Hurricane Mitch was the deadliest natural disaster to strike Honduras in more than a century. The rains led to floods, the floods to mudslides. Maps became useless overnight because whole networks of roads were wiped out, sealing villages away in sudden isolation. Keldy wasn’t especially religious as a child, but the destruction felt otherworldly and ungraspable. Eleven thousand people were confirmed dead and almost as many were missing. Twenty percent of Hondurans lost their homes. Seventy percent of the country’s crops were destroyed.
