Peter Espeut
ONE YEAR and a half after Hurricane Ivan, you can still see the damage it wrought. There is now only sky where the roof of the Roman Catholic Cathedral once was. The Anglican Cathedral and the Presbyterian Kirk are also still roofless. The church where I normally worship - Roxborough in St. Paul's - has only two walls out of four standing. And reconstruction on none of them has begun.
The House of Parliament is an empty shell; the legislature meets in a conference centre near Grand Anse. The rebuilding of schools has been a priority, and construction and classes share the time; there is still a lot of rubble around. Everywhere there are roofless, abandoned buildings. Grenada has not yet turned the corner with recovering from Hurricane Ivan.
But the trees are recovering. Fallen soldiers are everywhere, some lying beside the road; but everywhere there is stubby, new growth from battered trunks. Nature for once in modern times, is doing better than humanity.
Libraries have been lost. Homes can be rebuilt or relocated, and cars replaced; but the losses in books and archives are irreplaceable. We always seem to attend to really important things a little too late.
DEPTH OF A NATION'S ECONOMY
The defence everywhere for things not done, or done badly, is Ivan. It made me remember Hurricane Gilbert, for a long time the universal excuse in our neck of the woods.
But it is in time of disaster that the depth of a nation's economy makes the difference. There just isn't the production, the wealth, the savings, the tax revenue to rebuild. The charitable donations from individuals and the private sector to rebuild churches, etc., just isn't there. The Grenadian economy built on nutmegs and bananas was too shallow, too fragile. Ivan has destroyed most of the nutmegs and the bananas, and replanting is slow. They are investing in tourism now; and cricket.
Last Sunday was one year before the World Cup practice matches start, and in church we were asked to pray for the venues and roads and bridges to be ready; for a mild hurricane season; and for good weather. How much we are investing in cricket in our small islands for a few short weeks of reverie! Our economies, never really strong in the first place, will take another battering of Ivanic proportions. I don't see how in the short or medium-term - even with the cameras of the (small) cricketing world focused on us - these governments can recover their investments. Cricket is not football. I added much to those prayers!
But Grenada is a gentle country. The roads are narrow and traffic is easily snarled; there is no space to pull over, but the drivers rarely honk at each other, and there is no road rage. There is patient waiting on one another. I have walked the streets around the market vendors, cramped on the sidewalks because the market is finally being repaired. I see no bling or 'downtown fashions'; no one walks the streets in merinos, or with their underwear exposed, or with their body parts outlined on or flowing from their garments. There is no raucous street theatre, or loud talk of various kinds of cloth. You have to travel to realise by comparison how aggressive and raw-chaw we are as a people.
And there, overlooking the city is Richmond Hill prison, still containing those who killed their beloved, and demolished their revolution. Now Grenada has two horrifically traumatic experiences from which they have not yet recovered.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a consultant in sustainable rural development.
