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Traveling secondary roads in Honduras (picture someone riding a bucking bronco) is where I receive a firsthand lesson on the toll taken by Hurricane Mitch in October 1998. The lesson came from Chet Thomas, executive director of the Honduran nonprofit Christian development agency, Proyecto Aldea Global (PAG; in English, Project Global Village). We enter a town called La Libertad, where in 1998 a wall of water, mud, and trees had poured down the mountain and swept a hundred people away with it.

"We found lots of bodies in El Cajon [reservoir]. It's an old town, about 35,000 people," Thomas says. "Half the town was under water. To this day, two-story buildings are one-story buildings because of the mud residue." Moving higher into the mountains where the coffee farmers live, Thomas explains, "Mitch dropped four feet of water in six hours and it had to come down off these mountains, and did so in a way that took everything with it."

The hurricane destroyed all the export crops. The banana companies poured over $300 million into the recovery. It wasn't until 2001 that banana production reached pre-Mitch levels. The same was true of shrimp fishing. Coffee is a different story. Vietnam has emerged as one of the world's main coffee producers, which has sharply dropped prices everywhere. This is good for consumers, but disastrous for a country like Honduras, where coffee accounted for 40 to 50 percent of exports. Worse, most of Honduras's coffee producers are small farmers, who harvest the crop on a half-acre of mountainous terrain, and for whom the drop in price has created a disaster.

Even three years after Mitch, more than 100,000 displaced people were waiting for new homes while living on patches of dirt in houses made of plastic. Others have abandoned their homes because they lacked food. The country was in the middle of a drought, leaving many without water and food. Many secondary roads were impassable and many bridges were still out.

Honduras is about the size of Pennsylvania and its growth rate (3 percent) exceeds its food production. The country can't feed itself. Fifty percent of the 6.3 million Hondurans live below the poverty line. The average per capita income is about $1,977 a year.

In the aftermath of Mitch, PAG became the largest and most efficient development agency in Honduras, surpassing in size and income the Honduras branches of World Vision, World Relief, Habitat for Humanity, and Catholic Relief Services. Hurricane relief doubled PAG's personnel almost instantly to 286 employees (half of whom were let go amid decreased giving after Sept. 11, 2001). PAG received more hurricane-relief money from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) than any other agency—$5 million—and spent it at a rate of $100,000 a week. This is due in no small measure to PAG's reputation for stewardship and expeditious dissemination of funds to the most needy and remote communities. But it's also due to the tenacity of people like Thomas, who stare in the face of disaster and figure out what works for long-term development.

The problem with writing about "development" generally and PAG specifically is knowing where to begin. We begin on the winding road leading to the quaint colonial mountain village called Santa Lucia, where Thomas lives with Lizzeth, his wife of ten years.

Driving up from Tegucigalpa, where PAG's main office is located, Thomas and I stop at a little store. He returns a minute later, crestfallen, because the store doesn't carry the brand of razor blades he likes. "If you clean them out real good they can last for two weeks," he says, sighing. "I guess I can make it one more bad morning."

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2