Hurricane Dorian was the most powerful tropical cyclone on record to strike the Bahamas and is regarded as the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. Dorian struck the Abaco Islands on September 1 with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph
Image Credit; USA Today
TOPSHOT – An aerial view of damage from Hurricane Dorian on September 5, 2019, in Marsh Harbour, Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. – (Photo Credit BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Already, we are starting to forget, the posts are fewer, the images less. But still, I have friends that are working tirelessly every day sending supplies, aid and manpower to ease the lives of the survivors. Because they are survivors, survivors of a mass tragedy and still their lives are a million miles away from ‘back to normal’.
Alas, I fear that the worst of it is yet to come. The aftermath, so many people who have lost their homes, livelihood, way of life. Displaced to centers and temporary shelters, waiting for others to determine their fate. It is hard for me to reconcile that these people have to accept all that is given and with huge gratitude. Of course they are grateful that they have a roof, food, somewhere dry to sleep because of the kindness of others, but let’s not forget they are human beings with a voice, feelings and pride. It must matter where they want to be and they must have an input in their future. Through no fault of they own, everything they own, albeit in some case not very much, is now absolutely nothing.
(AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
I’ve not even begun on the toll that grief will have on these people as the loss of life has been great, although yet to be documented but surely almost impossible to count with accuracy.
The first day I arrived on the island of Nassau I met up a friend, Lily, who has been working daily with the Red Cross, providing much needed emergency supplies.
Lily took me to meet a family that had luckily been housed, albeit temporarily because of a generous benefactor. A single mother from Marsh Harbor, Nelly Frank, had survived the hurricane with her family. As we pulled into an area of condominiums a young boy and a teen were in the parking area, Nelly’s boys.
They are safe now, you can see that in their face. The youngest already brushing off the event of the past couple of weeks rushing around & playing, smiling when he realizes we are there for them and Lily has a car full of fun things and much needed domestic items. The older boy, Lavardo, looks at me cautiously. His gaze is a little unnerving, he is about fourteen years old but his eyes tell me he has seen too much for such a young man.
We are greeted by Nelly, she is bright, friendly and welcoming. After introductions, a little chat, cuddle of her daughters baby, Nelly says she is happy to share her story.
“So, where do I begin?”
“Angie had paid for us to go into this hotel in Treasure Key. But you know, we don’t really take it as serious, you know, but she kept telling me Nell, I think you and the kids should get outta there because we live right in front of the sea and so she rented us a room for two nights.”
(More to come on Angie soon)
“So I did, I popped some clothes and all that stuff and some food and we went up to the hotel at Treasure Key.”
“The hotel was called Harbor House”.
“We left before the storm came, we left the Friday, which was the 31st”
“We went from Cooperstown to the Treasure Key, That’s like 13, 14 miles.”
“We bought food everything like that, Miss Angie made sure we were we were okay. We had food, we had water, we had everything.”
“The major food store there was having a sale, I assumed that it was because of the storm so you could get like three cans of spaghetti for three dollars or two dollars stuff like that.”
“Our room was something like this it was downstairs and upstairs. It’s bedroom downstairs. So yeah, we were real. Okay. Yeah, okay”
“It’s the storm now, the storm started to come.“
“Okay, so when the storm came, when the winds started to come the first, okay?”
“Miss Angie called me and she’s like I don’t mean to scare you. She said but prepare yourself because a 2 o’clock this is gonna be on you guys real bad, right, you know, so I was I got prepared for that.”
“So me and my kids were sitting downstairs in the living room of the hotel and it had three Sliding doors, three together and I watched the sliding doors now keep going in and out like it was plexiglass.”
“I’m talking about real glass and I said to the kids this glass is gonna go, we gotta get upstairs.”
“But I know I googled and they said the safest place to be is in the bathroom and then before the storm came heavy, One of the ladies, the maid came by and she said if anything happens get in the bathroom!”
“So, you know, I had that already prepared. So we’re on upstairs someone we got upstairs I don’t even think we’s up there five minutes. We heard the glass downstairs, ping, ping, ping, it was like a chain reaction and I told the kids I said we can’t stay up here. And so she grabbed him (pointing to teen daughter and younger son). She lifts him up. He was in the back of me and I was in the front.”
“The first door we opened was the utility room with a big water heater. So I know we couldn’t stay in there. So I went to the next and that time the winds are raging and the chairs already starting to pull on thru the sliding door and so I got the bathroom door open and I held it for them to get in. She had gotten cut (teen daughter) She felt she step on a glass, but she didn’t you know, pay attention with the adrenalin.”
“Right and then so we all went in the bathroom and I held the door, I held the door and everything around us was just and we could hear outside like you’ve ever see a horror movie but the glass is flying, I never prayed so hard I ask God. Please don’t kill me & my children, Please don’t kill us and so my hand got so numb holding the door.”
“She had to come (Nelly’s 17 year old daughter) and help me hold it and we held on to that door, My kids started to cry and all I could say to them is pray, pray, pray.”
