The Slow Pace of Recovery

But faith alone won’t rebuild Marsh Harbor and Great Abaco Island. What’s being done to rebuild the island? What’s being done to help the residents? Is the pace of recovery going to speed up? Because the storm was on September 1, 2019, so it’s now (as of this writing) been five months since then.

It’s clearly evident that here on Great Abaco, the recovery is lagging behind.

No one has power in Marsh Harbor, and a local told me “you have to go to Nassau for power.” I only saw one power truck at work the whole time I was there, and I was expecting to see a lot more due to the amount of downed power lines. I know the suffering and hardship of an extended blackout; I have personal experience with that. It’s a horrible time. Thankfully the temperatures in The Bahamas are cooler right now, the highs are usually in the 70s.

One common complaint I heard from locals was on the lack of direction or action from the Bahamian government. During the closing prayers of one of the sermons, the pastor said “…we pray for guidance and direction for our leaders. We need to know where we’re going, we need to hear from them. We need a five-year plan, something…” The Bahamian government apparently discusses all sorts of ideas, including having the Chinese rebuild Marsh Harbor, but nothing solid has come to fruition, yet. There’s no clear direction from the government, no plan.

In terms of actions from the government, they repeatedly bulldozed a neighborhood in Marsh Harbor known as The Mudd, which was a primarily Haitian area (there are many Haitians in this part of The Bahamas) and the site of a shantytown. That being the case, there was major damage to buildings here and many completely came down. But regarding the effort spent on the repeated bulldozing, some residents criticized this move as motivated by the desire to erase all traces of Haitians ever having lived there. Some didn’t mind that part (there were tensions between Bahamians and Haitians here before the hurricane), instead criticizing that the Bahamian government hasn’t visibly done much more than this, in their opinion.

As another piece of evidence pointing to the ineffectiveness of the Bahamian government in this recovery, there’s the story of the temporary housing domes in Spring City, a neighborhood located south of the Marsh Harbor airport. As far as the damage in Spring City, it varied (though everything was damaged). Here is some of the worst that I saw:

To aid the residents, the Bahamian government setup some temporary housing domes … but didn’t finish them. The day I was there, there was one person working on them.

Clearly unfinished, as you can see. But besides the fact that they aren’t finished, the residents complained that these domes are 1) small, 2) LOUD (from reverberating sound), and 3) they leak. Of course if you’ve got leaks, that simply doesn’t serve as a shelter. This is why the residents of Spring City who haven’t evacuated elsewhere are staying in their damaged homes and will likely continue to do so even when the domes are finished.

In a pavilion in a neighborhood park here in Spring City, someone had chalked “RIP Abaco” a few times on the ground.

It is true that a lot of people here have a strong, hopeful faith. But even that faith can hit a limit. The slow pace of recovery is frustrating, and when people don’t see visible improvement in a timely manner, they can start to lose hope for better days or a vision of what that might look like. Once hope is lost, it can easily become fatal.

In these same closing prayers of the same sermon I mentioned above, the pastor asked for prayers for a local man who had died that weekend in an auto accident. “Let’s remember not only the people we lost to Dorian, but the people we lost after as well,” he said. “A lot of people have died in accidents after the storm. A lot of men. Which means that we need to really stop and think about how healthy and emotionally healthy we really are at this time.”

Natural disasters are terrifying occurrences that can be traumatic. But mental health can start to seriously fray during the aftermath as well, during the recovery from these disasters. When the recovery is slow or doesn’t seem to be progressing, stresses start to add up. Normal worries such as taking care of your family become more urgent and difficult to accomplish under the circumstances, and your source of employment might be totally gone. (Only a scant handful of businesses on the main road in Marsh Harbor had reopened while I was there, and most showed no signs at all of reconstruction; looked to me like they weren’t coming back.)

Add on to this the disorienting and disruptive circumstances that disasters bring. Schools are closed, for example, affecting your children’s lives and their emotional well being. Everyone’s well being is affected. Aftermaths are incredibly stressful situations. As I mentioned the power is out too, and daily life can become real primitive, real quick when the power stays out for a long time. This too is a major source of stress and has caused people to leave for Nassau and elsewhere.

Everyone has a breaking point under stress, but before that happens there are still other dangers. But in the case of accidents specifically, naturally when people are this stressed many turn to alcohol or other drugs to relieve stress, distract themselves, and for soothing from emotional pain. Not the best idea, but it is what it is, and I certainly can’t and won’t judge anyone. But when people treat their stress with alcohol (etc.), they can get reckless and suffer accidents they wouldn’t normally have gotten into. With the weakened medical infrastructure on the island (all serious cases must go to Nassau), injuries that may have previously been treatable in Marsh Harbor become a more serious issue, possibly even fatal. This fatal recklessness can be a symptom of the crushing stress of the situation. It can also be a symptom of a person’s hopelessness as well.

That’s why we’ve got to stick together and support each other during these times. No one can get all the way through something like this completely alone. We have to encourage each other and keep each other going when help isn’t coming fast enough. It’s not easy to get through these aftermaths. Supporting each other is the only way to get through it more or less okay.

The government is, however, operating a distribution point at the Central Abaco Primary School where people can get some supplies: Food, clothing, and necessities. World Central Kitchen delivers food here, while the government operates the rest of it.

A classroom at Central Abaco Primary School, ready to be worked on

AHAH, along with other groups, is currently working to repair this school, which is the largest on the island, so it can reopen. With the distribution center in operation at the same time, the scene is quite busy with lots of activity going on. Once this school reopens it will mean less disruption in the children’s lives and a huge step towards life on the island getting back to normal.

The simple fact is that Marsh Harbor, in the Abaco Islands, needs more help right now. They are getting help from NGOs, volunteer organizations, and plenty of church groups, but all of the above are doing much of the work that’s currently going on. The Bahamian government needs to step up and be more active in rebuilding this area. If the recovery doesn’t speed up, the area will continue to suffer in the ways I’ve described and more. Plenty of people have evacuated Abaco and headed to Nassau, Florida, or elsewhere. Similar to any other disaster, with every day that goes by, these evacuees become more established in their new lives in those other places. They become less and less likely to return with the passing of time, as they find employment and their kids get into school and so on. So if the Bahamian government doesn’t figure something out to speed up the recovery and can’t produce some kind of clear plan to present to the people, the evacuees will simply stay away, in that sense adding to Abaco’s losses from the hurricane. But the evacuees can’t shoulder one smidgen of blame for that; it’s beyond them.