The fish market smelled predictably like the sea. The buzz of the customer and buyer exchanges was a lot more subdued than I expected. Not all the vendors had customers. The market’s relative calm on a Friday afternoon reminded me how small Grenada is. The island is 120 square miles and has about 100,000 residents.

That night while pondering all this in my hotel room at the Coyaba Beach Resort, I parted the curtains and looked for a full moon to turn the beach outside “flash green.” October is perhaps the wrong time of year for this. Lorde had seen the sand turn green in April. There was no full moon, but I slept with the sliding door to the terrace open so I could hear the waves gently grazing the shore.

I AM NOT A GOOD TOURIST. I can easily evoke for myself the worse case scenario in any type of travel situation. I have immigrant guilt about taking time off. I am a bad swimmer. I am self-conscious in bathing suits, so most of my tourism is done through books. But because of my writing, I am invited to quite a few places and whenever I can I go.

I was in Grenada, which was largely unaffected by the hurricanes, to receive an honorary degree from the University of the West Indies Open Campus. Unlike U.W.I.’s brick and mortar campuses, the Open Campus is a virtual one. The 657 students in my graduating class hailed from all over the English-speaking Caribbean. They earned their degrees online. Only 139 graduates would cross the stage though.

Not all the graduates always travel to the Open Campus ceremonies, my hosts from the University of the West Indies told me. However, this year there were students who wanted to come to their graduation in Grenada but could not. Most of the graduates travel from other countries for the Open Campus ceremony, which takes place in a different location each year. Many had homes that were damaged or destroyed. Some lost loved ones along with everything they owned.

I was told the story of one graduate from Trinidad who stayed home because she had donated her plane ticket money to relief efforts in Dominica, which has U.W.I.’s most devastated campus. Some of the students from that campus are still unaccounted for.

Hurricane Maria struck Dominica, the southernmost of the Leeward Islands as a Category 5 storm on Sept. 18. Dominica’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, whose own roof collapsed during the storm, later told CNN: “Our agriculture sector is 100 percent destroyed. Our tourism is, I would say, about 95 percent destroyed.”