Time For Recovery- a Different Perspective on Irma and Maria

St. Thomas - US Virgin Islands -

The news is all aflame with Trump and Cruz.  But there is another story that goes on, mostly out of the mass media focus.- the US Virgin Islands, the place ignored by most of the media once the storm moved to more “newsworthy” places.

RitA wanted to give you another perspective on the aftermath of Irma and Maria on all of the Caribbean from the smaller voices.

On Medium we found this voice: 

@sarahschumacher

Sarah tells the story of her parents stranded twice in each of these storms, first on St. Thomas and then on St. Croix.  She relates the fears and concerns she experienced over many days, all the result of the collapse of the communication infrastructure.  Finally she learned that they were safe. They were the fortunate ones. 

And then Sarah shared this great example of local people helping others with something as basic as information from  a local weather website (in the absence of The Weather Channel): 


StormCarib.com 

Monday, September 25, 2017 09:00AM PDT – Time for recovery

“Maria has finally left us, Lee is still around but not posing a threat. Nothing else on the horizon, just a tropical wave a long way away and another one just rolled off Africa. No indication that they will develop into anything yet. So a little peace and quiet. Time to focus on recovery…

Many islands in the Caribbean are hard hit, let us not forget that! Dominica, St.Croix, Puerto Rico, Barbuda, St.Maarten/St.Martin, Anguilla, St.Barts, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, St.John, St.Thomas, Vieques, Culebra, … am I forgetting any? This is of course unprecedented. Just looking at the pictures I included with my earlier postings is gut wrenching. The high season tourist season is a bust for these islands, which means a loss of their main source of income…

Let’s hope for a not too frustrating recovery. I will push to have my special hurricane correspondents to keep posting on this website. Although I still haven’t heard from many with communications still a problem. E-mail apparently not the best means of communication after storms like these. Recovery won’t be easy, but we have to try our best. -Gert”

The scenes on these islands are a bad as Puerto Rico, and all involve humans in a life and death struggle to survive, recover and hopefully rebuild their lives. 

Politics makes this all unnecessarily complicated and ugly.

As Mr. Rogers says,  in every tragedy look for the helpers. Some of the smallest helpers are the journalist that documented the picture above and others, and the local weather guy, who depends on contributions to provide his much-needed service to his fellow islanders.

Maybe when we give our millions to the government and the large non-profits for recovery efforts, we can dig a  little deeper, and spare a few dollars to support the little helpers as well here.

Photo on Instagram by  Kelsey Nowakowski, Journalist, Virgin Islands