Doing their part; a medical mission to Honduras

One big part of the work of Medecins Sans Frontieres is bringing medical professionals from the rich nations into the under-developed nations. Doctors and nurses will spend a month or two in a poor community to provide support to the medical staff already in the area.

A doctor making one of these trips was profiled today in the El Paso Times. Writer Victor Martinaz talks to Dr. Sergio Alvarado, who is about to leave on a MSF trip to Honduras.

"Everybody needs to do their part and help out the best they can," Alvarado said. "I had good role models growing up. My mom brought us up like that. When we were little, we would help with the colonias by building homes."

Now 34, Alvarado will take a two-week medical mission trip to San José de Marcos de Sierra, Honduras, with a group of residents from the University of Rochester in New York.

"When I first wanted to do medicine, I heard about Doctors Without Borders and I wanted to go out and help and see how medicine is practiced outside the U.S.," Alvarado said. "Even before entering medical school, I was always interested in helping those in need. You don't have to travel far to realize poverty and shortage of doctors exists."

The international rotation will be from May 7 to May 21.

Alvarado met Dr. Doug Stockman, the program director for the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester, during a national family practice conference in December.

Stockman informed Alvarado about how their residents travel to Honduras to provide medical care.

The Rochester program is in affiliation with Shoulder to Shoulder (shouldertoshoulder.org), an organization that has been working in the Intibucá Honduras for more than 20 years to reduce poverty through programs in health, education, nutrition and environmental hygiene.

"There is a lot of poverty in Honduras," Alvarado said. "Over 50 percent of its population is below their standards for poverty. There are still a lot of diseases going around out there that we rarely see here anymore, like syphilis and TB."

Honduras is the second-poorest country in Latin America, next to Haiti.

A documentary on Honduras making the film festival circuit

A new documentary that focuses on Honduran poverty is making the rounds at film festivals. Blinded by Open Arms is produced by Alexie Elfmont a 24 year old recent College graduate from Miami. Elfmont and some friends traveled down to Honduras to film a fund raising video for a non-profit, but decided to stay longer and make a film.

From the Miami Herald, reporter Susana Montes-Delgado details some of the young film crews encounters.

For 17 days, the filmmakers interviewed former M-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and M-18 gang members, drug addicts, lawyers, policemen, politicians and prison officials.

They filmed children begging on street corners, inhaling glue and sleeping on sheets of cardboard. Their stories have a common theme: extreme poverty, low education rates and broken homes. More than 50 percent of the Honduran population lives below the poverty line.

The young filmmaker took her camera into San Pedro Sula's prison, where prostitution and rapes are common. Foreigners are the most common target of kidnappings. Although there are women in the prison, it is not divided by gender, Elfmont said.

``We went inside with one policeman. I remember walking through the prison and feeling the eyes of the inmates fixated on our bodies,'' she said. ``I felt I was a piece of meat and that at any moment, something could happen to me.''

Later that night, filmmakers went out with a Honduran SWAT team that regularly patrols the streets. They came across a 13-year-old boy who appears in the film sniffing glue.

``Why are you in the street?'' Elfmont asks.

``Because I don't have a family,'' he replies.

Sabillon was impressed with the candor of those interviewed.

``Nobody does this in Honduras,'' he said, discussing the film. ``In a way, people are victims of the system and they wanted to be heard.''

Students Helping Honduras

CNN helped to introduce us to a charity that helps to fight poverty in Honduras. Students Helping Honduras has chapters at several college campuses to raise money for development projects in the country.

Co-Founder Shin Fujiyama was profiled for CNN's story. Our snippet of the printed story begins with a trip to Honduras that served as inspiration to Fujiyama. The video of CNN's story follows our snippet.

Today, his organization, Students Helping Honduras, brings education and community projects to children and families in need through student service trips and fundraisers.

"Seeing the country and being able to make a difference really opened my eyes to a lot of things," he says. "I saw such a great need. I wanted to keep helping."

He started by telling his friends about his experience and collecting spare change at his two campus jobs, but Fujiyama found that organizing other students didn't happen so easily.

"When I had my very first meeting, I got all dressed up. And only two people showed up," he says. "I knew I had to keep fighting."
...

Students Helping Honduras is working with community members of Siete de Abril to build a new village. Many of the families lost their belongings to Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

"A lot of them are single mothers. They don't own the land. They all live in cardboard houses. They don't have access to clean water [or] health care, and they didn't have a school," Shin Fujiyama says.

