In Mitch’s Wake, Worry and Help

Since Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America, flooding villages and sweeping away homes, Christina Felipe Ramirez has not heard from her sister Gloria, who works on a banana plantation in a village near Guatemala’s southeastern border.

Ramirez is among the more than 400,000 Central American immigrants who are living in Southern California, many still anxiously waiting for news from home, praying that their loved ones are not among the 11,000 killed and up to 2 million left homeless by the monster storm.

“I have hope, but hope does not always quench my fear,” said Ramirez, a nanny working in Pasadena, offering a slight smile.

For most Central American immigrants, it has been an anxious two weeks since the 350-mile-wide storm ripped through the western Caribbean. Although the storm is long passed, telephone lines in most of the flooded areas are still down and news from the region has been sparse.

Many anguished immigrants--especially the large number who are not citizens--are tempted to return to their homeland to locate family members but fear they may not be allowed back into the United States. Most, however, simply cannot afford the trip.

Ramirez, who immigrated 10 years ago with her husband, decided to stay and hope good news arrives soon.

“If I go and I find her, I can’t help her financially,” she said. “What am I going to do? Cry with her?”

Norma Flores, a Honduran immigrant living in Alhambra, has spent the last two weeks wondering if her father, Ernesto Flores, survived the flooding in his village near the northern coast of Honduras. She finally learned Friday, through an uncle, that her father’s home was flooded but he escaped and is living in a makeshift shelter in a cardboard factory.

“I was frustrated because I was trying to call four days straight and I couldn’t get through,” she said.

Since the storm hit, Flores, who is studying to be a medical secretary, has worked as a volunteer at El Rescate, a social services group in Pico-Union--the heart of Southern California’s Central American immigrant community--answering phones and packing boxes of food and clothes for a shipment headed to Central America next week. She said the work is therapeutic.

Marlon Portillo, a Honduran immigrant living in Highland Park, has been so desperate for news of his missing cousin, Arnulfo Escobar, that he has been scanning television news broadcasts of the disaster, hoping that the camera, by some slim chance, will flash a picture of Escobar on the screen.

On Friday, Portillo got news from a relative that Escobar, his wife and his five sons had been rescued from a rooftop in northern Honduras and taken by boat to a hillside where they lived for five days without food.

“It’s a great relief to find them,” he said. “But they lost everything.”

Immigrant rights groups and immigration lawyers encourage people like Portillo to stay here and earn money to send home.

“The fact that people are here working makes a difference,” said Robert Foss, an attorney at El Rescate. One immigrant rights worker called it “the poor helping the poorer.”

Foss also warns that it will be difficult--in most cases impossible--for illegal immigrants or those with a pending residency application to legally return after leaving the United States.

The only exception may be Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants who were victims of the Central American wars of the 1980s and have been allowed to remain in the country while the government processes their applications for political asylum. Under the law, they can apply with the Immigration and Naturalization Service for a special 30-day travel permit if they can document evidence that their family is in peril.

But even that will be difficult. “The impossibility is how do you document anything in El Salvador and Guatemala right now?” he said.