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I had a bit of a scare today. I was driving my scooter on a bright, sunny day, heading off to a series of meetings and fun events for the rest of the afternoon. Unfortunately, while I had planned ahead for those activities, I hadn’t planned on hitting a ginormous pothole in the road and crashing my scooter.
Clearly since I’m writing this, I am okay.
I was very shaken up, and a bit scraped up, but otherwise walked away without a problem. But the accident isn’t what I want to focus on. What I want to highlight is how wonderful the entire community was in response to it.
Ana was driving behind me, saw what was happening and stopped her vehicle to prevent other traffic from continuing on. She protected me. And she also immediately got out of her car and came running over to be sure I was okay.
The taxi driving towards us stopped and blocked traffic coming the other way. The driver checked on my scooter, which had slid across to the grass on the other side of the street. He rolled it back across the street to my side and stood it up safely off the road.
Martin was driving the Sun Divers truck two cars back from my accident. He jumped out and immediately offered to drive me to town to the hospital. He also took my scooter in the back of his truck to bring it back to West End for me. The scooter actually barely got scratched. Although, maybe we just can’t tell the new scratches from its many old scratches at this point. Regardless, Rusty is running smoothly again, no worries!
Tish stopped and made sure I hadn’t broken any bones. She checked my pupils and made sure I hadn’t injured my head at all. She also very intelligently grabbed a towel in case I was bleeding heavily (I wasn’t, don’t worry).
Within minutes, an ambulance even showed up! Now I am one of those typical West End naysayers who claim that it’s quicker to put an injured person into a cab than to call an ambulance. They certainly proved me wrong today! They pulled right up with a bilingual driver and an EMT in the back. They did the same checks Tish had just done and made sure I was alright before letting me leave. Nothing broken, no crazy pupils, no major bleeding at all.
Gio, with whom I had scheduled a meeting later, happened to come upon us and came right over to check on me. I didn’t need to go to the hospital – luckily I was fine. So Gio not only drove me straight home, I was dropped off to rest while he headed into West End to grab what I would need from the pharmacy. He came back with an entire bag of supplies and refused to allow me to pay him back.
All of these people took the time to check on me and to take care of me – and only one of them actually knew who I was. Other drivers stopped to ask if further assistance was needed, including taxi drivers and motorcyclists. Everyone was concerned, even down to the neighborhood kid who ran out to grab my sandal and my purse from the middle of the road. He brought them straight over to me with a very concerned expression on his face. I assured him I was okay, but he looked as shaken up as I was!
I can’t thank these wonderful people enough. And an incident like this truly makes me reflect and realize how strong and supportive this whole community is in Roatan. I’m afraid somewhere else I may have just been bypassed or – perhaps if one person stopped – everyone else would assume I was taken care of so they could carry on with their days. Nobody here passed by without checking on me. Not one single person.
I am very lucky to not be injured after a crash like that, but I consider myself even luckier to be part of this caring community. Thank you all for being so very kind.
I truly do live in paradise.
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