Prior to this year, we had never had a hurricane, a tropical storm, or any other type of powerful storm in my first three years that forced us to evacuate the Finca to a more secure location. The Finca had to evacuate twice in November 2020 for back-to-back hurricanes, but that was a year prior to when I arrived here. Nonetheless, Emma and Alicia, two members of my first missionary community, were at the Finca during the evacuations in 2020, and they always told us how wild that time was to be a missionary at the Finca.
However, some things you just have to see with your own eyes and experience with your own body to fully grasp… pero no se preocupe, we now have a firm grasp on just how crazy an evacuation can be for the entire Finca community! Due to Hurricane Sara, the entire Finca community, including tías, niños, and missionaries, had to evacuate the Finca on Thursday, November 14th.
Our leadership team at the Finca, led by our director and our Honduran board of directors, were tracking the storm for days prior, and they called an all-staff meeting on Wednesday, November 13th to make a decision together on if we should evacuate or not. At that point, the weather forecasts were calling for up to two feet of rain in the local Trujillo area, which creates a handful of problems for a rural area like this.
The main risk for the Finca community is not being able to cross the planchas, or rivers that cross the roads, once the torrential downpour starts and the rivers fill up. This creates a huge problem if a Finca child needs to go to the hospital for whatever reason, and our Finca vehicles are literally not able to cross the rivers to get there. For our local neighbors, they typically just wait the storm out in the safety of their home and hope that no one needs to go to the hospital or to Trujillo for whatever reason. However, as an organization like the Finca that is in charge of taking care of our kids to the best of our ability, that isn’t often a risk that our leadership team likes to take if it can be avoided.
The other risk of staying at the Finca is trees falling on houses! We have so many old trees at the Finca that don’t need much wind at all to fall over, and so many of them are close to our houses and buildings. This particular storm wasn’t calling for outrageously high wind, but our leadership team doesn’t often like to take that risk if it can all be avoided.
The entire Finca community evacuated together to a retreat house in Trujillo that is owned by the Trujillo Diocese. There were three large rooms with lots of bunk beds, so the girls all squeezed into the biggest room and the boys and missionaries all piled into the other two smaller rooms. We fit 28 people into a quite small space, but at least we all got to stay together as a Finca family during the storm!
Two tías were in charge of cooking every meal for all 28 of us, and the other two tías and the missionaries were in charge of taking care of our 19 kids and keeping them occupied for the duration of the day. The first few days were REALLY hard because it was downpouring rain for almost the entire day, so the kids couldn’t go outside to get some fresh air and run around. There also wasn’t any power during the first few days, so we couldn’t throw on a few movies throughout the day to keep the kids occupied. Needless to say, we played A LOT of UNO, colored A LOT of coloring books, and had a few games of indoor soccer break out, much to the dismay of the tías.
The weather started to clear up on Sunday, November 17th and the rivers were more-or-less back to normal in the local area. The worst of the storm luckily went to the west of Trujillo, devastating many rural areas between Trujillo and La Ceiba and damaging almost every bridge in the area due to the rapid rise of the rivers. However, we were able to go to mass on Sunday morning and it appeared that everything would be back to normal within a day or so….
However, our Honduran leadership team was concerned about another storm and cold front that was supposed to be coming to the local area on Thursday, November 21st. They decided that it would be more harmful to leave the retreat house and have to evacuate again a few days later than to simply stay the duration of the week at the retreat house. That being said, we continued to stay at the retreat house in Trujillo for the entire week! We eventually returned to the Finca on Monday, November 25th after about 11 days in Trujillo.
The full week of November 18th at the retreat house was hard on everyone except maybe the kids, who were enjoying their time of not having to wash clothes, not having to cook meals, having the ability to watch lots of movies, etc. We even had the ability to go swim in the ocean and local rivers during three BEAUTIFUL, SUNNY days starting on November 18th.
Despite the inherent beauty of being all together as a Finca community, being evacuated was still not easy for the missionaries because there were literally no boundaries between us and the kids at all times of the day. We got a little better at creating boundaries and getting some space from the kids as our time went on, but our time in Trujillo challenged us in so many ways.
Please pray for all of the people that are continuing to be impacted by Hurricane Sara, especially along the northern Honduran coast.
Please let me know how I can pray for you!
God Bless!