After the storm, a week into rescue efforts, the city was noisier than we expected. Three-quarters of the country’s roads and bridges were destroyed, yet a cacophony of car horns, roosters, and crying babies echoed in Tegucigalpa’s chaotic streets. Pewter clouds thickened the November sky and the sodden pavement was adrift with refugees donning white plastic shopping bags for rain caps and green trash bags for ponchos. The newspapers called them Damnificados. Victims. Or more literally, the Damned, casualties of Honduras’ worst storm, a monster named Mitch. In reports to our donors in the States, we called them IDPs, internally displaced persons. At an elementary school transformed into a makeshift orphanage, the cracked cement playground corralled barefoot children too many to count, a blur of dirty faces, tattered clothes, tangled hair. Their parents among the thousands who didn’t survive the storm.
After the storm, orange cones and abandoned cars littered Tegucigalpa’s main avenue stinking of fish and diesel fuel where we bought the bananas with US dollars for an exorbitant price. We rode in the back of a pickup, the four-foot stalk stashed alongside our mud-caked boots and jeans. Back at the school playground, we questioned whether we could take photographs of the children while our guide, Oscar, handed out the bananas from the rear of the truck. We wanted to be sensitive, didn’t want to use a person’s image, especially not a child’s, sans permission. So we framed the photos from behind, looking over the children’s shoulders, careful not to photograph their faces, fearing we might exploit their suffering, objectivize their trauma. Glassy-eyed and shy, they clung to one another and surprised us with their silence even when the bananas, one by one, passed into their grimy palms. We wrote in our notebooks as Oscar, still doling out the fruit, told us how his brother had strapped his children to a tree limb to keep them from being blown away. O mio Dios, O mio Dios, we mouthed along with him as he told of a child’s harrowing escape from a river of mud, clinging to a cabinet door as his home pulled off its foundation and swirled away.
After the storm, down Tegucigalpa’s shrieking streets, in the silent playground, behind the pickup, our cameras still, our notebooks and pens useless, the mound of bananas had dwindled to woody, yellow-green scraps. We saw the dilemma unfold, understood the math on a global scale. Only one banana remained, and yet three orphans waited, empty hands reaching overhead.
After the storm, our stomachs grumbled and our bodies ached in strange sympathy, our hearts torn like the children’s clothes. Oscar said something in Spanish to the tykes and the last banana landed in the hands of the big sister in charge of two little ones. She peeled the fruit, and their eyes widened into winter moons. Then she split the banana in half. We watched. We worried. Who would go without? She gave each a piece and the duo squatted flat-footed on the cement to eat. With our cameras shuttered, we saw big sister bring the floppy peel to her lips and scrape the pith into her mouth, dragging the stringy insides down her teeth and tongue.
