Rising From the Ashes in Montserrat

OLD TOWNE, Montserrat —  Sting doesn’t windsurf here anymore.

The stately, million-dollar villas overlooking the broad beach at Old Road Bay that drew rock stars, adventurers and wealthy retirees from the world over are abandoned, cut off by the cold, gray remains of fiery mudflows that fried trees, filled in an entire river and drove thousands from their homes.

The capital is gone too. Plymouth, the picturesque seat of the “Emerald Isle of the Caribbean,” is now burned and buried in a hardened sea of mud--a surreal landscape where roofs, church steeples and water tanks poke through the lunar ground.

But just a few miles to the north, vital signs have begun to return. There is a quickening pulse of growth and dreams that is testimony to the resolve of thousands of Montserratians.

Four years have passed since Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano rumbled back to life--unleashing deadly pyroclastic flows that devastated the southern two-thirds of this island and drove more than half its 11,000 residents to the U.S., Britain and beyond, bankrupted its economy and rendered much of its 39 square miles uninhabitable. The 4,550 hardy souls who stayed behind in this remote eastern Caribbean British colony are quietly beginning to rebuild, even as ash continues to fall on the southern part of the island.

The sounds of circular saws and riveters fill the air in the northern town of St. John’s, where Emmanuel Gallaway--driven from his home three times in the past three years--is defying the forces of nature, putting the finishing touches on the elegant, new 18-room Tropical Mansion Suites hotel just a few miles from the still-active volcano. Surveyors are scurrying around W. H. Bramble Airport, finalizing a $13-million project to reopen it in 2002, five years after its runway was sliced in two by a mudflow that killed 19 people--the official death toll here since the volcano’s latest round of eruptions began in June 1995.

Plans call for a large berm to divert any future mudflow, although

no such flow is considered likely.

Architects are scrambling to finish blueprints for a new capital city in Little Bay at the island’s northern end, a cricket stadium for the World Cup in 2007, a beachfront disco scheduled to open next year and a multimillion-dollar cultural center sponsored by George Martin, the British rock music guru whose Air Studios once made Montserrat a recording mecca for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Sting’s former band, the Police.

And perhaps the most ambitious plan of all: Dentist Vernon Buffong is busy organizing the “Paradise Regained Millennium Pilgrimage.” It is hoped that the event, scheduled for July, will bring home many of the more than 6,000 people who fled their tiny homeland at a time when many feared that Montserrat would simply cease to exist.

A Land That Refused to Die

All this is occurring just two years after Britain’s Operation Exodus, a mass evacuation that most Montserratians believe was an attempt to clear every last subject from an anachronistic territory that Britain no longer wants or needs.

“People say we dropped off the face of the map, that the whole island is under ash,” said Annie Skerritt, whose new four-stool, one-table shack draws a respectable lunchtime crowd in the island’s safe northern zone.

“The world should know: We’re still here. And the worst is over. We’re coming back.”

Montserrat’s recent saga is a Phoenix-like tale of a land that refused to die and a people who refused to abandon their homeland as it literally disappeared beneath their feet, even as the British government offered generous resettlement packages that encouraged them to leave.

But it is a resurrection fraught with complexity. This once proud and prosperous island state must attempt to redefine its image and its future on a third of its former land with fewer than half its people and none of its previous income, while navigating its odd relationship with the British colonial government.

“We are still in the ashes, but we hope we’re beginning to rise up,” said acting Gov. Howard Fergus, a Montserratian university professor.

“In literal terms, we’re still getting ash falls, so we’re not out of it yet. Metaphorically, we’re still very much dependent on the British government for our survival. And this has implications for our political development and sense of self-respect.”

At the core of Montserrat’s hopeful rebirth is the conclusion by scientists that the Soufriere volcano--which had been dormant for about 400 years--finally is running out of fury. The last major volcanic mudflow was July 20. Within nine months, the scientists say, the dome most likely will stabilize, and the mountain that has irreversibly altered Montserrat’s demographics, economics and physics will be in repose.

“We never talk about prediction in this game because these things are so terribly unpredictable,” said Gill Norton, the British geologist who is acting head of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory.

“You can never say never. But the term we’re using now is ‘residual activity’--the kind of activity associated with a volcano that’s going back to sleep.”

‘We’re Starting From Scratch’

Just how to reawaken this island that has lost so much of the high-end tourism and luxury infrastructure that drew rock stars and wealthy retirees is fast becoming a case study in the survival of small island states amid the global economics of the new millennium.

“We’re at a crossroads,” said Chief Minister David Brandt, the highest elected official here. “I don’t think there’s any country in living memory that has lost two-thirds of its population and two-thirds of its land space, its only hospital, airport, seaport and thousands of homes. We’re starting from scratch.”

Montserrat is doing so at a time when competition among its Caribbean neighbors already is fierce for limited tourism and foreign investment dollars. Brandt’s vision for his island’s future includes re-creating its upscale-tourism niche, developing an investment-intensive computer software industry and resurrecting its offshore banking industry.

