Hurricane Irma aftermatch in a Dutch Docu and my own view on it

Earlier in the week I saw this docu series from a Dutch television maker about him visiting my old hometown island Sint Martin. Sint Martin is still batteling in the after match of hurricane Irma about 1.5 year ago and because it is still part of the Dutch Kingdom the Netherlands still have a particular interest in this country.

After the hurricane the population of the Netherlands raised 20 million bucks in public funds for aid and the government of the Netherlands itself decided to give 550 millon. In this documentary it is discussed how all of this money is being used. For the neutral spectator an interesting piece to see, for me as a hurricane survivor this is a total different thing to see when I am honest.

Pixabay

There are so many things in this docu that made me raise an eyebrow and on the other side seemed to familiar. For instance from the publically raised money the Red Cross is learning people how to fix roofs and passing out voucher for building materials on this (and one other thing, I know a lot of people are very sceptic on Red Cross, but I lived off of their food for a couple of weeks, so I can tell you only positive stuff about these guys) which is an awesome initiative. But there in is also the challenge. This training program is boundered just about roof-structure and a lot of people have more damage than just their roofs. Also the manpower to physically reconstruct these roofs is often lacking. Little old ladies do not climb up on roofs, they need other (very busy and often not so very skilled ) people to do this.

Also nature is still suffering from what happened in the night of Irma. Boats were stored temporarily in the mangroves and lagoon to keep them safe, but reality is that all of these boats sank and now there is no priority in removing them. Result: all of these boats are still on the sea bottom and have the potential to start moving again.

Pixabay

Emotions

One of the things that struck me most in this documentary was the sight of all these places that I know on the island that still look like utter shit. I left the island in May and it almost seemed as if some of the areas were left in exactly the same as that I had left them. It makes me kind of mad and sad at the same time. Also when I looked at the emotions that were presented in this documentary, they sounded extremely familiar. The amount of mental crisises has tripled since the hurricane and I know exactly why.

You see when you experience a major event like this where nothing is recognizable as you knew it, the only thing to do is to get started in order to survive and to make everything make to normal. And that is exactly what people did. You experience something horrible, but reflecting is not an option because your house is to shit and you need food and water. So you take care of that. Then you realize weeks after that, that your main source of income is gone so you need an income as well. So you take care of that. Then you see that your friends around you are having trouble getting by and you help them with their house and jobs. Because that is what you do. And all of a sudden you are in a grind and you just accept what happened. But when you deep down think of all the things that you have seen, you quickly turn away from them, because it will make you emotional. And emotions are counter productive. This is not PTSS, from my perspective this is just a coping mechanism to deal with what you have experienced