"Independence day has been cancelled", a Nicaraguan aid worker sighed in a thick Caribbean accent.

The September 15 celebrations had been called off in Puerto Cabezas as a sign of respect to the victims of Hurricane Felix and to avoid disturbing the clean-up operation.

Traditionally the streets of the town would be lined with flags and celebrations of the day Central Americans became independent from the Spanish. Now they were lined with debris and residents still in shock from the category five storm.

Most of the 155,000 affected people in the Northern Atlantic Autonomous Region where the hurricane made landfall are indigenous Miskito Indians.

The majority of Miskitos depend on sustenance farming or fishing and live well below the poverty line.

Each day new stories of Felix's terror are emerging from the jungle and battered coastline while the death toll continues to creep higher in this remote part of the country.

I joined a group of aid workers for a helicopter assessment flight provided by the Nicaraguan military.

We circled the community of Sandy Bay, where almost every home had been destroyed.

The eye of the storm is said to have passed directly through the village, and it showed.

Uprooted palm trees were mangled with wrecked houses and fishing boats. The remnants of the school and church buildings lay strewn over a wide area.

We landed and walked into the centre of the village to talk with the residents. A crowd quickly gathered and my colleague struggled to translate as people frantically recounted their experiences in Miskito.

That night must have been horrific. Felix made landfall at 4:45am. It would have been very dark.

Families huddled in their stilted shacks until the walls and roof were blown away, then fled into the darkness and driving rain in search of cover.

Children became separated, seawater surged through the village and zinc roof tiles crisscrossed the area like razor blades in the 164mph (265 kph) winds.

A disheveled man was pushed to the front of the crowd. He was covered in cuts and held up his arms to reveal raw sores. He and three others had been found clinging to driftwood after they were washed away from the Miskito Cays.

This archipelago of tiny islands sits 40 miles (64 km) off the Nicaraguan coast and is primarily inhabited by fishermen.

We heard reports of the 20-foot storm surge engulfing these islands like a tsunami and washing away whole settlements.

Bodies are still being found on the beaches and 11 days after the storm two men were found drifting off the coast, alive but in serious condition.

Inland settlements in Felix's path did not fare much better. Wooden shacks were obliterated while the jungle trees around them were stripped of their leaves and snapped like matchsticks.

Crops were destroyed and as residents struggle to deal with the immediate needs of shelter, food and water the longer-term problem of having to restore livelihoods is looming on the horizon.

The greatest challenge for the people responding to this disaster has been inaccessibility.

The roads linking the Mosquito Coast with the capital, Managua, are terrible at the best of times. Hurricane Felix knocked out bridges and totally crippled the road network.

For days the only way to get aid in from Managua was by air.

Operation Blessing chartered a DC3 airplane and joined the air-bridge ferrying relief goods from Managua to Puerto Cabezas. The military formed human chains to load and unload the plane as we rushed to get aid to the victims.

Now that some of the roads have reopened we are working with the U.N. World Food Programme by providing trucks and drivers to haul hundreds of tons of food from Puerto Cabezas to remote communities in the interior.

After hearing reports of one convoy being looted by hungry villagers, the military has been providing security for each truck.

But still the drivers are nervous and reluctant to make the perilous journey over the muddy roads.

This has inevitably made each trip very expensive.

"It's costing us the same to truck food to some parts of Nicaragua as it does to do an air drop in Sudan," a WFP coordinator said.

At one distribution site I saw two dugout canoes being filled with sacks of food.

We spoke with the men, who came from a remote community four hours paddle upstream on the swollen Wawa River. When asked what the conditions were like in their village, one of the men replied in English: "No food, no house," before they slid their canoes back into the jungle.

Despite Hurricane Mitch thrashing the region in 1998, there are still no early warning or communication systems in place for most of the inhabitants of this region.

By the time many of the Moskitos realized what was happening, it was probably too late.

"Now I'm getting afraid when the rains come," one woman told us in Sandy Bay.

Shattered nerves will make living in the Atlantic hurricane "firing line" hard to bear for most residents. Now they face the long struggle of rebuilding their lives while under the constant threat of another Atlantic hurricane.

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