Hurricane Felix

Well Javi and I thought we were in for our first hurricane, and a category 5 no less, yesterday evening. I checked the internet midday yesterday to see an image of a massive hurricane, the eye of the storm which was supposed to pass right over central Honduras! Mild panic and excitement set in!!


Up until that point, I thought the storm would only affect those on the north coast. We got a call from our project manager to tell us to "stead fast," or as we interpreted it, "hunker down," so we went around town in a frenzy buying food and stocking up on water. Hondurans, to the contrary, were pretty laxy dazy about the whole thing and continued on with their usual, laxy dazy pace. We figured this was due to one too many hurricanes passing through their country.

Anyway, after we were all stocked up, we waited. Some heavy rains came, but nothing worse than we had seen before. Turns out, (we found out this morning) Felix turned into a tropical storm by the time it hit land, mostly dumping rain on the swampy region that lies between northeastern Honduras and Nicaragua, the vast jungle wilderness of the Mosquitia.

Many had been comparing this hurricane to MITCH, a storm that wreaked havoc on Honduras in 1998, killing 11,000 (?) people and damaging the already feeble economy. I thought the most interesting part of the whole thing was when a guy at work told us that there were some people who were praying that the hurricane would bring that kind of damage, because then Honduras would get international attention again and the aid money would come poring in. That is crazy.

Another interesting antidote was a story I read on weather.com before we knew Felix would turn into a tropical storm. This guy had been evacuated from Roatan and was waiting for a flight back to the States. He was quoted as saying something to the effect that he hoped all this mess was worth it, because he had only gotten 7 dives in so far on his vacation, and he was a bit put out. SEVEN DIVES. And absolutely no thought for the rest of the people who actually live there on that island. Wow.

Well, thats all I have to say about that. Next time I will be posting something about the different kind of work business volunteers do here. Bye for now!