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A glimpse of Guatemala

We are traveling in the mountains of Guatemala for a story to air this Friday as part of our "Making a Difference" series. You´ll see much more about the great program we are here to cover then. But as we drove from Antigua (at the base of the mountains just outside Guatemala City) to Lake Atitlan Tuesday, another story was very apparent. That´s the effects of Hurricane Stan. Stan hit this area this fall, just a few days before the devastating earthquake in Pakistan. In the midst of a very busy hurricane season and then a much more deadly event in South Asia, Stan got very little attention. But for those who live here, it has over taken their lives. In terms of deaths, people here say Stan wasn't all that bad. In this part of the world, that means the loss of life is measured in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands.

And Stan didn't bring incredibly strong winds. But the storm parked over this region and dumped rain for nearly a week. As we drove through the mountains, the results were everywhere you looked. Mountain sides striped bare from landslides, river valleys are now mud flats. Those mountain sides are somebody´s fields. Here they terrace and farm every inch on land they can. You can see a hillside covered with corn, coffee, bananas...  and then it just drops away in a wall of dirt mid-field. And those river valleys were villages. We saw areas with fancy homes belonging to foreigners and poor farming villages alike now sitting amidst the hardened mud. The tiny river that trickled by us just about a month ago was a raging river that broke its banks and wiped out entire towns in its path. This is the time of year when the farmers should be harvesting their crops... they've already paid for their seeds and a season's worth of fertilizer. And now much of the year´s investment and expected returns are washed away.

We certainly had our share of natural disasters in the U.S. this year. And we had our share of issues in dealing with them. But seeing what the people in this part of Guatemala are dealing with, it somehow puts all that in perspective. They have no FEMA here. And forget the arguments about wind vs. flood, they don't have insurance either. Other countries are helping some - including USAID. And there are a few micro-loan programs set up to help people rebuild. But these are people who were just scraping by to begin with have yet another huge challenge before them. I have no doubt they'll fight on and restore their lives, but it's a tough go in an already not-so-easy part of the world.

Editor's note: You can see some of the devastation caused by Hurricane Stan in Central America in this MSNBC.com slide show.

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