Governor assures Nicaraguans: ‘We’re doing all we can’

Under the fruit trees, Governor Martyn Roper on Monday sat and listened to the stories of hardship and despair among Cayman’s Nicaraguan community.

Stranded on the island without income and reliant on charity for food, the group is desperate to get home.

The Governor’s Office has been working diplomatic channels to try to arrange an evacuation flight. But the borders of the Central American country remain closed – even for born-and-bred Nicaraguans.

Roper, who was on a visit with charity Acts of Random Kindness, sat for around 30 minutes, listening to the concerns of the group and informing them of the efforts being made on their behalf.

“The situation for the Nicaraguans is a really difficult one and I sympathise hugely with their plight,” he told the Cayman Compass after the meeting in the George Town neighbourhood.

“Just talking to the members of the community here, it is a desperate situation and we really need to help them. They have just lost all their income. If it hadn’t been for Acts of Random Kindness, they wouldn’t have food on their table every day.”

The governor said if they tested negative for COVID-19, there might be some possibility of them returning home. But much work remains to be done before an evacuation flight is agreed with the Nicaraguan government.

In the interim, he recognised the Nicaraguans, just one group of foreign nationals stranded in Cayman without income, were facing hard times.

“It is a very desperate and tragic situation and all I can say is we are doing everything we can to help them and enable them to go back to Nicaragua as soon as possible,” Roper said.

Visit uplifting for community

Norlan Jiminez, a former cleaner who lost his job when the lockdown was put in place, said it had been uplifting for the governor to visit.

“He says he is fighting to get us home… they are trying to do their best to get us home and we are happy about that,” Jiminez said.

“Everybody is happy because we have someone listening to us.”

He said he had explained his own situation to the governor, telling him how he is now struggling to provide for his children back home.

Jiminez also appealed to Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega to make it possible for his people to return home.

“I would just like to ask him to let us in,” he said.

“Our family is suffering and they want to see us now. My mum and other mums and brothers, sisters, friends, are protesting on the street because they want the government to allow us back in.”

He added, “We just ask him to open the border for us. We are Nicaraguan, we need to get home.

“We have no other country or anywhere else to go.”

Need continues to grow

Tara Nielsen, of ARK, which has been providing food to the group, said she had brought the governor to the apartment block on Avon Way as part of a visit with the charity.

“I really felt compelled to invite him to meet them and sit and talk with them because I knew that emotionally that would be really good for them and be very encouraging to them. He agreed right away,” she said.

Nielsen said just hearing from the governor and having him listen to them, had been morale boosting for the group.

She said many of them were out of work for the first time in their lives, through no fault of their own.

“They are here (in Cayman) to provide for their children and their parents and they can’t, and, to make matters worse, they are trapped away from them.”

She said hearing their personal stories had been enlightening for the governor and she invites any member of government to come along with ARK and see the situation on the street.

“It is one thing to imagine the different problems they are facing,” she said, “but it is a different thing when you hear it from the people that are enduring those difficulties…

“I am not sure why it is so difficult to associate this with a humanitarian crisis – they haven’t made one penny in 10 weeks, they can’t get home, they can’t pay their rent, their utilities, they can’t buy food. That’s a humanitarian crisis and this is just one pocket of foreign workers.”

ARK helps Caymanian families year-round with education and housing issues but expanded its services to provide food and to address the need in the expat community since the COVID-19 crisis began.

The charity is providing meals to around 2,000 people, with the numbers going up every week.

Roper, who also toured the soup kitchen at Deckers restaurant and met with volunteers, said he had been impressed with the scale of the operation.

“They really are doing an incredible job,” he added.

He acknowledged the Nicaraguans are just one group amid many communities of foreign workers that are struggling to survive as they wait for the chance to return home.

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, the Governor’s Office has arranged 25 evacuation flights to multiple countries.

But costs, border closures and diplomatic challenges have meant that many guest workers have not been able to go home and are effectively stranded without income.

Even Cayman’s closest neighbour, Jamaica, only opened its borders to its own citizens last week.

“There are still large numbers of people who want to go home,” Roper said. “The Jamaican community is another example. We arranged one flight last week but that was really a drop in the ocean. There are lots more that want to go.”

He said his office would continue to work hard to arrange the flights. In the meantime, the charities continue to help feed those who cannot work.

Roper acknowledged the non-profits were in some cases struggling for funds but said new sources of cash, such as the private sector-led R3 Cayman Foundation, were gearing up to provide support.

“We are fortunate to have private benefactors stepping up,” he added.

 

• Videos by Andrel Harris