He faced Hurricane Eta to defend his wife in Nicaragua

“It was difficult, but since I don’t want (the hurricane) to hurt my wife, I went up, put some nails in the zinc and went down,” Nihimaya said. The “heroic” act prompted a hardware store owner to offer a new roof for his home.

A man who literally took off his shirt to deal with Hurricane Eta and its winds at 240 kilometers per hour, aroused admiration this Saturday 7-N in Nicaragua, when it was known that he had done it to defend his wife, who was sick during the cyclone last Tuesday had an impact on the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast.

Until a few hours ago, Byron Nihimaya Cirilo, 32, was a stranger who some called “crazy” and others “hero”, because he appeared in a video on social media without a shirt, trying to repair the roof of his little house in the middle of the storm, which threatened to leave his family in the open in the pouring rain.

In the video Nihimaya is observed shirtless, while trying to reach the roof of his house from a tree, which next to him is shaken by the winds as if it were a rag, and after several attempts he manages to make contact with the upper part of the home, he lies face down, and begins the repair, without Eta’s fury giving him a second respite.

“I think not everyone would do it, if we had seen it we would have told them not to, but we realized it until the video appeared on social networks,” he told Efe Regina Velásquez, city of Bilwi, on the phone. located 30 kilometers north of the impact point of the hurricane eye.

Until now, no one had understood his decision, but Nihimaya had a compelling reason: his wife, Ivis Hodgson, had a fever and did not want to suffer in the rain with his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom they both adopted as a daughter.

“It was difficult”

“It was difficult, but since I don’t want it to hurt (the hurricane) my wife, I went up, put some nails in the zinc and went down,” Nihimaya told Radio Huracán, in the area that received the strongest winds. . of “Eta”.

The simplicity with which Nicaragua’s most recent “hero” speaks is inversely proportional to the scene in which he acted, as the video shows a dramatic struggle of man against one of the greatest forces of nature, such as hurricanes. The eye passed just 30 kilometers from the Nihimaya house, located in Bilwi, head of the Autonomous Region of the Northern Caribbean (RACN), of the Central American country.

“It was my grandmother’s house, she left it (inherited), and since it’s hard to find work here, think about replacing it, she definitely decided to go up in the middle of the hurricane,” Velásquez said.

In a country where there are more active cell phones than inhabitants, it is difficult to find Nihimaya, which lacks one due to lack of income, which is normal in RACN, the poorest area of ​​Nicaragua, inhabited mostly by natives and blacks.

Nihimaya’s “heroic” act prompted a hardware store owner to offer a new roof for his cottage. Velásquez said the family is happy for the man, as he could have a new roof within days.

Hurricane Eta left a trail of destruction in Nicaragua that has not yet been quantified by the authorities, but which can be seen in houses that have been left in shrapnel, boats stranded inland, fallen trees and power lines, and entire roofs without their homes.