One such moment occurred during a recent show in which a woman who had been married for a long time ran into her ex-boyfriend at a yogurt shop. She found herself thinking about him night and day. She looked forward to his calls. She considered meeting him. And finally she told her husband how she felt. What we expect is anger, or pain, or tears, resentment or the tallying up of the years her husband stood by her unfalteringly. What we expect is
outrage. Instead, the husband wraps his arms around his wife and says, “Honey, I am so sorry I can’t do that for you anymore.” He holds her, then she calls the ex and tells him she can never speak to him again.

That’s transformation.

“The husband, the wife, the ex — who, among us, has not been every character in that piece?” Glass asks.

As the medium’s coolest commodity, “This American Life” — which began airing on public radio in 1995 and falls just behind “Car Talk” and “Prairie Home Companion” in popularity — captures the listener’s imagination by mirroring our culture and society through the individual stories of people and the poignant, strange or luminescent moments in which they find themselves. Each week, “This American Life” presents “a bunch of stories,” as the program’s Web site explains; “some are documentaries, some are fiction, some are something else … we choose a theme and invite different writers and performers to contribute items on the theme.” Today the show reaches nearly a million listeners on more than 300 stations.

I spoke with Ira Glass recently at Zinfandel, a restaurant in Chicago’s River North area, not far from Touristville, with its Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. After more than a dozen e-mails attempting to pinpoint the wheres and whens, we settled on this place because Glass, who recently turned 40, feels a special affinity for it. Zinfandel, an ochre-walled nouveau American cuisine bistro piping in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, opened right around the time “This American Life” began. Zinfandel employees are unwavering fans of the show. So loyal are they that each month the restaurant chooses a culinary theme in honor of “This American Life’s” weekly themes, and offers special menus around that theme. “There’s something so loopy about that,” Glass says. “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.”

“The most surprising thing I can tell you about this place,” he says, leaning conspiratorially toward me, “is the shrimp cocktail. Because shrimp cocktail is not a thing you think would ever be good, but in fact it’s completely …” He thinks a moment. “It makes you think that shrimp cocktail can be something.” I stare at him. It’s true. Shrimp cocktail is just shrimp cocktail. “I think you’ll be surprised,” he says, then looks up toward the ceiling and mutters, “please, God, let it be good.”

I attempt to not look charmed. In Chicago he has a reputation for dating lots of women — an unlikely Romeo, one article called him — though pieces written about him mostly suggest he works too hard to maintain a shred of a social life. “If you date one woman a year,” he says with an air of exasperation, “times 10 years, and that’s 10 women …” he trails off. It’s a tired topic — and one that, with his growing fame, is bound to get more tiresome. I refrain from telling him that many of my highly educated, highly articulate female friends were reduced to schoolgirl giggles and the throes of groupiedom at the mention of my meeting him.

In jeans, Converse All-Stars, green T-shirt and unbuttoned button-down, Glass could be anybody — the Wrigley Field frat boy going gray, the roadie for an Elvis Costello tribute band, the tourist come to the big city for a weekend of megastores and theme restaurants. It’s precisely this regular-guy feel that allows him to penetrate worlds most of us would be barred from: a father-and-son exploration of the elder’s Alzheimer’s disease, a young daughter’s feelings of betrayal upon discovering her father and her imaginary friend are one and the same, an African-American who journeys to the homeland and in the process discovers where home is not, a pimp who fails because he is not brutal enough, a man’s violent boyhood pranks.

Glass withholds judgment completely and consistently, even with the inmates and the prostitutes. This refusal to judge, a trait that would both win him votes and make him a terrible politician, is part of the universal appeal of “This American Life.” It compels us to want to tell our stories in ways, perhaps, that we’ve not had the courage to tell before — ways that evoke audience empathy for everyone, victims and villains alike. We’ve all been down there with the liars, the thieves, the hacks. But we’ve also been heroes and saints.

He arrived exactly on time, which startled me. I assumed he’d be late, 10 or 15 minutes at least. I assumed things at the radio station would have been frantic and he’d appear panting with disheveled hair and rumpled clothing — the clichid marks of genius. In many of the articles I’d read about him, he’d sounded the part: busy beyond human capacity, the crackpot intellectual operating on two hours of sleep every night, the neurotic compelled to edit everyday conversations (somehow it’s easier to swallow a successful neurotic than a regular guy with a good idea). Though we would prefer him otherwise, Ira Glass is not, insofar as I can tell, troubled, compulsive or obsessive.

