Ben Meade
Saturday, July 18, 2015
As I rise and reflect on the strange happenings of Tuesday 18 July, 1995, shivers run down my spine. As a country, we have come so far, yet at the same time betrayed the Montserrat Secondary School Motto - "Qui non proficit, deficit." or “He who does not progress, retrogresses.” - as we have failed to progress in so many ways.
I remember walking home my then girlfriend from youth meeting at Salem Methodist Church that evening to Happy Hill and being told by her mother “Did you hear, they say the volcano erupting?” I thought for a moment that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. After all, how could the volcano be erupting. I had only a few days earlier done a hike around Soufriere Hills with family and friends. I walked out of the house and looked towards Chances’ Peak and saw nothing but then quickly “gave them a tutoring” of what would be happening (if a volcano was indeed coming to life) based on the teaching of Colin Riley, who had just covered Montserrat’s volcanic history in Geography class. I felt quite the man.
But then I walked home as normal. Everything seemed as it should on a random Tuesday night - there were only a handful of people at the various rum shops I passed on my way back to Olveston. When I got home, none of my parents were present as the time approached 10 o’clock. I thought nothing of it and turned the radio on to ZJB because “if” something was really happening, surely Rose Willock would be on air and surely she would have an expert like CT John on. As I flipped the switch, I stood there with my mouth open. There was no music playing but Rose was on the radio and I could hear the unmistakable voice of CT John in the studio with her.
Now, there was no Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp to check to see what was going on, so I sat in the kitchen listening and waiting for my parents to come home. It then hit me that my mother was holding service earlier that evening in Long Ground, so she would know that something was going on in the mountain above her. She didn’t come home soon but when she did, she confirmed to me people had been hearing a rumbling as though the volcano was coming to life and that my father (Chief Minister at the time) had been summoned to an emergency meeting.
The following night, I had to be in the mix and left the evening church service and went to the Emergency Operations Centre with my father. There I was stopped by the late Horatio Tuitt and informed that being a cadet who seemed so interesting in what was happening, I should at 0800 the next morning fall in at the Defence Force camp that had been set up at Sturge Park. In the weeks that followed, I would be stationed around the clock at the EOC as a radio operator, relaying information from disaster managers and others in the field to the bosses huddled in that little room at Police Headquarters.
At the same time, scores of people were being told to evacuate their homes and bring an overnight bag with just the essentials. That was fairly routine for several weeks. To this day, many have never slept another night in those homes.
We as a country came together in the months and years following. As ash spewed, the volcano did not care which political party we supported or which church we attended, it dumped the same ash on all the houses in the area. I remember everybody saying they couldn’t wait for the volcano to just blow the big one so all of this uncertainty would be over and we could get back to life. Oh, how naive we were, uneducated about the monster that sat within the belly of Soufriere Hills.
Some people couldn’t go to sleep if two things did not happen in successive order on ZJB. My father, as Chief Minister, had to address them with the information he had from the scientists and my good friend, Jeevan Robinson, had to play Garnet Silk’s “Lord Watch Over Our Shoulders Tonight” before he signed off. We as a country, did indeed have our brothers’ backs. I remember my father reaching home late one night after a very long day (they were all the same) and the house phone rang. It was a close friend of his who said his wife could not sleep because she did not hear “Chief” on the radio saying everything would be okay. We can look back and laugh at how silly this might have been but that is who we were as a country - we trusted that our brother would look out for us.
As days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months turned to years, we banded together. Those of us who did not have to evacuate, opened our doors to friends and family, sometimes even strangers. People were really living like “refugee in dey own country” as Zunky put it so aptly in his song.
As time passed on, when ash rained down, we grumbled and moved on. Sometimes our biggest worries were “I just washed and hanged out clothes on the line” or “I believe I left the windows open”. We were tough Montserratians and outsiders thought of us as crazy for living on the island or wanting to return there if we were overseas. But we grinned and bore it. We came together as a country because we were all in this together.
Fast forward 20 years.
It is as though the lessons learned from our ordeal have fallen by the wayside. We bicker and fight over every little thing. All of a sudden, friends become enemies over who they support politically. People hold grudges because they perceive another is doing the same to them. Did we forget how we were all in this together; that some of our people vowed never to leave because “ah yah me barn an a ya me a go dead”? If someone holds a different view than us, we are quick to shoot them down because “dem too grudge” or too badmind.
When the people of Salem banded together and marched against the authorities and threw the Nantes’ River checkpoint over the bridge, they did this because of a oneness they felt. When Defence Force soldiers and others slept in tents, they were not differentiated by political opinion. We were all in this together.
Today, it is as though we forget that pyroclastic flows did not discriminate about which homes and businesses to destroy. They wiped out all in their paths.
Some may not forgive me to use this term but I will nonetheless. We need a pyroclastic flow of change to sweep through our country. We need to stop the us and them mentality. We need to think and operate as one people - A people of excellence, moulded by nature, nurtured by God.
We need to learn from the mistakes of our past, build on positives of the past and restore our beloved island as the gem of the Caribbean. We need to raise the level of our discourse and see beyond party colours, if we really love this country and mean that it must survive. We can have differing opinions without making others with opposite views feel as though they are irrelevant or ignorant. We do not need to belittle each other over every simple matter. As humans, we will disagree from time to time but it is the differing views that will come together and ensure progress is made. If we fail to see it that way, then “crapaud smoke we pipe”.
As I sit here on 18 July, 2015, I hope and pray that in 20 years we will not look back and feel the need to have this type of conversation but would have reflected on our struggles and realised how strong we are as a people and how much we’ve grown as a country.
Thank you.
