Honduran Woman Grateful for Help

BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

This was Maria Walker's year to go home for Christmas.

She goes only every fourth year, so for more than a year now she's been planning, shopping, filling a big box with special gifts for her mama and her seven brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and children, dreaming of Christmas Eve and firecrackers and horns blowing and hugging each other and being together. And joy.

But not now.

"Home" is Honduras.

Her mama is alive, thank God.

But on the telephone, she gave Maria a "mama order" - in Spanish, of course, but the meaning was clear.

"No," she said firmly. "Don't come."

Honduras is no place to visit now.

So Maria dries her tears - they'll be back, she knows - and teaches Spanish to the 4-year-olds at Partners in Learning, the child-care center on the Catawba College campus, and tucks them in at nap time and thanks their parents for the outpouring of diapers and toothbrushes and over-the-counter medicines they've donated for the victims of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras.

Maria joined the staff about two years ago. Director Norma Honeycutt told the parents of their students in a letter that Maria won't be able to go on the Christmas visit she's been planning for a year. She also told them that the center would take donations to help the people in Honduras, and, well, she can't think of words big enough to describe what those parents brought.

"A complete van full!" she says. "I couldn't even get in it, and it took five people to unload it at First Assembly Christian School in Concord."

When she started collecting the donations, she didn't know how she was going to get them to Honduras. But she finally found the school in Concord.

"That was the only site accepting everything," she says, "and I was thrilled. I had 15 bags of diapers, and more formula than I've ever seen in my life. They brought a lot of clothes, a lot of new things. Parents had gone out and bought things and the tags were still on them.

"It was just the Lord working it out."

She's delivered that van load because the Concord school deadline was Thursday.

But the Partners in Learning center will accept donations through Wednesday. Norma will take them to the Rowan Baptist Association. See related story.

And the tears come again as Maria talks about the donations - and about the phone call that morning in late October.

She had been watching television the night before, hoping for reports of Hurricane Mitch.

"I was hoping maybe it wouldn't hit my country. But the next day - it was 2:45 in the morning - the telephone woke me up. It was my cousin in Miami, and she gave me the bad news."

The hurricane had hit with savage force.

"I was sad," she says. "I was angry. I don't know what I feel. I was so mad. Why is it happening? She told me, 'People lost a lot of things.' I told her, 'What we can do?'|"

Nothing but wait.

She tried to call her mother in Progreso on the Atlantic side of Honduras but couldn't get her that day or the next or the next.

"After my cousin called, it took me about four days to get my family. The operator told me, 'Due to hurricane you can no reach this country.' Finally my brother answer the telephone. My mouth was so dry."

And they were all alive - her mother, her brothers and sisters, their families. But a niece lost everying

"She is beautician. She lost her chair, her drier. She lost everything. The houses all packed with mud. Everything is a mess."

Maria's mother lives in a city with a river.

"I ask my brother, 'How you doing with the groceries?' He says, 'Right now, we have groceries at home.' But the people who have groceries in the stores where they live don't want to sell nothing.

"But they have no running water, no power. I ask, 'What you drinking?' They're drinking water from the river.

"But the water is contagious. They say they watch dead bodies floating in the water. I said, 'This is the water you are drinking?' He said, 'We are boiling the water. We don't have no choice.'|"

Maria's father died in 1985, and her mother, who is now 80, lives alone, but daughters and granddaughters are all around her.

She doesn't want Maria and her daughter to come to visit.

"There are many diseases waiting," Maria says. "And she told me my country smell so bad. They don't know if it is from bodies or mud. She is scared for me to get any disease.

"I talk with my family every weekend and my family in Miami, but my cousin and me, we don't know nothing about them."

The storm took 73 bridges out, and transportation, if there's any at all, is limited to and from the airport.

"I cannot send anything to my family personal because the airport are so busy," Maria says. "All this stuff from friends, from Partners in Learning, is for evacuated people."

Maria remembers Hurricane Fifi, which hit the city where her mother lives, but nothing, she says, was ever like Hurricane Mitch, not before she came to this country or after.

Maria met Claude Martin of China Grove when he visited a friend in Honduras. They wrote letters and sent pictures for a year and were married on Aug. 27, 1975.

They have two children, Karina and Carlos. They first returned to Honduras when her daughter was 1*z12 and again when her son was 2.

"And we have been going every four years after that."

In all these years, she has never met a Honduran in Rowan County. But she's met plenty of people who have been kind to the people in her country who have suffered so from Hurricane Mitch.

"It made me feel so good. This telephone go whang, whang, whang every morning. Old friends say, 'I'm sorry I hear what happen in your country. Anything I can do for you?' They bring me some things, and I brought to Norma.

"Still I'm sad, very, very sad. I was so excited for Christmas. All the family gather together for Christmas Eve. Now it will have to be another year. I hope my mama be alive."