When he was 19, Glass began working at National Public Radio, first as an intern, then as a tape cutter and eventually as a reporter and producer for “All Things Considered.” (In a May airing of Terry Gross’ “Fresh Air” we heard an earlier Ira during a six-month stint as host of “Talk of the Nation” — now Ray Suarez’s gig. He sounded as odd in that position as Tom Brokaw would doing stand-up.)

In the early stages, Glass worked with Keith Talbot, a former documentary producer for NPR now working in television in New York, who germinated the seed for what would later become the genius of Glass’ show. “His job was to find new ways to structure an hour of radio and to do that in documentary,” Glass recalls. “So he thought a lot about how you listen to something and why you stay listening; he was very inventive about structure and what structure does. And later I would find that I could actually structure stories based around the principles that I had learned.”

Our grinning waitress comes to the table for the entree order. I figure she knows who he is; except for one moment near dessert when he is away from the table, she does not make eye contact with me at all, but keeps her eyes trained toward him. He is insouciantly handsome — in the way that someone who ignores mirrors is handsome, or perhaps in the way that someone who makes you feel important is handsome, or maybe in the way that someone who hasn’t changed his manner of dress in decades and whose style has finally come around again is both handsome and hip.

Glass’ role as host of “This American Life” shifts. Sometimes he is the unbeliever and sometimes the cheerleader, but he is always the one who gives a context for each story, within each week’s theme and within the world as well. He tells us not only why we should listen to the story, but why we should take pleasure in it. “Often it’s just creating desire,” he says. “You say something like ‘the city schools in America’ and it’s just like saying ‘Vietnam’ or ‘public housing.’ It’s faceless, it just seems unfixable till you put a face to it and say it’s way more complicated than you think you know. In that way, broadcasting has a role in the way we think of ourselves and in our picture of the world … my staff and I do the shows we do because they’re entertaining and moving to us and we assume they might be to someone else. There’s a value to that for me.”

Glass is a writer’s writer, or more aptly a writer’s radio host. He understands how narrative works, how to build tension, how to place words within sentences and sentences within paragraphs, how at the end of a story a character must be transformed. Every good writer knows that the most important, most evocative information should come at the end of a sentence or paragraph, and even in conversation he does this. Take his earlier words, for example: “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.” He doesn’t say: “I love that they’ve chosen food as their medium.” Because he knows — probably instinctively — that what comes last will carry the most weight; he knows where inside a sentence the power lies — or rather where inside a sentence lies the power. And so even in his speech you hear the pregnant pauses, the places where, if he were writing the conversation, he would use colons, semicolons and dashes.

Our food arrives. Glass has ordered something geologic, a layer of hash browns, halibut, eggs and tomatillo sauce. I am less adventurous: I’m eating chicken and stuffing, which rivals my grandmother’s. “The stuffing’s always better than the rest,” he says after a sampling. “Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that’s what our whole country is based on. It’s amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he’s basically just protein.”

One of Glass’s strengths is that very few of the stories on his show are what they seem to be at first listen. The sidewalk Sinatra impersonator, for example, is not merely another member of America’s wacky fringe, but rather he embodies how life can surprise us, the accidental moments and meetings that color our lives — the profundities and reminders of things inside us, the pieces we may have left along the way or the places we’ve forgotten to find joy.

But despite his clarity in pinpointing the nucleus of a story, Glass is hardly skulking around every corner searching for material. There’s enough material sitting in boxes at the station, he says. He doesn’t need to look for it in everyday life; most conversations aren’t that interesting, anyway. Though he did admit to a recent moment when, on a rare sunny day in Chicago, he sat on a deck overlooking Lake Michigan with NPR’s president and WBEZ’s station manager — all three in dark suits. “Suddenly, I felt like I was in some Tom Clancy novel!” he shrieks. “I wanted to say, ‘Don’t you guys think this is really weird? We’re sitting outside in the sun and we’re wearing suits as if we’re plotting the overthrow of Belize!”

Which, I tell him, would only take the three of them.

