BY FRANCES ROBLES

 POSOLTEGA, Nicaragua -- The 350 families in Santa María, hurricane victims all, are conflicted.

 They are eternally, profoundly and sincerely grateful for the little windowless, powerless, concrete casitas built for them after Hurricane Mitch buried some 2,000 neighbors in three minutes flat. But they're broke now, staying in a crowded settlement financed by European donors that took farmers far from their land, away from their pigs, chickens, crops -- and livelihood.

 "To be frank, we're not used to that lifestyle,'' said Pedro Pablo Miranda, who lost 40 relatives in a mudslide that buried villages on the slopes of a volcano. ``It's hard.''

 It's been slightly more than three years since that October 1998 storm unleashed seven months of rain in seven days. It killed more than 7,000 people in Honduras and Nicaragua, leaving more than 70,000 families without homes.

 And now nonprofit organizations that breathed life back into communities -- and built new ones from scratch -- are packing up. The bulk of international donations have dried up, and the region's biggest benefactor, Uncle Sam, will end its three-year $500 million U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) Hurricane Mitch programs this year. They leave behind huge investments -- and extreme poverty.

 "It's problematic: The AID money is ending and there's a lot left to do. It's going to be a disaster,'' said Mariano Plannells, of Save the Children-Honduras, a nonprofit group that built 89 water systems and 56 health centers. ``There's no preparation for that, just like we weren't prepared for Hurricane Mitch.''

 In all, the United States spent $400 million in Honduras and $103 million in Nicaragua, building schools, bridges and thousands of houses. Roads that were wrecked are passable again. The homeless have houses. Kids have classrooms.

 In Nicaragua alone, 54 health centers were repaired and equipped. There have been another 123 in Honduras. Farmers got $53 million in agricultural training; 17,000 small business owners got loans. More than 6,000 houses went up in Honduras, and $49 million has been spent on roads and bridges.

 But despite money that poured in from around the world, thousands remain in shelters in Honduras, and many more are without basic necessities like water or electricity. In Santa María, a typical settlement built specifically for storm victims, people were given sturdy roofs but left destitute. Thousands of once-self-supporting farmers in Nicaragua and Honduras are jobless because they were relocated miles from the plots of land where they grew their food.

 STILL IN SHELTERS

 Even the nonprofit groups that helped them acknowledge there remains little chance of improving their lot.

 "People here were used to being poor but stable,'' said Vicente González, a Santa María community leader. "They gave us a start: a roof. What happened? Without our produce, our customs, we have nothing. Now I don't have either a job or a way to live.

 "But we thank God and these organizations. Who knows what would have become of us without them.''

 Plannells and other activists said agencies did not have enough funding to provide housing and employment. As it stands, about 2,000 families still live in temporary
 shelters in Tegucigalpa and Honduras' northern coast. Plannells stressed that the vast majority of hurricane victims got help.

 "There is fear that we are going to cut them off, especially after Sept. 11,'' said Gregory Adams, spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Honduras. ``I think they understood that nothing was forever, but we are not going to abandon Honduras or pull out.''
 Complicating matters is that while no one doubts that the region took a beating from Hurricane Mitch, severe problems existed beforehand. For example, Honduras had hundreds of thousands of families considered homeless -- living in shacks along river banks -- before Mitch.

 The U.S. government estimates that Honduras lost 50,000 homes in the storm. Of the 70,000 pledged, just 27,201 are completed and another 23,000 are in progress.

 CHANGING SCENE

 "You see shantytowns that were temporary shelters after the storm,'' said Abigail Golden-Vazquez, spokeswoman for AID in Honduras. ``When one person moves into their new home, someone else moves in. Then you have people saying, `Look, there's still people living in temporary shelters!' ''

 The U.S. government alone, she said, paid for about 6,200 houses. Its projects tried to ensure holistic communities that included water, electricity and roads. Victims, she said, all got titles to their new properties, something they lacked prior to the storm.

 ``Do I think we did a good job in reconstruction? I think we did an excellent job,'' Golden-Vazquez said. ``Is it going to solve all the problems? Not all of them. But we rebuilt, and we built better.''

 INFRASTRUCTURE

 Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Francisco Aguirre said international donations vastly improved the country's infrastructure. Nicaragua, he said, is too dependent on foreign aid and must learn to produce on its own.

 ``That money has been well-invested,'' Aguirre said. ``We knew we would not continue to get money for Mitch forever. The bridges have been rebuilt. The roads have been rebuilt. While we will continue to be dependent on foreign aid -- too dependent for my liking -- the country has made important strides forward.''

 In Posoltega, 800 families still live in high-risk zones vulnerable to landslides. The city is still trying to figure out what to do with thousands who got new houses but lost the means of supporting their families.

 ``Their hands are tied. They ask for food and houses and roads, and most times I have nothing to say,'' said Posoltega community relations liaison Jessica Cruz, who lives in an Austria-financed dilapidated settlement that lacks running water and electricity.

 ``Some of the structures are pretty, the roofs are nice, and their stomachs are empty.''

                                    © 2001