For Those Spared by Mitch, Safe Future Hinges on Jobs

CIUDAD SANDINO, Nicaragua —  Balancing brightly colored washtubs on their heads, women gather to do laundry at communal spigots in Nueva Vida, a subdivision sprouting near this nation’s capital for victims of tropical storm Mitch.

Children play with leftover scraps of building materials, configuring and reconfiguring doll-size houses.

Men look on, idle--and worried that they will be unable to support their families so far from Lake Managua, which shares its name with the capital and where they used to be fishermen.

Nueva Vida, as its name promises, offers these families a safe new life in 1,300 sturdy little houses to replace shanties that were washed into the lake at the height of the storm that killed 9,000 people across Central America late last year.

But away from the lake, the subdivision offers no way for jobless fishermen to make a living--reflecting a huge problem that faces storm victims and authorities across Central America.

Officials say they want to take advantage of the disaster to move the victims out of precarious and often illegal areas--such as lake shores, riverbeds and steep hillsides.

But, as they undertake the monumental task of relocating more than half a million people, authorities confront the uncomfortable reality that people lived in such dangerous places because they were poor and needed to feed their families.

To solve the problem, governments must not only find the money to build safe housing in settlements like Nueva Vida. They must also help people learn new ways to make a living, and they must enforce safety measures.

Unlike the new residents of Nueva Vida, many fishing families simply resettled at the edges of the polluted lake and waited for the waters to subside.

Survivors of a mudslide at Las Casitas volcano in western Nicaragua are refusing to leave the region of rich volcanic soil for safer wilderness areas with untested land. More than 1,500 farmers were buried alive in that disaster.

In neighboring Honduras, families are rebuilding shacks over the ruins of the neighborhood known as La Soto, which slid down the hill into downtown Tegucigalpa, the capital. They stay because the neighborhood is close to the market where they sell wares.

Dismantling the illegal shanties of the poor is a politically unpopular idea in countries where most citizens understand desperation far better than the abstract concept of zoning laws. Still, Mauricio Montealegre, Nicaragua’s top housing official, said the dismantling needs to be done.

“Even though it sounds cruel, we should tear to the ground all the houses [in danger zones] and make some kind of a park so that no one can settle there again,” he said. “In poor countries like ours, people always look for dangerous places, because those are the places that are available to build their houses.”

Of the 41,000 Nicaraguan families who lost their homes to Mitch, 80% lived at or below the poverty line even before the storm struck. They always have struggled simply to provide their children with enough food, and they live where they can. In Honduras, Mitch left three times as many families homeless, and the proportion of poor among the victims was about the same.

For weeks, homeless families lived in shelters, most of which were located in schools. The schools have been reopening after holidays that were extended because of Mitch, and officials are looking for more permanent solutions.

Honduran authorities are building semi-permanent shelters, many within freeway cloverleafs, where the whizzing traffic presents its own dangers.

Despite the immediate crunch, Montealegre insisted that, if done right, resettlement will mean not only recovery but transformation.

He hopes to gather Nicaraguan farmers into rural communities of 100 people or more, a size that will make it feasible for the government to eventually provide residents with running water, sewers, electricity and schools.

He plans to distribute building kits with sheet-metal roofs and concrete floors to replace the dirt-floor houses that were destroyed. But he also recognizes how badly previous attempts to move people out of danger zones have ended.

“This has been a recurring problem in the fishermen’s settlements in Nicaragua,” he said. “One generation settles there. They are given land outside the zone when it floods. They sell that land and move back.”

New Home Lots Laid Out in Alfalfa Fields

Managua environmental director Enrique Cedeno is determined to keep that from happening in Nueva Vida.

Within days after Mitch hit, City Hall had bought 100 acres of alfalfa fields in Ciudad Sandino, a northern suburb, and mapped out lots for new homes.

The beginning has been slow: just lumber for corners and cross beams, plastic sheeting for walls and sheet metal for roofs, all donated. In December, Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica gave money to build the first 200 simple houses, which cost about $1,200 each. City Hall is attempting to raise more international contributions for the remaining 1,100 families.