“And then all I kept thinking about in my mind watching on TV of other people in countries that went through all that and how the houses fell on people. I said God, please don’t let us die like this.”
“Please and so I kept saying pray, pray. And I mean we held onto that door for hours.”
“I prayed and I prayed and I whatever I knew in the Bible, I repeated and then my daughter, one who’s sitting here she said to me, she said “Mommy there’s a light”. Like we could see a light coming through the bathroom door and I was like, Okay, and then the sound all of a sudden, it almost stop, the wind and I said no is it?”
“We were in the bathroom for hours, two or three hours.”
“I took my time and I held the door, well both of us and we kind of just peeked out because I know things was flying out there. When we did, everything was still, but there was nothing left in that hotel room but the bathroom that we were in.”
“All the furnitures, the front door, the glass, the front glass, the back glass, everything was gone. I looked over and there was some guys next door and they push their head over and they’re saying you “Guys, you okay?’
“Cuz I guess they heard us screaming it got so bad. I wanted to be strong but it was so bad.”
“We were screaming, screaming, screaming. God have mercy, please don’t let us die and so when we saw that I told her, I said we got to get out here this is the eye, I know the eye come for like, two hours.”
“So we walk out to the front because we was upstairs and we walk out to the front and we look and we saw a lady and was waving at us and we waved back and she did like this..” (gestured to come over)
“So I told I said my bag has the passports in and let’s grab that and whatever little food, we could still see on the ground because we didn’t know what was going to happen over there. So we grabbed some water. We grabbed some little snacks that was in plastic bags, you know that we could take and we ran over there.”
“So we went over to community clinic but in Treasure Key, that was the only place that was still standing.”
“Maybe 20 minutes later, then everyone started topper in there because there was nowhere else to go and they say that is like Hurricane proof, which I prove it was cuz he really stood that storm.”
“So, I mean there where people was just pouring in then we heard someone outside crying. We got to understand that this gentleman was In his home and when it came down so bad. He took his mummy, his roof started to go and everything. He took his mummy to run with her and something came from nowhere and chopped his hand completely off. And the wind the wind tuck her. He said he didn’t see which way she turned it just took her completely out of his hand like a piece of paper and they found her on the front street.”
Erick the barber, Erick Auguste https://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/Dorian-Took-Erick-the-Barbers-Arm-his-Mom-and-His-Home-in-the-Bahamas.html
“No one could do anything about it, so what somebody did, because we knew that usually they say the second part of the tail of it is real bad, so they tied her dead body to the tree and it stayed there for days.”
“My son had to see that every day. They had to pass her and see that body and I mean she started to decay and everything right there.”
Nelly told me about the time spent in the community clinic
They spent three days there, there was no where to sleep, not enough food so she didn’t eat, instead fed her children. It was starting to get dirty and uncomfortable. I’m gonna be honest, that situation to me is my worse nightmare.
Emergency medical care came and wanted to take Nelly out of the shelter because of her diabetes but understandably she didn’t want to leave her children.
Fortunately her brother came to find them and they managed to leave with their meagre belongings carried in a deserted shopping cart and stay with her brother, whose home was badly damaged but familiarity in a damaged home was better than staying in an overcrowded and decreasingly dangerous, because of hygiene & disease, shelter.
On the Friday Nelly found out people were leaving out of Marsh Harbor to Nassau by plane.
After waiting for many hours they managed to get a flight out to Nassau provided by Bahamas Air, they’d provided a jet for their employees and families and her sister in law worked for them. They waited for hours in the airport and Nelly said they were the last four people packed I to that plane, the very last.
I spoke to Lavardo, he is 14 and I can see he was still very traumatised. “Tell me, I said, what was the worse thing for you?”
“It was two thing, like it wasn’t every day, but it was one particular day. I had to pass the body tied to the tree, five or six times.
“So it really was kind of scary for me and then the second thing was where we using the bathroom in the hotel everything was shaking for me and then they say because it felt in my ears that I was taking a plane. The air pressure.”
“We had to help each other, otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it out.”
Nelly and her beautiful family have been lucky, crazy to say considering what they have been thru. Their future is uncertain but they have each other, they survived, they have a story to tell.
Now the face uncertainty, where will they live, work, go to school? The family is divided. Nelly wants to stay in Nassau and the older children want to go home to Abaco.
For now though, that’s not an option. Theres nothing left for them there, the house is still standing but so badly damaged and with no means to repair it they wait on the generosity of others.
Nelly and her family are not alone in their plight, there are so many families like them. We need to keep up with the aid, the support and the rebuild of their beautiful island. They are wonderful people, normally self sufficient working on an island the creates an oasis for many a holiday maker.
But for them, there is no holiday. Now they are just looking forward and hoping that one day they will just get their lives back.
Carey Sheffield
Wed Oct 2nd 2019
Help is still needed, please see reputable links below:
Amazon Wish List:
Fundraiser:
https://www.facebook.com/iblancoknowles
