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This is a coffee and sugar cane farming area. Times have never been easy, but things are harder now because of blight in the coffee crop and falling subsidies since the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA

About a third of the villagers have left to go north for jobs in the US. They send money home to keep the village alive.

We came to meet one such 'remittance hero' who has kept her family going for years by travelling illegallly to the US. Not only did she send home enough moneyfrom what she earned cleaning in Kentucky to pay for the medicine her mother needed. She saved several thousand dollars, too.

Then, when her mother got sicker, she came home and opened a shop.

You'll hear more about her story in our reports.

The nightmare is that just after we finished talking to her and taking a walk around the village, the heavens opened.

We have only a small car, and a lot of the bridges were washed away in Hurricane Stan last year.

Getting up here was were tough enough.

It's rained for three hours now - gutter-groaning, river-down-the-middle-of-the-main-street rain.

If it doesn't stop soon, the rest of the road will be gone.

Then we'll have to settle down here and build alternatiive lives.

Found , years later, barefoot and bearded, still trying to teach village horses dressage...