Many things have changed since the Hurricane, both on the island of Dominica and in our lives.

Nature tries to bounce back, but visibly things got a bit out of natural balance. We had a wave of mosquito infestation – which thankfully seems to be ending. Then we had a plague of butterflies – so many of them – white, brown, orange. Looks lovely but their eggs hatching means lots of fragile flora struggling to get back is being eaten on the spot. That should stabilize too. As for plants – bushes and smaller plants are bouncing back nicely, but many bigger and older trees are still in shock, with broken limbs and leafless. The clear winner of this post-hurricane period are vines. They spread everywhere, strangling smaller trees. When you look around you see the rich greenery and thing all is back to normal. But most green you see are bindweed- “morning glory” plants, various wild peas and wild cucumbers – and also – in some unimaginable way – pumpkins! They took over, growing everywhere, in most unlikely places. Practically everyone has now several healthy pumpkins around the house. At least this – with shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables – is welcome bonus.

I bet when bigger trees restore their branches and put more leaves, the resulting shade will give many vines checkmate, but it may still be some time away. Parrots – homeless and hungry – migrated from devastated old forest to more populated areas. They add lots of chatter to the sounds of nature, but surely they would be more happy back in primary forest. One day soon, perhaps.

Many things change around us, a visible progress is being made. Roads get cleaned, debris removed, Roseau city getting a face lift here and there. Plenty still to be done – an overwhelming task. Our favourite Fort Young Hotel perhaps leads the progress, already partially open for guests while working on impressive upgrades. This is the resilience in making – taking advantage of destruction not to just rebuild, but to make things better. Much better. It is uplifting to watch these fast-paced works. We just finished a sent of new promotional photos for them, proud to be part of this rebuilding effort. Feels good to see our photos in Washington Post and in other media.

So things are changing for us. We’ve got used to lack of electricity and using our Coleman gasoline lamp in evenings. It is actually quite nice, like old times. A small generator sent to us by our old, reliable friend Les takes care of charging batteries, laptop, or running our bread mixer – talk about power lines being fixed in our area sounds almost unreal. Hard to imagine having power constantly on – an excess luxury!

We started (in part thanks to help received from many of you!) to rebuild our home, and we know it will be a challenging task – building materials are hard to get, the port – still shattered after hurricane seems not capable to process promptly all incoming shipments – resulting in weeks if not months long – delays in supply stream. But life goes on. We published more articles including another one for MACO magazine – this time about progress of cleanup works in Dominica and new opportunities created by hurricane, and we now work on another story.

Another photography job for Barbados tourism allowed us a glimpse at the “normal” world. What a weird place – all roofs are intact, trees green and happy, no mess to clean-up. We almost forgot how it can be.

We keep documenting all changes, photographing and filming with drone the progress around us. As more creative work is on the horizon we will keep you posted with new developments soon. Stay tuned!

Derek and Margaret

PS. Thank you to all friends who helped us financially in this critical time. If you still want to add your brick to rebuilding our lives, here is our paypal link  www.paypal.me/DerekGalon
Thank you!

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