Fujiyama's group helped villagers purchase a new plot of land to rebuild. Its members have helped build 44 homes in the village that has been newly named Villa Soleada ("Sunshine Village"). The organization also is raising funds to build a water tower, an eco-friendly sanitation system and a library and to help provide electricity.

For Fujiyama, who deferred medical school to dedicate himself to his mission in Honduras, the lifestyle is a far cry from private practice, but he says he loves what he is doing.

"I feel like we're making a huge impact. Some people might think that you have to be somebody famous or a millionaire or a doctor to do something," he says. "But we're just everyday students -- people in their 20s. We can do so much. We've got so many things going for us. ... It's just about leveraging what we have. And we have done a great job at that."

World Bank `Destroyed Basic Grains' in Honduras

from Bloomberg

By Alison Fitzgerald, Jason Gale and Helen Murphy

Fidencio Alvarez abandoned his bean and corn farm in southern Honduras because of the rising cost of seeds, fuel and food. After months of one meal a day, he hiked with his wife and six children to find work in the city.

``We would wake up with empty stomachs and go to bed with empty stomachs,'' said Alvarez, 37, who sought help from the Mission Lazarus aid group in Choluteca in January. ``We couldn't afford the seeds to plant food or the bus fare to buy the food.''

Honduran farmers like Alvarez can't compete in a global marketplace where the costs of fuel and fertilizer soared and rice prices doubled in the past year. The former breadbasket of Central America now imports 83 percent of the rice it consumes -- a dependency triggered almost two decades ago when it adopted free-market policies pushed by the World Bank and other lenders.

The country was $3.6 billion in debt in 1990. In return for loans from the World Bank, Honduras became one of dozens of developing nations that abandoned policies designed to protect farmers and citizens from volatile food prices. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee in Washington today explored the causes of the global food crisis and possible solutions.

The committee examined whether policies advocated by the bank and the International Monetary Fund contributed to the situation. Governments from Ghana to the Philippines were pressured to cut protective tariffs and farm supports and to grow more high-value crops for export, reports by the Washington-based World Bank show.

Haiti Pressure

The IMF pressed Haiti, as a condition of a 1994 loan, to open its economy to trade, Raj Patel, a scholar at the Center for African Studies in the University of California at Berkeley told the committee. When trade barriers fell, imports of subsidized rice from the U.S. surged, devastating the local rice farmers, Patel said.

``That is very odd,'' said committee chair Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. ``For anyone to have looked at Haiti at that time and thought that it was a functioning economy is a sign I think of ideology going rampant.''

``Of course they got it wrong,'' said Robert S. Zeigler, director-general at the International Rice Research Institute, southeast of Manila. ``It will work if you're an extremely wealthy country and you can import rice at any price. But if you're not an extremely wealthy country, I think that's very poor advice.''

`Command and Control'

The bank's strategy -- summed up in a 1989 article by its chief economist for South Asia, John Williamson --became known as ``The Washington Consensus.''

``The focus of the liberalization was on lowering domestic food prices,'' said Mark Plant, the IMF's deputy director of policy development in Washington. Governments' ``command and control'' policies increased consumer costs and cut farmer income, he said.

Williamson, now affiliated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a May 9 interview that the ideas are still sound, though they may have been pushed too hard by the World Bank.

``My own view is that all those things are good for countries,'' he said. ``But I'm not terribly sympathetic with the World Bank going in and laying down a list of things countries have to do.''

Highest Tariffs

Honduran agriculture stagnated through the 1980s because of subsidies and market controls, prompting the bank to recommend economic changes, said Adrian Fozzard, the institution's manager for Honduras.

Rice farmers in Honduras were protected by the highest import tariffs in Central America when former president Rafael Callejas took office in 1990 with the economy stalled. The trade barriers that helped the country meet more than 90 percent of domestic demand were dismantled under an agreement for a World Bank loan in September that year, allowing cheaper imports to flood the market.

The requirements for the loan included eliminating import restrictions and surcharges and reorganizing the agricultural finance system, according to Eurodad, a network of 54 European non-governmental organizations that was granted access to the World Bank's loan database to monitor loan conditions.

Prices Plunge

Prices paid to farmers fell by 13 percent in 1991 and 30 percent more in 1992, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

In August 1993, the World Bank advised Honduras to adopt a second round of economic changes as part of another loan, according to Eurodad. Those conditions included eliminating all price controls and cutting tariffs further.

