Sunday, March 12, 2000

Family whose past was swept away looks to future in Portland

David Pellerin/Caller-Times

Claudia Menke lives with a relative in Portland with her sons Steven (left) and Mauricio while her family tries to rebuild after the Venezuelan floods.

PORTLAND - Claudia Menke barely can bring herself to see news footage of flood-ravaged Mozambique. It dredges up emotions about her own family's narrow escape from mudslides on Venezuela's Caribbean coast that engulfed entire towns, including hers.
   Menke, her husband, Mauricio Tomaselli Sr., and their two sons, Mauricio, 13, and Steven, 10, survived, but lost many friends and neighbors in December, after months of unrelenting rain resulted in Venezuela's worst natural disaster in 100 years. An estimated 25,000 to 50,000 people died in the floods, the worst of which hit Vargas state, where the family lived.
   "I have nothing to go back to," said Menke, who had been an airport flight safety instructor until the mudslides from nearby mountains obliterated life along the nation's coastline. "The place looks like that movie, 'Mad Max.' Everything is gone."
   Refuge and rebuilding
   Menke, a U.S. citizen born in Caracas, and her sons are living temporarily with her cousin, Sandra Cheatham of Portland. Menke's husband remains in Venezuela attending to what is left of the family-owned trucking business.
   "This is one of the hardest things we've gone through," Cheatham said. "The boys still cry. Their father tries to call twice a week, and he cries on the phone because he misses his family. He's still down there, in the middle of all that death and the stench. It just breaks your heart."
   Menke said her family wants to rebuild in Portland, a city that reminds them of the coastal community they once called home.
   'How precious life is'
   For now, Menke works a full-time temporary job at Portland's H-E-B, a job she got three days after her arrival on Feb. 12. Menke is looking for a full-time permanent job and hopes to bring her 80-year-old mother, who lives in a Venezuelan nursing home, to the states. Meanwhile, Menke is trying to navigate the maze of paperwork necessary to get U.S. citizenship papers squared away for her sons, who were granted 90-day visas on their passports. Because her sons do not have Social Security numbers, Menke said she has been unable to get them enrolled in school.
   The past few months have been incredibly stressful and the family is far from recouping their losses and dealing with the emotional scars, Menke said. But she is grateful they escaped with their lives.
   "Whoever didn't learn from this experience about how precious life is will never learn," she said.
  
 

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