skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Because on Saturday, the tropical storm caused the island to be declared in a state of emergency, the hotel was closed and Didier was home with us. It seemed a little bit like camping in the house. We were all snuggled up in a bed on the floor in the living room with flashlights, candles, and a portable DVD player playing Madagascar for the 1000th time to satisfy our tiniest campers. I say snuggled, but more as a figure of speak, as snuggling usually involved wrapping up in some cuddly blanket in someone's arms and we were more like, sprawled out on the hot sheets sweating very close to one another, but you get my drift.
As the hotel was actually meant to open the upcoming Monday, Didier had to return to work to see what was going on over there and determine if and when he would be able to start cooking and teaching the new menu to his rag tag staff. Turned out there was still no power at the hotel, as at our home, and he would be going in to help with the removal of debris and fallen trees from the property and to see if there was anything salvageable in the refrigerator. Like many hotels on the island, as we discovered, his hotel had a generator that had not been well maintained and was not providing power to the hotel. That included the rooms, offices, refrigerators, freezers. Pretty much anything that required electricity was now not working. Strangely, even were the generator working, the freezers and refrigerators were not considered essential and were not connected. Go figure. (Now it could be that because I am the wife of a chef, I consider the food stuffs of value, but perhaps rising food cost and waste is not as important as I imagine it to be.)
While the hubby toiled away at work, I prepared to cook as much of the food I thought possible to prevent it from going to waste. I cooked 12 sausage patties, a pound of bacon, twenty-four chicken tenders and did all the dishes too. It seemed I was doing dishes all day long for fear that our water would go too. There were rumors about the water supply and many friends had already lost theirs. We listened to my iPod on a portable iPod base left by some of our visiting friends and did puzzles, drew, colored, danced, and exhausted ourselves so that I could coax both girls to nap.
The nap wasn't quite long enough as we were all just too hot, but it was a welcomed reprieve. After the nap and a snack, we went for a walk to see how other properties had fared and saw felled trees, downed power lines, signs torn from their hinges, sidewalks overturned due to uprooted trees. The hotel is just a short walk from home, so we found ourselves there. With a crew of executive and rank and file staff, we found Didier hustling to get the generator installed. He was sweating and looked stressed but determined. To show our support for him, we kissed and hugged him and then went back towards home. It would soon be dark and I surely didn't want the girls out there on the street with me.
We picked limes from our fallen tree once we were home, and went inside to prep the house for the darkness. It was fast approaching 5 PM and though we had an hour before blackness, inside the house was already a dark grey. The water pressure was fading and I feared we wouldn't have the chance to shower. Then it dawned on me that once when our solar panels had failed in the main house, we'd still had water in the guesthouse. The two units were on different water tanks! I ran the girls over to the guesthouse where, in still, nearing darkness, we took a warm shower together, lotioned up, and walked back home just as the sun was sinking into the sea. Didier pulled up at that moment and I sent him over there for a welcomed surprise shower.
We ate red meat for dinner and the girls had pasta or noodles or some other carb to fill their bellies and I transfixed them with a video before we passed out at 7:30. There would be no school tomorrow as much of the island was still without power, so I counted my blessings and thanked God for small mercies. We were all together in the living room again, sweating it out. Again, very little sleep and every sound roused me. The instinct to protect my cubs is quite strong and I envisioned looters, animals, and another storm at every sound. I prayed for a break. I missed a chat on the phone with someone, anyone to commiserate.
(c) Copyright 2010. City Mom in the Jungle.
At the end of hurricane season, a small tropic depression with a 10-20% chance of becoming a Tropical Storm developed east of Barbados. By Friday afternoon, hours before it struck as a tropical storm, Tomas, tearing roofs off, throwing lawn chairs about, and ripping seemingly well rooted trees from the ground and onto the power lines, it had jumped to 100% chance. I stood with my friends at Zaccio's Pizza as I do on Friday afternoons and chatted casually about how serious the storm might actually be. When I left, my friend Karl and I stopped into the SuperCentre to buy a few staples, just in case. We have a hurricane/emergency supply already at home, also just in case, but I bought balloons and chips and water and yogurt. You know, the essentials.
When I arrived home on Friday evening, a little boozy and a lot tired, my landlady called to tell me she thought we should take in the patio furniture and shutter the house. We would indeed get hit by the storm some time around 2 am and we should be cautious and prepared. Didier walked in the house after a bullshit day on the job to my insisting he start taking in the furniture while I fed and prepped the girlies for bed. It was, of course, already raining, soon to be pouring while furniture was brought in, some into our house, some into the guest house, some into a storage house on the property called the chattel house. After the tables, chairs, and loungers, along with tricycles, big wheels, and other riding toys were brought in, the windows and glass doors were shuttered and strapped shut with wooden beams. I took out candles, flashlights, made a little emergency escape pack and we went to bed.
When Virginie woke at 3 am and couldn't be satisfied with singing and nudges to take juice rather than nurse, I walked her to her father in our room and returned to the girls' room so that Lily would not be frightened if she woke up to a storm. About one hour later, we heard a Phhhmffff! like an pump gun and the power went out. It was pitch dark in the house. You couldn't see your hand in front of you. I felt the presence of something moving about and then saw a small light flickering. It was Didier with the flashlight walking through the house. He has heard the sound of the pump gun or whatever that was as well and has gotten up to take a look. With all the windows shuttered and it being completely black around us, we never did figure out what the sound was. The darkness was all encompassing and the rattling shutters made it sound like we would soon take off to Oz. I moved Lily from her bed to the guest bedroom with me, just in case the Aki tree next to the girls' room should fall. I mean, it really did sound like that was a possibility. Didier returned to our room with Virginie and they went back to sleep for about 2 more hours.
