Honduras started their COVID-19 crisis response saying they were going to close all airports and ports in their second communication on Tuesday March 17th, 2020. All incoming flights were cancelled, leaving Hondurans stranded outside their home country, and tourists in Utila ‘stranded’ here. I put “quotes” around “stranded”, because any of you who know Utila, know that if you had your family here with you, there’s probably no place else you’d rather be ‘stranded’, am I right? There were some sensationalist news articles that made being ‘stuck’ in Utila sound like it was a horrible place to be. All I can say is ‘beware of sensationalist news and rely on the authorities like the World Health Organization WHO for your COVID info’, and any other sources that you would like to point us to in your comments below.
So immediately following the Presidential ordinances, the Governor of the Bay Islands Dino Silvestri started daily communication by broadcasting live on their facebook page. He made two transmissions daily, one in spanish and one in english and spanish… except for his first transmission where you can see he was getting used to the platform. Bay Islands Governor’s Facebook Page
Governor Dino set up countless WhatsApp chats for each nationality to start working on repatriation of the tourists in the Bay Islands. I was part of those chats, and there were times in the middle of the crisis where I could no longer read the messages. If I read 5,000 messages during this crisis so far, he must have read 30,000! And he would always eventually answer which is amazing!!! Charlene was in the USA and she works for Utopia Dive Village and she monitored the chat groups tirelessly helping people along the way. There was sooooooooooooooooo much information being spread around, some of it true and some false, it was clear that without people who knew the facts, no one would get out of the country. So after the tireless efforts of a ton of people in Utila and Roatan and the USA, and the Canadian Embassy & Steve in Utila, the US Embassy and Miss Hannah in Utila, Rosalia from the Municipality of Utila, Rebecca at The Lodge/BICD, the travel agents, Charlene, Dino and all the other people in Roatan on the chats, over 3065 visitors were evacuated from the Bay Islands with 45 ½ more today, that makes 3,110!
Our friend Thomas was here from Germany, and he had to get back home to his family. Karen from the German embassy started chatting about getting Germans off the isalnd to catch their flight from SAP to Frankfurt. So after a bunch of organizing and gathering names from WhatsApp and our Facebook pages Utila Expats & Utila Guru, we finally had 45 evacuees.
So today, three Lanhsa planes left Utila completely full with 15 passengers per flight, to evacuate 30 Germans and 15 other nationalities who are all heading home at 1:40pm today from San Pedro Sula to Frankfurt, Germany. The Utila departure went super smoothly, and the three travel agencies all worked together to make it happen:
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