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16 Feb 2008

Dominica Artists

whitney-and-wyatt-in-dominica charity art fair.jpg

Not too long ago Dominica Artists were given the opportunity to display their work at a Charity Art Fair held at Ross University. Right there on the scene was Wyatt Bardouille the co-host and producer of WhitneyandWyattt.com, a TV Talk Show that mixes serious stuff and girly fluff for women on the web. Wyatt, who was on vacation at the time in Dominica did an 8min video highlighting Dominica Artists and their work at the fair. Click the link below to watch the video.

Artists of Dominica - 8 min.

Hurricane Dean: The View from a Distance and in Hindsight

Written by Dan in Reviews

We love Dominica and our friends who live there. But until Ruth can retire late next year, we’re consigned to twice-yearly month-long visits. We were chagrined on our June-July visit that the month seemed to go so quickly, and that the time away just seems to drag. And now, we expect to see damage when we return in December.

From the USA, television and Internet coverage of the hurricane’s effect in Dominica was just awful. We could spot the storm’s ominous projected path on the Internet (and were relieved when the actual path was a bit more southerly). The loop was played on TV news, but the broadcasters were appallingly ignorant of geography. I sent an e-mail to one local TV station whose newscaster said that the island directly north of Martinique was Guadeloupe. And there was no storm footage or reportage from Dominica itself on any US TV network. All the talk on the TV news was about places more populous, more likely to be full of tourists, etc. It was as if Dominica did not even exist.

The only news we were able to get, in our attempts to assuage our concerns about our friends and neighbors came from Dominica on this Web site and what we could get over the phone or email. Our place is in Calibishie and we also have a dear friend of 20 years in Paix Bouche. We were able to telephone people on the bay in Calibishie and nearby in Point Baptist and in Paix Bouche two days after the storm. But telephone service up the Calibishie Ridge Road took two weeks to recover, and we learned that electricity in the immediate area of our home was out for a week. Pipe water was also out for quite some time in Calibishie, we learned, and in Paix Bouche as well, where a major pipe burst.

Our kind friends on the bay in Calibishie got a message to our dear friend and neighbor to use her key to get into our house and get the chicken out of our freezer and use it and/or give it away. We’re glad for that, for the help it may have been to people and because coming back to rotten meat would have been just awful.

Thankfully, nobody we knew was hurt. We were very sorry to learn of the tragic loss of two lives, a mother and her 7-year-old son in Campbell. Dominica’s leading author and historian Lennox Honychurch reported on the storm to friends via email, and that quickly made the rounds, as did photos of damage in some churches. The crop damage and paucity of disaster funding is disturbing news. The new banana and plantain crops will be at least 36 weeks in the future, and EC$300 per acre under cultivation isn’t much to tide farmers over. I don’t have data, but I doubt that there are as many as 36 acres per farmer, or individual doing the farming. There will be some hard times ahead for many families.

But we have learned that Dominicans are energetic, cheerful, optimistic, industrious people; not the type to let a storm get them down. While America with its vast resources can’t make recovery happen in New Orleans, we fully expect to find when we return that life in Dominica will be very nearly back to normal. And that will make us happy too.

Lovely Seashells

Written by Dan in Dominica Island, Reviews

Dominica’s beauty is everywhere! Her mountains are majestic. The cliffs and bays and beaches of her Atlantic and Caribbean shores are breathtaking. Numerous magnificent waterfalls grace her rainforest interior. Dominica is the land of 10,000 flowers. Hummingbirds visit those flowers, hawks circle in the sky, and pelicans, kingfishers and frigate birds patrol for fish. Dominica has astounding coral reefs that teem with colorful tropical fish. And, Dominica’s waters are also home to myriad univalve (one-shell) and bivalve (2-shell) mollusks.

You can spot the wondrous and beautiful mollusks while snorkeling or scuba diving, or you can (as Ruth and I often) do; beach-comb for them on pleasant and fun-filled strolls. It is a great deal of fun to “discover” shells on the beach. As an added benefit, we know that we’re gathering shells of animals that have perished, and we needn’t worry about even possibly harming the ecology by taking a live specimen (or a shell that is serving as a temporary home to a hermit crab.

Here are some photos from our shell collection. I took these photos back at our home in Massachusetts (which we’ll sell when we relocate to Dominica next year when Ruth can retire). If you can see a white marble tabletop in the background, the photo is of a large shell (6 to 9 inches) that we collected on other Caribbean islands. The small shells shown on Dominican black sand or in a small (3 inches across) bowl or on the back of a book (the size of the print will give you an idea of the scale in those macro photographs) are all Dominican shells. These are not “baby” shells; nearly all are the size of the adult animal. We have collected some fairly large conch shells in Dominica, but the supply of this edible animal is nearly exhausted from over-hunting. It’s too bad, because large conchs prey upon the nasty stinging black spiny sea urchins, which have multiplied absent their chief predator.

Conch

Cone

Helmet Conch

Triton

I hope to be able at a later date to post the popular and scientific names of the shells in the photos. We have purchased “Seashell Treasures of the Caribbean” by Leslie Sutty, edited by the late eminent conchologist Richard Tucker Abbott. Ms Sutty lives in Martinique and when I contacted her recently she graciously offered to provide this information for photos that we e-mail to her. But I just couldn’t wait to share our photos of these beauties with you!

This post was guest blogged by Dan Tanner