A Wickford student fighting to relieve the carnage left in the wake of Hurricane Mitch is pleading with people back home to help.

Marianne Johnson, 21, pictured left, from Fourth Avenue, Shotgate, was working in the village of Tamanique in the Central American country of El Salvador when the worst storm in centuries struck.

The hurricane caused widespread flooding and mud slides which brought mass death and destruction across a huge area.

So instead of missionary work, the former Ursuline School, Brentwood, student has instead found herself fighting against the sickness and disease that are sweeping through the region.

Speaking to This Is Essex from the devastated village, she said: "It's just going to get worse. The people don't have any clean drinking water.

"We have already had the first case of cholera in a village about 60 miles from here, and we are also predicting other epidemics like meningitis A, diptheria, typhoid and dengue fever.

"We had a little boy, about ten- or eleven-years-old, brought in here to us last week.

He couldn't even walk. His foot was virtually rotting off him because it's just impossible to get dry, it was more like a lump of meat.

"The people here are suffering tragedy beyond belief and urgent financial aid is needed to buy food and medicine."

Marianne, who graduated from Leeds University in the summer and is taking a year out before doing her Masters in Latin American studies, recalled the night Mitch struck.

She said: "It really was extremely frightening.

"The river runs through here, and all the time there was no way of knowing if it would burst its banks, or if mud would slide down from the hills and swallow the village. It really makes you realise just how vulnerable you are to nature."

Nearly 250 people have already died in El Salvador, mostly as the result of drowning or suffocation and crushing caused by mud slides, and 50,000 people out of the tiny country's population of only six million have been left homeless.

Back home in Shotgate, mum and dad Bernadette and Len wait anxiously for their daughter's safe return, and that of the seven nuns from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Chigwell with whom she is working.

Bernadette said: "We are very proud of her. This is what she has wanted to do from ages back and she is really glad that she is out there and able to help."

Send donations, payable to SSHJM El Salvador Appeal, to Sister Laura Ryan, Chigwell Convent, 803 Chigwell Road, Woodford Bridge, IG8 8AX.

TRAGIC EXODUS: Aid workers in El Salvador help homeless villagers flee the flooding that followed Hurricane Mitch.

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