Water from My Heart (35 page)

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch stalled over Nicaragua. With sustained winds of 155 knots and gusts reaching 200, the Category 5 monster hovered for several days. Mountain outposts recorded from 72 to 96 inches of rain. Others, where the instruments were washed out or ripped off their foundations, suggest amounts closer to 144 inches. That's right. Twelve feet. Nobody really knows. What they do know is that a lot of water filled up a lake atop a dormant volcano called Las Casitas. The resulting weight cracked the mantle and caused an eruption and mudslide. The thirty-foot-high wall of mud traveled down the mountain and toward the sea some thirty miles away. Satellite imagery records the mudslide traveling in excess of 100 miles per hour and cutting a swath a mile wide. Naval and Coast Guard vessels would later pick up survivors, clinging to floating debris, miles out in the Pacific.

During the deluge, Moises and twenty-seven members of his family huddled, cold, hungry, and wet, in his cement-block, tin-roof house where rushing floodwaters had cut them off from the rest of the world. After five days of soggy isolation, Moises—a dollar-a-day sugarcane farmer and volunteer pastor—heard something that sounded like helicopters. Thinking the UN or some relief agency had flown in to rescue them, the entire family rushed out of their house, eyes searching the sky. Expectant and hopeful. But there were no helicopters. Instead, they were met by an apocalyptic wall of mud wider than their field of view. Before them, giant, ancient trees were crumbling in its wake; houses were being ripped off their foundations. Giant boulders tumbled toward them. Death had come to Las Casitas. Moises had time to glance at his wife and his children and voice this:
“La sangre de Jesus! Vamos a estar con Jesus.”
Translated it means, “The blood of Jesus [cover us]! We are going to be with Jesus.” The caustic, super-heated tsunami of mud reached his yard, towering. Only one thing stood between Moises and the mud.

A well.

A simple hole dug into the ground with a pump and enough pipe to lift the water out of the earth. The well had been drilled six months earlier by an NGO and provided enough water for Moises and his neighbors to cook, bathe, and live. In this part of the world, dirty water is both the source of sickness and the feeder for continued sickness, so the advent of available clean water had changed living conditions, shrunken swollen stomachs, and brought new life. Wells do that. Moises was the keeper of the well for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Moises watched the mud reach the well, but then a strange thing happened. The mud split. Parted. To their wide-eyed amazement, the mud rerouted around his house, sparing his family, only to come together again on the other side of his house and continue its death march to the sea. From mountaintop to sea, the Las Casitas mudslide would cover thirty-two square miles and kill more than three thousand people, but not Moises or his wife or their kids or the twenty-seven people who saw this happen.

I know. I talked to several of them. If you ask Moises, he shakes his head confidently.
“La mano de Dios detuvo el barro.”
Or, “The hand of God stopped the mud.”

Over the next seventy-two hours, Moises and other able
-​bodie
d men combed the mud, pulling both the living and the dead from treetop and barbed wire and muddy grave. To combat disease, they buried the bodies and burned decomposing livestock. For weeks the air smelled of smoke and death. As one of the lone standing structures, Moises' house became both triage and housing for some of the mudslide victims who lost everything. Moises exhausted himself responding to the cries of man, woman, child, and animal stuck in the mud. And because the mud started in the belly of the volcano it was hot, caustic, and burned much of the skin off his feet and shins. He still carries the scars. Surrounded by a sea of mud, Moises doctored the sick, prayed with the dying, and cried with the heartbroken. It would be days before anyone in the outside world knew they were alive and needed help.

In the aftermath of more than a billion dollars in damage and a decimated infrastructure, relief organizations from around the world poured millions into the local economy to help rebuild a landscape that looked more like the moon than earth. Seeing the devastation in Moises' village, a foreign NGO bought new land away from the mudslide area and offered to rebuild. To do so, they needed a trustworthy man to lead the effort on the ground. A supervisor of sorts. Someone with whom they could trust tens of thousands of dollars and who commanded the attention and respect of the community. When they asked around, every finger pointed to Moises. The NGO entrusted Moises—equipped with his third-grade education—with more than $200,000 with which to rebuild his community. At the end of eighteen months, he presented meticulous receipts and apologized for not being able to account for six bags of concrete—for which he offered to pay. Think about it: After having spent a couple hundred thousand dollars rebuilding an entire community, he was losing sleep over a few bags of concrete. Oh, and he had built twice as many homes as they had budgeted. Literally, twice as many.

