by Peter Schweitzer

When hurricane Iris stormed into southern Belize in the evening of October 8, many people didn’t know what to expect. There hadn’t been a hurricane in these parts since sometime in the 1940s and Hurricane Hattie in 1961 did most of its damage in Belize City and points north. Most people knew it was coming from listening to the radio, but some people were still working in the forest or on their farms when it hit.

In the village of San Miguel Martin Ack’s father was reluctant to leave his home and go to the concrete block building that was designated as a shelter. But by 7:30 PM the winds were getting strong and they could hear the hurricane approaching like a thunderous forest fire, so the Ack family headed for the shelter. By 8:30 it was over. People cautiously went out side and were stunned to see the destruction now viewable in the calm, clear night.

Iris was a category 4 hurricane with 5 being the most severe. Sea surges reached 18 feet and winds were clocked at 145 mph. Thankfully, it was all over in two hours from the time Iris landed on the coast to the time it had passed over Belize losing most of its punch by the time it reached Guatemala. I asked people what it was like in the shelters. People in Blue Creek had chosen an abandoned cement block building with a metal roof sitting on relatively high ground as their shelter. Sixty people huddled in the dark, but soon they heard and saw that the roof was beginning to move and break apart so they scrambled into a smaller back annex where thankfully the roof held. Others told how they ran from building to building to get to one where the roof stayed on. People talked about the frightening sounds of corrugated tin roofing crashing around the village and trees snapping and crashing to the ground. Many said if the storm had lasted another hour, they could not have survived.

The next day was dry and sunny. Families told of birds flying into their thatch-roofed houses before the storm that would not fly out until the dawn. In the morning light the true dimensions of the devastation were only too clear. Thatch roofs were blown apart. Slat board walls were flattened or leaning in odd directions. Sections of sheet metal from church and school roofs were crumpled like tin foil and scattered like discarded massive gum wrappers. Even some buildings with concrete walls reinforced with steel bars had been blasted apart. Thirteen thousand people had lost their homes.

The day after the hurricane the men of San Jose, population 800, divided themselves into three teams and proceeded to go about the village clearing downed trees from roads, houses and other buildings, gathering up debris and helping their neighbors concoct some kind of shelter out of what remained of their homes. Our friend Candido Coh told us 48 men were able to push his leaning house back up straight. He then spent three days cleaning the leaves and branches and other hurricane trash out of his house.

The rainforest around the villages, once a thick, verdant green jungle was now a sad, bare, spindly concoction of broken and twisted trees and branches and uprooted one-hundred-year-old giant hardwoods. The usually noisy forest, resounding with bird songs and whistles and insect buzz saws and high-pitched sirens is now strangely quiet. The toucans have moved closer to the coast looking for the food that has been stripped from the inland trees. The howler monkey population is seriously depleted and no one knows how the jaguars fared. Only time will tell. It will be at least 40 years before the rainforest regains its former majesty. It will come back, but it will be a different rainforest, with a different mix of vegetation and wildlife.

Seven of ten Toledo Ecotourism Association guesthouses were demolished, crimping another local income generator.

Perhaps the most serious consequence of the hurricane was the damage to crops, most of which: corn, rice, citrus, were just about to be harvested. Rice, one of the few cash crops of the Mayans, was a total loss. Some farmers were able to salvage half of their corn. The lucrative organic cacao harvest was wiped out as most of the cacao trees and the larger trees that provide their needed canopy were destroyed. A great number of chickens and pigs were also lost. Food assistance will be a priority for awhile. There will be no new harvest for the next 2 and a half to three months.

The Punta Gorda Fire Dept. provided water for Plenty staff to distribute to the villages. Here Greg Grosenick doles out water in the village of Big Falls.

With all of its fury, Iris claimed no deaths among the villagers of Toledo, and if no one succumbs from post-hurricane water contamination or malnutrition, then all the damage is reparable.

Immediately following the storm, our Plenty Belize staff and volunteers started bringing food and water out to the villages. The town of Punta Gorda, where our office is located, was untouched by Iris. It missed it by nine miles.

By the time I got down there on November 1, the Plenty crew was bringing soybeans and corn out to villages and setting up cooking stations with big propane burners and woks and letting women’s groups roast the beans and corn and grind it into a fine “pinole.”

Pinole, made from corn without the soy is a food familiar to the Mayans of Central America. The corn/soy pinole has the texture of extra fine cornmeal (it’s ground twice so the mill doesn’t overheat from grinding the roasted corn and soybeans too fine the first time) and can be mixed with hot water for a high protein drink or cooked into a porridge. Sugar and cinnamon are added to the mix. People love it and it provides a nutritious supplement to a meager diet. Plenty buys the beans and corn and pays for the propane for roasting and diesel to run the cornmill. We figured out it only costs about 30 cents in US currency to make a pound of pinole. One pound will provide 20 people with a big cup of the hot drink. The women who do the roasting and grinding get paid in corn and pinole. This is the main work we have been doing with emergency relief donations.

Also, UNICEF and the Pan American Health Organization will be financing Plenty to perform a longer-term program to institute school lunches in nine villages. We’re working with a Peace Corps volunteer who is helping to establish community and home gardens in these same nine villages.

Author and ornithologist, Lee Jones, conducts birding workshops with Toledo Ecotourism guides. The guides report seeing birds they never saw before the hurricane, and other birds are not as common.

Even the Toledo Ecotourism Association was hurt badly by the hurricane. Plenty Belize is still participating in the bird-guide training and environmental education project with TEA members that is being funded by the Global Environmental Facility and Onaway Trust.

The Traditional Birth Attendants training program is also continuing, but the solar energy project is temporarily on hold. Our partners in that project, the Toledo Cacao Growers Association, are starting over from scratch. It will take at least five years to grow back the cacao to pre-hurricane levels. Their first priority is to construct five nurseries to grow cacao and canopy tree seedlings. We are looking at the viability of solar water pumping for irrigating these nurseries, each of which will produce 8,000 seedlings.