In a press release sent to Q95 news on Wednesday, IOM said over 580 families who lost their roof and nearly everything else after Hurricane Maria, have received assistance from the UN Migration Agency (IOM) to rebuild stronger, more resilient roofs.
An IOM contingent arrived in Dominica less than two weeks after the category five hurricane decimated Dominica on September 18, 2017, damaging or destroying 90% of housing stocks. Almost one year after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, Dominica is struggling to go back to normalcy. Most of the country has been reconnected to the national water and power grids, schools have reopened, and the government claims it is working to make Dominica the world’s first climate resilient country. Notwithstanding, if the array of houses covered in tattered tarps, the piles of distorted galvanized sheets at many bends, or the ghosts of abandoned homes and businesses littered around the country are any indication, there is still a great deal of work to be done. “Getting to this stage has not been easy,” says Jan-Willem Wegdam, Team Leader of IOM Dominica. “We have had to be creative to solve procurement issues, to obtain scarce building materials, and to recruit skilled carpenters from the wider Caribbean, because we simply did not have enough available workforce locally to implement the tasks. We have been working with many international and local organizations: Habitat for Humanity, ADRA, All Hands & Hearts, volunteer builders from the Mennonite community and, of course, our migrant carpenters.”
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