Seventy-two-year-old Maria Reyes has been living in a tent in the pouring rain for the past three weeks.
Maria and her family had to leave their home on 19 October when their village – Liberación Campesina – flooded. Since then, the rains have kept coming.
The Reyes family has been homeless for three weeks.
Maria is now sharing a cramped roadside tent with six others: her grandchildren Milton (2), Saida (5), Wendy (10) and Ana (11), and the children’s parents Samuel and Gloria.
As the family fled, they were only able to rescue their chickens and a few of the children’s clothes.
They lost the rest of their belongings – furniture, clothes, school materials and cooking pots – to the floodwaters.
The family is keen to get home to start repairs and clear up work, but their village is still cut off by floodwaters from the river Ulua, which has broken its banks.
The tent affords scant protection from the elements or from the mosquitoes, raising the spectre of dengue fever or malaria infection, especially for the vulnerable young children.
And when the family finally gets home, the difficulties won’t be over.
Samuel supports his family by working on a banana plantation, but with acres of crops destroyed in the flood, he expects to be unemployed for months.
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