Hello everybody,
Dealing with unexpected situations abroad can be a very difficult matter. In order to better help expats and soon-to-be expats in the Cayman Islands face such tricky situations, we invite you to share your advice and experience.
What are the key emergency numbers you should know by heart?
In the event of a legal problem, an accident, a natural disaster, an injury or the death of a close family member, what are the first things to do in the Cayman Islands?
What are the things to plan ahead in order to better cope with such unexpected situations (registration at the Embassy, transport, medical, comprehensive insurance for instance)?
If you have gone through such experiences in the Cayman Islands, do not hesitate to share your story.
Thank you in advance!
Priscilla
Dealing with emergency situations in the Cayman Islands
No special advice is needed for Cayman, any more than would be needed for new residents of a town of 50,000 people in England - Bath, say, or Hereford. Our main island has a fairly sophisticated economy, everybody speaks English of one sort or another, medical services are top class - and all expats are obliged by law to have medical insurance anyway. My last "column" for the Expat Focus website told of everyday life in an "offshore" tax haven, and can be found at the link below. Other columns of mine have covered other aspects of local life.
expatfocus.com/c/cid=285/
Individual personal emergencies are dealt with matter-of-fact-ly. My personal blog-site (http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com) contains a piece posted in October 2013 called "On being a house-father" that tells of a few medical crises involving my son, and that illustrates how they were handled. Of minor interest; nothing dramatic.
Our major concern in the Caribbean is hurricanes, but very few of them visit Cayman. We had one in 2004 that killed an old man and a baby and was mildly inconvenient for the rest of us, but was nothing compared with the tsunami in south-east Asia a couple of months later.
