Living in Jeremie

Living in Jeremie

Owen Wood

I remember before the hurricane hit.  I was with my mother.  The government in Jeremie said that there was a storm coming, and we should evacuate.  But at the time it meant nothing to me.  We got those reports all the time.  The only time something had ever happened was when I was younger.  A big earthquake struck that no one could predict.  But that never affected me because that happened near the capital, far from my parents and me in Jeremie.  But the next day after we heard the warning, my father and my mother were selling food to make money as usual.  I was outside with my friend James.  It started to rain but not too hard, and we were laughing because we thought this was the storm we had been warned about.  But then the wind began to pick up, and it started raining a lot harder.  

We had to shout to each other over the now whipping, wind and we both sprinted to our homes.  When I arrived home, the door was blown open and there was water at least a foot deep in the floor of our house, just like in the street.  I managed to keep the door closed by propping a chair against it.  I grabbed another chair and sat on it in the middle of the floor with my feet up.  I don't know how long I sat, there listening to the wind howl, but it felt like hours until I heard the banging on the door.  I sprung off my seat and pulled away the chair and my parents came rushing in soaking wet.  My mom made sure I was okay, and then we all stood in a huddle,  feeding off of each other's body heat and praying that this would end soon.  The next thing I remember was a terrible noise as a piece of a tree near our house came smashing through our roof, destroying it completely.  My parents both jumped on me to protect me from debris.  After they thought it safe, they got up and stared at our hole in the top of a house.  From there, we waited the storm out, standing there and letting the rain pour down onto us.  

After what felt like days the wind started to slow and the rain turned into a drizzle. My mom hugged me, and we both cried and cried for a while.  Then we went outside and looked at what used to be our street. The water was very murky from the dirt on the road and floating in that water was people's smashed up houses.  It was an awful thing to look at, but I was just glad we were all alive.  We spent the day constructing a makeshift roof from what we could find on the street and whatever was just lying around.  At night, when I went to fall asleep was when, I realized how hungry I was.  

The next afternoon trucks and other vehicles came into our district in Jeremie.  The people handed out a little food, but mostly they just had medical supplies that thankfully none of my family needed. For the rest of the day, I just sat there and watched them hand out supplies for those who needed it.  The next day, they left to go get more supplies because Jeremie’s situation was worse than they thought.  We knew that leaving was a bad idea because Jeremie is a very remote location and hard to get to.  They were gone for a week before we saw them again,  and when we did, we were not happy.  In the week we all had little to no food and many people had died.  When those people came, they brought very little food but they did bring a lot of toothpaste.  Toothpaste, when they saw we were upset they said it was all they could bring to us.  I mean I probably should be thankful that they came at all, but right now we do not need toothpaste.  Things similar to this happen every week and every week it gets a little better in terms of food.  Now I need to get used to my new life and forget about the old one that looking back on it seems like a privileged life even though we had very little before.