Bishop Clyde Harvey of St George’s in Grenada arrived by boat to the island of Carriacou July 12 to find “a traumatised community” and at least two diocesan churches that suffered catastrophic hurricane damage.
On July 1, the Category 4 Hurricane Beryl landed a severe blow to the two islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique.
“On Friday I went to Carriacou and it rained and rained and rained – Carriacou is normally a place lacking rain, but people had buckets sitting out and full of water,” Bishop Harvey said by phone July 15 according to Detroit Catholic, a digital news service of the Archdiocese of Detroit.
“We also have had a priest on Carriacou as a permanent (presence) and I wasn’t feeling too badly about the time it took for me to get there, but I didn’t appreciate the seriousness of the damages there until I arrived,” the bishop added.
He said the Our Lady of the Rosary Church in L’Esterre was destroyed. “Our Lady of the Rosary Church had been completely flattened – it is a beautiful community and has one of the best choirs on the island. The only thing left standing was a sanctuary wall with the crucifix and the tabernacle still standing. That church will have to be rebuilt completely from scratch,” the bishop told the Florida Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Miami.
Another, Church of St Patrick in Hillsborough on Carriacou, had only lost its roofing but would need to be assessed as to whether the remaining walls can serve as a future church there or will need to be replaced.
Other diocesan teams have already made visitations and humanitarian trips to northern Grenada and Petite Martinique, where at least one church reportedly lost part of its roof and suffered other structural damage, he added.
Bishop Harvey praised the early post-hurricane outreach of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Caritas Antilles and the local Youth Emergency Action Committee, or YEAC, which is associated with the Antilles Episcopal Conference geared at engaging Caribbean Catholic youth to respond locally in times of emergency and following hurricanes especially.
Catholic schools in the area, the bishop added, fared fairly well structurally, he noted. Some were continuing to serve as hurricane shelters—a fact that will likely have later consequences as the summer moves into the start of a new school year. One of the government schools in Carriacou was completely destroyed, he noted.
To assist with mental health needs, a team of counsellors associated with the Franciscan Institute in the Caribbean made several visits to hard hit areas and were looking at ways to support long term psycho-social support for those regions.
“One of the major challenges now is how do we help with the rebuilding programme but also with rebuilding lives – the real rebuilding is rebuilding people’s lives,” Bishop Harvey said.
