by Lorraine Orlandi, originally published in Nica News 18 (November 1998)

	Trauma: No family escaped without the loss of a member. Photo: La Prensa/Germán Miranda.

Most of the survivors from the slopes of Nicaragua's Casita Volcano have fled their homesteads, abandoning the mountain that gave them a taste of prosperity and then brutally betrayed them.

In the days following one of the worst natural disasters in Nicaragua's history, residents of villages such as Santa Narcisa descended their lush mountainside on foot, on horseback and on flat-bed trailers to start rebuilding lives ravaged by a massive mudslide that killed an estimated 2,500 of their neighbors, burying them beneath 30 square miles (80 square km) of mud that raged down the slopes of the volcano, swallowing entire villages.

The wreckage at Casita was perhaps the most dramatic and deadly to result from Hurricane Mitch's rampage through Central America in late October and early November. Some 11,000 were killed throughout Central America under Mitch's unrelenting pounding, and the death toll continued to climb as bodies emerged from receding floodwaters or were unearthed from the mud.

"I'll never go back there," 57-year-old María Aguilera, a volcano dweller for 40 years, said as she rode down from Santa Narcisa with her 5-year-old grandson clasped in front and a 7-year-old clinging to her from behind. "We didn't sleep last night because we had rockslides. We left everything behind."

She and her neighbors in Santa Narcisa escaped the brunt of the devastation that transformed the adjacent villages of Porvenir and Rolando Rodríguez into fields of corpses. But the disaster forced them to start their lives over.

Santa Narcisa, Porvenir, and Rolando Rodríguez were among several farming cooperatives in the municipality of Posoltega, 75 miles (120 km) northwest of Managua. The cooperatives were formed with lands distributed to poor campesinos by the Sandinistas last decade.

Until this tragedy, the volcano known by its inhabitants as Casita Hill had been generous.

"Here everything grows -beans, corn, sorghum, soy. That's why we love this land," Santa Narcisa farmer Ernesto Rueda said.

He refused to leave his home in the wake of the disaster, though he sent his children and grandchildren down to the shelter in the municipal center, to join some 500 hungry, homeless refugees. He and his wife stayed on their land to care for their livestock and consider their futures.

The mountain exploded

	In Sock: Part of the first group of survivors to be helicoptered from the disaster scene of the Posoltega mudslide to a hospital in the city of Chinandega. Photo: La Prensa/Germán Miranda.

Once self-sufficient with potable water, bus transportation, neatly tended fields, and small brick houses, Posoltega's new grim reality reeks of rotting corpses. Residents in the municipal center six miles (10 km) from the obliterated villages found bodies daily in their fields for more than a week.

Witnesses described the nightmare that left their lives in ruins. At about mid-day on Friday, October 30, the steady rain had kept most residents at home.

"We heard a noise like a roar and my granddaughter said to me, 'an airplane is coming,'" 78-year-old Raul Espinoza said after his rescue to a hospital in Chinandega. "I looked outside and said, that's not a plane, it looks like the mountain exploded."

A minute later he was tumbling in a torrent of mud, boulders, and tree limbs. He struggled free to find his wife and other family members alive. They pulled the lifeless body of a grandchild from the debris.

In the aftermath, sisters Reina and Juana Mayorga came from Costa Rica and Managua to search for their parents, siblings, and other family members who lived in Porvenir.

"We've gone from hospital to hospital," Juana said. "At least if you bury a loved one you know where they are. This is not the same."

Throughout Nicaragua, survivors fled scenes of destruction only to find scenes of chaos in overcrowded, understocked shelters rife with illness. When María Aguilera arrived at the converted warehouse in Posoltega with her hungry family after a day-long trek on horseback, she received an oversized tiger-print skirt to wear, and nothing else.

"We need sweaters," she lamented. "And the children are hungry." Hurricane victims had a common refrain: "We've lost everything, we have nowhere to go."

Abel Morales, who was born and raised on Casita, led the effort to evacuate remaining residents, including his father. Some 60 members of his extended family are presumed dead. He believes the tragedy could repeat itself.

"I'm going to continue until every last soul has been removed from the mountain's threat," he said. "It shouldn't have finished us off this way, after we had so much affection for this place."

Still, even some of the hardest hit residents of Posoltega seem ready to again stake their futures on the slopes that gave them so much, and then took it all away.

Santo Díaz, 24, dazed and tearless, limped down Casita with his brother-in-law and two oxen, carrying in a couple of nylon bags their only remaining possessions after visiting the lunar landscape that once was their village.

Days earlier, Díaz had been at his father's house when the wall of mud and rock burst from the cloud-covered mountain top 4,636 feet (1,405 meters) above sea level.

He tried to pull his elderly father and brother to safety, but they were torn from his grasp. The murderous wave carried Díaz and his younger sister onto a rise, where they survived.

With a sweep of his arm, Diaz took in the verdant slope on the opposite side of the volcano from the devastation. "We want to build a village here," he said.