• Rotary Club of Santa Rosa de Copán
• Rotary Districts 5360 and 5370, Alberta, Canada
• Rotary Club of North Sacramento, USA
• Rotary Club of Luebbecke, Germany
• Emergency Management Committee, Government of Honduras (CODER III)
• Many generous individual donors

Hurricane Mitch first roared onto Honduran soil in the Mosquitia, and its largely flat topography presented nothing to slow it's then category 5 winds. Category 5 is the highest ranking possible for a hurricane: meteorological texts refer to its force as "total destruction" and it is generally assumed that few in its path will survive.

Yet the Miskitos survived. The year's rice crop was washed away right at harvest time, few buildings remain -- the village schoolhouse at Yapuwas was last seen heading downstream past Krausirpi -- but somehow the people survived. In the village of Wampusirpi, the survivors were joined in the following days by a flood of 5,000 refugees from up and down the Patuca River, swelling little Wampusirpi's population to over ten times its normal size and quickly consuming what little food had not been ruined in the hurricane. The refugees came in search of airlift relief, as Wampusirpi has the only runway in the area.

Our club's Mosquitia relief effort began on November 3, 1998. Realizing that Santa Rosa de Copán was the only city of size in all of Honduras untouched by Hurricane Mitch, and wishing to help in an area unlikely to receive other assistance, our club adopted Wampusirpi and the surrounding villages. Within days special accounts were opened in Honduras, Canada, and the U.S., and fundraising began in earnest thanks to the Rotary Club of North Sacramento (California, USA) and the clubs of Districts 5360 and 5370 (Alberta, Canada).

As our friends in North America went to work, we did too. Many hours were logged by ham radio operator and Rotarian Felipe Morales, HR5FAM, making contact with the far flung Mosquitia villages to obtain an early assessment of needs. One of Felipe's most daunting tasks was to try to make sense of the incomplete and often conflicting early reports from the field.

Meanwhile, others in our club worked with the Honduran government's regional emergency management committee (CODER III). Committee chairman Col. Alberto Oyuala become an important ally of the Mosquitia relief effort, obtaining five tons of food aid and fixing bureaucratic potholes. Still others spent hours daily on the telephone and Internet helping to forge the small band of organizations and individuals world wide with an interest in the Mosquitia into an effective and coordinated relief team.

With donations accumulating, a communications network coming together, and transportation arranged, what could go wrong? A waylaid bank wire, that's what. A critical donation from Alberta was misplaced by a local bank for weeks. Had this donation arrived on time, we would have had the money needed to make a relief flight in November. Sadly, it was not to be: the bank didn't find the money until well into December, delaying our first flight until January. We have since changed banks.

Arriving in Wampusirpi with our first shipment in January, we discovered that the situation was even more critical than reports had indicated. Many families had been without food for days and were foraging for edible roots in the surrounding forest. As we arrived, and later as we assisted in aid distribution, we were received with tears.

The aid distribution, based in a village church, took fourteen workers over six hours to complete and didn't end until 9 p.m., a late hour for a village without electricity. The process was efficient, fair, and detailed. Wampusirpi's CODEM (village emergency management committee) had a census of every person in the surrounding seventeen villages and their status of need. Our incoming aid shipment was inventoried and proportioned for each household on the basis of need and household size, right down to the pound. Each head of household must sign or mark for all aid received. In this way the village committee has written records on exactly what was received and what was distributed. This level of sophistication and honesty in the middle of a famine ridden jungle surprised and gratified us.

Additionally we traveled two hours upriver in dugout canoe to the village of Kurpa. Kurpa is situated on a bluff some 45 feet high overlooking the Patuca River. There we found the river's high water mark, eight feet high on the schoolhouse wall on top of the bluff. Several families were living under tarps, as their houses were destroyed. Numerous other homes were left structurally unsound, as the flood deposited mud in the thatch roofs that dried and became as heavy as cement.

While in Wampusirpi, we and the village committee worked out a waterborne transportation system to replace costly airlifts. Upon our return to Santa Rosa, we begun the first of several shipments overland to Puerto Cortés, via ship around the Caribbean coast to the mouth of the Patuca River, and then upriver via dugout canoes to Wampusirpi for final distribution by the emergency committee.

Although initial soil analyses suggested that it would take one to two years for the villages to return to agricultural self sufficiency, we were pleasantly surprised to learn in May that the local committee believed that the villages were back on their feet and the relief shipments should cease before people became dependent upon free food. Our fact finding trip that month verified their opinion, and we happily terminated the project.

At the suggestion of the local committee and with the permission of the donors, the remaining funds have been invested in equipping a rural health clinic for Wampusirpi and the surrounding countryside. Our club is thus able to leave the region better off than it was before the hurricane.