It is often said that strength shines through in adversity and the teachers and students at St. George's Preparatory School are living proof of this.

Five classrooms and numerous offices, including the principal's, were destroyed in Hurricane Fabian five years ago. A tornado, which those living across from the road from school described as a "freight train barreling towards them", ripped apart the 85-year-old building and left in its wake a pile of rubble. Walls were damaged, desks and chairs were left strewn across the sports field, twisted wrecks of metal around the children's swings and text books, wall hangings and other education material were literally gone with the wind.

But the clouds had barely moved across the island when a handful of St. George's based teachers arrived at the school and began salvaging what they could — dodging falling ceiling tiles, crawling under fallen beams and moving concrete blocks to collect as many of their belongings as they could.

Principal Mary Lodge recalled how difficult it was for many of her long serving teachers to simply accept that items they were given by adoring pupils were gone forever.

What was even more frustrating for her was it wasn't until three days later that she finally got to see the damage firsthand.

"A friend of my neighbour's who lives in St. George's had sent her photos of the Prep and she told me to come and see," she recalls. "The first photo I saw was taken from the road and all I saw was a bit of the roof blown off and I thought "OK, that's not good," but I had to wait three days until they had put sand bags on the causeway to make it safe. Driving over it was still extremely scary and it was pouring with rain that day. I was terrified driving over the causeway because there wasn't much of a road."

Mrs. Lodge says she and her daughter arrived at the school and only when they pulled through the gates on to the sports field, did the extent of the damage hit her.

She was in shock, but put her emotions aside to support her staff, parents and pupils who had gathered at the school to take stock of the situation.

"What was so hard for teachers, apart from the initial shock, is that teachers are weird, they hoarded stuff and if you had been teaching for 20 years and you have a passion for a subject, you collect books, dolls and other items and are irreplaceable," she explains. "It was those things that were hard to lose."

She explains that one teacher had a coffee mug on her desk that her pupils had given her 10 years before and after digging through the rubble they found it — much to the teacher's relief.

School was set to start the following week and meetings were held almost immediately to urgently find another location in St. George's. The only two options were Club Med and the St. George's Community Centre.

"In the pouring rain we were driving around when we met some people downtown. I told them to find Charlie Marshall and get him to call me," she recalls with a smile. "It was very funny to me even after all this because I never had his telephone number and the phone lines were down, but within an hour he called me on my cellphone."

When they arrived at the St. George's Community Centre Mr. Marshall welcomed them with open arms and agreed to help them in any way he could. He was not the only one. Over the next few days donations, pencils and other teaching supplies poured in from the community and other schools.

"We got permission to not open for another week and we moved what we could save up to the community centre," she says. "It was very emotional because it was like someone was watching over us. There was this extraordinary feeling that we were not in this by ourselves."

She recalls one incident when a "lovely old woman of about 80" came to the centre and had baked each child a sugar cookie: "She thought they would be a bit upset about losing their school. There was just this tremendous support from the community."

Mrs. Lodge adds that without the help of the Co-ed Facility, they couldn't possibly have moved equipment and cleaned up the school as much as they did in the first few days. She says a group of about 46 youngsters arrived at the school to help in the clean-up operation.

As for the light at the end of the tunnel, Mrs. Lodge explains that the fallout from what happened in the months after Hurricane Fabian is felt to this day:

"Charlie Marshall thought it was great because we had to move in there.

"Government supported the community centre by fixing screens and windows and because there were all these children coming in there, the school was moved up the Works and Engineering to do list and when we left things had improved there, so now his community centre was better than before we went in there."

Another benefit was the portable cabins that were built on the school property. Six months after the storm teachers and pupils were able to move back to the school premises and resume classes in the cabins until the new wing on the school was completed. Today these cabins are still used as multi-purposse room for things like creative writing classes.

"The main part of the building, which was more than 80 years old, is now state of the art. It's not often in a school that you get new things all at the same time, but to walk in and have everything new and teachers got to custom-design their classrooms," she says. "Even though it was extremely distressing at the time, now that we've got to this place you look back and see it as a blessing in disguise."

Two years after Hurricane Fabian, teachers and pupils moved back into their school. With her notorious sense of humour, Mrs. Lodge adds with a chuckle that for months she got a lot of mileage out of the fact that her office had been destroyed, especially when the Department of Education asked for reports: "I would say 'It blew away guys!'"

On a more serious note Mrs. Lodge adds that there was a tremendous amount of bonding that took place between the children, parents and teachers in the months and years after Fabian, and through it all only one family moved their children from St. George's Preparatory School.

She explains that buses were not allowed across the causeway for weeks and because the family was not from St. George's, they chose to move their children to another school.

But more than anything the hurricane instilled a sense of compassion in the St. George's Preparatory family that might not have been there before.

Whenever there is a major disaster anywhere in the world, pupils, teachers and parents pull together to raise money and reach out to help those in need — the way others had done for them.