In Mitch's Wake

When he arrives in Nicaragua Monday, President Clinton will find a country still scarred by Mitch, the worst hurricane to hit Central America in a hundred years, reports CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts.

The worst incident: Six straight days of rain last October collapsed an old volcano in Western Nicaragua, causing a massive mudslide that wiped out every village in its path. Villagers say it was a mudslide of biblical proportions that turned this creek into a canyon. The Nicaraguan government estimates that at least two thousand people were buried alive.

Hurricane Mitch changed life in this region enormously. In rural areas where people live off the land, relief workers say that, because they now receive free food donated from around the world, many have lost their will to return to the hurricane ravaged fields.

Says food bank volunteer Auxi Gomez: "There are people who have the mentality that they only work to eat. So if they eat they don't need to work."

Despite the region's slow recovery there are places where children no longer have nightmares. Diana Frade runs The Little Roses Orphanage in San Pedro Sula Honduras, which is one of the cities the President will visit during his tour. At the orphanage, girls whose parents were killed by the hurricane receive a free education, three meals a day and a bed of their own. That's a luxury few people had here even before the hurricane. "Its like an oasis in a dessert of poverty," says Frade.

But this is the exception. In Honduras and Nicaragua, children by the thousands have either been abandoned by their families in the countryside or fled on their own to major cities - creating a new more dangerous and desperate generation of street children.

Nearly 100,000 children haven't been to school since the hurricane swept the two countries. Half the population of both Honduras and Nicaraqua are children - under the age of 15 - and most of them are now without parental care.

The poorest children have little to look forward to and are considered lucky if all they lost was their home.