A Small Place After reading this book, I don’t think I will seriously consider a trip to the Caribbean anytime in the near future. The first part of the book by Jamaica Kincaid is written about a tourist visiting Antigua. Initially she puts you in the tourists’ shoes as your plane lands as she takes you through your visit to this beautiful island. The sights, sounds, and food you experience are everything you have imagined a tropical island to be. Bright, colorful, soothing and delicious are words that come to your mind as you begin your visit to Antigua. But slowly, you begin to see that this island is like a movie set. What you see is not reality. And what is the reality is frightening. You see that the taxi drivers drive expensive Japanese …show more content…
On an island with such a booming tourism industry, why is everyone so poor? The sadness is in the fact that most of the people that should be able to get employment in the big resorts are not even eligible to get the jobs… employees are brought in from the “mainland”. The people of Antigua are not even able to get a job in the hotels. The people who are getting rich off the tourism, are not even from Antigua. The government officials are wealthy and they are corrupt. They hire their families to fill the government positions. They collude with wealthy individuals to make money off the tourism industry. They get wealthy, the wealthy get richer. The people of Antigua just get poorer. Does the government make the services for the citizens better with the money they make? No. Their hospital is so bad that officials of Antigua, leave the island for healthcare. People die in the hospital. If you are a tourist…trust me you do not want to get sick while you are on a trip there. They have a large library that was damaged in the earthquake of 1974, that still has a sign on it that says, “Repairs Pending”. Then the tourist checks into the hotel and eats a fabulous dinner of locally grown food, except the food in flown in from Miami, not grown locally. The worst visual image you could ever imagine is when you are wading at the edge of the ocean, and the water is as blue as the sky above and Kincaid tells you that the water you are wading in contains the solid waste from the flushing of the “lavatory” in your room. Antigua does not have any type of sewage disposal system. You could be wading in the contents of your excrement as you walk along the shore thinking what a beautiful day it is. The whole tourist story makes you sick when you think about it. You as the tourist, going to what you think might be the most beautiful island on the earth and never knowing that the people that live there