Irma, she remains with us in our thoughts

It is already 4 years ago that I was living on the small island St Martin in the Caribbean sea when hurricane Irma passed by. 4 years is a long time and sometimes it almost feels surrreal to think about that one of the strongest storms ever in the Atlantic basin passed by over your head, destroying everything.

As you could see recently in Afghanistan there were also people who just before it all went down still traveled there out of curiosity. Stupid that is. For the people who sometimes would say 'ow I would love to experience a storm like that to see how it feels.' Well trust me, you really don't want to. Just wanting to experience something that potentially end up with killing you, that is just a bad idea.

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The small island in the eye of the storm is the island St Martin, yes the eye was directly on us there.



Especially on an island or in other remote areas one of the major issues is that the influx of material and people who can provide aid just stops. That is so much different when having an option over land or by helicopters who can only do small distances. In the middle of the sea you need a port or an airport. And when both of these are destroyed...Then what?

Exactly, then what. When the powerplant is shattered, and the water cleaning factory for clean drinking water came crumbled down like a house of cards and all of your basic life necessities are a struggle all of a sudden. Yeah, then what.

Then the red cross comes in and provides you with food, and the army comes in to provide you with drinking water and you start flushing away your number 2s with buckets of sea water. That feels surreal.






But with all things..with time everything passes. Recently I had a friend here from back in those days and she tells me she still struggles with when the wind is picking up that it annoys her. I only have the feeling when the wind starts to blow that I want to secure everything that is outside. I guess that is not really a bad habit honestly so someone who is a terrible unorganized cleaner.

But I notice I has made me so much more cautious on how unstable I find the human race. With all of these normal functioning societies you don't really need much to unbalance them. Give it a pandemic, give it a political unstable situation, give it economical instablity, it all doesn't really matter.

First life resources are the things we need at first, and security comes after. But security is something everyone experiences differently. Sitting from the safest place on earth in Holland thinking about that I was hearing gun shots in the night all around the hospital where I was sleeping on the operating room tables. It doesn't really add up in my brain anymore because it feels so far away again.





I have mentioned it recently in another post as well: As I was watching the Handmaids Tale and looking at the Afghanistan situation with in the back of my mind the pandemic and how a possible variation of the current virus can totally turn around the whole world, I feel it is all so fragile. The almost absurd situations in the Handmaids Tale....Are they so asburd? We don't need much to turn into swines right?

I am thinking about how we had to guard our food so people wouldn't steal it and I literally spoke the words: 'if someone tries to steal it, just stab them. I don't care'

Shocking and this was only like 3 or 4 days after the storm and already my mindset had changed that much. As said, we don't need much to become a swine.





Four years after Irma the destroyer passed by. Luckily I can say it has made me a wiser person in general and everything turned out pretty well. But this isn't for everybody as experiencing that fear of death so vividly messes with your mind a lot. And that takes way longer to give that a decent spot again, 4 years is nothing I guess.

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