A naked Mayan boy curiously watches his big brother slice a coconut with a machete. Swoop. The 12-inch rusted blade narrowly misses the small boy's head as it slashes through the green fruit.

Their father glances over and then returns to staring at what's left of his home - a bare wooden frame with no walls or roof.

The thatched palm leaf roof that once sheltered his nine children is scattered along the orange dirt road that stretches for miles. But Sebastian Muccu remains hopeful like the rest of the Mayans in the village of San Marcos. Even though Hurricane Iris destroyed 90 percent of their homes, contaminated their water and wiped out crops, Muccu thinks only of his family and how he must find a way to give them the basic needs to survive.

"We need good water and food that's all," he said. "Our home, we can rebuild that."

The Central American country scrambles to give aid to the more than 19,800 people in Belize devastated by the storm in 38 villages. These are people who were, and some who still are, without electricity, water, food or shelter. The storm on Oct. 8 carried 140 mph winds and destroyed 3,178 homes in the Toledo District, which consists of mostly Mayan villages. More than 13,000 are left homeless, including an estimated 8,000 children.

But aid to these remote villages is sporadic, unorganized and limited despite the slow efforts by the National Emergency Management Organization and Red Cross.

Burgus points to the three bags of corn he bought to feed his wife, nine children, chickens and turkeys for two weeks. He smiles as he picks up the rain-soaked wood that was ripped from his house.

This grateful attitude captures the Mayans' way of life family first.

"I have to smile because if I stay with those feelings [of sadness] I will forever stay with those feelings," the 39-year-old said. "I smile because my family is with me. They are alive."

Most of the Mayan families in southern Belize live in similar ways to those of their ancestors, only these days, they face different challenges left by the hurricane.

The women spend their days washing clothes in brown-colored streams that have been contaminated. They wear hand-embroidered blouses and skirts while they wash disposable plastic plates that have been reused for days.

The girls run around in brightly colored dresses that contrast sharply with the grays and browns of destruction. And the mothers are busy making corn tortillas for the homeless and volunteer rescue workers.

The Mayan women in San Marcos insist on cooking. Two days after the storm, the rescue volunteers asked the women to come at 6 a.m. to make the village breakfast before a long day of rebuilding. Instead, they showed up at 4 a.m.

Peter Eltringham, author of the book, "Belize; The Maya World" said the Mayan women are doing what they've done for thousands of years - grinding, mixing, flattening and cooking tortillas by hand.

"They didn't feel comfortable with us doing the cooking," said Eltringham, who also volunteers with the Cave & Wilderness Rescue Team, a local organization that set out to help those remote villages that were almost completely destroyed but receiving little aid. "They didn't know what to do [after the storm]. The Mayan women do the cooking and they do it before dawn because the men are going to set out for the fields before it gets light. The Mayan women's reaction to disasters is we got to make tortillas,'" he said.

Throughout the Mayan villages of San Marcos, Santa Cruz, Santa Elena, Pueblo Viejo, Blue Creek and Jalacte, the small girls carry their baby sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews on their hips while their mothers cook from pre-dusk to dawn.

For the women, it's almost as if life is normal in their daily work. But the boys are helping their fathers lift and haul wood back to their flattened homes and cut down the palm leaves to rebuild the thatched roofs.

The channels to relief are complex. The modern Mayan culture is organized with an alcalde, a mayor elected by the people of the village.

The villagers tell him their needs and he has to go through the chairman of the District Emergency Committee who then contacts the National Emergency Management Organization, which distributes the aid. The system of relief is slow, organization officials acknowledge.

"If we don't have helicopters to move the food fast enough we have to move it by roads," said Maj. Sheldon DeFour, the training officer of NEMO. "Things don't get to you as fast as possible. We expected U.S. helicopters to help but we know there is a war going on so we are trying to understand."

Muccu, the father of nine children, understands that the hurricane was "nobody's fault."

He still finds hope even after the storm destroyed his village.

After the storm, he looked up at the evening sky and said, "OK there's a star. Then we feel good. Everybody start to feel good. They start to come out. They start to talk. We start to say this was a hard one."