This is the second part of the four-part “Mission of the Heart” series

Copyright 2000 Des Moines Register

Reprinted with permission
March 20, 2000 Monday
SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Pg. 1A
HEADLINE: Tragic sights shake Iowans
Survivors of floods tell tales of sorrow
By STEPHEN BUTTRY
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

Los Corales, Venezuela - Jose Roure leads the way through the swath of
boulders and hardened mud that covers what used to be his neighborhood. He stops
near a small cross and a potted chrysanthemum. Nearby lies a child's brown
sneaker.

Here, he says, was his parents' house. Somewhere buried under rock and mud,
he hopes, lies his mother, Maria Teresa Roure. "I prefer to think that she is
down there," Roure says, "and the water didn't take her."

He looks toward the Caribbean Sea, about a mile away. The water took
countless thousands of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who were swept away
by onrushing water, mud and rocks.

Standing by a boulder that could smash a car, Roure tells in English about
that night. "We saw it coming down, these rocks, and they move like feathers."

The aftermath of this South American country's worst disaster transfixed

about 60 Iowa missionaries last month. During their visit, they struggled for
words to describe the catastrophe that swept down the mountain called El Avila
for two horrifying days in December.

"I can't imagine what that was like," said Steve Drake of Ankeny.

The mudslides killed an estimated 30,000 people, almost as many people as the
United States lost in battle in the Korean War. Not since a cyclone in
Bangladesh in 1991 had a natural disaster caused such carnage. Many residents
still must depend on relief agencies for food rations.

The missionaries from First Assembly of God in Des Moines visited the last
week of February, more than two months after the disaster. Before the Iowans
reached the barrio of El Pauji, where they would worship and run a medical
clinic, they could see why a disaster here would be more deadly than in Iowa.

On the hills and mountains around Caracas, the capital of 3 million people,
small rancho houses of lightweight red clay brick stand next to and on top of
each other, up and down steep slopes. The homes, built by squatters, cover many
hills and reach far up mountainsides.

"They just built wherever they could," said Pastor Alexis Mora, the Iowans'
host at Fuente de Vida (Fountain of Life) Church in El Pauji, one of the barrios
on the slopes surrounding Caracas.

Many of the heavily poplulated mountainsides, ravines and alluvial plains

along the coast were not suitable for habitation, especially not at such an
extreme degree, said Matthew Larsen, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological
Survey who has studied the Venezuela disaster.

"It's just unfortunate that so much building was allowed to go on in these

sites," Larsen said. "What happened there shouldn't have happened. God made the
storm, and man made the disaster."

Rainfall like northern Venezuela had in December comes a couple of times

every century or two, he said. But the meeting of the mountain and the sea makes
for a "geologically dynamic and active setting" where floods and landslides are
inevitable.

El Avila rises 8,500 feet a few miles from the Caribbean. Moist air ascending
so rapidly over the mountain can produce violent weather. Steep slopes send
water and earth cascading into canyons and gullies.

The ravines and plains at the bottom are no place to live.

In the coastal resort area of La Guaira, across El Avila from Caracas and El
Pauji, mile after mile of devastation shocked missionaries on their way to
minister and clean up in an area inundated by mud.

Empty luxury hotels and tattered billboards advertising sunscreen hinted at

the tourist attraction the gorgeous beaches once were. Bathing beauties and sand
castles were replaced by buses buried in mud, vehicles so crushed and twisted
they were indistinguishable as car or truck.

In five swaths of destruction 75 to 150 yards wide, rivers of boulders mashed

everything in their path from the mountain to the coast. The terrain and large
buildings protected some areas from destruction, but hardly any escaped the mud.
After two months of cleanup, countless homes and shops remained filled with mud.

Anderson Ortega, who showed some of the visiting Iowans around, went to work
that Wednesday at a hotel by the beach, perhaps a mile from his home. When the
mud washed through, he said, "My family was at home. I didn't know if they were
alive or dead."
 The disaster paralyzed the coastal region so thoroughly that Ortega did not
see his family until Saturday. Their home was on a steep hill, away from the
primary flow of water, mud and rocks. His mother had minimized damage by
pounding holes near the floor in downstream walls. That way the mud rushed
through the house rather than piling up. Still, they were moving out.

