For a long time now I've been trying to gather my thoughts and succinctly explain what my feelings about St. Martin were and why they tended more towards the negative than the positive. Every time I meet someone who hears for the first time where we lived and that we were not as thrilled about the experience as honeymooners usually are about being in the Caribbean, I realise how little people outside the Caribbean know about its reality. I think that through this blog and through conversations I've head I've managed to astonish quite a few people.
But to astonish them was not the point. I was under the impression that many of these people thought I was just ungrateful for the 'fortune' of an experience in the tropics, or worse, that I am just a difficultly satisfied spoiled snobby westerner - even if I'm not a westerner;) So I hope it is clear to all, I did not complain about St. Martin because I'm thankless or because it sounds cool to say a desired and unreachable for many place sucks.
I would love to have triggered a thought provoking process with all the negative SXM aspects I drew attention to. This is probably not the last post on the topic. I still feel there's so much more I can say about the reality of the island and that somehow this will at one point translate to someone's positive doing and 'fixing' of the 'wrong'. I just don't know how to link the 2 yet. I feel I have to spread the word about what I learned there, what I saw, what I experienced. SXM is not a paradise. It is a ruined paradise; ruined by people, people who wanted to exploit the paradise without any consideration for it's fragility, for its limits, for the irreversibility of certain actions or for the costs of trying to restore balance, or for the natural, social and economic side effects of certain activities. To use a popular term, there was never an impact assessment done, or if there was, it was ignored.
SXM is a place out of control in many aspects. The best illustration to this statement is a video uploaded to the following link of a local SXM ngo, (Caribbean Foundation for Sustainability) with which I was involved while living there. First 40 seconds show you the paradise you expect to see, later you see the reality the island is made to endure. The second half of the video is what shocked me at arrival and what kept impacting me all along my stay.
Notwithstanding the state of affairs, there are plenty of great civil society actions under way in St. Martin. It is not a forgotten by God place, but the ones who care and want to fix or restore seem to be outnumbered by the ones who keep not caring. It was really a difficult place to live and to accept it all, especially the not caring.
But to astonish them was not the point. I was under the impression that many of these people thought I was just ungrateful for the 'fortune' of an experience in the tropics, or worse, that I am just a difficultly satisfied spoiled snobby westerner - even if I'm not a westerner;) So I hope it is clear to all, I did not complain about St. Martin because I'm thankless or because it sounds cool to say a desired and unreachable for many place sucks.
I would love to have triggered a thought provoking process with all the negative SXM aspects I drew attention to. This is probably not the last post on the topic. I still feel there's so much more I can say about the reality of the island and that somehow this will at one point translate to someone's positive doing and 'fixing' of the 'wrong'. I just don't know how to link the 2 yet. I feel I have to spread the word about what I learned there, what I saw, what I experienced. SXM is not a paradise. It is a ruined paradise; ruined by people, people who wanted to exploit the paradise without any consideration for it's fragility, for its limits, for the irreversibility of certain actions or for the costs of trying to restore balance, or for the natural, social and economic side effects of certain activities. To use a popular term, there was never an impact assessment done, or if there was, it was ignored.
SXM is a place out of control in many aspects. The best illustration to this statement is a video uploaded to the following link of a local SXM ngo, (Caribbean Foundation for Sustainability) with which I was involved while living there. First 40 seconds show you the paradise you expect to see, later you see the reality the island is made to endure. The second half of the video is what shocked me at arrival and what kept impacting me all along my stay.
Notwithstanding the state of affairs, there are plenty of great civil society actions under way in St. Martin. It is not a forgotten by God place, but the ones who care and want to fix or restore seem to be outnumbered by the ones who keep not caring. It was really a difficult place to live and to accept it all, especially the not caring.
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