Week Fame and Hurricanes

Huge week for the Buffalo Bills and the Bills Bar in Dominica! I hope everyone enjoyed the Buffalo Bills making Tom Brady cry like a little girl as much as we did in Dominica. The only thing that came close to rivaling that this week was being quoted on the front page of the Buffalo News about Tom Brady’s girly hair http://www.buffalonews.com/incoming/article568402.ece

That’s right. The Buffalo Bills Backers Bar in Dominica was featured on the front page of the Buffalo News on Saturday morning with a big picture of Ma Clem, Glen John (my neighbor) and myself. I am still quite excited about it. There will be nothing better than giving Ma Clem a huge framed picture of herself on the front page of the newspaper!

Since I wrote this on Tuesday I have not had electricity or water. Dominica was brushed by Hurricane Ophelia and it was ugly. Flooding, landslides and unpassable roads were the norm for the past two days. Being incredibly lucky I didn’t have to leave my village and avoided spending countless hours stuck in a bus or walking through knee deep mud.

I have been better about storing water for times when the water goes out (about once a week for around 18 -24 hours) but I was absolutely not prepared for 48 hours. I had plenty of drinking water but no cleaning water. I had to step up my indoor survival skills by doing things like collecting rainwater and manually pouring it in the toilet tank to flush my toilet, screaming at anyone who approached my refrigerator to make sure NO coldness got out (luckily I have a Dominican style refrigerator which has an icebox that has to be defrosted which I whine about but because of it the 5 pounds of chicken wings I purchased are still frozen), putting up a mosquito net at 3 am while holding a flashlight, and most importantly making sure that your faucet is closed even when the water is off lest you come home to an entirely flooded kitchen that makes the straw mat, handmade by your landlady, smell like a moldy barn.

Luckily everyone is safe in Dominica and all of the damage was to property and not people.

But still- this is some rough damage:

Stolen photo of Massacre- a town south of me

Dominican Phrase Book: “Current” is used instead of electricity and it is referred to as an object.

Example:

Adorable Grade 3 student when the lights went out: “Miss! Miss! They took the current!”

Neighbor: “Air-een, did they give your current back yet?”