USVI Facts

The point of this post is to give you an idea of the weather that affects the USVI, and the people who live here. Interspersed is a sequence of pictures I took toward Magen’s bay during a “scattered thundershower”. This drop and recovery in visibility is common to rainstorms here. The entire storm took less than 30 minutes from first to last drop.

The CIA World Factbook (to be abbreviated as CIAWFB, you have love acronyms) lists the resources of the Virgin Islands as “sun, sand, sea, surf”. Subtract “surf” and add “inexpensive jewelry, crystal and booze” and it is fairly accurate.

Three main islands make up the US Virgin Islands, St John, St Thomas, and St Croix. St John and St Thomas are very close to each other (~3 miles), while St Croix is ~40 miles to the south. St Thomas and St Croix both have about 50,000 people, while St John has about 5,000 people. St Croix is also home to one of the largest oil refineries in the Western Hemisphere, which seems a bit out of place for a Caribbean island. In addition to the main islands, there are many cays, some of which are populated (up to a couple of hundred people), all the way down to cays that are just a rock with a stunted sea grape tree.

Despite the fact that NOAA lists a 20-70% chance of rain just about every day, it only rains infrequently (example: it has not rained at the house that I have noticed for several days, despite having 50% chance of rain for each of those days), and then not for very long. The two months that I have been here, it has only rained for more than 2 hours straight a couple of times. Most rain comes in scattered showers, accompanied by thunder/lighting about 1/3 of the time. When it does rain, a strong breeze of (blessedly) cool wind is followed by the rain, which often builds quickly to a downpour, continues for several minutes, and then quickly tapers away. There has not been a day where it has been cloudy all day. Even on the rare occasion where it rains for several hours, the sun manages to shine at least a little.

We don't have a regular trash pick up here. Instead we take our trash to one of the sets of dumpsters that is around the island. I would estimate that there are 10 or so groups of dumpsters. The closest to us is about 2/3 of the way down to Magen's bay. Dumpsters don't help traffic, especially the one in town that has no place to pull off the road. People just stop in the middle of the road (on a hill no less) to toss their garbage.

Kendra pointed out that I refer to myself as a “white boy”, so it might be worth pointing out the racial breakdown of the island. According to the CIAWFB, the USVI has 109,000 people, subdivided as below:
Black 76.2%,
White 13.1%,
Asian 1.1%,
Other 6.1%,
Mixed 3.5%

It seems (to me) that there are less than 13% white people, but that could just be because I haven’t ever been the minority before (unless you could Revelle College at UCSD, where Asians were the majority). There is a little racial tension on the island. I think most of what I perceived as racism when I first arrived was just a combination of social rules different from what I knew, islanders not liking mainlanders (who happen to be mostly white), and islanders really not liking tourists. Since I was “not from here”, and I didn’t know the social rules, people were not super friendly. These days once people realize that I live here, they are generally much nicer, but there is still a wide range in the responses I get from islanders, from rudeness to friendliness.

Having said that, there have been incidences which have raised racial tension on the islands. There is also a group who feel that they are “natives” (ironically, all the pre-Columbian natives are dead/displaced) and that whites, having previously been slave owners on the islands, owe them reparations of some sort. The motto on the vehicle license plate frame says, “Our Islands, Our Home.” Depending on who “our” represents, that can mean a lot of things. Anyhow, most people who I will be interacting with for an extended period of time (Kendra’s co-workers and VI Ecotours people for example) are friendly, and even strangers tend to become nicer (or at least less rude) when you greet them directly.