Santa Lucia, Honduras ? The grieving father wiped sweat from his forehead, and tears from his eyes as he spoke of his son who drowned last week with 13 other migrant workers in a remote corner of Maine.

“He was coming back this week for good,” sobbed 58-year-old Juan Angel Alvarado, whose son, Jose Santos, left behind a wife and four children under the age of 9.

Jose Santos Alvarado, 3, youngest son of Jose Santos Alvarado, plays in his home in Santa Lucia, Honduras, some 99 miles south of Tegucigalpa. Jose Santos is one of the seven migrant workers from this town who died last week when a van that was carrying them to a logging job plunged off a wooden bridge and into a river 25 miles east of the Canadian border. Hondurans facing poverty at home have gone to the northeast United States in hopes of joining a timber industry promising pay of hundreds of dollars weekly.

Santos and six others from this run-down mining town near the border with El Salvador died when a van that was carrying them to a logging job plunged off a wooden bridge and into a river 25 miles east of the Canadian border.

In all, the accident killed 10 Hondurans and four Guatemalans who were drawn to the Northeast after word spread about a timber industry that paid its workers hundreds of dollars a week extraordinary money by Central American standards.

Sorrow hung in Santa Lucia’s sweltering air Wednesday as friends and neighbors gathered to pray and mourn in the small adobe and stone houses of those who lost loved ones.

Most said they understood that a tragedy like this could have struck anyone here.

The gold mines that used to dot the region shut down in the 1970s, and the days when farmers would hike for five days to sell their prize-winning poultry and goats in the markets of the capital, Tegucigalpa, are long gone.

Today nearly all of the 800 men in this village of 2,000 have headed north to look for work at one time or another. Some 30,000 Hondurans have left for the United States every year since the devastation of 1998’s Hurricane Mitch.

Miriam Zulema, 34, talked to her 22-year-old son, Delkin Padilla, on the telephone Sept. 10, happily chatting about how long it would take for him to save enough money to come home.

Two days later the phone rang again with news of his death.

Across her small home, a single candle lit a photo a friend snapped of a grinning Padilla standing in an apartment he rented in the United States, triumphantly giving the camera a thumbs-up sign while bobbing his head to music pouring from earphones strapped to his head.

“We didn’t have enough money to pay for him to finish school, so he went to the United States to try to help me,” said Zulema, who added that her son became the man of the house several years ago after his father was shot and killed during a party in a nearby town.