Plans are in hand for a world-wide aid organisation, an arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, to set up a relief agency branch in Anguilla.
There are three established SDA congregations and two companies, including a Spanish-speaking group, in Anguilla. But any aid made available to the island will be shared among everybody in need and not just the membership of the church.
The relief agency branch is intended to work closely with the Government, the Department of Disaster Preparedness and other agencies. The outpost in Anguilla will be part of the Adventist Development Relief Agency (ADRA) which operates in more than 130 countries. It provides “long-term development programmes and immediate emergency response to communities through a network of global offices”.
Two regional SDA officials are now in Anguilla to conduct a programme of training for aid workers at the church’s District Office in the Mason Complex, just off the Stoney Ground Road. In announcing the event, the resident District Minister, Pastor Trent Berg, told The Anguillian:
“I am very happy to share with the community that the Seventh-day Adventist Church, here in Anguilla, has been contemplating just how we may be able to better organise our Ministry to serve our community better in the case of a disaster event. On Wednesday, this week, at 5.30 pm, at the SDA District Office, we are going to begin that process. We are going to have training workshop conducted by some of our Ministry leaders from around the Caribbean.
“We will be having Pastor Wilmoth James who serves as our ADRA Director for the immediate region of the US and British Virgin Islands, St. Eustatius, Saba, St. Martin/St. Maarten and Anguilla. With him will be our Director for the Southern Caribbean, Dr. Alexander Isaac. The people they will be training are local members of our community who will be tasked with the responsibility to begin the relief initiative from our church to help our community in future cases of disaster.
“The responsibility of the trained persons will initially make an assessment of specific areas of the island’s community. This information is to be reported to the wider ADRA mechanism that will be communicating with the Anguilla Government whenever there is a disaster and our desire to offer our assistance and services. They are also going to be prepared to respond to individuals who have initial needs. Those needs could vary from transportation, provision of food and clothing to the clearing of properties where families have seniors and minors in their care.”
Pastor Berg further said: “I think it was very evident, through our experience with Hurricane Irma, that we saw that there was a need to respond to people. Because our island is very slender in nature, it is very easy for us to be cut off. It is important, therefore, for us to be able to offer to the community an organised group of individuals, from our church, which can step up and provide initial assistance to persons in addition to the wider assistance provided by the helping arm of the church’s relief organisation.”
The Seventh-day Adventist Pastor was pleased that the SDA Church “was able to have worked closely with the Government” following Hurricane Irma. He noted, however, that “our response was slow as communication was rather haphazard very early on, but once the communication was flowing, we were able to get our operations set up in the second or third week after the hurricane. That was much, much later than we preferred.”
He pointed out, nevertheless, that: “We were able to feed over 500 families in Anguilla, especially those who had minors and elderly family members. The Adventist Development Relief Agency (ADRA) is focused on responding to the community. It is not designed to serve the members of the church. If the members of the church are in the community where the relief agency workers are targeting, they will help everyone.
“Thankfully, through our work in Anguilla, post Hurricane Irma, we were able to forge a very good working relationship with the present disaster team that the Government has. We pray that we will not have another disaster, but we recognise, given our past experiences and the place in which we live, we need to be prepared. We have to take our experience from Irma as a warning so that we could be better prepared to respond to the needs of our people.”
In expressing the church’s satisfaction and pride in assisting the Anguillian community, at a time of much disaster, Pastor Berg said: “We longed and pressed for this and we are actually one of the communities here which are having this [relief assistance] put in place. With this training, also, will come some financial support which will allow our team not just to go out and act, but to assist in a practical way before there is any assistance to Anguilla from outside the island.
“It means that our response now, instead of waiting for the leaders, who are part of this organisation world-wide, to come in, we will actually have a team on the island that would act ahead of a storm, so that things would be in place by the time it passes. This will make our response much faster.”
