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Coping with a volcano
I've had the very great pleasure of being a guest on Rose Willock's Saturday morning cultural show on ZJB Radio Montserrat. Rose was the calming, cheerful voice that helped inform and support the community through difficult times. After the show she explained how Montserratians had shown true resilience in the face of the volcano.
When I was there in 1995, the radio station had just been modernised and refurbished. Rose herself had just finally finished building her house. The eruption I witnessed of August 21st changed everything. With the consequent evacuations and a public who desperately needed advice, information and good cheer, ZJB Radio played an ever more important role in people's lives.
Rose's house was high up the the volcano and her large garden provided a useful landing area for the volcanologists' helicopter as they came to monitor their equipment. Rose didn't mind her garden being used as a heliport: it ensured she could pick the brains of the scientists and get all the latest developments.
When the citizens of Plymouth were given 36 hours to evacuate, and told to take only their passports and important papers with them, both Rose and I were impressed at the equanamity, calmness and composure of Montserratians. Their livelihoods, social structures, and homes had all been taken from them.
Rose mentioned the distress and suicides witnessed in the recent Wall Street economic crash. "That was terrible but those people" she said, leaning forward to emphasise the point, "those financial people who thought their world had ended, they should have come to Montserrat and witnessed how we coped with far worse than they. You want to see the best example of resilience in awful circumstances? They should have come to Montserrat - we can show you real resilience".
This is just one of the stories that inform my talk Montserrat - reclaiming paradise
