Just thought I would drop you a quick note to tell you that everything is going well on St. Maarten and to send you some pictures.
I also wanted to let you know that I have been made a senior companion and have a new companion named Elder Neff. He and the rest of the missionaries from Guadeloupe and Martinique were evacuated yesterday so I have 7 elders stay in my apartment besides myself. There are also 5 in the French Apartment. (Mine is bigger so more were able to stay with me). For the next 4 weeks or so there will be 8 missionaries on the island (4 on each side). That should help the work progress! Then we will go back to being just 4 missionaries if things have calmed down on the other islands.
The rest of the missionaries that are here will be flying to Guyana over the next couple of days until they have all left. It should be an interesting month! I'll keep you posted on how things are going. This was a special e-mail day because none of the elders that came in had e-mailed yet. So I had these few minutes to write. E-mails will come on Monday as normal next week.
France sends police to quell Guadeloupe riots
by Benjamin Sportouch – Wed Feb 18, 3:36 pm ET
POINTE-A-PITRE, Guadeloupe (AFP) – France dispatched hundreds of police reinforcements to its Caribbean island of Guadeloupe on Wednesday as a month-long strike over the rising cost of living descended into deadly riots.
Union representative Jacques Bino, aged in his 50s, was shot dead overnight when he drove up to a roadblock manned by armed youths in Pointe-a-Pitre, the island's main city.
It was not immediately clear who shot him, but he was the first victim of the escalating violence on Guadeloupe, normally a tourist-friendly island but crippled since January 20 by a general strike.
"There were no police nearby," said local prosecutor Jean-Michel Pretre.
Bino's car was hit three times by 12-gauge shotgun slugs. Two rounds hit the rear of the vehicle and the third was fired through a side passenger window and fatally wounded the activist in the chest.
"These were not stray rounds," Pretre said, adding that he was looking into the possibility that, given their age, Bino and a passenger had been mistaken for plain-clothes police officers.
Six members of the security forces were slightly injured during clashes with armed youths, police said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a nationwide address he would meet with elected officials from Guadeloupe on Thursday to "address the anxiety, worries and also a certain form of despair from our compatriots."
After holding an emergency meeting on the deteriorating security on the island, Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie announced that 280 police reinforcements would fly to the island immediately.
Gangs of youths looted shops, smashed storefront windows and threw up burning roadblocks overnight along the main streets of Pointe-a-Pitre and in at least two other towns. Fourteen people were detained.
Ary Chalus, mayor of the town of Baie-Mahault, where three police were hurt, described the scene as "chaos."
"We have 15-year-old children who are clashing with police. We may well have families in mourning," he warned.
Bino, a tax official, had been returning from a labour meeting, said Elie Domota, leader of the Collective Against Exploitation (LKP), the coalition of unions and leftist groups that launched the strike.
The LKP had said it planned to step up protests this week after the government refused to bow to demands for a monthly 200-euro (260-dollar) pay increase for low-wage earners.
Domota appealed for calm but also accused the French authorities of treating the island, one of its four overseas departments, like a "colony."
"Guadeloupe is a colony because they would never have allowed the situation to fester for so long in a French (mainland) department before taking action," Domota said on RTL radio.
The conflict has exposed race and class divisions on the island, where the local white elite wields power over the black majority.
The economy is largely in the hands of the "Bekes," the local name for whites who are mostly descendants of colonial landlords and sugar plantation slave owners of the 17th and 18th centuries.
A Socialist opposition leader, Malikh Boutih, said it was "shocking" to watch a police force "almost 100 percent white, confront a black population" and drew a parallel with the 2005 suburban riots in France.
"There are no concrete buildings, there are palm trees, but it's the same dead-end, the same 'no future' for young people, with joblessness and a feeling of isolation," Boutih said.
Unions launched a strike on the neighbouring French island of Martinique on February 5 also to press for higher salaries and measures to bring down the prices of basic goods.
Most shops, cafes, banks, schools and government offices have been shut in Guadeloupe and Martinique and the strike has also hit the key tourism industry.