or general store, in the new neighborhood.


What Romero’s neighbor Alfredo Mendoza likes best about the development, he said, is that “it’s nice and quiet.” He looks forward to continuing improvements in the area, adding, “we may build a little park.”

Mendoza has the standard Donald Hawk floor plan: two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bath. A guard who earns 3,000 lempiras _ about $200 _ a month, Mendoza lives in Donald Hawk with his two children still at home.

The roaring Catacamas “took away everything,” Mendoza said. Like other future residents, Mendoza invested his own sweat in the construction, earning coupons redeemable for food to provide for his family during the building. He has been living in his new house since Jan. 10.

Neighbor Elias Calis’s house is similar to Mendoza’s. But Calis has added a separate kitchen to the roughly 20-foot square original structure. Ten people share the Calis house.

Donald Hawk residents pay about $14 a month, said Clark. The monthly obligation lasts until owners have paid back half the approximately $3,400 each home originally cost.

The Predisan mission built a system to pump well water to each of the houses, which, unlike many Honduran homes, are designed with indoor plumbing.


There are signs Donald Hawk is becoming a community instead of an agglomeration of displaced people. Next door to the general store, a Holiness prayer group meets Monday and Friday at 7 p.m. A team of Americans has recently been building a Holiness church in the neighborhood. There’s a playground and room to kick a soccer ball.

“There is a better future here,” said Salvador Palma, Donald Hawk resident and president of the neighborhood’s governing 10-member council. Compared to his old home on the banks of the Catacamas River, the new residence “is a place … with better chances for progress,” said Palma.

But despite the progress, Donald Hawk isn’t Eden.

The electricity still has not been hooked up. Built on land donated by local government about a 15-minute bus trip from the center of Catacamas, the neighborhood is far away from work and shopping for a town where walking is a common way to get places.

In addition, the homes in one section of Donald Hawk remain unfinished and residents complain of being abandoned. Instead of the multiple rooms of the other houses, Ramona Galiana’s unfinished home had cardboard and cloth partitions strung up on an interior wooden frame. “We don’t have anything here,” Galiana said. “We’re just been left to the good will of God.”

Though the unfinished structures appeared to be only a small percentage of the project, Clark said it has been a difficult task not only to build new houses but to make neighbors of people thrust side-by-side without the normal time for communities to adjust and evolve.

“It hasn’t been without its problems,” Clark acknowledged, adding, “there’s all kinds of social work activity that should go on there.”


Despite the bumps, Central Holiness Church’s Martin credits divine intervention with having brought together the disparate groups that jelled into CAITE.

“I can really only see the work of the Lord,” Martin said of the effort.

The School of the Sower, an elementary, high school, vocational school, and Bible institute, is affiliated with World Gospel Mission in Marion, Ind. The Good Shepherd Clinic has ties with The Luke Society, a Christian mission organization headquartered in Sioux Falls, S.D. Predisan, a compound of the Spanish for “to preach” and “to heal,” is under the direction of Northlake Church of Christ in Atlanta.

The committee’s name symbolized the way suffering united the different groups in a common task. It was time “to take off our shoes and put on the thongs of the poor,” said Martin. “We had to sort of get out of the role we have … in our institutions” to serve people who suddenly had nothing.

For St. Francis’ pastor, the Rev. Dionisio Cruz, it was important to carry out “how Jesus asked us to be one, apart from being from different cultures, a different social status, and a different religious belief. There is being fulfilled there what the gospel itself asks us to do.”

DEA END PARKS

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