Lately, Glass has toyed with the idea of “This American Life” as a television show — he’s even had offers. The format would be similar to the radio show, with weekly themes and segments. Though part of the magic of radio is how it allows individual imagination to bloom, Glass feels confident that he could capture this as well in a visual medium. “Each story would be shot in a different style,” he explains, “some with a hand-held camera in available light, some shot with a director and lighting and beautiful in the way that an Errol Morris film is beautiful. A lot of the images will be” — he pauses a moment — “I’ve been warned not to say this in front of TV networks because they take it as a little more arty and threatening than I think it is … The images will be more impressionistic. They won’t directly represent, but will gesture at ideas in the story.”

In a recent piece he wrote for Slate magazine, Glass mentioned the possibility of putting the radio show on hiatus for a year and exploring television. “The next morning I woke up with [something] like a bad hangover,” he shakes his head, “like ‘what did I say that for?’ That’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is keep doing the radio show and also do some television.” It’s a scenario that, on his current high, seems entirely plausible.

In the world of “This American Life,” Glass believes that art is anything that gives us pleasure, anything that evokes some sort of emotional or visceral response. The stories that air on the show are chosen with this in mind. John Gardner once defined art as seeking to improve life, not debase it, as seeking “to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us … Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness,” he wrote. It is arguable that Ira Glass may have brewed our latest, greatest example of the marriage between art and humanity. Or, as he himself might put it, a surprisingly perfect concoction of grease, starch and protein.

Born in 1942 in Brooklyn, King grew up listening to the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll to hit mass audiences in America. Her earliest songs reflected a pop-rock sensibility geared to a white teen market. At Queens College in Brooklyn, where she trained to be a teacher, she met Gerry Goffin, with whom she would form one of the most successful songwriting teams of the ’60s (classmates included Paul Simon and Neil Diamond). A trained chemist, Goffin wrote lyrics to accompany King’s deceptively complex arrangements. They married when King was 18 and had their first child, Louise, just after they’d had their first No. 1 hit. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” recorded by the Shirelles in 1960, stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks. The song’s subject matter was considered racy by some in the music industry. Its chorus was a post-coitus interrogative, bringing to the surface a sensibility far more modern than many in the post-World War II era cared to acknowledge.

Before “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Goffin and King wrote more than four dozen songs that were never recorded. They lived in a basement apartment in New York City, and when King finished her secretarial day job and Goffin finished his chemist job, they’d sit in a tiny office belonging to Don Kirshner at Aldon Music and toil over songs. After they gave “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to Kirshner (whom they’d met through King’s childhood friend Neil Sedaka), Goffin recalled King, then seven months pregnant, driving up to his lab in a limousine and telling him to hang up his white coat, they wouldn’t have to work again. Kirshner had given them each a $10,000 advance.

Goffin and King came from an era when performers rarely wrote their own material but relied heavily on songwriters to provide them with hit singles. The most famous factory for this songwriting talent in the ’50s and ’60s was New York’s Brill Building. It housed more than 20 music companies off and on throughout the decades, and songwriters knew they’d made it when they found themselves working inside its cubicles. Goffin and King worked around the corner, at Aldon Music, where they were considered part of the same happening scene. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau wrote: “The songs of Goffin and King are superb examples of the songwriting craft of the ’60s. Finely honed to meet the demands of the clients who commissioned them, and written with the requirements of AM radio always firmly in mind, they still managed to express themselves in a rich way. Like Hollywood directors who learned how to make the limitations of the system work for them and in the process created something of their own pop vision.”

Most of the more than 100 hits penned by Goffin and King in the
’60s had a thin, bubble-gum sentimentality to them, like “Pleasant
Valley Sunday,” “The Loco-motion,” “One Fine Day,” “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “Crying in the Rain” and “Up on the Roof.” Recorded by artists such as the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney cited the pair as one of the group’s major influences), the Monkees, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Everly Brothers and the Chiffons, the songs contrast sharply with the more mature, complex work King began producing after her split with Goffin in the late ’60s, when she relocated with their two daughters from New York City to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles — breeding ground of another burgeoning music scene.

In Laurel Canyon, where folk musicians proliferated, King began the
evolution from songwriter to solo artist. Contemporaries
including James Taylor (a longtime friend who appears on numerous King albums), Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Eagles and others were all part of the Laurel Canyon music scene; shortly after moving there, King hooked up with then-undiscovered guitarist Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and bassist Charles Larkey, who would become her second husband and with whom she would have her only son. “Those were remarkable days in Laurel Canyon,” Taylor wrote on King’s rerelease of “Tapestry.” “Exceptional was commonplace. The record industry was a labor of love in the service of music. It was a hoot.”

