After the hurricane, the building did not sustain any kind of structural damages like most of the places here on the coastline. We had an issue with the storm surge. There was a huge pile of sand in front of the building. We had to dig out in order to get in, but we got in and were able to clear out whatever was inside — the sand and the water. After that we decided to use this facility as a relief centre because it was untouched. So here is where we held several community meetings after the storm, and we had a core group of persons who came in on a volunteer basis. We met and started planning ahead; this was on the Friday after the hurricane. We started asking, what we are going to do? How were we going to handle the distribution of stuff? And we literally took the whole of the building at the time and we prepared it, and we’ve been receiving supplies from that day up until yesterday [Saturday].
Government support
In Cane Garden Bay, like all the other communities, we were cut off after the hurricane, so our initial efforts were to bring the community together. We wanted to do more in terms of setting up several different committees to do cleanup, to do all 
[Who felt we were overstepping] is the million-dollar question. That’s the issue. Because, you see, across the territory the distribution decision from the [National Emergency Operations Centre] was that distributions were going to be done through the district reps. So the political representatives for areas took control of the distribution. I’m not a political representative; I’m just another member of the community who feels that I can assist and we can do things. I’m an administrator — that’s my background — so I figure I can pull people together and we can organise ourselves as a community. We recognise that we can’t sit and wait for someone to come in and do things for us; we have to prepare ourselves so that when the food supply begins to run out, what are we going to do?
Western Tortola
So I leave my post and I go to the western end of the island where the rest of my family is, and I said to one of my cousins, “Look, in Cane Garden Bay, we have started a process where we pull people together, we sit and we discuss and we plan.” My cousin on that end took the idea and ran with it. She called her people in, set up and did the very same thing that I did. The difference that I would say between my experience and her experience is that when the district rep in that area found out what was happening, what she was doing, he supported her 100 percent. She’s using the downstairs of her house, her mother’s house, as a distribution center. They cleared out and they said, “Look, we don’t have any other public facility here; we’ll use this.” They set it up and run it consistently. The district rep now, who’s [Opposition Leader Andrew Fahie (R-D1)], whenever he gets supplies for his district, some go there.
‘Just the muscle’
In our section, we did not get that kind of support. In fact, we were blocked. I’ve had the encounters. We were blocked, literally, and nothing was delivered to us afterwards once it was felt we were overstepping our bounds. They took control of that, but stuff still kept coming because persons knew we had set up the centre and we continued to distribute every week. One of the ladies who came by yesterday said, “I have a little job I get two days a week, but the money doesn’t go very far.” There’s not much she can do with it; she’s quite happy she can come here and collect stuff. Her job does not pay a whole lot and does not meet all of her needs. We are happy to be able to offer that kind of support in the community.
From a church perspective, we don’t do a lot of radio or media. We do it and the persons know we are here and persons come in every week. We do it that way because we figure that the persons who come are persons who need stuff. I have four children; they run the centre. I am just the muscle. On Sunday after church we open up because we have elderly members who come to worship on Sunday. Now that we finally have a generator we can open up in the evening, because that was our limitation.
CGB cleanup
In the community overall, the cleanup level has not happened. I get the sense that there is this pull to bring the community together to do it and that did not happen, and the longer it goes on the more difficult it is. In the weeks and the months after it would have been easier to bring the community together to do it. Once three months pass, it’s a waste of time. I’m in Jost Van Dyke every day for the past three weeks; it’s very different because a lot has gone into it and they had the benefit of a lot of volunteers who came in: The Kenny Chesney foundation [Love for Love City] and several others blanketed the island, working there to clean up everything. Those are the kinds of limitations that could have been overcome had we used an opportunity to do what I refer to as rebuilding the concept of community — empowering the community to help itself. That’s what we were doing, and this is an example of what we were trying to achieve.
Brown hills
I don’t want to be pulled into the political concept, so apart from my encounters here and encounters in the streets, there’s a sense that BVIslanders can be very optimistic people. We don’t see the end-all in everything: We see opportunities. That has been to our benefit. Once the trees started getting leaves, people started seeing things differently, because we went for weeks with just grey hillsides. A young friend said to me, “This looks like when Scar took over the pridelands” [in The Lion King], and I remember watching that movie with my kids and everything was grey and dark and dismal. And then as the rains fell and trees started reviving, people’s outlooks started to change, because living in an environment where there’s no greenery totally affects how you see things. We are totally accustomed to the hills being green and we look up and see every stone in the hillside just brown and grey, and I think because of that kind of outlook it has made a difference. And people are trying to look at the positive side but people are still conscious of the fact that more could be done, should have been done, earlier. There were persons who feel we weren’t getting enough of that: We were dragging along thinking, “What’s next? What’s going to happen?”
A ‘psychological process’
When we started our meetings, we would meet here every day at 10 o’clock, and I said, “Listen, this is a psychological process.” Here we sat in our individual homes being pummeled by these hurricanes and people came out literally shaking. How do we go back to a sense of normalcy? Every day at 10 o’clock, [there was] a sign outside the centre. We share information: Whatever you heard from town, you said, “This is happening,” because we had no radios; we had nothing. And this became our sharing centre, and we did it because as human beings we operate based on schedules. This is the life that we live: You must have a routine. Ten o’clock this place is open, people are here.
Supplies for everyone
This centre runs apart from the government relief centres. It is run through the church. We have a core group of volunteers, and we’ve been receiving supplies from different sources all over. We open up weekly, because now the sun sets very early. We didn’t have any electricity in the building; we could only work by daylight. We serve the community as a whole — not just Cane Garden Bay, but whoever comes in, as long as we have stuff. If you need it, we give it to you. It runs separate from the government distribution centres.
Even after there was talk about ceasing and closing down government distribution centres, from our interaction with the community we know that there are persons who are in need, and so that’s why we struggle. The struggle has been made easier every day, but we continue to operate. Yesterday we had a shipment of stuff that came in from St. Thomas. I picked up a truckload of stuff that came in directly from West End; we went down there and received them and brought them up here to the centre. So we are now looking at coming into the Christmas season and we have lots of gifts, toys. Volunteers have already started wrapping them for children. We try to see what we can do to make a difference in the community.
Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Claire Shefchik.
This article orginally appeared in the Dec. 7, 2017 Beacon print edition.
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