Words such as depressed, frustrated, despair, hopeless, worry and fear cannot truly described what the people of St Maarten are currently going through since its island was totally ravaged by the category 5 Hurricane Irma two weeks ago.
On Saturday, during a relief and support exercise with Caribbean Airlines, members of the T&T media got a first hand experience as to what the island was really like and what its people were really faced with.
The Dutch and French island was once known for its lush greenery hills surrounded by the nylon blue sea and ecstatic night life in the Simpson Bay area.
Now that island has become a stranger to its own native people.
One tour guide said: “It’s brown all over. Irma’s strong winds either uprooted all the trees or broke all the branches from off the trees…now everything is brown, dry and parched…lakes that we never saw because trees were in the way we now see.”
The very next day, after Irma’s disastrous landfall, there were seen 40-foot shipping containers, light aircraft, boats, yachts and vehicles strewn all across major roads, side streets, coastal areas and even along the runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport.
People along Wellington Road in Cole Bay spoke of their houses falling apart before their eyes. The wooden houses were now seen as stacks of harsh hay, similar to shredded wood.
One woman lost her house, her clothes and important documents. She resorted to alcohol. She thought there was no way out of the island. However, she was one of the fortunate 46 Caricom nationals who were rescued from the island on Saturday and brought to T&T on board Flight BW 3417.
Among the hundreds of people, who turned up at the airport from as early as 6 am, some complained of not having drinking water for days.
Sterling Bisquette told the T&T Guardian that he had not eaten in the past five days, “Not even a sip of water I get. No bread…biscuit…nothing. People loot out all the supermarkets…I want to get out of here back to my homeland, Dominica.” Bisquette was told that he would be placed on the next flight to Martinique, however, that did not happen for him on Saturday.
Horiel Hewitt, 29, a Jamaican national, her two-year-old daughter, Aliyah, and another relative, Patricia Marshall, who resided on the French side of the island for the past 17 years, said they lost all that they had in their house when the sea came up and washed it away.
“We are going back to Jamaica from Trinidad because we don’t have anything here again. I do not know when I will return to St Maarten,” Hewitt said.
Another passenger, who wished not to be identified, said he was quite disappointed of the relief response generally, “it is very hurtful to see that no food and no water that are being donated were being adequately distributed. The Dutch soldiers were seen rationing water by giving one-litre bottles per family.”