Cat Island updates and developments

The first airlifts of food and supplies have started to arrive on Cat Island. There are four or five resorts on Cat and I use the term resort loosely. Cat Island resorts aren't the kind of places where you get hot stone massages or room service. Rather, they're places to go unplug and unwind. The bonds forged at those resorts though, are lifelong. Two of those resorts have stepped up and turned themselves into aid organizations. The Bahamian government is overwhelmed by the widespread damage and supplies are stretched thin to say the least.

The two resorts, Greenwood and Fernandez Bay Village, are distributing food and supplies to anyone who needs it over there. The Bahamians who own and run Fernandez Bay are people I know and trust implicitly. Pam and Tony Armbrister, the people behind Fernandez Bay, are two of the most decent people I've ever met. Tony's family has been on Cat Island since the 1700s and he's a walking repository of that island's history and culture.
Tony and Pam have a daughter who lives in For Lauderdale and she's taken over as the point person for aid destined for Cat Island.

Cat Island is reachable by air and by the once-weekly visit by a mail boat. The mail boat leaves Fort Lauderdale and works its way though the Family Islands (formerly the Out Islands). It's on this mail boat that the bulk of the material aid destined for Cat Island gets delivered.

Air lifts are a great way to get emergency supplies over there, but it's what ends up on the mail boat that will sustain everybody until they can rebuild themselves.

I'm still planning to fly down there on Tuesday but Hurricane Katia looks like it's positioned to thwart my plans. Even though Katia isn't going to threaten Cat Island directly, the disturbance she's causing will make flying prohibitively dangerous. Add to that the lack of outside news available on the island once there and it's looking pretty grim.

My fundraising has been an incredible success and I thank everyone who's donated with every fiber of my being. Every dime you sent will go directly to the people who need it. If I don't make it down there this week, I'm going to wire the money we've raised to Fort Lauderdale and to the Armbristers of Fernandez Bay. Once in the hands of the Armbristers, your donations will be turned into food that'll be distributed to anyone who's hungry and in need. If you want material aid to go to the orphanage or to schools, just let them know. You can also donate to Remote Island Ministries, they too have pledged to donate every penny they collect.

In addition to raising money, the Armbristers are collecting and distributing non-financial assistance. They're loading up the mail boat and giving away anything that comes their way. If you, your church or your school wants to donate something other than money, the gang at Fernandez Bay will take anything. In particular, they need soap, first aid supplies, Home Depot gift cards, flashlights, batteries, tarps, nails, Publix gift cards, canned food, Costco gift cards, candles, games, children's books, school supplies and clothing. You can send any donations to Tameron Armbrister at 151 North Nob Hill Rd., #310, Plantation, FL. 33324. Fernandez Bay will cover the costs of shipping everything to the island.

In addition to that, my best friend in the universe and able pilot JD has sweetened the pot for the next two weeks. He's kicked in $250 to the money we've raised so far and he's agreed to match every donation, dollar for dollar, for the next two weeks. Please take him up on this generous offer. I love him to death but even so, make this hurt!

JD in better days on Cat Island

Fernandez Bay will be open for business again on November 1st and if you're looking for a getaway, I can think of no better place. Buoying the Bahamian economy is another way to help them rebuild. From now through June 30th, 2012, Fernandez Bay is running a promotion to make that easier to do. If you book four days at Fernandez Bay through Majestic Tours, they will fly you from Nassau to New Bight for free.
If you're planning to spend a week on a cruise or at the Atlantis, or Sandals or Club Med change your plans. Those places don't need your money but the smaller spots on the Family Islands do.
To make it easier, here are those links again.
Fernandez Bay VillageThe Greenwood Beach ResortMajestic Tours
This video was recorded this past week and in it you can get a feel for the scope of this disaster and a glimpse into the character of the people who call Cat Island home.


Once again, the link to donate is:

If that button doesn't work, click this link instead.

Hansgrohe and Axor are giving away a $10,000 bathroom

Do you want your life to look like this?

How about a bath that looks like this?

To celebrate their new Facebook page, Hansgrohe and their designer brand Axor are giving away $10,000 in bath fixtures. There's no trick or trial to go through in order to qualify. All you need to do is go to Hansgrohe's new Facebook page, give it a like and then fill out the entry form. The contest is running from now through October 31st, but don't put it off.

I take a shower every morning under a Hansgrohe fixture, I have the Pura Vida handheld and I love it. Though given the option, I'd add a few more fixtures to my set up. With $10 grand worth of Hansgrohe and Axor shower stuff I don't doubt for a second that my life would end up looking like this.

So go register on Hansgrohe's new Facebook page today.

Check out my Cat Island/ Hurricane Irene fundraiser too if you'd be so kind.

The best book I ever read: a Blog Off post

Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What's the best book you ever read?"

------------------------------------------------------------

This is a tough one and I'm having a hard time narrowing it down to just one. I've been a prolific reader my whole life and different periods have always revolved around different books. I remember reading Alex Haley's Roots when I was in sixth grade and I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever read.

In high school I bounced between Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. When I went away to college I was all about Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage until I ran into John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. I thought that was the most profound thing I'd ever read. A couple of years later I stumbled across John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and it held the title of best book I ever read for a number of years.

I learned to read when I was around four and since then I've cycled through countless Best Books I Ever Read. Whether fiction or non-fiction, there's always been something at the top of the pile. But I suppose the last ten years or so have brought with them a less flexible sense of the Best Books. I have my lifetime favorites of course and I do go back and re-read some of them from time to time. But not all of them are great. These same last ten years have had me gravitating toward the social criticism (fiction and non-) from the late 19th early part of the 20th Centuries.