In the light of the day we could see that the pump/air gun sound we'd heard was the palm tree next to the pool breaking off and falling in. There was a palm tree sitting like a dunked tea bag in our pool. There was so much wind and rain. Looking out one of the uncovered windows in a bathroom, Didier watched two trees just snap on top and break behind the guesthouse. Hours later, as the monkeys came through to check out their old haunts, they found two of their favorite trees down. They moved on and I have not since seen them in the garden.
Trees are down everywhere. The lime tree in the front of the house is ripped out of the ground. One of the palms is hanging over the front wall. There are palm fronds all over the streets and a huge tree has crashed across our street preventing movement in or out.
Our neighbor paid some guys about $50-100 to remove the tree so he, and subsequently we, could get out. They took to it with machetes and saws. We could hear the sound of sawing into the afternoon as they tackled another tree crossing the main access road as well.
The two month renovation of the hotel where Didier works is over and with it, my semi-sense of calm. For his family, this job sucks. We see so little of him; he is exhausted and frustrated when he is able to be with us, and all of the tasks of the household and child-rearing, save driving, will fall back entirely on me. Not that I wasn't already topping off at "responsible for everything," but I could at least spend a little time with my husband of just under two years and enjoy his company while doing the dishes or checking in on the girls, folding laundry. You get the picture.
Last night in bed I found myself gasping for breath. I was truly struggling to breathe and started to panic. I sat up and tried to meditate to calm myself, unsure of what exactly this could be. Was I developing asthma after a year of breathing pollutants on the island? Didn't seem likely, though how some of these vehicles pass any emissions test or are deemed road-worthy is beyond me. I had exercised the other day and had no such difficulty. Could I have some sort of bronchial infection or irritation that constricted my lungs? I didn't wheeze or breathe heavily at all during the humid afternoons and the air conditioning was on at some modest temperature. Sitting up peering into the night, listening to Didier start the snorchestra, I felt the panic. I was having a freak out, a panic attack.
We are both under extreme amounts of stress and are unable to really help each other. The day to day of taking care of these children, listening to them, caring for them, feeding and clothing them, making sure assignments are done, papers are signed, doctors are visited, all the good stuff moms talk about and get the mute button pressed because even listening to the list is overwhelming, is just exhausting. When I add the cooking and the cleaning and the laundering and the entertaining, by the time they go to sleep at 7:15, I don't have any energy left. I am depleted and still see tasks before me. I miss my friends and more than I realized, I miss the insane circus that is my culture.
Let the Bajans have their craziness. Sometimes I want my E! True Hollywood Story, True Blood, Sopranos, non-stop coverage of whatever, Cosby reruns, Will and Grace, and commercials, commercials, commercials. Our satellite picks up programming from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and other Spanish-speaking countries, so not only do we miss much of the programming from the US, when we do get it, it is either subtitled or, my personal favorite, dubbed in Spanish. Sitting down for a zone out, if that were possible, would involve an assault of advertising and promotion that my three semesters of Spanish just didn't well prepare me for.
I'd hoped to address this with Didier at the end of the week, talk with him for the 10,000th time about helping me a little and giving him the "being a stay at home mother is one of the toughest jobs in the world" lecture/monologue/speech, when he blurted out in the car ride to Lily's school, "This is killing me. It's not going to change. I could one day tell you that this is it and we would have to go." I was astonished and looked at him like I had never seen him before or at least not as clearly as I was seeing him in that moment. He was tired and hurt and clearly spent.
For two months, he'd dealt only with upper management, no staff. He'd had positive conversations with his new General Manager about moving forward, making new things happen, starting fresh and on the eve of the full staff's arrival, he'd just crashed and burned. The workforce here in Barbados is less than desirable and I am surely not the first to say it. Coddling and too much support by government has made too many detached, unfocused, unconcerned, and disloyal to any company or organization. These feelings take the form of rampant high absenteeism, sick days that go on for months for illnesses that in another country wouldn't even get a blink, and slow, slow, slow service and execution of job tasks. Of course I understand the old colonial wounds that leaves a local population disinterested in the success of what it sees as an oppressive outside force (foreign companies and expatriates) taking advantage of the small guy(themselves), but with family from the southern United States and deep rooted understanding of the torment of colonialism and slave culture and mentality, I think a time has to come when you work with self respect, set your own goals, and try to achieve for yourself and your family. Didier is not seen as the enemy per se, but there is no reason to have loyalty to his company and therefore, no loyalty to the kitchen, its chef, or fellow employees.
The company, a major multinational, still expects that standard offered at any of its other hotels, and rightfully so. Didier is meant to provide that. But I wonder if any chef, any captain of any industry, could achieve all he or she is capable of without a team of strong players. I wonder how it would affect their souls, their sense of themselves if the product, no matter who they had working for them, still had their names attached to it.
I am angry, pissed actually, and there is no one to really be upset with. So we find ourselves here again. Both working for the goal of a strong family unit, but doing so independently of one another. We have a five year plan We have set goals for our family and for ourselves and have gone without some of the luxuries that might ease the burden a bit in order to save for that future. It is certainly worth it, but for this or because of this, we both are suffering from high anxiety.
(c) Copyright 2010. City Mom in the Jungle.