``Remaining trade and price controls should be eliminated,'' bank officials said in a 1994 internal report. ``The program of privatization of state silos should be completed; and the use of a grain reserve for price stabilization should not be reinstated.''

The report's author, Daniel Cotlear, now a World Bank economist for Latin American and the Caribbean, declined to comment for this story.

The bank pushed the policies because food prices fell in real terms for at least two decades, and few economists expected that to change, said Mark Cackler, manager of its Agriculture and Rural Development Department. Free trade and open markets remain the best path to competitiveness, he said.

``There are actually opportunities to reduce protectionism that have a beneficial impact,'' Cackler said.

World Bank Reaction

World Bank spokesman Sergio Jellinek said it's impossible to connect today's food price crisis with 20-year-old free-trade policies.

``The price of food, especially grains, is determined in the international market and not in the local markets,'' he said. ``So if a country such as Mexico, or Colombia, or El Salvador or Honduras would have multiplied by three or four its grain production, that would not have significantly affected world supply. And food prices in local markets would be as high as they are today.''

There now are 1,300 rice farmers in Honduras, compared with more than 20,000 in 1989, according to human rights group FIAN.

``The international lending agencies have destroyed the basic grains industry in Honduras,'' said Gilberto Rios, executive secretary of FIAN Honduras. ``The best land now produces things like African palms, which are not for consumption.''

Last month, thousands of activists, students and farmers blocked highways and rallied in the capital, Tegucigalpa, to protest food prices and policies that made their country the most open to free trade in Latin America -- and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Not `a Boon'

Per capita income rose by 0.5 percent a year from 1990 to 2004, one of the slowest growth rates in Latin America, a January report by the International Food Policy Research Institute found.

``Trade liberalization does not appear to have been much of a boon to the Honduran economy,'' the Washington-based institute said in the report.

In the Philippines, the World Bank encouraged the country, the world's biggest importer of rice, to stop striving for self- sufficiency and instead to diversify into crops like tropical fruits which have greater export value.

It approved a $60 million loan in 2004 to help the Philippines' Department of Agriculture become more market- oriented, diversify crops and stimulate private investment.

A World Bank Group technical working paper in June 2007 said the government shouldn't stockpile grain to stabilize prices. Rather, it should keep enough on hand for disasters and social welfare programs. It also advocated opening the domestic market to competition by cutting tariffs.

Philippines Reverses Course

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo now says the country has to change course toward being able to feed itself.

``We must move toward more self-sufficiency, not necessarily 100 percent, but more self-sufficiency, less import dependence on rice,'' she said last month.

African nations including Ghana and Mali similarly followed World Bank advice. In 1992, the bank required Ghana to cut tariffs on rice to 20 percent from 100 percent, leading to a tripling of cheap rice imports, Patel said.

In 2004, the bank advised Ethiopia to stop providing fertilizer and credit to small farmers as part of a debt relief package, and it persuaded Indonesia to dismantle its rice marketing board, according to Elizabeth Stuart in Washington, who is the head of relations with the World Bank and IMF for Oxfam International, the U.K.-based alliance fighting poverty.

Cheap Loans

Now farmers are asking the Honduran government to reverse policy and provide cheap, long-term loans to buy the seeds and fertilizers they need to survive.

The government of Honduras yesterday asked the IMF to send a team to the country to examine how the rising food and fuel prices are affecting the economy and whether they should reconsider some aspects of a current economic program, the IMF said in a press release.

``We haven't seen the worst of it yet; that's to come,'' said Jarrod Brown, president of the Mission Lazarus. ``They need help now.''

'Magic bean' transforms life for poor Jacks of Central America

from the Independent

By Julian Pettifer in Guinope, Honduras

In the nursery tale, a handful of magic beans rescued Jack's family from poverty. In Central America, there are tens of thousands of poor Jacks whose fortunes have been transformed by planting beans; and that is no fairy story. This magic bean is called mucuna, or the velvet bean, and extraordinary claims are being made for it: maize crops have been tripled, erosion has been halted, destruction of the rainforest curtailed, and migration to the cities reversed.

In the nursery tale, a handful of magic beans rescued Jack's family from poverty. In Central America, there are tens of thousands of poor Jacks whose fortunes have been transformed by planting beans; and that is no fairy story. This magic bean is called mucuna, or the velvet bean, and extraordinary claims are being made for it: maize crops have been tripled, erosion has been halted, destruction of the rainforest curtailed, and migration to the cities reversed.

