Maria
Maria Hurricane Maria tore through the Eastern Caribbean as just one of many storms in the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. Back in my home in midwest America, the news was centered around the ruination of Puerto Rico. The loss of electricity. The audacity of America to not care for the people there, the lack of water and food, the scarcity of resources. Much quieter was the destruction of the small island country of Dominica. My grandfather and I arrived in Dominica a year before Maria hit, on the sixth of June in 2016. I was nineteen and had been out of school for exactly a year, which I’d spent working, saving, sleeping. I accompanied him out of both curiosity and boredom. It was grandpa that got us there, inviting himself and his Minnesotan granddaughter along on Mark Hauser’s excavation in the Caribbean. Mark was a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, and Grandpa knew him through a friend of friend, though the two had never m...