CIUDAD SANDINO, Nicaragua — Maria Corina Artola has never been wealthy or even financially comfortable. But Friday, she was the poorest she has ever been.
Little by little over the years, she had established herself as a street vendor, earning enough to support her four children in a shack along an open sewer. That was until tropical storm Mitch washed it all away.
Standing dazed before a few sticks of wood and plastic sheets donated by the Managua city government, Artola tried to figure out how to make a shanty that would shelter her family.
"All that I could rescue were my children because they are the most precious thing I have," she said.
Artola's tragedy underscores the plight of millions of people left homeless by Mitch and symbolizes the overall predicament of the tiny, poor countries of Central America where they live.
"Suddenly, in two weeks, we have lost what it took 50 years to build," said Javier Ibisate, dean of economics at the University of Central America in San Salvador. "That is a strong blow."
The tropical storm battered Salvadoran roads that still had heavy equipment on them from that country's efforts to repave rural highways.
In Nicaragua, seven new bridges built with $20 million in Japanese aid had been inaugurated in the past three years. All of them survived, but this country must now replace 80 other bridges destroyed or damaged by Mitch.
Honduran officials estimate that their development efforts have been set back 30 years. El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize suffered relatively few deaths and less damage than Honduras and Nicaragua.
Panama and Costa Rica largely escaped damage.
Mitch, the fourth-largest hurricane to hit the Caribbean, will go down in the record books as the most destructive storm since the Great Storm of 1780 killed 20,000 people.
One U.N relief official termed Mitch the worst natural disaster in Latin America in a century.
On Friday, the number of confirmed dead had reached at least 8,000. As time passed, hopes of finding another 6,500 missing people alive were fading.
The rains and flooding also have come close to extinguishing the hope that the region would finally begin to recover from the devastating civil wars of the 1980s.
"As we say in El Salvador, it has rained on what was already wet," Ibisate said. "There was so much destruction from the wars, and we had just begun to rebuild bridges and roads."