The times we live in now are largely the result of societal shifts that took place over the last 100 years. Going back and reading what was a contemporary commentary from 1890 and seeing how times have changed or not changed since then is endlessly fascinating to me. It drives home the point that history is a continuum and that I'm part of that same continuum. It also tells me that human beings have always been human beings. We have the same emotional range, regardless of the era and the times. There's nothing I feel or think today that hasn't been felt or thought in an endless loop since Homo sapiens first graced the scene.

So with that said, there are three books that sit at the top of my favorite book pantheon and they've help that spot for a while. I'm sure it'll shift with time but on 31 August 2011, those three books are:

Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives. In 1890, Jacob Riis exposed the horrific conditions that New York's tenement dwellers lived in. Due to his book and its accompanying photographs, there arose a movement to clean up the inner cities in this country and at the same time a sense that there are minimum standards in which people should live and that it's in a society's best interest to establish and enforce those minimum standards.

Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt from 1922 is a scathing indictment of conformity, suburban and bohemian alike. George F. Babbitt is a Realtor and early in the novel his professional life's described as making "nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry,” but that he is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” It's scathing and prescient at the same time. Lewis wasn't the first to point out the holes in the American dream but I don't think anyone's ever done it better.

Finally, John Steinbeck's 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath holds a place so near and dear to me I struggle to find words to describe what an important work it is. Most people are forced to read Grapes when they're in high school and that's unfortunate. Few 17 year olds have the life experience to appreciate what goes on between the covers of that novel. In some ways it picks up where Babbitt left off. The Grapes of Wrath is all about the dark underbelly of capitalism, and underbelly that's become vogue to ignore again. If you haven't read The Grapes of Wrath since high school, read it again. If you've never read, read it for the first time. Read it before the next election.

What about you? What book or books hold the title great in your world?

 -------------------------------------------------

As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's posts. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here.

Help me help some people who need it

Photo: Edward Russell III

Finally, I got some news from Cat Island yesterday. The good news is that Hurricane Irene passed and no one died on the island. The bad news is that a place and a people who already had very little lost even that. Here's the front page of today's Nassau Guardian.

That's a large photo, click on it to see the whole thing. From the reports I'm getting, the headline in that newspaper couldn't be more true. Also from today's Guardian is an article reporting from the island itself. It doesn't sound very good, but Cat Islanders are a hardy lot and I don't doubt they will recover in time. In the short term however, the electricity and phone systems (which were always rudimentary) will be down for months. The massive flooding from the storm surge has fouled wells and ruined crops. The next six months will be difficult to say the least. I'd been planning to head to Cat Island for a vacation next month and in discussing it with my traveling companions, we're still going. Our vacation's been turned into a mission to help dig out and alleviate some misery but the prospect of being able to be of service for a week holds more appeal to me than lounging on a beach ever did. If you've ever been on a cruise through The Bahamas or been to an all-inclusive resort there you'd be surprised to learn that The Bahamas is very much a part of the developing world. Their national economy is completely dependent on tourism and maintaining that cash flow is priority one for the Bahamian government. As international aid starts to arrive in that country, it will be channeled into repairing the landscaping around Sandals in Exuma and the Atlantis on Paradise Island. What doesn't end up in the hands of the big resorts will be fixing the swimming pools of a variety of ministers in Nassau. Places like Cat Island, where there's no real tourism, will be the last in line for help after the first shipments of food and water stop. The only way around that is to give money, supplies and help to people there directly. One of the things I hope to accomplish there in a week and a half is to alleviate some of the hardship of the people of Cat Island. There's an orphanage on Cat, the Old Bight Mission Home. It's just down the road from the house where I stay and it provides a place to live and an education to ten orphaned kids. The husband and wife who run it are living saints. They'll need all sorts of things and I want to be able to lend a hand. The cultural life of Cat Islanders revolves around a handful of churches. It's those churches who will end up feeding everybody until things start to turn around. I want to be able to give them some money to help to do that. So, I am throwing $500 of my own money toward this effort. I'm turning to you guys to help me double that, at least, between now and when I leave on September 6th. I'm not at all used to asking for you to do more than click on the occasional link, but this is pretty important. So if you can help at all I know a whole bunch of people who'll be tremendously grateful. Give it some thought and thanks.

If that button doesn't work, click this link instead.

8/28 edited to add:

The Palm Beach Post just added this video to their website. It's an interview with two women who describe what it was like to live through the storm surge on Cat Island last week:

Storm comin'

Hurricane Irene is barreling toward The Bahamas right now.

If you click on that map the 2am track is connected to an M in a circle. M stands for Major Hurricane and that 2am track has Irene squarely between Exuma and Cat Island. A Major Hurricane is a category three or above.

I'm scheduled to go back to Cat Island in two weeks and if the airport's still there after tomorrow, we're still going. Instead of a vacation that'll have me perched here for six days,

My trip to Cat this time's going to become a humanitarian mission. That porch probably won't be there, but it's insured and will be rebuilt.

It's the non-expats of Cat Island we'll be going over to help.

When you're a typical Cat Islander, things like insurance are an unheard of luxury and when your house gets destroyed in a storm you live in a tent until you can raise enough cash to rebuild your home. In the meantime, you scrape by as best you can. That's who we'll be going to help.

The folks on the Carolina coast are going to get walloped by this storm this weekend and the damage there will be widespread. I'm not minimizing the the threat and trauma my fellow citizens are in for. But I can't help but worry more about a group of people I love who have so little already.

As soon as I get word about what's happened on Cat, I'm going to start raising money to help with relief efforts on Cat. You have been warned.