Together with Larkey and Kortchmar, King formed a trio called the City and cut an album, “Now That Everything’s Been Said.” Because of King’s stage fright, the City never toured, but the album’s failure to succeed became the springboard for her leap into a solo career. With encouragement from Taylor, King released her first solo album in 1970. “Writer,” slightly more successful than the City’s album, was an example of King’s growing musical maturity. With dense, layered piano chords, the songs were far removed from her teen pop ditties of the ’60s. Both Goffin and legendary producer Lou Adler realized, after these two albums, that King’s best work was not with a group of musicians, but when she was simply accompanying herself on piano. “I knew that her demos were more popular than her first two records,” Adler told Rolling Stone. “People in the business collected Carole King demos. You couldn’t get them back once you’d sent them to a producer.” “Writer” sold 6,000 copies initially, enough to encourage King to make a second solo album, the one that would become her pihce de risistance.

“Tapestry,” released in February 1971, spent 15 weeks in the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s chart and stayed in the top 100 for six years. By the end of 1971, “Tapestry” was still selling 150,000 copies per week and had scored four top 10 hits; while a complete accounting of its sales has never been made, it remains one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Upon the record’s release, Rolling Stone critic Landau wrote: “It is an album of surpassing personal intimacy and musical accomplishment. Every note reminds you that ‘Tapestry’ is not the work of pop star hacks diddling around in the studio to relieve their own boredom. Conviction and commitment are the life blood of ‘Tapestry’ and are precisely what make it so fine. Carole King is thoroughly involved with her music; she reaches out towards us and gives everything she has. And this generosity is so extraordinary that perhaps we can give it another name: passion.”

King’s music was personal, sentimental and individual. She sang of enduring friendship or love, the connection not to the philosophical Other, but to an ardent partner. “That remains both her outlook and her subject matter: friendship,” Landau wrote. “No one has
expressed its full range of feelings as well as Carole King. The
simplicity of the singing, composition and ultimate feeling achieve the kind of eloquence and beauty that I had forgotten rock is capable of.”

“Tapestry,” which won King four Grammy awards (though King was a no-show for the event), is the perfect antidote wedged between the angry ’60s and the consumerist ’80s. It fit with what David Collins, in “Contemporary Musicians,” claimed was “a post-psychedelic generation that yearned for songs with a more personal, acoustic sound and lyrics that reflected simpler values.” One of the best tracks on the album is King’s rendition of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” nearly unrecognizable as the Shirelles’ thin early-’60s hit. King’s version is sad and sincere, with haunting echoes of the chorus slowly building to a viscerally charged crescendo, as if, in asking her lover, King is also asking her audience: Is this a lasting treasure or just a moment’s pleasure? Can I believe the magic of your sighs? Will you still love me tomorrow?

Likewise, her rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” is vastly different from the version made famous by Aretha Franklin. This is one of King’s strengths as both a songwriter and a solo artist, the ability to allow for various interpretations of her work while concurrently reinventing it herself. “I’m a songwriter first,” King said in an interview with Chuck Taylor, “have always been, and probably always will be. Making the demo is a natural product of writing a song; after that, I’m happy to hear other people do it in other ways.

To date, King has released more than 20 solo albums, though none
even came close to “Tapestry’s” pinnacle. In 1977 Rolling Stone even named “Simple Things” the worst album of the year. “Carole King Music,” which followed up “Tapestry,” was met with mediocre reviews, though it remained in Billboard’s No. 1 position for three weeks. “Anyone who failed to follow up an album that had sold 4 million copies with a very similar album would have to be either a fool or Bob Dylan,” Tim Crouse wrote in Rolling Stone. “Carole King is neither. There is no question about the validity of the content, only the validity of the style. Carole now has to choose between simplicity and complexity. The middle ground where she is now standing isn’t good enough for her and the sooner she moves on the better.”

With the emergence of groups who wrote their own material, there became less of a need for songwriters. In some ways, the movement was already losing steam when King moved to Laurel Canyon. A 1995 article in New Statesman and Society, written by Toby Manning, said, “The term ‘singer-songwriter’ tends to deliver street-cred death these days. For the post-punk music press of the 1980s the millions-grossing likes of James Taylor and Carole King were emblematic of everything that was wrong with the 1970s: blandness, hippy-drippy sentiments and self-indulgence.”

