"It is makes you sneeze a lot," Gregory Willock, the president of the Montserrat Cricket Association, told AFP in the nearby island of Antigua by telephone.

Life has continued as normal since the Soufriere Hills volcano erupted Thursday, throwing up a plume of smoke and volcanic ash 10 kilometers (six miles) into the air, he said.

"All I know is it can create problems for people who have sinus" problems, Willock added, saying many residents had taken to wearing masks while schools and government offices have been operating as normal.

Thursday's eruption came almost 15 years after the volcano, which had lain dormant throughout recorded history, first rumbled into life in July 1995.

The 1995 eruption threw up a huge plume of ash and molten lava into the sky, which in coming weeks rained down on the British overseas territory.

The island's capital city Plymouth was buried in ash and volcanic debris in a further massive eruption a month later and destroyed. Two-thirds of the island's population were forced to flee abroad.

This time islanders are praying for rain to clear away the blanket of dust, which has even stopped the cricket team practicing.

"We cannot practice because Salem Park is not accessible. We need rain to get rid of ash on the ground," Willcock said Saturday.

Another resident, who asked not to be named, said his only complaint so far had to do with his medical condition. He's asthmatic.

"It has not worried me but because of my complaint I'm being ultra-careful. I'm talking to you with a mask over my mouth," he told AFP.

"However, life goes on beautifully. It is just like normal life. We are a resilient people," he said.

Many flights around the Caribbean remained cancelled Saturday due to clouds of ash spewed up into the skies.

"The continued ash hanging in the atmosphere presents a risk to planes and to the security of passengers," the police in the nearby island of Guadeloupe said in a statement.

The airport in Guadeloupe, which lies just 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Montserrat, would remain closed until Sunday, it said.

"The dispersion of these ashes will depend on today's weather conditions," it added in a statement, after fire engines were deployed late Friday to try clear the airport's runways of a thick layer of ash.

Some 300 people were stranded on Guadeloupe waiting to leave, the director of the islands' tourism office Thierry Gargar told AFP. He added they were all being accommodated in hotels on the islands.

Flights to other Caribbean tourist hotspots including Anguilla, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Maarten also remained disrupted.

The ash has also forced LIAT, the region's biggest airline, to temporarily suspend flights in and out of the V.C. Bird International airport in nearby Antigua, although flights resumed Saturday to Dominica.

Montserrat, settled by English and Irish colonizers in 1632, has been dubbed "The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean" for its lush vegetation. It has been trying to rebuild its tourism industry since the 1995 eruption.

The buried capital Plymouth, which has been compared to a modern-day Pompeii, now lies in an exclusion zone, but can be visited with organized tours.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook