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Olveston House
where I'm staying Today was my real introduction to Montserrat with a special tour, but starting off with a very encouraging meeting.
I met with Herman Francis, the Minister of Culture in the morning and was very impressed to discover that his work was also very much hands on as he runs various school and community music groups in the evenings and a weekends. I can't imagine there are many other ministers of culture around the world who are so closely involved and dedicated to their ministerial cause. It was also good to find out that there are a variety of music groups that have been running for some time and a fairly substantial selection of instruments available (though some looked rather worse for wear - there was even a very old looking banjolele!). There is 'Small Beginnings' a little youth orchestra, the Brades Primary School steel pan band (more about this later) and an adult steel pan band and a choral group all of which meet weekly. It appears all of these are run by the Minister of Culture and another musician, John, who helps him.
The Music Room where most of these sessions take place is a massive kind of
The Music Room
Violins at the ready warehouse space and we had a look there. Herman invited me to visit some of the sessions he runs - later on he would be running the Steel Pan band and Braids primary school and after that the adult steel pan group. So I agreed to come along to the Primary School session in the afternoon.
From there Thomas took me on a great tour of the island, at least the part of the island that is still accessible following the volcanic eruption. Still there's a surprising amount of winding hilly roads to drive along. I would say anyone living here definitely needs a car and if possible a 4x4 - there are some very steep bits of road. You don't see any cyclists on the roads that's for sure, you'd need to be a Tour De France type cyclist for this terrain. Thomas filled me in with a lot of the local history whilst tooting at all the many friends who we passed by.
Whilst I won't try and recount everything here, I fell I should give a bit of the background. In 1995 the volcano in the South of the island, which had been dormant for
about 400 years rumbled into action with devastating consequences. At that time the capital city and most of the population was in the south of the island and the whole area had to be totally evacuated as lava and ash covered everything. Plymouth, the capital was eventually totally covered. Many people were evacuated abroad to the USA or the UK and have remained there after their homes and livelihoods were destroyed. I believe the population is now about a third of what it was before the eruption, and much of the current population is made up of immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados and other islands. The volcano has continued to cause further disruption with further ash clouds and pyroclastic flows. The tour with Thomas took me to a view point where I could see a huge swathe of soil and rocks that had slid down the mountainside all the way into the sea in February 2010. In the distance you could just make out a ruin of a house that had been carried down and a factory chimney sticking out.
I'll let my photos do the description of the tour. Thomas took me all around the part of the island
that is possible to get to, much of it is out of bounds. He knows the island and it's people probably better than most and although doing taxi tours is his work it never felt like he was just a tour guide doing his job he clearly loves the island and talking about the people and places on it.
After the tour we had lunch at Tina's Restaurant and then went to Brades Primary School so I could watch the steel pan band rehearsal. I'll add some video so you can see, but I was impressed with how focussed the children were (at the end of a school day) and Herman Francis worked patiently with them. He never had any training as a musician and cannot read music but teaches virtually every instrument, so in this session he was mainly telling them the notes they should play then running through sections until they had them down. He didn't demonstrate by playing, but occasionally sung a section of tune and they picked it up really quickly.
Suddenly in the middle of the session Thomas came and excitedly beckoned me to come outside. Earlier in the day we'd seen an
The Montserrat Cultural Centre
This was part funded by George Martin iguana running along the road ahead of us which I was very delighted about and so Thomas had found some guy who was carrying a dead one by it's tail and thought I might like a snap shot of it seeing as I'd failed to get a photo of the living one.
After watching a bit more of the session I headed back to Olveston House to cool off. There's nothing scheduled for Tuesday, but I should be meeting the Minister of Education on Wednesday and will watch some more of Herman's sessions.
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Mub
non-member comment
Brilliant writing!
Great stuff. Thanks! I can't play the video for some reason...but pics are good. Have you played yr mandolin yet?! lots love Mub xxx