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On August 31, 2019, Nadia, a stoic thirty-nine-year-old in pigtails, heard a voice through a loudspeaker on a vehicle circling the Mudd, her tranquil neighborhood in the Bahamas. “Seek shelter!” the voice said. For days, Nadia’s two sons, aged six and ten, had been watching news reports about an incoming storm called Hurricane Dorian, which broadcasters warned would cause historic destruction on the islands. “Mom, a big one’s coming,” Nadia’s ten-year-old, a skinny, bright-eyed math whiz named Kesnel, said. “We’d better board up the windows.” The next day, as the storm descended, Nadia and her sons ran to a local church for refuge. Water rushed over the chapel’s floorboards and rose past the children’s knees. Nadia wished that she could have fled the Bahamas before Dorian hit, but, like several thousands of her fellow-Haitians living there, she was undocumented, and wouldn’t have been allowed to return. (To protect them from government retaliation, the family requested the use of pseudonyms.) At the church, she bowed her head, pictured her favorite Biblical figures, who always prevailed amid disaster—Esther, Job, Jonah in the mouth of the whale—and prayed that she would make it through.