Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter
Jamaican hotel workers who survived Hurricane Katrina's walloping of the United States Gulf Coast arrive at the Norman Manley International Airport last Wednesday. - IAN ALLEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
IMAGINE BEING in pitch darkness, inhaling the stench of the dead, rotting corpses floating around in murky water.
These are some of the images that still linger in the mind of Hermine Clarke-Lewis, a Jamaican survivor of Hurricane Katrina.
She was among the more than 300 Jamaican hotel workers who were caught in the storm that devastated Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana along the United States Gulf Coast two weeks ago.
WORST HURRICANE EVER
She said that the hurricane was the worst she had ever seen.
"I have never seen a storm like that before. We had the storm for about 13 hours, and then there was a big tidal wave, about 25 feet. The highway was flooded with water, there was no road to drive on," she recalled.
But what remains vivid in her mind, she told The Gleaner minutes after landing at the Norman Manley International Airport last week, were the "dead bodies floating around".
"The place was very stink. We did not have any light or any water; it was very rough. I wanted to come home the same day but I am glad I am alive," she added.
RUN FOR COVER
Clarke-Lewis and other colleagues who worked at the Casino Magic in Biloxi, Mississippi, took refuge at a shelter four miles from their apartments.
After the storm, they headed back to their dwellings but the journey was very difficult because the bridge on which they had travelled was destroyed.
"We had to walk for four miles to get to our houses," she said. Asked how she managed to survive, she said that it was the good old wood fire that kept them alive.
"When we got home, we had some chickens (meat) and we put it in a cooler and we made up wood fire and that is how we survived," she grinned.
Serene Williams, another hotel worker, told a similar story. "We as Jamaicans had to come together, because if we did not come together, we would be hungry. We had to go look wood," she said laughing.
She said the devastation forced everyone to look out for each other.
"We were in the bushes cooking our food and when the Americans saw us cooking, they had to come and join us," she said.
Despite the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, Clarke-Lewis, who has been on the Ministry of Labour's Overseas Employment Programme for the past 12 years, said that she would still enrol in the programme.
"Yeah, I would go back, but not to Mississippi," she chuckled.
