Floods, our social responsibility

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

Diary of a mothering worker

I called Miss Pinky to ask how she was and this time she wasn’t in tears. Her washing machine was lost after floods last year, and with help, she recovered. This year, the new one was lost, along with her fridge and stove. Next door, her children and grandchildren “lost everything,” a phrase that is now so common across the country, despite remaining so surreal.

Compassion, care and help will be needed for months, for whole communities have been devastated, whole areas of small enterprise and home-based businesses lost, and thousands left traumatised.

I thought of Miss Pinky because she’s retired. Though she worked as a cleaner for decades at UWI, from just this month, she’s no longer here. As the university collected its list of staff and students affected, I thought about senior citizens and their additional vulnerabilities, their health complications, their economic insecurity and how much they will have to rely on their children for their recovery, if their children are able to provide.

When I called, Miss Pinky was using a hairdryer to try to dry out and fix her stove. She was by friends, because her doctor advised her against staying surrounded by water where she could get an infection. They had been provided with food. I wondered at her resilient positivity, at her shock, at the fact that she was focusing on the immediate, rather than the full flood of tears that she was absorbing after such a setback.

There’s a lot to say about the immediate crisis intervention, but we should also focus our attention on the State’s co-ordination of a longer social response. People have to leave their damaged possessions in their yards as proof of their suffering, but this only furthers their sense of trauma and inability to move on with recovery as they wait for local government representatives to arrive.

If your documents are destroyed or lost, you can go to Richmond Street to have them re-issued, but this should be co-ordinated through the regional corporations so that you are not waiting for state officials to come to your house at the same time as having to go to the health centre to get antibiotics or anything else needed while finding someone to take you to PoS as your muddied vehicle is no longer working and then waiting there amidst hundreds of others with the same plight, all while managing despair and PTSD without a counsellor in sight.

Does every house need to keep its destroyed appliances? State officials know which neighbourhoods and streets were flooded, already know the maximum amount that will be disbursed per household, and are keenly aware that this is barely enough to get a start, and only then because citizens everywhere are stepping in to help.

Any future disaster-management plan must have the post-disaster recovery far better co-ordinated, with all state services available in one community location, whether the school shelters or regional corporations or police stations that are unaffected.

There’s something to keep in mind too: the situation for all our sister and brother citizens in a few months’ time when it's Christmas and Carnival, and the media have moved on. Will we be able to track the effect of the flooding on children’s scores at SEA and in end-of-year tests? Was there a Ministry of Education plan for how to support those children in coping and thriving between now and then?

Do we know how women and men’s recovery will be affected by being in a female-headed household or a two-parent family or in an extended family with elderly or ailing parents or with disabled children? Or among households that survived on home-based businesses, and who are now without both a place to live and a livelihood? It’s so important for us to always understand that social context – income level, family type, source of income, disability, age, gender, experience of household violence – influences how people recover, their experience accessing social services and their approach to trauma.

Amidst the apocalyptic and heartbreaking destruction are people’s different and unequal capacities to recover. This is not a "national security" issue, it’s an issue of co-ordination and sensitivity in post-disaster service provision. This is as necessary as life vests, ropes and rafts in police stations for the next time.

And there will be a next time.

Disaster recovery efforts should have planned for this, and for grandmothers like Miss Pinky, who are living by the grace of God – until the next such rain.