Cristina and her family had been sleeping each night on a mattress under a mango tree for more than a year when we met them in January 2000.

Her family's humble mud and stick house had been totally destroyed by flooding from hurricane Mitch in October and November of 1998. With no money to rebuild, they simply strung up a blanket between two trees in their yard and placed their few remaining belongings behind it for privacy.

Cristina, along with her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, had been calling it "home" ever since.

They weren't alone. Many of the houses in Monjarás were washed away from the rush of water that flowed down from the mountains of central Honduras and swept through this coastal community.

Monjarás is a town of approximately 6,000 people, located about six kilometres from the southern Pacific shoreline of Honduras. Although the community is only 140 kilometres south of the capital, Tegucigalpa, it takes more than three hours to drive to Monjarás from the city because of the atrocious condition of the winding mountain highways that were eaten away by Mitch.

Since May of last year, Impact Teams International, the relief branch of the international Christian missions organization Youth With A Mission, has been hosting teams of volunteers from around the world to help rebuild the community.

Our team of 14 from Centre Street Church in Calgary arrived on January 11, 2000. During our two-week stay, we helped build houses for Cristina's family, as well as two others.

Each three-room house is six metres wide and eight metres long, including a covered porch, and cost $3,600, which was paid for in part by money our team raised in Canada. The houses have cement floors, concrete block walls and clay tile roofs, and should prove to be much sturdier the next time a hurricane rages through the town.

I spent my time working on a new home for a family of 12: Andres, Florinda, their brother, three daughters, and six grandchildren.

It was a delight to get to know 11-year-old Denis, the oldest grandson. He had amazing strength for such a small guy. He’d draw buckets of water from the well in the backyard. Then, hoisting the bucket onto his shoulder, he’d carry it to the front of the new house where we mixed cement on the ground. Other children even younger pitched in where they could, carrying buckets of gravel and hauling concrete blocks half their size to the work site. 

During breaks, Denis, along with other children from the neighborhood, would steal my hat and sunglasses, then break into huge smiles as they modeled them for each other. 

We played games and boxed each other with the work gloves Mark’s Work Wearhouse donated to our team (they gave us 84 pairs to take down, along with work boots and other clothes, all of which we left in Honduras).

Sometimes we’d just sit around pointing to objects and teaching each other the words for them in our own language. “Hammer?” “Martillo!”

Before leaving on the project, several people asked me why we didn’t just send the money we raised to Honduras rather than traveling there ourselves.

The answer came from Alfredo, a local man who wandered into the community centre where we were staying during lunch one day. 

I’m so thankful people are coming here to build houses rather than just sending money, he said. Money could be sent, and the government could distribute it, but who knows if people would actually use it to build houses.

The new homes are truly a blessing for the families. Most Honduran men who have a job make only 300 lempiras a week – about $30 Canadian. It would take most families at least five years to save enough money to build a house similar to the ones we built. 

Alfredo went on to share with us his memories of Mitch.

He explained that waters from the swollen Choluteca River flooded the town because of Monjarás's low elevation. The river took new routes and ran up to a kilometre wider than usual during the storm. In the nearby city of Choluteca, it grew to more than ten times its normal width. The area got up to 75 centimetres of rain.

Debris from villages at higher elevations floated into Monjarás with the flood – garbage, dead animals, bodies, and even coffins that had been unearthed as waters surged through cemeteries.

The people of the town fled to their rooftops. Animals climbed trees for safety. Alfredo's family waited on their roof for seven hours for the flooding to pass.

Once the waters retreated, the citizens of Monjarás were faced with the daunting task of cleaning up and rebuilding. Amazingly, there had been only two deaths in the town from the storm. However, the townspeople also had to bury the many bodies brought in by the floodwaters.

Today, the town is still dotted with many makeshift homes using blankets or garbage bags for walls. Water stains mark the walls of buildings that survived Mitch – a permanent reminder of the storm’s wrath. 

Although much work remains to be done, Monjarás is gradually rebuilding. Volunteers with Impact Teams have completed fifty houses. The organization is now in the process of building a park for the town, complete with a soccer field, basketball court and playground.

The sites I saw in Honduras will long linger in my memory: pigs, chickens and cows wandering the streets, peasants digging in the beach for their breakfast of clams, children doubling up on bicycles twice as tall as them.

But the memory I treasure the most is the smiles, tears and ‘thank yous’ of the families when we said our goodbyes. Truly, they were as much of a blessing to us as we were to them.