Turks and Caicos in the international limelight

Turks and Caicos’s Moment in the Limelight Turks and Caicos will be in the international spotlight again next week, when we welcome an international team bringing to our islands the Queen’s Baton relay.

This is the curtain raiser to the 20th Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland this July, when TCI will be among 70 countries competing in a wide range of track and field events. I’m delighted that the organisers have included Turks and Caicos on the circuit for the Queen’s Baton. As the Baton arrives here there will be less than 100 days to go until the opening ceremony.

The Queen placed a message in the Baton when it started an epic journey from Buckingham Palace last October, crossing such vast areas as India and Australia, as well as South East Asian and African countries, before arriving in the Caribbean last month.

It has received warm and sometimes rapturous welcomes in independent countries like Barbados and St Kitts, as well as causing great excitement in the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, where hundreds of school children turned out to take part in the relay, or watch it pass along their streets.

In Turks and Caicos time will only permit the baton to be carried in Providenciales and Grand Turk, but I’m pleased that school children from South Caicos will also be involved in the festivities, which include events along Grace Bay and Main Street. The BBC are making a film of the Baton’s historic journey.

The BBC also featured a rather different perspective of our country, when they broadcast recently the second part of a trilogy of dramas by famous British writer and director David Hare. “Turks and Caicos” was a 90 minute film about the activities of MI5 and CIA agents in the islands and their involvement with companies securing profits from the building of installations to imprison and interrogate suspected international terrorists. It was serious stuff, and without having seen the other two episodes I suspect many viewers may have been left rather perplexed. But there were many shots of the Turks and Caicos’s world renowned beaches and international resort Amanyara to lighten the drama.

Many thanks to the Seven Stars and Sibonne resorts for providing hospitality for the events, and not least to Rita Gardiner and her hard working team at the Commonwealth Games Association and David Bowen, the Cultural Adviser, for planning this moment in the limelight for Turks and Caicos.

I hope that the BBC’s film of the Queen’s Baton relay will demonstrate to an international audience that we are much more than the fictional hunting ground of spies, and that Turks and Caicos Islanders can give as big a welcome or more to the relay as any other Caribbean country.