“We are trying to arrange for some organizations to teach trades like carpentry and masonry and to create a greenhouse and some family businesses,” Cedeno said. That would give victims an incentive not to move back to the lake.

Felipe Mayorga is not waiting around for the government; he is busy making a new life in Nueva Vida.

“I have been through this plenty of times before,” said Mayorga. “I know what is going to happen. I have five kids and a wife to support. I need to get to work.”

So every morning, the burly, shirtless 42-year-old painter, two apprentices and his eldest son heat emulsifier over an open fire, dump in other ingredients at the right moment, then refill used paint cans with colors tinted to order.

The wooden facade on his own plastic house is painted mint green, his way of showing pride in his home and his trade. He expects business to boom once Nueva Vida’s permanent houses start going up.

Meanwhile, he sells paint for $1.50 to $2 a gallon. The price barely covers his costs, but he is teaching a trade to his assistants. And he hopes that the colors painted on scrap-lumber facades will brighten his new neighborhood and build his reputation.

One of his neighbors, Maria Francisca Canosa, used to support her 10 children by washing clothes in the lake near the tiny shack she rented for $5 a month in San Francisco, the largest of the villages dotting the northern shore of Lake Managua.

Now that community spigots have been installed in Nueva Vida, she is trying to reestablish her business, but work is sporadic. She often does not have enough money for bus fare, which she needs to pick up clothing from her clients.

“No one has work here because everything depended on fishing,” she said.

Cedeno hopes to keep people from moving back to the lake by building fences and starting a reforesting project there. “People say we are destroying their way of life, but what kind of lifestyle is that?” he said.

But the government has not contacted people like Gilberto Montes, who stayed along the edges of the lake. Montes and his four older children live in a lean-to overlooking their flooded house in San Francisco, Canosa’s old neighborhood, which reeks of dead fish and raw sewage. His two youngest children are with his wife, who works as a live-in maid.

Montes, 60, has no land, and even though he knows carpentry and masonry, he can’t find work. So, he and his two older sons fish for a living--and that means being near the lake.

Nicaraguan officials are reluctant to start forcing such people to leave the shore until they have resettled thousands of families who remain in shelters. Then, they need to find housing for people living with friends or relatives.

Montealegre has $1 million in commitments from international donors, enough to build 5,000 houses. “That’s about 10% of what we need,” he said.

Like Nicaragua, Honduras has shown some willingness to let people resettle in dangerous areas, but it also has demonstrated an unexpected firmness in halting new settlements.

Keni Elizabeth Lanza’s two toddlers play among the jutting metal rods, jagged concrete blocks and broken glass that were once La Soto, the market vendors’ neighborhood in the Tegucigalpa hills.

No government officials have come to tell Lanza and her husband that they must leave this dangerous place, where houses slid down the hill into the Choluteca River. Three generations of their family have begun rebuilding with salvaged lumber on the site of their rambling old compound.

“I’m scared for my children, but we’re here out of necessity,” said Lanza, frying eggs from chickens who scavenge through the rubble. In a shelter, they would not be allowed to keep their chickens or their lumber, she said.

One of her neighbors, watch-repairman Omar Velazquez, said that he and his wife were moving their three children to a safer neighborhood at the edge of the city. He had just completed the paperwork to take over payments on a foreclosed lot in a public housing project.

Neighbors derided his decision. “Just wait until you wait in line for a bus every day for half an hour,” warned Angela Garcia, a spice vendor.

Police Evicted Families From Unstable Area

The Honduran government did enforce its prohibition on building in another unstable area. Police carrying nightsticks evicted 580 La Soto families in January from atop Mogote Hill, which is relatively close to downtown.

The storm victims had demanded that the government confiscate the land from its owner and give it to them--the traditional way in which poor neighborhoods are founded here. Campaigning politicians eventually bring electricity and water, but no one ever checks for planning- or building-code compliance--inviting disaster in storms and earthquakes.

The great irony is that halfway up Mogote Hill, shells of row houses from a bankrupt public housing project sit unfinished on terraced streets.

The empty houses and homeless people would be a perfect fit, except for one problem: Modest as those houses are, Mitch’s victims probably could not pay the $15 monthly mortgage.