Rebuilding the Bahamas: How a hurricane blows up social divides
Shella Monestime’s baby boy was born in the days before Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas from Sept. 1 to 3. The unauthorized immigrant never had time to nest with him in the little wooden structure in her neighborhood in Marsh Harbour, on the Abaco Islands, Bahamas, that she called home.
The Category 5 storm hit no place harder than informal settlements such as Pigeon Peas, populated by Haitians like her or Bahamians of Haitian descent. It swept away their tenuously built homes and crushed others into broken heaps, the wooden planks tattered as if they were paper strips. The worst hurricane to ever hit the Bahamas, Dorian has officially taken 70 lives, but more than 200 people remain missing, many of them believed to be unauthorized immigrants. Thousands have been rendered homeless.
All that remained of Ms. Monestime’s Pigeon Peas settlement has since been bulldozed. Today it is a flat field of mud, rock, and weeds. In the middle stands a lone Bahamian flag, tied with string to a reedy, branchless tree. The flag could have been raised as an act of solidarity, of Bahamians coming together in shared loss. It is also easy to interpret it as a statement, of one group asserting rights over another and claiming control of land.
Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis has vowed that such “shantytowns” will not be rebuilt. He’s also decreed that no immigrants who are here illegally are welcome in the shelters the government is erecting for those left without homes, even though immigration status has become a desperate affair as many residents have lost documentation or were in legal limbo before the storm hit. The Minnis government has resumed deporting unauthorized Haitians affected by Dorian as well – a move condemned by international bodies such as the United Nations.
#BahamasStrong?A cycle of vulnerabilityVarious U.N. organizations have warned the Bahamas that migrants must not be left out of the humanitarian response, and that increased vulnerability only leads to more exploitation and abuse – even more human trafficking.Tensions exposed“It’s easy ... to just vilify one group”