Following the storms and floods of Hurricane Mitch, a current of human and humanitarian intervention is bubbling through this provincial capital, writes our correspondent in Nicaragua Sam Gordon.

Students from the city's university were among the first to get active. A year of protesting against education cuts has left the students with experience of mobilising in the streets and plazas of Leon.

This week they left behind their cans of spray-paint and campaign slogan of '6 per cent No!' Instead they turned up at traffic junctions, along bus routes, and around the central market. Equipped only with plastic buckets the call was 'Help the hurricane victims'.

Leon's Communal Movement works at neighbourhood level on issues of housing, water and sanitation, and community health.

Four years ago it received a computer and training from the British charity, Codex International Training. This week it is number crunching.

Information is being prepared on health and social conditions among the city's poorest. Experience has taught international charities not to release resources without reliable information. So community-based organisations like the Communal Movement, with organisational structures already up and working, can help bridge the information gap.

"Fear of typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis is real," explains public health lecturer, Rigo Sampson. "But staff and students have established a programme of epidemic vigilance in country areas.

"However, we still have to treat outbreaks of skin infection, conjunctivitis and dysentery. For this we need basic medicines and water treatment tablets."

Stretching north and east of Leon is the greenish gray Maribios mountain range. Down the face of one mountain, Cerro Casitas (The Little Houses) pours a tan-coloured tear. This is the mudslide which killed an estimated two thousand at Postoltega.

Two Nicaraguan organisations, the Centre for Psyco-social Crisis and the Commission for Children and Adolescents, are offering training in Leon for volunteers working with survivors of this tragedy. But no-one here believes that head counting nor eye ointment will wipe away this sorrow from the west of Nicaragua.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.