Antigua
June 25th
Antiguans are feeling their freedom.
After many years of a single family regime ruling the nation, they revel
in the freshness of a new government voted in last year in March 2004.
Everyone has something to say about where Antigua is going and how they
are getting there, and what they are going to do when they arrive. And
of course, speaking cricket, each Caribbean island hosting the World Cricket
Series of 2007 has arrived, and Antigua is one of them. Other islands not
included in the series can only bathe in the reflected glory. This event
has every Caribbean country just blazing with pride and excitement.
Kids and adults alike play cricket throughout the ex-British island nations
on every street, village, beach and bare patch of ground, flat or sloping.
The names of great cricketing icons such as Vivian Richards, Dennis Walcott
and Clive Lloyd are much more familiar within the average Caribbean home
than Venus Williams or David Beckham.
In the days when Cable and Wireless
Ltd was a monopoly in the English speaking West Indies, the company made
a shrewd decision to sponsor cricket with a big budget and strong campaign,
branding telecommunications and cricket inextricably to generations of
kids. Today, the long awaited competition has at last arrived and as we
start to move away from Cable and Wireless, the successful job they did
with uniting telecommunications and cricket has now been acquired by Digicel.
A cool move on their part, and just before the World Cricket makes it positively
stellar! Lets hope their cellphone services live up to the world class
cricketers whose names they promote.
So cricket, which is normally around
second on the chat list, is now outclassing even politics in whichever
country you are in. As we get closer to 2007, it will become the only topic!
In a local bus a Bajan said to the Antiguan taxi driver, as we drove past
the cricket stadium outside St. Johns, are you rebuilding your stadium
where it is or making a new one for 2007? We are building a new one. So
are we, responded the Antiguan almost huffily, and launched into a detailed
monologue on the new cricket stadium about which he seemed to know an awful
lot. But everyone is a cricket expert these days.
But now I wonder whether cricket
and national freedoms go together? A senior government official told me
I am really quite scared of 2007 and what its going to bring to us she
continued, People here have no idea of what is going to happen, and we
in government are quite worried.
You see global sponsors such as Coca-Cola
and others have already bought the advertising rights to the cricket stadiums
throughout the region, where the major games are to be played. This means
for example that you cannot wear a t-shirt, drive a car, sell anything,
carry a bag or a bottle, with any commercial logo or picture on it, inside
and outside within a specific radius of the stadium, of your own choice.
Only advertising for the official sponsor will be allowed, whether you
like the product or not.
Antiguans, she continued with concern,
are not used to that. They like their freedoms!
The following is the previous article
Deb wrote for the magazine:
To contact Deb Click
Here
Deb Andrews and her husband Stewart
sold their home in a remote villiage in the Yorkshire Dales, England in
1985 and with their two children started to sail in the Caribbean and Europe
on a 45ft steel yacht called the Safara that Stewart built. After sailing
from Trinidad to Puerto Rico, they fell in love with the Caribbean sky
and sea and decided to stay. Their children were home schooled for the
first four years in the Caribbean and then returned to England to finish
secondary school and university. To survive in the Caribbean, Deb and Stewart
worked in the British Virgin Islands administrating a private plastic surgery
clinic and managing huge civil construction projects with EU and British
funding. In their free time they sailed the Eastern Caribbean. They are
now planning to settle down in the mountains of Dominica.
June
20th, 2005 Dominica - There is an undeniable magic about Dominica,
it hovers in the universal sound of falling water, in the misty green mountains
and vowel-heavy Creole spoken on every village street. Take care, this
region of magic is inhabited by jumbies, entities who are not known for
their kindness to people. We all know that Dominica has one of the
highest rainfall counts on planet earth. That is why its known as the Nature
island, it does not get that green without some serious rain! And
what other country not even forty miles long and a quarter of that wide
has a waterfall for every day of the year? Summing it up, there are only
two continuously boiling lakes in the Americas, and they stay boiling because
heavy rainfall never lets them boil dry! Dominicas lake is the largest
of its kind.
