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Hurricane Mitch and Raggedy Ann
One Little Girl’s Huge Loss
 by Adrianne Aron

Excerpts:

     It had rained for days, so long and so hard that people began to have scary dreams about the rain, and later saw those dreams as prescient. On the last day, it rained incessantly – ten hours without stop, a heavy, torrential downpour that pounded the crops to death and so saturated the earth that water started coming up from the ground into the houses. "They were good houses, too" someone told me, "with tin roofs." Ana lived in one of those good houses with her mother, father, and little brothers. The one-room place had a front door and back door, and running water. It had no electricity or toilet, but it was sturdy, and it was close to her grandparents and her aunts, uncles, and thirteen cousins; they all lived in the settlement called Rolando Rodriguez, on the Las Casitas volcano in Nicaragua, near the town of Posoltega.

     When the houses started to flood, Ana remembers, all her relatives left for the chapel, where they spent a day and a night in safety, until the water came in there, too, forcing them to flee. They left the chapel, running towards the house of a nun higher up on the mountain. Ana had the baby Misael in one arm, and held onto her father with her free hand. Abel, her other brother, was with their mother, and they ran, frightened, through the thick mud, when el corriente, the current, came ripping down the volcano with its thousands of pounds of force like a great explosion and carried away Abel and her mother, disappearing them into the chaos. That was the last she ever saw of them. She tried to keep hold of the baby, but she lost him as she herself was hurled through the current, smashing and careening in the ocean of mud until a tangle of tree branches caught her and put an abrupt stop to her swift and senseless motion. "I think that's when my leg got broken," she says, pointing to her cast. When she draws a picture for me, the right arm of the girl she draws is cut off by the edge of the paper. That would have been the arm that was holding Misael . . .


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