As President Clinton arrived in Central America this week to tour the area devastated by Hurricane Mitch, it is entirely possible that many Americans had forgotten the disaster he was talking about.
For the record, Hurricane Mitch was a gargantuan storm that wandered around the Caribbean Sea for nearly a week last October before sweeping down on Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, attacking the region with 180 mile-per-hour winds from above and ferocious floods from below. Some 11,000 people died.
Those figures alone should have made Mitch memorable, but the truth is, it didn’t make much of a splash a thousand miles to the north.
For one thing, the U.S. media were slow to pick up on the story. Moreover, distant death is a difficult thing to keep straight–the relative sufferings of Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, India and a dozen other spots on the globe are hard to grasp by themselves; together, they tend to blend into a large mixture of things we would rather not think about.
But where analytical comprehension fails us, imagination sometimes steps in. And it was imagination–not make-believe, but the peculiar power of an image to bring understanding, and to move a person to action–that turned Cliff Williams into a one-man Hurricane Mitch relief force.
Williams is a railroad worker for the Illinois Central by day and an ordained Baptist minister who devotes much of his life to the First Baptist Congregational Church on the Near West Side of Chicago.
Before Mitch, Williams had no personal connection or pre-existing interest in Central America. His outreach work takes him mostly to places such as the Henry Horner Homes and Lower Wacker Drive.
But one night, watching a television news show, he saw an interview with a Honduran woman who had been swept out to sea on a makeshift raft during the hurricane. Her husband and three children died; she was adrift for six days before a navy vessel rescued her.
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What, the interviewer asked her, did you do for six days, bobbing in the Caribbean Sea?
“She stated that for six days she was praying and praising the Lord,” Williams recalled. “It brought to mind the Bible. It brought a thought to me about Jonah. . . . I saw the hand of the Lord in that.”
“Within 10 minutes I awakened my wife and said to her, `I’m going to have to go to Honduras,’ ” Williams said.
For months, Williams talked about Mitch to his co-workers and to members of his church. He collected money and enough supplies to fill a 40-foot-long shipping container. He convinced his employer, the Illinois Central Railroad, to transport the container from Homewood to Gulfport, Miss. He solicited help from Chiquita Brands to ship the container from Mississippi to San Pedro Sul, Honduras.
Thursday morning, Williams used his vacation time and a donated airline ticket to set out on a two-week trip to Honduras. Along with a deacon from First Baptist Congregational and a physician from Atlanta, he will help distribute the aid he collected and provide whatever services he can to the rebuilding effort in Honduras.
Williams, of course, is only one of thousands of Americans who have donated their time and resources to help the hurricane victims.
The Roman Catholic Church, the dominant religious institution in Central America, has mobilized millions of dollars and legions of workers in the effort; scores of Protestant relief efforts, evangelical missionaries and secular charities have joined in as well.
Individuals, too, have made tremendous sacrifices in response to the suffering. In December, a truck driver from Chicago was making a volunteer trek to his native Guatemala when he was killed on a Mexican highway trying to deliver relief.
It is hard enough for most people simply to summon the details about Hurricane Mitch, to tease them from snippets of other human and natural catastrophes scattered through their memories. It is more difficult still to understand what makes a person drop his own needs and wants and concerns to rush off to a land he has never seen and help people he doesn’t know.
Certainly, the motivations behind these efforts are as varied as human histories and beliefs. But they share some underlying conviction, just waiting to be tapped, that people are fundamentally bound to something much larger than the world they see every day.
Williams puts it in the language of an evangelical Christian, but you have heard other people say the same thing with images of their own religious or humanistic faith.
“My mission calls for me to go to the utmost parts of the world,” he said Wednesday, as he put together the final details of his journey.
“We serve an extraordinary God,” he said. “Sometimes you have to go beyond what might be considered normal.”
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