And while Belize has committed to help Jamaica after the storm - as you heard, Belizean students in that country are asking: "what about helping us before the storm?"
For struggling university students, there is no way they would have been able to budget for hurricane prep, let alone purchase tickets on the first flight out of Jamaica.
Our Belizean students, roughly 70 of them enrolled in UWI's Mona Campus will have no choice but to weather the storm.
And so The National Students Union of Belize has. joined forces to raise funds for these students in need of supplies both before and after the hurricane hits. We spoke with their director of events about what they are doing to provide support for their alumni.
Jaleeza Roberts, Director of Events, National Students Union of Belize
"Our plan right now is that each of the individuals we will be raising monetary donations to provide them with a stipend but we have also been in communication with, our vice president has been in communication from the union in Mona and so what we are planning to do is initially we will provide them with a monetary stipend and after that we will see how we can get relief supplies because we know that afterwards that will be happening and so our plan is that we will be opening a go fund me in the Us, we will open a fund me here in Belize because I know that now there is the app that is called fund me that also does stuff like that and then we will also be collecting monetary donations and additionally what we are doing today specifically, is that we are reaching out to businesses to see if they would want to donate towards it but also donate like a service or an item whereby we could raffle it because as I mentioned to you this won't be an easy task and it won't be something that will be resolved in one day the reality is that a lot of them are on campus and the very few are off campus and resources are limited. If electricity goes down like Samir mentioned to me the stove tops will not be able to be used because they are electrical stoves and so he was breaking it down to me and at this point it is really realizing a matter of the survival of our people."
"Its just to really bring the country together and for us to have one goal and that is to help our students that are out there because it could any of us, any of us could be in a situation like that no one can really guess a natural disaster especially with climate change when you are living on these Caribbean nations of course a hurricane is the inevitable but of course not everyone is privileged enough that when a hurricane is coming they can get a ticket to come back home it is not affordable for them so they need to stay there and they need to weather the storm. And so it is really about being thoughtful about those who are out there."