In the months that followed, Moises grew in name and stature. He planted more churches, and because the carpet of mud didn't just scar the land, he worked to heal a deeper wound. If God has hands, they are muscled and calloused and muddy and bloody and tender—like Moises'.

A year later, I was brought in. A green writer asked to tell this story. My guide was a seasoned Mercy Ships volunteer named Pauline Rick. Pauline knew Moises and his family. Six months prior to the mudslide, she'd found him. She's the reason you're reading about Moises.

Without Pauline, this is a blank page and there is no story.

Over the next week, Pauline and Moises guided me back through the timeline. The installation of the well, the hurricane, the mudslide, the relief effort. To educate me, we hiked up Las Casitas, stood on the edge of the scar, and stared down at the Pacific; then we followed its path. It wasn't difficult. Our first stop was Javier's house. Javier was a coffee farmer who had also heard the helicopters. Javier was taller than most, had huge hands, and was physically very strong. Imposing for a Nicaraguan. He walked me out of their house, retracing their steps. He spoke in hushed tones. Pauline translated. He pointed at an invisible line along the ground. “We walked to here.” He pointed again, just a few feet away. “My two daughters stood there.” Tears appeared on Javier's face. Javier broke off. He gestured with his hand. “The wall of mud…” Javier quit talking.

He hasn't seen his girls since.

Halfway down the mountain, Javier's voice echoing in my ear, my own tears drying on my face, Moises stopped along the road and pulled fruit off an overhanging tree while a howler monkey screamed down on us. I think it was a howler monkey. It looked like a monkey and it was certainly howling. I didn't know the name of the fruit so I asked Pauline, who was peeling the greenish-orangeish thing while the juice seeped out between her fingers. She looked like a kid in a candy store. “It's a mango.”

It didn't look like what I thought a mango looked like and, to be honest, mango had never been my thing. My wife, Christy, was always trying to get me to try it but I always thought it tasted a bit odd. I shook my head. “Not really a fan.”

Pauline offered again with a knowing smile. “Just eat it.”

I remember sitting there, the juice running off my chin, thinking to myself,
Where has this stuff been my whole life? This is the best fruit I've ever eaten. Christy would love this.
Staring up through the trees at Javier's rusted tin roof, I could not then and cannot now make sense of that place—of shattered souls, sadness untold, a mud scar
across
and
through
the heart of a people. And then there were the crosses. Too many to count. Every time I turned around, I saw two or three or seven more, rising up out of the dirt. And they weren't organized like at Arlington or on the beaches of Normandy. They buried these people where they had found them—where their arms and legs had stuck up out of the mud.

But that mango started me thinking. Amid all that grotesque horror and loss and pain, there was that fruit. Just hanging there. An offering for the taking. And as I looked around, I saw beauty in the blooms rising up through the mud, tasted sweetness dripping down my face, heard children's laughter bubbling up out of a dirt shack on our left, saw a lush, green San Cristóbal smoking behind us into a clear blue sky. While death had cut a wide swath, the place where I stood was teeming with life. Colorful birds danced in the trees, blooms painted the landscape, singing touched my ears. Right there, I stood in the midst of it. One of those rare self-aware moments where I sucked the marrow. Death had come. A murdering thief in the night. But then morning came and life—rich, thick, dense, beautiful, sweet, vibrant, laughter-charged life—had sprouted up through the very same mud.

I seldom taste a mango and don't think of that moment.

That afternoon, Moises introduced me to his church, his wife, his children, and his new home in the community he built. That evening I ate dinner at Moises' house. A king's banquet of roasted chicken, soup, rice, and thick corn tortillas. His children sat wide-eyed and smiling at the table. I asked Pauline, “They always smile like that at dinner?”