Still, Carole King is one of rock’s most valuable icons, a successful woman performer who both rejected the idea of feminism and embodied it. She and Gerry Goffin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990; they were also given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Songwriters in 1987. Though “Tapestry” is still her biggest-selling album, King has managed to release albums occasionally since the late ’70s when she retreated from the spotlight for several years after her third husband, Rick Evers, died of a heroine overdose.

Living in Idaho with her fourth husband, rancher Richard Sorensen, King emerges from her shell in fits and starts. In 1988 she starred in the off-Broadway production “A Minor Incident,” and in 1994 she had a six-month stint as the lead in Broadway’s “Blood Brothers.” Her song “Now and Forever,” written for the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” received an Oscar nomination. Last year she was featured on VH1′s “Rock Divas Live” concert, and for several years now, King has committed herself to the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

Throughout her career, King has eluded the press, offering only rare
tours or concerts and even rarer interviews and appearances. “She’s a songwriter and a recording artist,” Lou Adler told Rolling Stone after the release of “Carole King Music.” “That doesn’t necessarily have to make her a personality. It’s useless to have to explain your lifestyle in order to explain your music.” This may illustrate why King, neither wholly present nor wholly absent, will never fall into obscurity. Even today, mention Carole King to a teenager — someone born long after “Tapestry” — and the name may not be familiar. But sing a line or two, like “I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down,” or “You make me feel like a natural woman,” or “It’s too late, baby, now it’s too late, though we really did try to make it,” and she’ll sashay down the street, humming the familiar tune like it’s as true and timeless as the earth itself.

Nearly 25 years ago, another powerful hurricane devastated Honduras. Fifi, it was called, like an innocent pup, and 8,000 people died. Three hundred thousand were left homeless. This one, Mitch, was worse: 6,600 died, 9,000 are missing, 1.5 million are homeless. When it came, on Oct. 26 and 27, it brought 200-mph winds before diminishing to a catastrophic tropical storm that hovered for nearly a week.

You can’t walk more than 10 minutes without seeing the effects in Tegucigalpa, the capital. Garbage still hangs from the telephone and electrical wires. Buildings are shells of concrete or wood, piled inside with dried solid mud. Water marks on some houses rise higher than six feet. Roads have been slashed in half by foot-thick cement walls that slid down the mountainsides; the slashes reveal gutted layers like raw wounds with red dirt underneath. Once, while walking through a neighborhood with only seven walls left standing from the dozens of homes that had been there, I looked down underneath the swell of dirt I was standing on and saw, peeking through, the rusted yellow of a car roof. The rest was buried.

We have come here, Ann and I, to report on the post-hurricane relief efforts. This is our second journey to Honduras — the first was in 1994, when we drove overland through Copan, San Pedro Sula and on up to Tela. Portions of those roads now no longer exist.

There was a misty sadness around New Year’s in Comayaguela. There were few firecrackers this year, fewer fiestas, fewer gifts. But there were prayers of gratitude, too, for those spared. Last night, from the windows of our hotel in the central market, we watched a procession of hundreds holding candles and following a row of priests in white robes and red sashes. “Help in our hour of need,” I heard the priest say. Many brushed tears from their cheeks.

The market here runs almost as it did before the hurricane. Stalls sell grains, fruit, shoes, undergarments, tools, colorful toys, small electronics, baseball hats, barrettes, firecrackers, powdered milk, meat and household goods. A small boom box is rigged to two bullhorns and merengue music blares and crackles. Overhead, U.S. military Chinooks carry relief supplies to remote parts of the country. Behind the vendors, where a railing used to run along a bridge overlooking the Rio Choluteca, a few wooden planks have been nailed together for safety.

Even before the hurricane, Honduras was the poorest country in Central America. Now, more than 50 percent of its crops have been destroyed. In the valleys around San Pedro Sula, the banana crops for this year and next have been wiped out. Some are afraid that all the grains coming in from relief agencies will send the shattered economy into a depression. Surplus will cause the prices to drop and poor farmers won’t earn enough to live. It’s a terrific irony, a law of economics that seems cruelly unjust.