The origin of this "magic" bean is obscure. It is thought to have come from southern Asia and spread through the tropics and beyond. In the 1930s, two million acres were grown in the US as fodder for cattle; and it was probably American plantation owners who brought it to Central America where it has now become part of what Professor James Pretty of Essex University calls " a new agricultural revolution".

Professor Pretty points out that, while the majority of the world's population benefited from the high productivity of industrial agriculture, two billion poor people were left out. "Poor producers [of food] cannot afford expensive technology ... they will have to find solutions based on existing resources."

One of those resources is the mucuna bean. In recent years, its use has been promoted by non-governmental organisations working among the rural poor in Guatemala and Honduras. They chose it because it provides the best solution to their biggest problem: how to improve crop yields on steep, easily eroded hillsides with depleted soils.

Farmers first plant mucuna, which produces masses of vigorous growth. When the beans are cut down, maize is planted in the resulting mulch. Subsequently, beans and maize are grown together. Very quickly, as the soil improves, yields of grain are doubled, even tripled.

The magic of mucuna is that it produces 100 tonnes of organic material per hectare, creating rich, friable soils on rocky hillsides in just two or three years. It is also so vigorous that it almost wholly suppresses weeds. The land never needs to be ploughed and, as if that is not enough, mucuna produces its own fertilizer. It takes atmospheric nitrogen and stores it in the ground where it can be utilised by other plants. Mucuna can fix up to 150kg of nitrogen a hectare, enough to triple maize yields.

In Honduras, results like that can turn abject poverty into modest prosperity. Twenty years ago, the small town of Guinope, two hours' drive from the capital, Tegucigalpa, was seen as a dying community, as many of its small farmers gave up the struggle to feed their families and fled to the cities. Today, some of those farmers are returning to their abandoned land and making it productive, with little investment other than knowledge.

Response from the heart City priest ministers to poor in Honduras

from South Coast Today

By LINDA ANDRADE RODRIGUES
Standard-Times staff writer

SouthCoast residents witnessed faith in action this week as Catholic Social Services, Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish at St. James Church and people of good will responded in the aftermath of the immigration raid, reaching out to help with legal assistance, care for minor children, counseling, food and clothing.

Bishop George W. Coleman met and prayed with the families affected by the raid and called for a response from the heart.

"I pray that all of us might deepen our understanding of this reality as we work together both to find short-term solutions to this crisis and long-term solutions to the socioeconomic conditions which have made our brothers and sisters feel compelled to come to New Bedford," Bishop Coleman said.

The Rev. John M. Sullivan, pastor of St. Lawrence Martyr Church, addressed the plight of undocumented workers in his sermon last week.

"How can we help prevent illegal immigration? We can improve the economic conditions in Honduras," he told his congregation.

Hondurans have always held a special place in the local priest's heart.

While in seminary, Father John became friends with Byron, a fellow classmate from Jamaica. Assigned to a diocese in Honduras, Father Byron sought assistance to build homes for the poor of his parish. Consequently, Father John held his first fundraiser for Honduras in 1999 while serving at St. Joseph's Church in Attleboro.

Under his leadership, the congregation at St. Lawrence Martyr also has embraced the people of the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. During Lent, parishioners place quarters in a folder, and the donations are collected and sent to Guiamaca, the mission in Honduras sponsored by the Diocese of Fall River. In years past, they have helped to build a chapel. This year they are raising money to purchase sewing machines.

"I want them to understand what the money is going for," Father John said. "Most of our projects are geared toward the internado."

A boarding house, the internado houses about 50 girls from the surrounding villages so that they can live in Guaimaca while they study. They return to their homes for the weekend every Friday afternoon.

"Education is the key to conquering poverty," Father John said.

Last January, Father John boarded a plane to Honduras, along with Sister Faye Medina, OP, and the Marie Poussepin Young Missionaries — about 20 college students from UMass Dartmouth and Bristol Community College. He also was accompanied by his nephew, Tim Thomson, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island.

Father John and Tim filled suitcases with hygiene items and medical supplies for the Hondurans, including toothbrushes, toothpaste, Ibuprophen and vitamins, which they checked in baggage. They packed very lightly for themselves, items that fit in one carry-on bag. Father John would return home with just the clothes on his back; the rest he left behind.

The 10-hour flight, with a stopover in Miami, landed in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

"We barely touched the rooftops landing on one of the two runways," Father John said. "You could see the poverty."

