NO TIME TO MOURN

POSOLTEGA, Nicaragua —  This does not look like a town where disaster has struck.

On Sunday, children ran errands, men chopped wood and women washed clothes with a clear view of the mudslide that rolled down the Casitas Volcano on Oct. 30, killing more than 1,000 people and depositing bodies along the way, including scores left in sugar cane fields a few miles from town.

Most local residents lost many friends and relatives. But here in one of the poorest towns in the second-poorest country in the Americas, people have little time for mourning. They must get on with the daily business of survival.

Rescue workers had to persuade Cecilia Sevilla to abandon her home in Rolando Rodriguez, one of the hillside hamlets swept away in the disaster caused by rains from tropical storm Mitch. The mud barely missed her house, leaving her and two granddaughters to live on lemonade until rescue workers found them Friday.

Despite having seven bodies around her house, she was reluctant to leave because no one would be there to care for the pig, chickens and ducks she was raising for market.

There is not even time to identify and bury the bodies of Mitch’s victims. With 1,952 confirmed dead so far nationwide, the government has sent out brigades of Health Ministry workers to burn corpses here in order to prevent epidemics.

Such pragmatism is essential in a town as poor as this one, said parish priest Father Benjamin Villarreal.

“The sun is out,” he exhorted his congregation at Sunday Mass. “Clean the mud out of your houses and get back to work. Begin your lives. Our God is a God of the living.”