There are places in Colombia where getting seriously ill is not a possibility. In Providencia, the Caribbean island that was destroyed a year ago by Hurricane Iota, its inhabitants have always held their breath. Slipping through rubble, being run over by a motorcycle or a vehicle that crosses the island at full speed is to surrender to an almost never flattering destination, or to God, in whom they believe so much on this island, located 1,250 kilometers from Bogotá. If the disease arrives and becomes complicated, we must beg that an ambulance plane or a boat arrive soon to be taken to the neighboring island of San Andrés, and that the health companies authorize an exit to the mainland. They say on the island that children have not been born there for years and there are those who have died waiting for an authorization. The situation got even more complicated a year ago. In the early morning of November 16, 2020, the hurricane hit the island and 98 percent of its buildings collapsed. The hospital too.
Eight days after the disaster, the government installed a makeshift field hospital. “He was pro-vi-sio-nal,” emphasizes Dr. Dionisio Mow, who has been treating patients under those tents all year, where he does what he can. “They forgot about the hospital,” denounces the doctor, sitting in his canvas office.
It is a Wednesday in November, a few days after the anniversary of the devastation of the island. Outside, the sun shoots mercilessly against the head. Inside the tents, the covid-19 virus is free and doctors have been doing tests all morning. A line of workers employed in the reconstruction of the island awaits their turn to find out if they are one of those affected by an outbreak that that day already adds 41 cases. Reagents out of stock, a young man informs Dr. Mow.
“It has been our turn as drug traffickers to get on speedboats at night and arrive in San Andrés so that patients can go to surgery. We do it with great pleasure, we love it, but they forgot to rebuild the hospital ”, laments the doctor. “Patients have to bring blankets because at night in these tents your bones ache from the cold,” he denounces.
Judith Mclean is the wife of Rojino Levinstong, one of the two killed during the hurricane, and she still lives in tents outdoors. He remembers, although he shudders when mentioning the dawn of November 16, that Rojino or Fuentes, as he was known on the island, died saving others. “By doing what the government should do, which did not provide good shelters. Even today we don’t have shelters, ”he explains.
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Her 46-year-old husband took refuge as instructed in a church on the island, but this too began to collapse. “Rojino was helping to get people to another place and a piece of wall fell on him,” he says. In a country with so many catastrophes, many forget that the hurricane also left fatalities.
Now Judith, a nurse by profession, suffers from the absence of a good hospital. At the end of October this year, her six-year-old grandson was run over by a woman who was driving a vehicle, called a mule on the island. The little boy was left unconscious and suffered a head trauma, had to be transferred to San Andrés and then to Barranquilla. In Providencia they did not have a way to do a CT scan.
“Having a good hospital is important, super urgent. I do not understand why they have not dedicated themselves to rebuilding it. The 16th is going to be a year since that unpleasant event and they haven’t even started ”, says the woman. That night that she avoids remembering, while her husband died, she worked in the hospital that also collapsed. Imagine now that we are in tents. If something similar happened again, the rain and the breeze would carry them away. There we would not save anyone ”.
The white mass of what was once the hospital is still fallen and abandoned. Last June, the Government of Iván Duque announced the beginning of the reconstruction process with the support of the private sector, but it is barely in the designs. Luis Fernando Correa, infrastructure manager of the Ministry of Health, tells EL PAÍS that the contract was signed in September 2021 and they expect to begin construction in early 2022.
“We will not have new infrastructure for another eight months. Meanwhile, we will dismantle the tents and transfer all the services to the Spa de Fontur (the official institution dedicated to tourism) ”, says Correa, who admits that the tents are not the“ ideal ”place. However, the dream of building a more complex hospital, as Duque promised, would take at least three years.
There are still people in tents
Providencia is today an island under construction. From the landing, workers can be seen forcibly advancing on wooden or brick structures; a contingent of soldiers disembarks from an Air Force plane, others collect debris that is still scattered around the island. You can see that in a few days government officials will talk about the progress of reconstruction one year after the hurricane. “The refrigerators that donate will also return, it is what happens whenever they come to show progress,” says a resident of the island.
The visits made by President Iván Duque during the year did not leave a good taste among many Raizales, as the inhabitants of the islands of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina are known. Days after the emergency, Duque spoke of a plan to rebuild the island in 100 days. The islanders began a countdown that was not fulfilled. The Government later said that the departure date to which the Government was referring was January 2021. They do not give the accounts that way either. The islanders themselves know that the distance from the mainland makes the transfer of materials even more expensive and difficult. But they took him at his word. Nor did the words of the manager for the Reconstruction of San Andrés y Providencia, Susana Correa, who said on local radio that the islanders were impatient and that they did not accept the prefabricated house models that the Government wanted to install.
They liked less that the president stamped his signature on the wall of a kindergarten with the phrase: “To the Divine Providence, with my eternal love,” just when there were only two houses standing. Now, the walls speak. In many you can still see the marks of the numbers of the houses that are still waiting to be built and in others, as if it were a response to Duque, it is written: “Pure paint, pure makeup.”
Following complaints from the media, the Ombudsman’s Office and the Comptroller’s Office for the slow progress, has now increased the speed of reconstruction. Of 1,787 homes that need to be rebuilt or repaired, 894 have been delivered and there are 280 construction sites open, with contractors rushing to deliver at least 1,160 homes by the anniversary. “Of the 910 new houses, 486 are in different stages of the process and 269 have been delivered,” reports the Territorial Development Finance (Findeter) to this newspaper.
Meanwhile, there are still 84 families living in tents. Judith, her mother with cancer, and her sick father are among them. “Not even being a relative of one of the two deceased have given us priority,” he says. In anticipation, she secured a brick donation and is building a home, but is concerned about her parents. “They began to build them in June and nothing. Things are going super slow and there is no where to get into it ”.
Time becomes a more desperate measure when you live in the open. Arelis Fonseca, former glory of the softball, he sleeps and bathes inside the tent where he has been with his daughters for almost a year. Before entering it, you have to go through the skeleton of what was once its white house. Imagine the room where he fixed hands and eyebrows, the place where the kitchen was and now there is only a washing machine or the remains of what was the bathroom.
Minutes before the rain falls on the house without a roof, the official from one of the many construction companies that are now on the island has visited it. He shows him the plan of what his house will be like, asks him where his favorite place was, talks about participatory architecture. Arelis has already heard about everything and only wants to know one thing: And where is the safe zone going to be? The official talks about the bathrooms, the place where the islanders instinctively huddled to avoid flying away during the hurricane.
But Arelis is not convinced. His biggest concern and that of many on the island is what will happen “if the hurricane happens again.” “You cannot live in the bathrooms. That is not dignity, ”he says.
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