Raising help and hope from afar

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This article was published 25/09/2017 (2945 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Few Winnipeggers have heard of Denise Morancie’s tiny hometown of Wotton Waven, but she’s hoping they’ll step up to help the hurricane-ravaged community on the Caribbean island of Dominica.

“The village is totally cut off,” she said.

Saturday, Morancie spoke to her sister in Dominica, where the Category 5 hurricane Maria that hit on Sept. 18 has left the nation desperate for help.

“It was very emotional,” said Morancie, whose sister had to walk six hours from the mountain village to the next town to make the call to Canada for help.

“There’s no electricity, no running water,” she said.

Morancie moved to Winnipeg with her husband four years ago. She works as a cook at the University of Winnipeg and the bistro InFerno’s on Academy.

“They need food — dry goods, like rice, flour, candles — and flashlights,” she said.

“When I talked to my sister, I could hear the emotion in her voice, but she didn’t want to break down,” she said, choking up.

“If you see Dominica, it’s so heartbreaking.”

Morancie’s parents are subsistence and market-garden farmers in the village. They’re caring for her 18-year-old son, who is in his last year of high school.

“Every Saturday, my mom would go to the market to sell the stuff (from their garden), but now the market is gone,” she said.

Dominica’s seaport and airport are both out of service because of hurricane damage, but when they’re up and running, she wants to have a care package ready to go to her village.

She and her husband, Richard Hannah, set up a GoFundMe page to help Wotton Waven. They’re hoping to raise $25,000 to send containers to the village of just 300 residents, which is far removed from Dominica’s capital, Roseau, and unlikely to see much help for a long time, Hannah said.

“We’ll fill them with every kind of item that the village needs,” said Hannah, who met Morancie while working in Dominica. The couple has been in touch with the Commonwealth of Dominica Manitoba Association, which is also planning to raise funds for the devastated island of about 71,000 residents.

Canada has officially offered Dominica its help. On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke by telephone with Dominica’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, and reaffirmed “the positive bilateral relationship that exists between Canada and Dominica,” the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said in a statement.

The PMO said Trudeau spoke to his Caribbean counterpart of measures that are underway, including the dispatch of HMCS St. John’s to support the humanitarian assistance efforts.

Morancie knows first-hand what people there are dealing with right now.

“I went through hurricane David in 1979,” she said.

“The same thing happened.”

She was just five years old and her family ran to the school for shelter, but it was destroyed.

“The whole school went,” she said.

She remembers being blown away by the force of the storm — literally.

“I was up in the air — my dad pulled me down,” she said.

People in Wotton Waven survived on breadfruit that grows there in abundance until the day help arrived.

“The first people who helped us were Canadian missionaries who came and brought food and clothes,” Morancie said.

Villagers in Wotton Waven were grateful, she said, but also gobsmacked.

“We’re a small village — how did they find where we are?” she said.

Now she’s hoping Canadians will once again find a way to aid her village.

Further information about the fundraising effort can be found at gofundme.com/hope-for-dominica.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca