On the Ground Update: For Hurricane Dorian’s Survivors, Not All Wounds Are Physical

On September 1, Hurricane Dorian ravaged the Bahamas as a category 5 storm with winds over 200 miles per hour. Project HOPE was one of the first organizations on the ground, and today our emergency response team is still there, helping meet people’s medical needs and prepare for the long recovery ahead.

Dr. Marvin Wang is a pediatrician at Mount Auburn Hospital in Boston. Shortly after the storm, he traveled to the Bahamas with Project HOPE as one of our volunteer physicians. He wrote this dispatch from the field while helping evacuee children in Nassau.

Yordelee’s Story

Yordelee is 23 years old. Though he was raised in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island, he was living alone on Abaco when Hurricane Dorian hit.

Yordelee never heard the warnings about Hurricane Dorian, so, like many, he assumed it was going to be a tropical storm like any other. But when the waters never stopped rising higher, it was apparent he needed to find safety.

Yordelee had three friends with him during the storm, and together they decided to go to the church and sit on the roof. As the water continued to rise, they tried to catch several other friends who were sweeping through the current. In the midst of these attempted rescues, Yordelee watched as a two-by-four slammed into a friend’s lower back. He hasn’t seen him, or many of his other friends, since the storm. He assumes they are all dead, though there are still survivors on Abaco and scattered throughout other shelters in Nassau.

At a certain point, Yordelee realized that he needed to jump off the church and find better shelter. So he jumped — and landed on an upright nail. Despite the pain, he made it to safety in a government building, where he rode out the rest of the storm.

Yordelee was able to receive some basic wound care for his foot, but he would have to wait two days before the police and the U.S. Coast Guard would evacuate him to Nassau in order to get more proper treatment. He was sent to a shelter tucked away in the first floor of a church. There, he was evaluated by a Project HOPE physician, who realized that the wound would need a debridement procedure to remove contaminated tissue. Yordelee was quickly sent to the local South Beach clinic to get the procedure and begin antibiotics.

That was three weeks ago. Since his evacuation and the treatment for his foot, Yordelee has essentially been sitting alone in front of the shelter in a chair, just wondering what will happen next. He was already living alone before the storm; now that he’s in Nassau, he only has one or two friends at most living in neighboring shelters.

Our Project HOPE team has been coming every day to tend to Yordelee’s wound care, but it soon became clear that his emotional needs were more salient. Every day, we would arrive to find him sitting in the chair. Except when it was time to come have his dressing changed, he would always return to his spot outside, alone. He wouldn’t engage with anyone; he would just stare out at the street.

Before the storm, Yordelee had finished high school and was working for a local Abaco ferry company. But he was living purely on cash, with no bank account or credit to his name. As a Bahamian citizen with a passport, he is better situated than most to receive government services. Yet, despite knowing that he can get help, he still feels helpless.

Like his peers who are also evacuated, Yordelee feels stuck — hopeless, without a future. With much of Abaco still devastated, there doesn’t appear to be any place to return to, let alone anything to do while living in a shelter.

In the weeks following the hurricane, Project HOPE’s emergency response team and volunteers have been able to manage the acute medical issues for the storm’s evacuees and survivors. Many of these survivors, however, are in the same sort of “limbo” as Yordelee, not knowing what the future holds for them. As you walk through the shelters you can see it, especially among the older population — a constant dazed look on their faces. They don’t talk much. They just stare out into space all day, lying on their air mattresses or cots.

Overwhelmingly, all the shelter officials agree that the thing these people need most is emotional and mental health assistance. So, as medical clinicians, we do the best we can by trying to manage their day-to-day physical issues — while also trying to greet and engage with all the Yordelees who sit outside the shelter, day after day, wondering what comes next.

To learn more about how you can become a volunteer with Project HOPE and help people after disaster, click here. For more on how Project HOPE is helping the people of the Bahamas recover from Hurricane Dorian, click here.

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