Hurricanes or las tormentas are a way of life when you live in the Caribbean. They roll through in September and October keeping us on the look out and making us feel like we live on a small island in a big ocean. We’ve been in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic for eighteen months and have seen three major hurricanes. Hurricane Matthew came through in 2016, I missed most of it as I was in Guadalajara, Mexico at a conference. But this fall Maria and Irma visited us and battered the Caribbean with some incredibly intense wind, rain, and sadly many deaths.
Of course, when Maria, a category 5 hurricane called the largest in the history of the Atlantic bears down on you, it is concerning. We prepared by taping our windows, covering things on campus and, at least a little, thinking about what would happen if the city was destroyed and we needed to go into survival mode. I wasn’t too concerned during Hurricane Maria. I felt ready, school was canceled and we had a week’s worth of food and water. Then, the embassy started evacuating their families and I made my daughter and wife pack a grab bag just in case we had to flee in the middle of the night. My daughter also suggested we keep shoes right next to the bed in case the large windows in our apartment shattered and we needed to get out. The preparation helped a bit but I think we all went to bed a little nervous.
In Santo Domingo, we were really never in danger. At one point the island of Dominica, not the Dominican Republic, was getting hammered by Hurricane Maria. We got a number of thoughtful concerned folks who reached out to us and seemed worried. Then, we explained that Dominica was hundreds of miles away and the worry faded.
As Hurricane Irma approached a few weeks later, we got a call from a friend saying that there were some kittens in her neighborhood that might need a home. A local family had these tiny little cats in a bag and wasn’t really interested in keeping them. Just as the hurricane hit, we swung by and picked up two cats, each less than a week old and brought them back to our apartment to weather the storm together.
We have a friend who is a Veterinarian who we called. She wished us luck but also told us that kittens that small really need their mother more than kind-hearted humans. As the storms hit, we got up every couple of hours to feed and warm the tiny kittens. We fed them by injecting milk in their mouths with a tiny syringe. Even their bladders weren’t developed so we had to pet their bellies to stimulate urination. It was a tough couple of days. Sadly, neither kitten made it through the hurricane. Life is fragile during a storm.
We were lucky in Santo Domingo, our friends and family remained safe and although the northern part of the island was hit fairly hard, the devastation to the D.R. paled in comparison to that seen on Puerto Rico and many of our neighboring islands. During the middle of Maria, a couple of us even went for a run by the ocean to check out the waves and wind. The streets were as quiet as I had ever seen. In a city where traffic is intense, chaotic, and everywhere- the silence was unsettling.
I thought about vulnerability quite a bit when I was awake in the middle of the night feeding a kitten who would not make it, and hearing the wind slam into the big windows by our deck. Not only did I think about the power of nature but how life and safety depends not only your own strength and preparedness but more importantly on the community around you. Living an expatriate life, this sense of community is so important. Whether things get tough due to natural disaster or just homesickness, these friends and colleagues are your life line.