MOROLICA (HONDURAS), DEC 5: Her home washed away in the night, Keilyn Rodriguez awoke on a stranger's cold cement floor, hungry, wet and aching. Her baby was crying, sniffling children were lining up at her door, and one of her patients was going into labour.The 26-year-old medical student wanted to escape, to climb over the debris that Hurricane Mitch had dumped on her village, and walk away. But she stayed and for more than a month provided almost the only medical attention to 3,500 people whose homes were buried.``I was hysterical,'' said Rodriguez, who was finishing up an internship at a rural clinic in her hometown. ``I kept telling my mom, `I can't. I can't.' I don't even have gloves. How am I going to deliver a baby?', but she told me, `You are all the people have.'''Morolica, 100 km southeast of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, is an extreme case of the plight of towns across Central America, where Hurricane Mitch killed more than 9,000 people in its sweep through the region a monthago.Mitch damaged hundreds of villages that were already mired in poverty, where medical students doing required training - like Rodriguez - were the only doctors people knew.``She doesn't need to be here, but she wants to be with us,'' said one of Rodriguez's patients, 50-year-old Maria Luisa Espinar.``We love her very much.''Medical school never taught Rodriguez what Mitch forced her to learn how to care for hundreds of people with no medicine, no equipment and no access to the outside world. It wasn't addressed in her treasured medical books, which her father had worked overtime to afford.Not that it mattered. They were buried with her home and the rest of the village.On October 30, the hurricane-powered Choluteca and Chiquito rivers jumped course and roared straight through the town, wiping Morolica off the map.Everyone fled - the last ones, like Rodriguez, in chest-deep water. Most went to Las Delicias, to the south. The last group, cut off by flooding, fled to Tejar, to the north.A few, afraid to be on low land, slept in the mountains.A woman in Tejar offered to put up Rodriguez and her family. The next day, under a steady rain, Rodriguez climbed to an Adobe mountain home where a 25-year-old woman lay in bed, sweating and writhing from labour pains.The area's two nurses were on the other side of the mountain in Las Delicias, unable to get through. Four hours later, a girl was born two months premature.Rodriguez cleared the baby's lungs with an eye dropper. She warmed the tiny, underweight infant, who should have had an incubator, under her jacket, keeping her close to her heart.``We prayed for a helicopter to come and take her to a hospital where she could be put on oxygen,'' Rodriguez said.Two days later, the baby died. She was the first patient Rodriguez had lost.``I got depressed,'' Rodriguez said. ``But I had to pull myself out of it and worry about the others.''By the end of the week, Rodriguez, who trekked an hour daily to tend to the rest with her nurses in LasDelicias, was treating dozens of people suffering from diarrhoea, conjunctivitis, pneumonia, malaria and dengue.
