Hurricane Irma - A rant about CBC's Anna Maria Tremonte and tourists who don't care.

Turks & Caicos Club Med

I heard an interview on CBC’s the current yesterday morning. The host, Anna Maria Tremonte interviewed a woman stuck at a “Club Med” resort in the Turks and Caicos. With Anna Maria’s prompting and encouragement, the woman complained about the Canadian government not acting effectively enough in her favour. An Air Canada plane was sitting on the tarmac waiting to take Canadians out of the country but the local government wouldn’t let them leave. Why wasn’t the Canadian government doing enough to get them out of there?

Turks & Caicos after Irma

That was the story? Really? Was this all that Anna Maria and the woman had to talk about? How rough it was to her having to stay at the Club Med, fed and watered, with little else to do but wait? No mention of the locals and their loss. Nothing about how lucky she and her husband are for having survived a category 5 hurricane relatively unscathed. Just how upset she was at the Canadian government for not getting them out.

What, are we children here? Can we not take responsibility for our own actions? By this woman’s own account, she knew the hurricane was coming before she’d even flown to the resort. She just thought that the storm would die down or change directions. When my wife and I were in an accident in Nairobi, Kenya, the help we received from Canadian High Commission in getting my wife with a freshly broken back on a flight to Edmonton was quite a surprise to us. 

My wife in a Nairobi hospital

Not that we weren’t grateful to the high commission but it wasn’t our fellow Canadians or tourists who saved the day. It was a Kenyan man who’d stopped his flat bed truck to help when all the other white vans filled with foreign tourists refused. Fortunately, our hero spoke English and, with the assistance of other Kenyan bystanders, helped me put my wife on an improvised backboard and then transported her to a local hospital. Once we arrived at a clinic outpost, this Kenyan got me in contact with the Canadian High Commission and from there, the flying doctors were contacted and medical transportation was arranged to Nairobi. 

So, when I visit developing countries, I like to think at least a little about the people who live there. If I was caught in a disaster, I would hope to have some empathy. Put myself in their shoes. After all, they're going to have to deal with loss of life, home and livelihood long after I'm gone.