The parish had hired an old secondhand school bus bought from the U.S. to take the missionaries on the two-hour trip along the unpaved clay roads to Guaimaca.

"It was a tiring ride," he said.

The only priest among the missionary group, Father John lamented the fact that there is a lack of priests in the country.

"The people have strong faith, and I think there are less than 1,000 priests in all of Honduras," he said. "We need to encourage more local vocations."

Father John celebrated daily Mass throughout his weeklong stay. The priests in the diocese served the provincial towns of Guaicama and Orica.

Outlying villagers might see a priest about once a month. "Delagados," or lay ministers, who receive some theological training, assist the priests and often conduct prayer services.

Father John helped at health clinics, which were conducted by nursing instructors and students in the missionary group. They screened the people for heart disease and high blood pressure, and the children were treated for parasites.

"I gave them each a bag of hygiene products," he said.

The missionaries also worked at a farm owned by the Dominican Sisters. Their job was to fill in an irrigation trench.

"There's a complete lack of heavy equipment," Father John said. "Human labor is so plentiful and cheap."

Traveling to a neighboring diocese, Father John visited his former classmate Father Byron. It was the beginning of the wet season, but there was a beautiful blue sky overhead, low humidity and the temperature was in the upper 70s.

"Back in New England, this is a rare day in June," Father John told his friend.

"Welcome to winter," Father Byron replied.

Father John also visited the beautiful campus of Catholic University in Tegucigalpa.

The experience at the university was such a contrast and a sign of great hope," Father John said.

Contact Linda Andrade Rodrigues at lrodrigues@s-t.com

Fredericksburg-area college students and businesspeople experience poverty, hope in the squatter village of SietedeAbril

From The Fredericksburg Free Lance Star

College students, businesspeople from the Fredericksburg area travel to Honduran village where poverty is the norm

By RUSTY DENNEN

EL PROGRESO, HONDURAS--Outside this teeming Central American city sits a village on a garbage-strewn dirt road at the foot of a mountain shrouded in mist.

As a bus carrying Americans--mostly from the Fredericksburg area--lumbers past, barefoot children in worn clothes smile and welcome the visitors to Siete de Abril. Men carrying firewood and machetes say hola --hello.

Chickens, pigs and dogs roam freely in the shade of banana trees and coconut palms. Papayas hang from trees behind some houses.

The sound of hammering, English and Spanish voices, and handsaws is everywhere. To the 70 families who live in this poor squatter village, it's the sound of hope.

The Americans--conspicuous with their pale skin and stylish shorts, tennis shoes and ball caps--are patching up the scant dwellings. They work in six crews, using building materials purchased in town. Every morning for a week, they board a hired bus from a Catholic retreat center in El Progreso, where they are staying, to the village. An armed guard rides with them.

Ten are here from the Stafford and Rappahannock Rotary Clubs, along with 25 students with the Campus Christian Community at the University of Mary Washington. Several others are with Students Helping Honduras, including Shin and Cosmo Fujiyama--the brother-and-sister team who have coordinated relief projects in El Progreso for more than a year now.

Shin, 23, in his final year at UMW, first came to Honduras three years ago as a student volunteer. That journey was the catalyst for a Honduras connection that has grown into a movement, involving multiple groups from the Fredericksburg area, from the college to businesspeople to churches.

Siete de Abril means "April 7," the date in 1999 when the village was founded to provide a place for refugees from Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Honduras the previous year.

Whole villages were wiped out in floods and mudslides, but unlike in America when Hurricane Katrina hit, there were no government subsidies, no checks in the mail to help rebuild, no massive flood of volunteers.

The displaced were allowed to move in after the storm and build whatever shelter they could. And they've stayed.

The contrast between downtown El Progreso and the village just a few miles away is stunning. With KFC, Burger King, nightclubs and hotels, El Progreso could be any small city in America.

In Siete de Abril, there's no electricity. Bathrooms are outhouses--holes dug in the ground. The only modern amenity is running water, a spigot to each shack, piped from a stream on the mountain.

Most houses have cookstoves fashioned out of dirt.

Kelvin Baker, 28, the son-in-law of Bob Azzarito, minister of the Campus Christian Community, is fluent in Spanish and translates what the middle-aged woman who owns the home he's working on tells him.

"This woman has seven kids. Her husband was killed. They came out and occupied this space" a couple of years ago, he says.