Midoly Jean Luis, who escaped the onslaught with her husband and two sons,
shuddered at the memory of that day.

"I think that was the last day for me," recalled Luis, who speaks English and
is expecting her third child. "I wasn't scared about me. I was scared about the
children. We thank God that all the children are saved."

Her family was among 700 refugees in barracks at the Fuente Tiuna army base
in Caracas.

The Venezuelan government plans to relocate refugees inland from the crowded
barrios around Caracas and the coastal region where the devastation was the
worst. Some of the homeless don't want to go, not to mention the many barrio
residents who remain in harm's way.

"Now the problem is relocating these people, and it will take years and
years," said Mora, the pastor, gesturing to a mountainside covered with ranchos.

While the government works on long-term solutions such as relocation,

Venezuela faces a monumental challenge in caring for more than 100,000 refugees.

The Iowa missionaries visited a makeshift shelter in Guarenas where Rosa

Aguirre and her children were staying. Their quarters in an unfinished post
office were separated from other refugees by hanging bedsheets. They barely had
room for a twin bed and a twin mattress on the concrete floor. They had a
television but few other belongings.

Aguirre was worried about all the rainfall the morning of Dec. 17, so she
took her three children with her to work cleaning houses. "When I came back from
work in the afternoon, all the homes had fallen," she said through an
interpreter. "To the glory of God we were all together and safe when it all
happened."

Relief agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the
Red Cross continue to provide assistance.

The Iowa missionaries visited the village of Santa Barbara three hours east
of Caracas, downstream from a dam that burst. Residents lined up at a Red Cross
tent for food rations: bags of beans, corn meal, rice, flour, pasta and bottles
of vegetable oil.
 Iowa missionaries Shelby Franz, Yvonna Stephenson and Kelsey Blessman
presented their traveling puppet and evangelism show in the village square.
Women in the crowed eagerly accepted gifts of toiletries and religious tracts.

Wanting to respond, a villager offered the only gift he had: cocoa beans that
had been drying in the sun on the village streets.

GRAPHIC: _By: GARY FANDEL, THE DES MOINES REGISTER; Disaster: A man
and a child
walk past a flood-damaged mountainside near Caracas, Venezuela. Healing hugs:
Full-time missionary Crissy Brooks hugs one of the many children at Fuente de
Vida Church in El Pauji, Venezuela. Brooks is from California.

SIDEBAR HEADLINE: Beneath rubble and rocks, 'here was a house'

By STEPHEN BUTTRY
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

La Quebrada, Venezuela -Pastor Alexis Mora walks through the rubble of jagged
rocks, dried mud, shattered homes and buried dreams.

"Aqui estaba una casa," he tells a group of visiting Iowans, pointing to the
left. "Here was a house." Then to the right. "Aqui estaba una casa."

La Quebrada, the Ravine, vanished late on the night of Dec. 15. Mora's church
in El Pauji, which was host to a mission team from First Assembly of God in Des
Moines, escaped major damage from the worst catastrophe in Venezuela's history.

Just a few minutes' walk away, though, is La Quebrada. In a few horrendous

hours, Mora explained to the Iowans, this mountainside barrio became a ghost
town.

No one knows how many people might be buried beneath the mud and rocks where
the barrio used to be. Mora says a couple of thousand people used to live in La
Quebrada.

La Quebrada remains buried more than two months after the disaster. It is the
dry season now, and the mud that filled this gully has turned nearly as hard as
the rocks that it carried. It may never be excavated.

Soraida Centeno, whose home was destroyed, lives now in a small shack that
overlooks the carnage. Centeno looks down into the valley of death, her
10-year-old son, Luis, at her side.

"It was like a wave," she said. Muddy water, dirt and rocks rushed through
the narrow gully where Centeno had lived for 19 years. "People started running
up the sides of the mountain."

Laimi Ramirez was one of those who ran.

"Whole houses were coming down," Ramirez said through an interpreter.

"Everything just went down the slide. Everything was like an earthquake."

GRAPHIC: _By: GARY FANDEL, THE REGISTER; What's left: Pastor Alexis Mora
stands
amid devastation in a ravine where about 2,000 Venezuelans lost their homes in
December floods. "They just built wherever they could," Mora said. He was the
Iowans' host at a church in El Pauji.