By Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor 
Blackwood Meeks
THE HORRIBLE stories about the depth of human depravity from which the furious winds of Hurricane Ivan stripped all cover will, perhaps, not all be told. Happily, for every one of these unspeakable tales there are also the most uplifting stories about the nobleness of humanity.
Take for example, a secretary at one of our educational institutions. I met her at her desk late on Wednesday, September 8, before the anticipated visit of 'Ivan'. I shared with her my alarm that at that time shops and supermarkets were already out of candles and batteries. The matter was of little concern to her. "I work so hard," she said, "And the only preparation I can do for the hurricane is pray. God will provide."
She spoke on behalf of thousands of Jamaicans who did not have the option to lament about items in short supply. Yet she remained at her desk completing the task that she could not allow "to pile up", maintaining the institutional memory of her place of work, even though she was aware of the possibility that after the storm she herself might have been only a memory.
HOUSE WENT
Those who passed through the institution might not want to hear anything about Ivan when it came time to collect their transcripts. Thankfully, she is still with us. Her house went. She was back at work, heavily involved in the clean-up operations.
And then there were the young men from Killancholly in St. Mary where I live, who own no motor vehicles, have no real need to be on my bit of the road one mile from the nearest house, but who were busy with machetes removing trees that needed chain saws to do the work, and then arrived at my house when the job was done to inform me that my forced maroonage was over and that I could "drive anywhere now". I had no idea they were undertaking this task and had been trying unsuccessfully, for the better part of two days to
contact some official agency to come to my rescue.
SELFLESSNESS
There must be so many other taken-for-granted tales of selfless kindness, matched perhaps only by the will to get up and keep going, rooted in the experience and knowledge of forced self-reliance. If only we could shift gears a bit to give them the media attention we seem to reserve that things that make us clap our hands to our lips and recoil in protection of our good Christian upbringing.
Up until Tuesday afternoon when I returned to Kingston, to my certain knowledge, not one 'representative of the people' or State agency had been inside of Killancholly where more than 50 per cent of the buildings suffered at least roof damage and bare ground stood where crops had been thriving up to the Thursday before Ivan. Yet farmers were replanting their crops on Sunday. Villagers were assisting each other to reuse the same old zinc sheets and worn rafters to recover their houses.
Women and children gathered at the spring to fetch water and do laundry with a marked emphasis on preparing school uniforms. And everyone salvaged food crops from downed trees.
UNDIGNIFIED OFFERINGS
All of this was done against the backdrop of the most inspiring music written, performed and produced by Jamaicans known and unknown, which thanks to Ivan, we now know that the radio stations have in their libraries. We now know that these are obviously accessible to the same disc jockeys who, under 'normal' conditions feed us a steady diet of banal, spirit-sapping, undignified offerings to which incidentally, they returned as soon as Ivan waved goodbye.
I wondered what the late great Winston Hubert McIntosh, a.k.a. Peter Tosh, would have said about this. I wondered if somewhere in the wind the Stepping Razor felled a few trees as we jointly forgot to mention that he was our first September 11 and that the murder of this giant of a fighter for equal rights and justice marked a defining moment in our collective unbecoming, and that a large part of that undoing is our penchant for carrying other people's burden to the detriment of understanding and unloading our own.
I know that Peter would have had more than a thing or two to say on behalf of the common people, 'the poor little people who will be builders for eternity' who construct and reconstruct Jamaica time and again and still lack the means to prepare themselves for disasters. Their reward is usually to remain in that group for whom there is no timetable about when their utilities, irregular as they too often are in some localities, might return to tolerable.
I know that Peter would have been 'coming in hot' over the 'downpressors' who 'drink dem big champagne and laugh' as the poor who live from breakfast to dinner grow psychotic over where to find the money for the igloo that must carry the water to school on the backs of the little ones who have received no post trauma stress counselling that will make school life with diminished facilities bearable. And before any of them even recognises that there is something in this to think about they have to 'pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again'.
UNITY IN DISASTERS
As a people, we no doubt have the capacity to unite around a national effort to heal from a natural disaster. Does that mean that we are unified nation? Can a
natural disaster or even a national joyous occasion like our performance at the Olympics transform us into that, eliminate criminality, rid us of the behaviours of which so much shame and disgust have been expressed post-Ivan unless and until we clear up the mess of social, economic and political injustice which for far too long has been blowing the political storm which has left the man Peter wailing in the wilderness for equal rights and justice? And if we do not address these issues can we return to anything but a normal, abhorrent abnormality?
"And that's why poor little people like you and me
Will be builders for eternity
Each is given a bag of tools
A shapeless mass and a book of rules."
