It’s been almost six months since Hurricane Maria ripped through Dominica as a Category 5 storm. By many measures, this country could have been bombed to just this side of the apocalypse with equal or less damage.

We drive on roads that I would not even hike on. Besides pot holes and landslides, (we are discouraged to drive in the rain), frequently the pavement just disappears as we are driving.

And those are the good roads on the west side! On the east where we are based, there is no pretense of repairing the roads, and instead huge hazards warning signs, with dire predictions of road washout and pavement collapse are posted. <Hi Mom!  Just kidding, the roads are well-paved, dry, and safe.>

Pile on (no pun intended) the fact that you have two-way traffic on little more than a one-way road, (with both directions trying to avoid the road hazards), we easily spend 3 hours a day white knuckled. Thank heavens for our 2 IsraAID Israeli engineers. They get us to our beneficiary sites safely, though we all hold our breath over the bridges.

So, what am I doing day-to-day? There is so much to tell you that I am struggling to organize my thoughts.  But, since I have only a few hours of electricity and Wi-Fi, (it’s a toss up whether I’d more easily kill for Wi-Fi or Dairy Queen right now), I will just start.

I split my time between the capital city of Roseau, on the west side, where I participate in government and NGO planning meetings, (total irony that I retired from Microsoft and still find myself in meetings that approximate those I tried to escape. Karmic justice, no doubt), and the rural countryside where we work with beneficiaries, doing site surveys of their homes to assess and prioritize them for re-roofing.

The NGOs and aid groups building (or funding our building), here on the island beside us (IsraAID) include the International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations (UNDP), Red Cross, Engineers without Borders, ChinaAid, (it’s tough to look a gift generator in the mouth), Samaritans Purse, All Hands All Hearts, and others I am sure I am overlooking.  These aid groups are flat out amazing – and do so much with so little. The amount of goodwill and cooperation between the groups should put any dysfunctional corporation (you know who you are) to shame.  It’s a small price to grit my teeth during meetings that get lost in the weeds. As for the island politics which serve to either support or impede the recovery process, I go on record as saying that I am here as an honored guest of the Dominican government, and will leave it at that.  Okay – fine, not quite.  Those of you to whom I write personally have been treated to some uncensored rants.

I am living in the rural eastside at Rosalie Bay. I promise my next blog will be totally devoted to the Rosalie Bay Resort, (spoiler alert, I am living in the Honeymoon Suite!), and our distance from the city  gives rise to the aforementioned road-trips back to Roseau, for my meetings.   Most days, working in the field, our engineers do the physical/structural house assessment and I do the beneficiary vulnerability assessment. Nothing is good. We have either bad or worse. It is most heartbreaking when the house has been blown away or flattened, since rebuilding is beyond our scope. The despair is palpable.  And our frustration is constant.

Even with these obstacles we are making real progress. We are already re-roofing, and we’ve completed 5 houses as of last week, with many more ahead of us! My role is to  create order, establish processes, source materials,  design metrics to track our progress, and support our ability to scale. We are better supplied than I feared, but, we still need so much to equip our local workers.  Going to the local hardware stores is an exercise in futility.  I’ll devote a future post to how one sources materials around here.  Let’s just say, it hasn’t come to anyone needing to post bail for me…. yet.

Marine Reach, which operates supply ships, is an amazing relief organization! They are helping us source and purchase 5 generators from Panama, which we didn’t think we could do, because we don’t have anyone in Panama to create the documentation required to move the goods. They are doing all of that for us and donating cargo space on their relief ship.

These generators will power the tools our workers need for roofing. There is no electricity anywhere we are working. And estimates give us 12+ months before many of the local communities come back on the grid.  Which, while terribly sad, is more than a bit reassuring, since one of the more frequent road hazards, which show no sign of clearing is downed power poles and power lines.

Finding workers qualified to do the work is crazy hard. Many people left Dominica and may never return. The remaining workers are in huge demand, and skilled supervision is totally non-existent. We are always talking with the community looking for leads, and they do pay off. We may have sourced a general contractor who splits his time between here and Guadalupe.  We are also hiring an Engineer to join our project, it’s a contract position.  If you know anyone who is interested, please share it with them:   Job Description for Construction Engineer on Dominica They won’t get the Honeymoon Suite at the Rosalie Bay Resort, since I already have it, but, they will have a chance to do amazing work they will always remember.

We’ve decided to offer non cash incentives to maximize our workers’ working conditions. I just sourced a woman who had been a school cook until the school closed due to damage and she lost her livelihood, like many (most?) in this beautiful country. She will begin catering lunches to our workers starting Monday. It’s one more small way to put money back in the community. Small victories. They do count.

“It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”
– Chinese proverb

It is totally insane that while I have been here only 4 days, it feels like a lifetime of battles.  I have incredible pictures and will provide more of them in future posts.  For those of you keeping track, I owe posts on the Rosalie Bay Resort, Sourcing Materials – or how one gets Amazon to ship you things they have no intention of shipping, and photos, lots of them.

Now, no Debra blog post would be complete without a certification that I *am* eating.  While I reserve the right to withhold exact details, and notwithstanding that today’s fish lunch acquired in the city, turned out to be chicken, the cook at Rosalie Bay does the best with what she has.  Dinner is kept warm for us on a propane stove, when we return way past dark. Our makeshift kitchen was once a beautiful guest bathroom. And when we can scrounge a fish, Serraphine feeds us magnificently. Sorta reminds me of the Hunger Games except we are all on the same team.

Pray for Wi-Fi, feel free to send me solar panels, and as they say here:  “Have a blessed day!”.