She paused, considering whether to protect me from the truth. She said, “They've never eaten two chickens at one dinner.”

That night I slept in a cot in what might be called their living room. My companion was an enormous, grunting pig that Moises brought in at night so no one would steal it. She was, how should I say, a little on the heavy side. Made for an interesting night.

Just before lights out, I passed by the door, or curtain, that led into Moises' room. His children were sleeping on rope-woven bunks to my left. No sheet. No blanket. Just a hemp rope. I found Moises kneeling next to his bed, Bible open before him, lips moving. Several hours later, when I rose to go to the bathroom, he was still there. Lips still moving.

Even now, when I think of Moises, that's my image. A man on his knees. Speaking face-to-face.

That night—now over fifteen years ago—God did something in me. DNA-deep. Something only God can do. He both broke and filled my heart at the same time. I still don't understand that.

Over the course of my career, I have witnessed poverty and war-torn landscapes firsthand. I've walked the bullet-riddled streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, following their civil war. Men my age with no arms stood healthy and helpless with cups hanging around their necks, unable to go to the bathroom by themselves. I have been stranded—with raging amoebic dysentery—for five days in the Ivory Coast amid a riot and an airport strike. And no, I don't speak either French or any African dialect. I have walked through an overcrowded prison in Honduras and backed up against a wall when a fight broke out, and then ambled along the docks where families live in damp cardboard and the mosquitoes swarm by the tens of thousands and coughing children just cough night after night after night. Each of those experiences challenged my calloused indifference; they cut me deeply—
​especiall
y Freetown. But it was Nicaragua and Moises that broke through the granite in me.

Let me say this directly: Indifference is the curse of this age. We need to hear that. Indifference is evil, and it could not be further from the heart of God. Don't think so? Let me point you to the Cross. Hanging there, Jesus was anything but indifferent. Don't think I've somehow got a handle on this. I don't. I am as guilty as anyone, my rags are filthy, but lying on a cot in Moises' house with a pig racing beneath me, with the smell of the outhouse floating on the breeze, the deep scar trailing down Las Casitas, the look on Javier's face burned on the backside of my eyelids, the long shadows thrown from so many white crosses, the absence of food in Moises' house, and the sound of his own whispering prayers rising up over the wall, I saw my own indifference maybe for the very first time. It shook me awake. Shattered me. It shatters me still.

And for the record, I am so very sorry.

Over the years, Moises and I have stayed in contact via e-mail. He drives forty-five minutes to an Internet cafe with a dial-up connection. I glance at my phone. I don't speak Spanish and he doesn't speak English, so Pauline faithfully translates. I keep promising to learn, but
no hablo
. I've been back several times. Taken friends. Taken Christy and my oldest son, Charlie. John T. and Rives are next on the list.

A year ago, I returned and rode in a truck back up Las Casitas. And yes, the tears returned as if they'd never left. They streaked down my face and, no, I didn't wipe them off. I cried for that place, for my friends, and for myself. It felt good to cry. That night I spoke in a church by candlelight; we handed out rice, beans, oil; we prayed for some folks; we hugged a lady with no teeth and a beautiful smile that has become tender to my heart; then we rode back down with a new pig that Moises bought on sale. Standing in the back of that truck, surrounded by fifteen sun-weathered Nicaraguan men and a rather unhappy pig, many things struck me: That landscape is dotted with fruit trees, cows, wood smoke, sugarcane, plastic-wrapped dwellings, and three thousand white crosses—many now covered in weeds and vines.

But what had me thinking then and has me thinking now is this: These people, these sweating men next to me, these Children of God—they live here. Those bones beneath the crosses are their wives and children and brothers and mothers and fathers. And they never leave that image behind. Never escape that this is the reality of their lives. Me? I fly home. I smile at the attendant, stow my bag, buckle up, adjust the AC above my head, order water or coffee, check my e-mail, and…fill my mind with anything but that reality. The luxury of leaving allows my mind to drown out the deafening pain in my heart. Put it behind me. And let's be honest, at times I have.