In April this year, when La Soufrière Volcano in St Vincent began to erupt, I was on a call with a client in North America and they kindly asked me how my family was in the Cayman Islands, wondering if they were impacted.
I gently noted to them that the Caribbean is a big place and that Cayman is over 2000km from Saint Vincent, so no, they are not impacted.
Perhaps I could have sent them a link to the wonderfully simple https://www.distancefromto.net/ , which notes that the actual distance is 2254k (or 1400 miles)
From that site, you can see the Caribbean is a big place, plus when you want to travel between islands (back when we could travel), air service between islands often meant long days and travelling via Miami and/or Puerto Rico. For example, Cayman to Barbados is over 2400km, but to get between the countries means flying via Miami, so takes about as much time as flying from London to Cayman (about 12 hours). Oh, and for comparison, Cayman to Barbados is further than London to Athens (2392km) and at least there are non-stop flights between those cities.
However, even though I am looking to teach readers about the scale of the Caribbean, for those not from the region or otherwise deeply travelled around it and understanding of it, our biases are hard to shift. You can look at a map of the world and it looks like a few dots between North and South America. I cannot tell you how many times people from outside the Caribbean have asked me questions like that client did.
So, what is my point? most simply, to seek to educate, though more deeply, to encourage us all to be curious, open, to look at ways to broaden our understanding by looking at areas of interest for us from the perspective of others.
By the way, the image is from the CTO and their website is called One Caribbean. A great privilege for me many years ago was to get to know their director for many years, Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace. His “stump speech” was about how we are at the same time “One Caribbean”, yet also how many visitors will come back again and again but to different islands, to both experience the consistent Caribbean “vibe” and also to experience the difference between islands, peoples, cultures, history.
A magic moment for me was in April 2006 when my oldest son was in his first CARIFTA swimming championships in Barbados. I sat next to Vincent (his daughter was swimming for the Bahamas, four years older than my son). As we sat there watching swimmers from 11-17 years old from 18 nations across the Caribbean, speaking at least five different languages but united as Caribbean people, we reflected at “One Caribbean” right there in microcosm. Hmm, as I finish my wandering down memory lane, after not seeing Vincent for years, I bumped into him in the line to enter the swimming pool at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, some eight years later. My oldest son and his daughter were then swimming for Cayman and Bahamas respectively and yes, all week the Caribbean fans were cheering on all of our swimmers. One Caribbean indeed!