Tourism Week, now being observed in Anguilla, has had three sessions of Wellness Day activities for adults and students. The first, on Tuesday afternoon, was open for all adults from 4.15 – 5.30 pm. The second session, on Wednesday, from 10.30 am – 12 noon, was for 4th and 5th formers of the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School; and the third session in the afternoon from 1.00 pm – 2.30 pm, was for 1st, 2nd and 3rd formers of the school.
The theme for Tourism Week 2017 has been “Extraordinary in Nature: Resilient and Rebuilding Sustainability”. Accordingly, the Wellness Day sessions were centred on such matters as rejuvenation mentally and physically – especially at a time when the Anguillian community has just emerged from experiencing stress and trauma caused by Hurricane Irma.
Methodist Minister and Counsellor at Her Majesty’s Prison in Anguilla, Rev. Lindsay Richardson, set the tone for the Wellness Day activities when he spoke particularly in relation to the hurricane. “Self-care is a difficult thing and one of the biggest challenges to self-care is stress – and this is perhaps something which we take for granted,” he stated. “The first time I heard a primary school child talk about stress, I really laughed. It was a very ignorant laugh because when I took time out to listen I realise that these children have far more stress than me. I don’t want to be in their shoes as the number of issues they are dealing with they should not be doing so. I had nothing close to that in school when it comes to issues, challenges, fears, anxieties. Children shouldn’t have those issues but, as adults we have our own stress – some we bring on ourselves, some other people throw at us, and sometimes just being alive we have stress thrown at you.”
He continued: “Hurricane Irma was not just stress. Irma was trauma if you were here and you went through it. That was trauma and trauma is an extreme form of stress. It was not just the experience going through Irma, but it was what happened afterwards – and all these things keep adding and compounding each other. Even if you didn’t go through Irma, you came back to Anguilla and saw what Irma left. You had to deal with that and that brought on its own stresses, and then just trying to cope with this, overnight life changed in Anguilla. But you still have to reach work for 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock, and you still have to meet all these other demands when everything around you is completely in disarray. That in itself has its own stresses – and you still have to look after your parents, your children, and take care of the house etc.
“The question is: how do you deal with all of that stuff and make sense of it all – because that is where you either get stuck, or you begin to heal.”
The Wellness Day activities for Wednesday included presentations by the Department of Sports, the Anguilla Tourist Board, and drumming by Judy Guthridge.
