On one side of the road, I saw a calm lagoon stretching as far as the eye could see, or so I thought. The road was clear and the Ulúa River, wide and murky, was slowly returning to normal. We made our second attempt to leave the Sula Valley as the waters began to recede. The rain flooded the roads to San Pedro Sula, cutting off all access to the city. It exposed the area’s crushing poverty, rotted crops, flooded factories, destroyed bridges, and wrecked so many houses that still no one knows exactly how many. It rained and rained in the Sula Valley, the economic engine of Honduras, drenching almost everything. Category 4 hurricanes produce winds of 250 kilometers per hour and it’s incredibly rare to be hit by two in a single season, which is why World Meteorological Organization spokesperson Clare Nullis complained about running out of adjectives to describe that historic season. Hurricane intensity is measured on a scale of 1 to 5 - the Saffir-Simpson scale - named after the two men who created it. Two of them became Category 4 hurricanes and made landfall on the Central American coast within two weeks of each other, slamming the northern coast of Honduras particularly hard. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season produced 30 named storms. Our first attempt was thwarted because a long stretch of the four-lane highway was so deep underwater that rescue teams were racing over the asphalt in motorboats. In November 2020, the year of the pandemic, after having reported on the devastating impacts of hurricanes Eta and Iota, we were trying for the second day in a row to leave San Pedro Sula on the highway to Tegucigalpa. With the solemnity of a sharecropper, he flatly stated the obvious, “We’re not parasites - we’re people.” The old man elbowed his way into the noisy crowd that was trying to talk to us about their situation, and raised a bony finger. “They call us parasites, but we’re not - we’re people.”
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