That vision does offer one unique feature. It seeks to exploit the very cause of the island’s destruction: the volcano itself. Small tour groups have already begun to arrive on day trips from nearby Antigua.

But Montserrat’s political leaders are at odds with one another about the future--and with the British bureaucrats who must finance it. Critics say the internal struggles have stalled development and foreign investment.

“We are at the crisis stage right now,” said Reuben Meade, an opposition leader and former chief minister who shelved his doctoral degree in economics and turned to construction to help build more than 600 British-financed houses for volcano refugees from the south.

“Once we finish building the houses, what do you do? Construction is OK for growth, but it’s not self-sustaining. And frankly, Montserratians still are continuing to leave,” Meade said. “The question is how to create self-sustaining development that will bring our people home.”

One key debate that recently framed the issue focused on a thick document called “The Country Policy Plan,” which Brandt’s government developed--and British aid officials heavily edited--to chart Montserrat’s near-term future.

British officials, who have already spent or earmarked $208 million for Montserrat, said yes to the airport but no to the golf course--an 18-hole magnet for upscale tourism that is now a sprawling volcanic mud hazard.

“It would have been impossible for our minister back in London to justify a new golf course when our mission is to aid the poorest people of the poorest nations in the world,” said Doug Houston, the resident head of Britain’s Department for International Development, which has administered all government aid to Montserrat.

Compounding the dilemma, Houston said, is the fact that about 350 Montserratians are still living in squalid emergency shelters, awaiting resettlement in the 655 new homes Britain has been financing in and around the new village of Lookout on the island’s northern third.

And Houston, who was based in Bosnia-Herzegovina before taking over in Montserrat two years ago, insisted that the money his government has earmarked for the island “represents a substantial commitment on the part of her majesty’s government”--the equivalent of more than $40,000 for every man, woman and child who remains.

Just how the British have spent much of that money, though, remains controversial.

Millions of those dollars, critics say, simply have gone back into the British economy: The multimillion-dollar contract to build the new homes went to a British contractor; the thousands of dollars Britain spends daily on jet-catamaran ferry service that links Montserrat to the world goes to a company with British investors; and a large share of Montserrat’s aid is used to finance the salaries, travel expenses and recreation leaves of British officials based here.

Some Projects Leave Haunting Legacies

Other projects reflect poor planning, leaving legacies that will haunt Montserrat for years: Haste in putting up a centralized government center after Plymouth disappeared has left the “interim” seat of government in a complex of one-story prefab wooden buildings that resembles a sprawling trailer park on some of the island’s prime real estate, more than a mile from the site of the future capital in Little Bay. The bill for that alone topped $3.5 million.

At least some of the largess has trickled down to the island’s economy--into the pockets of Montserratian subcontractors and laborers and a small army of “guest workers” who have poured in from Jamaica, Guyana and Dominica to exploit the construction boom after so many island residents fled.

Deposits at the Bank of Montserrat are up 25% since June 1997, according to bank manager Gregory de Gannes, who is among the most gung-ho prognosticators of the island’s future growth.

“There’s no project that’s too big for us to handle,” said the Trinidad-born De Gannes, who traveled to London in mid-October to pitch a large-scale subsidized-mortgage plan aimed at bringing islanders home.

“The Montserratians abroad are calling all the time,” he said. “They want to come back. But they need a home. Montserratians have a fierce loyalty and pride in their country. But owning a home is also very deep in the culture.”

There are other lingering concerns--not the least of them the psychological toll this long-running disaster has taken on those who left and those who stayed during a frantic evacuation that uprooted and ripped apart families overnight.

“You can rebuild physical damage,” Chief Minister Brandt said. “But the emotional scars from the separation from your family, after having lost everything in the twinkling of an eye, the feeling when you, as an independent person, suddenly become dependent on the government for everything--when you live through that kind of indignity, it must leave a scar.

“I think we need lots and lots of support. We need specialists to come and talk to people. A lot of people, I’m afraid, will have pent-up scars and not even know it.”

Most of the Montserratians who stayed behind agree, and many take a far less sanguine view of their island’s future than do the officials who will help determine it.

“A man without a home is bad off, but a man without a country is a million times worse,” said Emmanuel Gallaway, explaining why he stayed and how having fled will affect those who didn’t. The 52-year-old contractor, who is building the new 18-room hotel along with his two sons--an architect and a civil engineer, who now live in Miami and the Bahamas, respectively--added: “It took centuries to build what we lost, and I don’t expect things will get back in place overnight.”

Neither does Fred Loving, although his new Freshbreeze Bar on a hillside in St. John’s is packed every weekend these days.

“Montserrat is coming back. She’s coming right back,” said the barkeeper and chicken farmer who is universally known here as Lord Hayes. “But it’ll take her some time yet. People got to have a place to live.

“Meantime, all I need is a karaoke machine.”