All quiet on the western front.

A thousand million apologies for no news at the very point when my little islands were all over the news! Our internet connection went out last Thursday night and we only got the connection back this morning (over a week later) because Cable and Wireless were concentrating on getting phone connections back up and working after the 2 hurricanes. The past 10 days have been extraordinary to say the least and I promise to give you all the stories very soon. The short version is this:



Hanna covered all our precious belongings with salt water and some 3 days later the sun came out and the temperature soared just as Hurricane Ike was barrelling towards us for a direct hit. The heat is not the best time to be frantically cutting plywood to batten down the hatches! By Saturday afternoon we were all exhausted from plywooding the windows, strapping down the little wooden house, evacuating the labourers (3 of them) out of the wooden house which we were not sure was going to survive a direct hit and buying in supplies. Ike had been a cat. 2 going north of us, but he then gained strength and headed WSW. What made this all the more scary was we had no internet connection so no up to date information and were relying on phone calls from Grand Turk and the UK to give us a position. Our last news was about 4pm Saturday afternoon when Ike was going to pass about 30 miles to the north of Grand Turk as a Cat. 4....putting the eye slap bang over the top of Provo. The winds started about 6pm, by 2am they were screaming around the house, the power went out at 4am, we got no sleep at all and by 8am it was just very wet and windy outside. We had no power until about 4pm Sunday afternoon (we are on the same circuit as the hospital, hence the early return of power), many folk didn't get any power back until Wednesday afternoon.



The damage on Provo was mostly flooding, stripped shingles from roofs, all the floodlights down at the ball park and some tin roofs buckled. Most of the telegraph poles in Blue Hills were down across the road, but by and large, nothing too serious.



Despite numerous attempts we couldn't get any word from Grand Turk (Daniel's family live there) until Monday when we discovered that Ike, as a Cat. 4 gusting a Cat. 5 had gone right over the top of them (rumours of gusts up to 200 mph....!). Rumours flying around were that 80% of the houses there (and South Caicos and Salt Cay) had been damaged.



More news from Grand Turk came through during the week and on Thursday Nicky and Daniel flew over armed with tools and food to help out, Osh and I went after school Friday to also help out and take more supplies. The destruction on Grand Turk is biblical. I'll post more details later (very tired after an exhausting weekend on GT - working conditions worse than I ever experienced in rural Bangladesh or Ghana!) but in the meantime I think the photos will help you see what mother nature can do when she puts her mind to it. No-one died (miraculously) but Grand Turk is going to take a long time to recover from this and the living conditions there are the moment are grim to say the least.

The huge Ficus tree outside the little wooden house came down in Hurricane Hanna. Can probably be set back up again once it is pruned.

Boarding up the house for Hurricane Ike - makes it very dark and stuffy inside.

Ike blew over this container which was full of stuff (not ours, thank goodness) but fortunately didn't land on top of the new floor tiles that we simply ran out of time to move (needed the fork lift to move them and it was stuck in several feet of water at the airport!).

Ike put one car on top of another at Grand Turk airport.....

All the branches on one side of this Norfolk Pine have been completely removed by Ike....