Before the house was fixed, it had a leaky tin roof and mattresses that would get wet every time it rained. Inside are two beds and a hammock separated by curtains made of sheets. The floor is dirt. Personal belongings, pots and a few tattered stuffed-animal toys are nailed up on the wooden posts inside.

At another house, Ken Scruggs, a Rotarian and mortgage broker back home, waits for nails. Maria Anette and her twin 2-year-old daughters, Luis, 10, and Joselene, 6, live in the one-room shack.

"We took the old roof off, added 2 feet on an interior wall. This one is getting a whole new roof," Scruggs says. He and Carlos Melendez, a chiropractor and Rotarian, finish work on a door, with help from a villager.

Maria, dressed in a blue top, jeans and flip-flops, takes care of the children. Her husband, Juan, sells shoes. They eat mostly tortillas, rice, beans, eggs, cereal.

Another shack has holes in the tin roof and big gaps along the sides. Shin Fujiyama translates what a woman in her 30s, but who looks to be twice that age, says:

"Sometimes we have to sleep under the beds when it rains. The baby is sick because it's so humid and wet and there's no money for medicine." Seven people live in the house.

Fujiyama shakes his head. "I don't know how these kids can study. If you want a kid to go to school, they need a full stomach and to get a good rest at night."

Everywhere they go, Shin and Cosmo are greeted like rock stars. Kids run up and hug them, adults pull them aside to talk.

The original plan was to fix 17 roofs in the village; by the end of the week, 20 homes are practically rebuilt. The tab: nearly $2,000 from donations collected back home and money chipped in by some of the relief workers as it was needed.

Fujiyama's goal is to eventually fix every house in the village. Maybe someday replace them with more substantial concrete-block abodes. He wants to build a communal chicken coop, and a soccer field to keep teenagers, who have little to do, away from a cycle of drugs and violence.

"These people are so thankful for people helping them out," he says. "I couldn't have done any of this without Bob [Azzarito]," who has helped spread the word back home to get college students to make the trip.

"I bring the students here because it changes their lives and their view of the world," Azzarito says. One of them, Bethany O'Connor, 21, for example, plans to do economic development work in Third World countries.

"College students are so good-natured and flexible. And you can tell how much they love the children," Azzarito says.

Blythe McLean, 19, a UMW student studying political science and religion, takes turns working, then playing with village children who gather around.

"I wanted to come because of my faith in God and to serve others just as Jesus did," she says. "We're here, helping, instead of just hanging out at home. It disgusts me that so many brothers and sisters are suffering and no one cares."

In the village, Rotarian Jim Lewis is lining up the help to construct a permanent toilet for the Shin Fujiyama School of Hope, built last summer and named by the villagers. There's room for 40 to 60 children in kindergarten and elementary school.

Desks from the old James Monroe High School sit under its tin roof. They were shipped in a container several months ago.

Henry Osburn, a Milwaukee philanthropist whom Shin met on a plane, pays the salaries of four teachers. UMW students and Immanuel Presbyterian Church in McLean helped with the project.

Over several days, men from the village who work in construction donate their time to dig the hole for the school bathroom, dig the footer and mix concrete by hand. Some are being paid, while others donate their time.

One is Oscar Herrera, 26, who lived in the United States for 12 years until he was caught by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported four months ago. He lives with his mother now.

Used to $1,000-a-week paychecks doing drywall and construction work in New Mexico and Texas, he had two cars, a girlfriend and a child. Now he has nothing.

In the United States, "I lived near a country club and a pool. I want to go back, but I have no money."

Rotarians Lou Barnett and Richard Lyall and UMW students Amanda Lemco and Taylor Hall rebuild a hut completely blackened on the inside. The residents were cooking with too little ventilation. As a result, a teenage boy who has been living there has chronic breathing problems. A scorpion scurries out from under the doorway and is promptly crushed under a shoe.

Barnett, 50, is an interior designer back home.

"I work with beautiful things all the time. This is such a contrast that shows not only how lucky we are, but how grateful these people are for the basic necessities."

This is her first trip to do relief work. "Friends warned me about coming here. But an opportunity like this may never come again."

Lemco, a Spanish major who speaks fluently and helps with translating in the village, is getting a first-hand look at one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

"The country is very beautiful, but very poor. They get very little help from the government. It's nice that they get help from their neighbors, and that Shin [Fujiyama] cares and that people come here with him," she says.

Jeff Small, a Stafford Rotarian, businessman and lawyer, puts things in perspective after working on several houses.

"Back home, I've seen stalls for horses much better than these."