Cayman should neither neglect nor undervalue the role of traditional culture when predicting and confronting the results of catastrophic hurricane events.
Traditional Caribbean culture offers insights into weather patterns and natural phenomena that more modern, scientific analyses cannot, said Franklin McDonald, senior technical adviser for the United Nations Development Program.
Speaking at the close of a three-day UN workshop on disaster management and recovery, Dr. McDonald described how communities might build resilience to natural disasters.
‘Disasters are not a question of if, but rather of when, and then after that, of when again,’ Dr. McDonald said.
He divided resilience into four categories:
Robustness: The ability of a community to withstand both physical and emotional stress without losing its function;
Redundancy: The extent to which the elements in a community continue to function in the event of disruption
Resourcefulness: The capacity to identify problems and mobilise resources
Rapidity: A society’s capacity to contain losses and avoid future disruption.
While achieving the four requires modern systems such as legislation, monitoring and even law enforcement, simpler, time-tested cultural traditions can contribute.
‘During Ivan, there were people who were very upset, reporting to news outlets about people walking around the streets with machetes,’ Dr. McDonald said.
‘Well, when a storm has torn everything up and blocked streets and homes and neighbourhoods, you’ll see me walking with a machete. That’s the best way I know to clear debris.
‘It’s traditional to take care of your own front yard, and then your own street, and to take care of the elderly,’ he said.
‘Caribbean societies have strong coping capacities and you don’t want to pull people away from that,’ Dr. McDonald said.
He cited his own experience growing up in Jamaica.
‘I probably know as much about the hurricane of 1932 as anyone because of listening to my grandmother’s stories about it for years and years,’ he said.
Inter-generational storytelling in particular is an invaluable conduit for information and the preservation of folkways that can help predict disruptive weather and reduce its effects.
‘In a sense, the Caribbean is a hurricane culture,’ Dr. McDonald said.
‘We all know, for example, that in the later part of the hurricane season, storms tend to come from the south, instead of the west, and that you get less than 24 hours notice when they come from the south.
‘A lot of lives were saved in the Asian tsunami, for example by the observations of people who have lived in coastal areas for generations. When the sea goes out, you go in,’ he said, referring to mass inland retreats by people anticipating the killer wave that swept the Indian Ocean littoral.
Dr. McDonald said few people realised that the Caribbean had a history of tsunamis.
‘The last one was in 1946 in the Dominican Republic. Thousands of people were killed,’ he said. ‘And before that, in 1917, on the west coast of Puerto Rico, where a couple of hundred died.’
Flight by particular species of birds in a particular direction was another traditional method of storm prediction, he said, as was the unique warning sound of blowing through conch shells, contributing to mass communications among population centres.
Quoting UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Dr. McDonald reminded his audience: ‘Much has been learnt from the creative disaster-prevention efforts of poor communities in developing countries.
‘Prevention policy is too important to be left to governments and international agencies alone. To succeed, it must also engage civil society, the private sector and the media.’
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