Medical express
The health service in the Virgin Islands comes in for a lot of complaints, often with good reason, but a Beaconite was reminded of the strengths this week when he needed to see a doctor fast. After paying $11, he was whisked in straightaway and dealt with promptly and efficiently. This experience compared well with other places he’s lived. In Dublin, you now have to pay the equivalent of $60 to see a walk-in general practitioner. In London, the National Health Service has always been free at the point of use, but it’s not really “free” because Britain is a heavily taxed country. And though he found price was never really an issue in the UK, access was. If you want to see a “free” GP that day, you have to ring your surgery at 8 a.m. and hope that you make it through the phone lottery to get an urgent appointment. A hospital stay in the VI earlier this year also saw the Beaconite receive outstanding care after the ambulance got to him in very good time. So maybe the VI healthcare system is a lot healthier than people often think.
SFC reading
A Beaconite has been reading the report on the recent deliberations of the closed-door Standing Finance Committee, where House of Assembly members met with senior public officers while deciding how to allocate taxpayer money. She noticed that the 369-page report is shorter than SFC reports from previous years, and she wasn’t the only one: Some HOA members noted this fact in the HOA budget debate last month. But despite having fewer pages, the report is informative and much better written than in many previous years — and it’s print is also smaller. As usual, the report summarises the SFC proceedings rather than providing a verbatim transcript, but it nevertheless gives a reasonably clear sense of what transpired in the deliberations. As just one example, several sections explicitly note when the discussions went off the record. (Previous SFC reports have done no such thing, leaving readers to wonder about abrupt changes of topic where text clearly had been omitted.) The result of such care is a much more reader-friendly report this year. Of course, the Beaconite still believes the law should be amended to make SFC deliberations and other HOA committee sessions open to the public. But a clear SFC report is a big step in the right direction, and she commends the HOA staff for the improvements. Residents of the Virgin Islands are surely interested in the state of the public agencies in the territory.
On foot
Still without a car of his own, a Beaconite has had the privilege of getting to know Tortola on foot and through the windows of kind strangers’ vehicles. Walking offers the benefit of closer inspection, and in his neighbourhood of Cane Garden Bay and around various spots of Joes Hill, he has taken to noticing decay: the burnt out, stripped vehicles on the roadside; the abandoned houses in complete disrepair, some still animated by paint that has not yet faded; the crumbling roadways in many areas. Another prime example is the Cane Garden Bay Community Centre: It was put temporarily out of commission by Hurricane Irma and reopened last year, but it now seems to be more of a hotspot for chickens and other strays. There is a kind of beauty in decay, like you see in New Orleans, where houses reclaimed by nature show deep veins of Spanish moss, or like you see in larger cities where vacant lots are fenced in between skyscrapers. These spaces can stand out because their surroundings are so well kept, elevating the spots of neglect. The Beaconite believes that residents and the government should work together to clean up, repurposing or disposing of what is no longer used.