I’ll admit it. I’m not much of a hiker. If I had to choose, I would pick reading a book on the beach to hiking mountains any day. But I just came back from hiking through the mountains for seven hours in Honduras and even though my legs are sore, I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.
It’s supposed to be the rainy season in Honduras but in the country’s dry corridor there’s no rain in sight. It’s estimated that 42.5 per cent of Hondurans live in extreme poverty and people living in this part of Honduras are amongst some of the poorest. They rely mostly on what they can grow to feed their families. When the rains didn’t come this year, many of them lost their only source of livelihood.
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I accompanied Honduran Red Cross volunteers on an assessment mission to pinpoint exactly which communities had been affected by the drought and to what extent. We knew at the municipal level, but we really needed to identify where the most vulnerable people lived, and make sure we could target them with our assistance.
Upon arriving in the municipality of San Marcos de Sierra, we were told that one of the hardest hit communities could only be reached by foot. We were going to have to climb over a mountain to reach them. This didn’t seem to faze the Honduran Red Cross volunteers although I was a bit doubtful of my hiking abilities. We set off by car on a dirt road for about 45 minutes, winding through the mountains.
We took a local guide from the municipality with us, who knew the mountains well. We parked the car on the side of the road, packed some bottles of water and a first aid kit and off we went. For hours we hiked through some of the most stunning landscapes I have ever seen. Along the way, we encountered people and stopped to interview them.
We found out that one hundred per cent of the 3,000 or so people in this community had been affected by the drought. The two main crops they depend on, corn and beans, had been almost entirely destroyed. What’s most worrying for these communities is that pretty soon the real dry season is coming up. That’s why the Red Cross has launched an emergency appeal to assist the most vulnerable people affected by this drought, at this critical stage.
“It’s important for us to help people living in these remote areas, because if we don’t, I’m not sure that anyone else will,” the International Federation of the Red Cross disaster manager for Central America told me as we were hiking.
Emergencies often don’t make the evening news. But getting assistance can mean life or death for people affected by severe drought.
After seven hours of walking through the mountains, we made it back to the car just before dark. But the work didn’t stop there. We worked until past midnight to share all the information we had received that day. And soon the real work of providing assistance will begin.