“I am 46 years old and I had never seen before a hurricane like this. It destroyed everything. My community lost animals, cultivations and plantations. Our rivers and water wells are contaminated.” This way begins Guillermo Simón, the Whita of Panua, his story, remembering the Wednesday 5th of September.

For the inhabitants of the area, these were three interminable hours in which the force of the wind, joined with the rains, demolished everything they had, including robust century old trees. Hurricane Felix entered Nicaragua fifteen days ago as category 5, the maximum category of the Zaffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 200 kilometers per hour. The area was left incommunicated.

Panua is one of the fourteen communities in which Plan has joined the humanitarian aid for the Miskito families, in coordination with the Ministry of Family, the Civil Defense and the National System of Prevention of Disasters of Nicaragua.

Two weeks after the phenomenon, the population is still trying to recover and to get out of their isolation. “The people are traumatized after the hurricane and they have been trying to survive,” explains Guillermo Simón, while enumerating the needs of the community that he, as a Whita, leads and represents.

Arturo Zamora

“We are concentrating our work in fourteen communities, but in the area there are 63; 72percent of the population of Puerto Cabezas (almost 52 thousand inhabitants) are Miskito natives and 50% are children and adolescents who require psychological attention and emotional help; of the nine schools in the area, just one remains and in precarious conditions,” said Mariella Greco, Nicaragua’s Plan director.

“We need plastic to make provisional ceilings and more or less protect ourselves from the rains. Even though we were poor, we had our houses; they were small but they were ours. We had our cultivations, some small things, little boats and pipantes. We had little but at least we had something. Now we have nothing,” adds Guillermo, surrounded by some children of the community.

In Panua, all 61 families lost their houses, there are no sanitary provisions and the three wells that provided their drinking water are contaminated.

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The fight against silence and isolation