What have been avoided are the disease epidemics that often follow such natural disasters. Even in the shelters where so many are living together in squalor, diarrhea has been the most common ailment. Cholera, typhoid, malaria — they are no more prolific than during any other year. Relief agencies acted quickly. Enormous blue tanks with UNICEF stamped on the side brought clean water to shelters and rural communities.

A child approaches me eating powdered milk from a tin lid and asks for a
dollar. I refuse. This is not a result of the hurricane. It is everywhere, in all third world countries. Children speak two words of English: “hello” and “money.” The barefoot child wanders off dejectedly. Another woman approaches me
and asks if she can have the baseball hat I have clipped to my pack. I’m not
using it, she explains, and the sun is in her eyes. As I give it to her, she
thanks me like I’ve offered her the queen’s crown. Ahead of me looms a garbage
pile 25 feet high and a full city block long; from the bridge, I can see that its contents include a woman’s high
heeled pump, a car door, a blue toothbrush, orange rinds, banana peels, the
wrinkled pages of a book, a tire, a child’s leg brace, corn husks, broken
plates, food wrappers, tin cans, pantyhose, a fan blade, a purple satin
dress and, in front of it all, a rotting dog’s head, his lower jaw and body
missing, and the remaining fur matted down with blood and dirt and sand.
Flies and mosquitoes are prolific.

Walking here we see crumbled walls with pink and purple bougainvillea
snaking over their tops. Inside one kitchen, the mud is solid to the tiled
countertop. Workers in rubber boots and white face masks struggle to clear
the debris, but it is like trying to sweep the sidewalk with a safety pin.
Inside, the houses left standing smell oppressively like mildew. In one end
of the city, Concordia Park has been destroyed, its temples and monuments — small
replicas of the Copan ruins — lie smashed on their sides, the fountains empty
and thick with spider webs. Two teenage girls were clutching each other
inside one of the fountains during the storm, a man told me. When he came
upon them, they were already dead. On the other side of the park are more
house remains and beyond that a surplus of stagnant water. Large bulldozers
are working to clear a channel, but it has been three months and
the diseased water still stands. Some people still living under corrugated
tin roofs on the mountainside use the filthy water. More than 140 cars are
buried deep under the dirt, a passerby tells me, with the drivers still
inside. Now, in the stagnant water, limbs have begun to surface, bloated
hands and feet and arms.

Someday, modern explorers will come through this tiny corner of the world
and try to explain what happened. They will find the skeletons of people and
animals, the twisted metal of cars and chunks of painted cement or floor
tile nuggets. They will find buildings and trucks buried under the hardened
dirt. They will theorize on what provoked such heavenly wrath. They will
think of other discoveries, other ruins: Tikal in Guatemala, Chichen Itza in
Mexico, the Coliseum in Rome. They will think of Sodom and Gomorrah, or
Pompeii. Of sudden furies, instant devastation and the decades of untangling
the destruction wrought upon so many millions of lives.

In the shelters, where tuna, tortillas, rice, beans, corn, flour, coffee
and powdered milk constitute the daily diets, things are different. Housed
mainly in schools, the people will soon be moved to five massive shelters that are being built by UNICEF and the government.
The folks at UNICEF hope the shelters will be necessary for only 13 months.
Though sparse and temporary, each will have school facilities, a medical
clinic, clean water, garbage collection, security, laundry and electricity.
Food, so far, has been available through donations, and families are given
six gallons of water a week to use for cooking and drinking. At the Olympic
Complex, where 1,072 people live, hoses are used for bathing and washing
clothes, and laundry is strewn over the manicured green bushes. A woman lies
on her side on a bed breast-feeding her baby. Kids color with pencils on
white paper next to two large blue bags stamped “U.S. Mail Foreign Air.” One
relief worker from Michigan says he has two jobs: to play with the
kids and to wash the lice from their hair.

The hurricane has affected even those who came through the storm
unscathed. Roatan and Utila, the two largest of the Bay Islands, are in
surprisingly good shape. There is very minimal scarring on the landscape,
but the tourist industry, on which the islands’ economy relies, has all but
vanished. Seaside restaurants with wooden tables and stellar sunset views
sit like deserted ghost towns from wild West fables. Hotels and
guest houses are empty. Divers are few. Mike
Arellano, part owner of the Sueño Del Mar Dive Shop on Roatan, says he’s
called the U.S. media repeatedly to say the island is OK. Tell the tourists
to come, he says. Kevin Braun, owner of the Sea Breeze Hotel, has given
discounts on his deluxe suites and kayak tours for those visiting now. But
everyone is afraid: The tourists are afraid to come and the islanders are afraid that the tourists
won’t come. Braun and Arellano know things will change, eventually. By summer the tourist traffic
is expected to pick up again, but the time between now and then is an
insufferably long sigh.

