Seattle’s Caribbean communities send aid to storm-damaged homelands

When I reached Carmen Maymi O’Reilly last week, she was standing in line at Western Union and asked me to call her back. An hour later, she answered the phone exasperated. Western Union would only let her send a maximum of $50 per person to four family members in Puerto Rico suffering the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service wasn’t taking packages. She had almond milk for her nephew, who’s allergic to dairy milk, but no way to send it.

“I’m not doing well, I’m a mess,” she told me. “The hardest thing for us is that there’s nothing we can do, every avenue is blocked.”

That sense of helplessness in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria was shared by many in Seattle originally from the Caribbean. First came the dread of following news of the storm from several thousand miles away, then waiting in agony for friends and family to resurface after communication was cut off for days, and now the slow calculation of how to support recovery efforts.

For Maymi O’Reilly, a retired Seattle Public District social worker who was born in Caguaz, Puerto Rico, and came to the University of Washington in 1978, the waiting period from when the storm made landfall until she heard from her loved ones was “pure anguish,” she said.

“I had a knot in my stomach for almost the whole week,” said Pauline Elwin-Smith, a native of Dominica, an independent nation that Hurricane Maria ravaged before thrashing Puerto Rico. Elwin-Smith took a personal day off from her job as a city of Seattle grants and contracts specialist on Sept. 19, the day after Maria made landfall in Dominica.

“I was devastated, worried, and concerned after hearing what CNN had to report,” she said. It wasn’t until the end of that week, Friday, Sept. 22, that she received a text message from her brother saying that her immediate family had survived.

While that was good news, there was still plenty of bad news to report. Elwin-Smith knew people who perished in the storm and several of her relatives’ homes were severely damaged — a cousin’s roof was ripped off and an electric pole fell on her 95-year-old grandmother’s house.

For a woman who survived Hurricane David in 1979, Maria was much worse.

“It was just disastrous,” Elwin-Smith said. “From what I understand, [my grandmother] has never experienced anything like that in her life.”

Marcus Barry, a manager at Amazon originally from Sint Maarten/Saint Martin, shared the sense that September’s hurricanes were the worst in a lifetime. He was a teenager in 1995 when Hurricane Luis brought his home island, which is half-Dutch and half-French, to its knees.

His family was smart about rebuilding, he said, describing his house as “like Fort Knox” with solid mahogany shutters and metal bars designed to be resistant to hurricanes as well as looters. So when Hurricane Irma roared through, the house withstood the worst. “I’m one of the luckier ones,” he said.

But lucky in such a brutal context still meant hardship. In the days leading up to the hurricane, he had to coach his mother over the phone about how to react to the direction the wind is blowing during the storm, for example opening certain windows slightly to avoid too much air pressure building up inside the house.

Amazingly, Barry received a call from his mother while the island was in the eye of the storm, but then lost contact for two days once the second half of Irma slammed through the island.

Barry’s father, who is on dialysis, has since been airlifted to Aruba, which is a Dutch possession like Sint Maarten, to keep up his medical treatment. His mother and elderly grandmother remain on the island and until recently were living on rations provided by Dutch soldiers.

Sint Maarten/Saint Martin remains under a midnight to 5 a.m. curfew following bouts of violent looting, but electricity has been restored. On the Dutch side of the island, where Barry’s family lives, one-third of all buildings were destroyed and 90 percent were damaged.

Barry monitors the situation closely from his office at Amazon, where he said countless coworkers have come up to him to offer their support and inquire about his family. In late August, Amazon announced a $1 million matching donation to Red Cross relief for Hurricane Harvey in Texas, but has yet to announce any charitable efforts for Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

“Right now I’m more (of) use to my family out here,” Barry said. “Going down there would just be me walking amongst destruction.”

With an established life in the U.S. – a former Microsoft employee, he has lived in the Seattle area for 12 years – he will be a resource to order building materials from the U.S and send them to Sint Maarten once the shipping and air routes reopen.

While the U.S. government’s overall response to the post-hurricane need in its Caribbean territories has been criticized, some immediate relief for the islands has come from the Puget Sound region in the form of Joint Base Lewis McChord, home of the 62nd Air Lift Wing. The Air Force has relied on its Northwest contingent to fly 15 missions to hurricane-affected areas, delivering FEMA personnel to St. Thomas, coordinating air traffic from Martinique, and providing supplies and airlifting out medical patients across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Caribbean community, meanwhile, will be mounting its own fundraising relief efforts this weekend at two restaurants in Seattle that serve the West Indian and Puerto Rican communities. They will be offering traditional food, music from salsa to soca, and a domino tournament to raise money with all proceeds after costs going to support relief efforts.

• Friday, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. – midnight: _{Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fundraiser}, Taste of the Caribbean, 1212 E. Jefferson St, $25 at the door or with a receipt from the event’s _GoFundMe for food and music.
• Sunday, Oct. 8, noon to 10 pm: Puerto Rico Fundraiser with _{Lechón (Pig Roast)} and _{Domino Tournament}, La Isla Cuisine, 2320 NW Market St, $30 for food, $50 for domino tournament.

Can’t make it to either event? The people interviewed this story endorsed the following charities to support the people suffering in their homelands.

• Dominica Relief
• Unidos Por Puerto Rico

Vox also has a useful guide when deciding how to donate after natural disasters.

Correction: an earlier version of this post listed the dates incorrectly. The dates are now corrected. A quote by Marcus Barry was also clarified.

Gregory Scruggs

Gregory Scruggs is a journalist based in Seattle. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Thomson Reuters Foundation. He is a coordinator of the Puget Sound chapter of the Solutions Journalism Network.