Each time it rains now, on the islands or inland, people feel a twinge of
fear, and wonder if or when it will happen again.

But even with all the terrible reminders, the arduous task of rebuilding,
the threats of disease, economic depression and housing shortages, many
people in Honduras have hope. Long-term hope. It is a chance to rebuild
better, they say, a chance to form communities, to fix what was wrong
before. “Based on other things that’ve happened in this country, I thought
things would go slower. But this thing has unified us,” says Lesly Aravjo, a
17-year-old college student who helped drain water from a barrio near
the airport several weeks after the storm. “Right after the hurricane, my
first thought was, ‘How are we going to get out of this?’ We were just
starting to grow and in one day it was all over. But when I saw that so many
other countries were helping us, I thought, ‘OK, we can do this. It’s going
to take a lot of time, but we can start all over again.’”

Dozens of women rinse mud and debris off furniture salvaged from homes near
the worst sites. In shelters children play as if offered eternal recess with
their friends. Twenty thousand college students across the nation converged
into a mighty army of volunteers two weeks after the hurricane struck. On
Roatan, foreigners and natives cleaned the beaches together and shared phone
lines, lodging, food.

When the hurricane first hit, Tegucigalpa had 6 p.m. curfews. Authorities
feared looting. Alcohol was banned. Now the curfew has been lifted, the
alcohol is back and the old, familiar dangers have replaced the new. We are told
to be in by 9 for safety, 6 for extra assurance. “Peligroso,” everyone
says. Dangerous. There is peligro everywhere. Stay out of Comayaguela
altogether, one Internet source says. Do not climb to the Peace Monument at
sunset. Do not walk around at night. Do not walk around alone. Every
Honduras man has a gun and none fears using it. The day we arrived — on
Christmas — six shots were fired into the United Nations building in the dead
of night. Four days later, we were due to drive to San Pedro Sula with a
UNICEF worker, but canceled the trip due to scheduling conflicts. On his
way home, the driver was robbed at gunpoint, the truck stolen. Peligro
everywhere.

Some believe it is no different in the urban zoos of the United States, and this may be true, but coming on the tail of a national tragedy makes such
events stand out like vortexes of despair. Bruises over bruises are always more
painful.

The government, too, is in a bind. So many of the villages that were
leveled, the entire barrios that slid down the mountainsides and crashed
into roads and bridges below, were squatter neighborhoods, housing poor rural
families who had moved to the city for a shot at a better life and had found only
the same scenarios of poverty they had fled. The government fears an
influx of more such migrants if it announces plans to rebuild those
devastated squatter villages. So it announces no such plans, while
understanding that complacency is clearly not an option.

In spite of all the overwhelming problems, most everyone in Honduras agrees
that the hurricane brought people together like nothing else in recent
history. Hector Espinal, another student volunteer, says, “I saw all these
people in my community offering bread, coffee, things for people. This
[hurricane] spontaneously unified people. It’s a positive change.”
Communities energized one another, neighbors helped neighbors, strangers
helped strangers. Those who came out all right offered food, clothes, beds,
toys, money and time. Friendships were born from tragedy. Nothing brings
people closer than war and natural disaster. And nothing solidifies that
bind more than hope. This, among all the things that this country lacks now,
is what Hondurans everywhere seem to carry in abundance.

In Comayaguela, it is 5 p.m. and the market has begun to close for the
day. The music stops. The stalls close. The food and clothes and toys are
packed in burlap sacks to cart home. The woman with my baseball hat walks
across the bridge holding the hand of her young son, another child held on
her hip and one trailing behind. On a distant mountain, the Virgin Mary
stands illuminated by an amber glow, a monument somehow untouched. The
setting sun casts mirrors of color into the Rio Choluteca below, rainbows of
pink, blue and green walls that look, in the shifting water, nearly whole. The
sky is full of colors and clouds and crows; the moon rises overhead. Orange
hibiscus tower over the walls and intertwine with pink bougainvillea, nearly
big enough to hide the scarred remains below. Soon, all in the city will be
quiet.