Where De Bus?
Heatwaves across the Caribbean, Creole curriculum in Saint Lucia, Guardian article tries to explain regional crime.
A good part of the reason why many Caribbean passports are so powerful is the fact that most of us are tiny and will never use them. The countries extending diplomatic olive branches to us, do so with the tacit expectation that we won’t come, won’t stay too long if we manage to make it and certainly can’t come in numbers that would pose a threat to their own stability.
This is Disgruntled Musings, a compilation of quick commentary on the latest socio-political news and updates from across the Caribbean region.
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New network for small businesses in Barbados
Barbados Today
Minister Lisa Cummins promised a new small business network for connecting owners to new opportunities. Let me stop the honorable minister right there. Small businesses in Barbados are mostly a joke. This is not meant to offend any of the legitimate goods and service proprietors here on the island, heck some of my closest friends are great entrepreneurs. They’re a joke because the government pretends to care about fostering them, while unceremoniously doing everything in their power to make creating or maintaining one a nightmare.
Look no further than the island’s FX levy, which imposes a 2% charge on every international transaction. Need to source craft materials for a new product, 2%. Need ingredients for a novelty menu item to differentiate yourself? 2%. Planning to offer your services beyond the 166 measly square miles of the rock? Too bad, everything you try to acquire overseas will attract a 2% charge. And that shit adds up fast. You’re quite literally being punished for daring to have any item or service that the island itself doesn’t offer and I don’t know about you but “we have xyz at home” isn’t what I want my government to be gaslighting me about. I’ve already given my honest thoughts on the FX debate, just see the last episode for my embattled plea for my people to rise up and demand US dollars. FX controls hurt businesses, restrict market access and perpetuate the lie that a healthy economy needs to be self-sufficient. We don’t need to make pop tarts in Barbados and I don’t care about promising initiatives for growing sustainable rice.
The import bill is often used as a scapegoat for issues surrounding government spending. Every time the PM and friends bring it up, they are directly blaming consumers and businesses for having international tastes. I don’t want yams, I don’t want eddoes, I want a damn pop tart. So all this entrepreneur nonsense is just a smokescreen to distract from the government's own poor spending habits and to place the blame on us for making honest lives. For those of you who manage to carve out your niche in this rubbish heap, power to you.
Creole to join curriculum in Saint Lucia
Castries has announced that Kwéyòl, the creole French spoken by the native population of the island, will be taught in schools. Hot take here: but there is no actual economic or cultural advantage to doing this and it’s even more eyebrow raising following the announcement by the CXC that the region’s students might be sucking at passing basic English. Now I can hear the cultural pundits going “it’s preserving an integral part of blah blah blah”. No, it's preserving a broken French which the island has crafted as part of an identity to sell to tourists. It may have had its origins in slavery etc but why are you really trying to preserve this rather than progressing beyond it? In the age of globalization, hamstringing your own curriculum with languages that aren’t used outside your minuscule borders just sets you back and fosters insularity for no other reason than maintaining a way of life that was made obsolete the moment the airplane was invented. You can’t keep your country linguistically in the stone age yet wonder why the rest of the world is passing you by. English is the lingua franca of the planet. If Kwéyòl is entrenched enough then it will keep its place in the language pool, otherwise let that bitch go the way of Latin and stop fighting progress.
Cold take: Yes sure, whatever. Maybe just revisit your policies on education for the wave of post-pandemic illiterates who will now never leave the island. At least they know Kwéyòl now.
“Wherever you have drugs, you have guns: why is there an epidemic of violence in the Caribbean?” - Natricia Duncan for Guardian
Guardian
I don’t know Natricia, you tell me. Because your piece missed the mark in a few areas, likely intentionally to protect a bit of national pride perhaps? Oh wait, she's in Jamaica. This one’s all over the place. But the gist of it is “the region’s got a lot of drugs and guns which is prompting turf wars”. She throws in declining family values so the London housewives reading can clutch their pearls in concern and something about Haiti, convincing anyone at the foreign ministry to ready the next draft of ill conceived policies.
Okay maybe I’m a bit harsh. She’s not entirely off the mark. Drugs and guns do spur on the crimes we are seeing across the region. As it would anywhere else in the world. And yes there’s been a bit of an uptick in crime. But Natricia, the answer is staring you in the face and you willfully ignored it. You mentioned that the region is a trans-shipment point for contraband. Tran-shipping between who and who Natricia? She wrote this entire piece in a fervor and just didn’t want to acknowledge that the USA and UK are both the largest source and market for the drugs, guns and shifty financial services she side eyes the Cayman Islands for.
And why is Haiti here? Why have you brought that up? That’s like complaining about crime in Europe escalating because of the war in Ukraine. Is that a thing? Haiti is a collapsed failed state. It doesn’t have a crime rate, that’s just life in Haiti now. Pay no attention to the CARICOM member state thing, we can go ahead and blot it out on most maps. Just leave it gray like Western Sahara, for no data and no government.
Caribbean warned to brace for heat
Loop News
Antigua and Barbuda’s met office joined a regional chorus this week to spell out the impending barbecue the region is about to emulate for the next few days. It’s the usual, high temperature warning, climate change yadda yadda. They even do that thing where they warn about all the health risks of exposure to these conditions.
“Extreme heat can lead to heat-related illnesses such as heat stroke, heat exhaustion, fainting, cramps, rash, and edema.”
Okay so what are we gonna do about it? I am most confused as to what the plan is. Sure I’m grateful for the warnings, but what exactly are we to do to rectify or survive these new normal temperatures. Let’s face it, this is the new normal. Sweltering summers and intensifying storms mean climate stress across the board for everyone, but I am not seeing a concerted effort by the governments of the region to alleviate this stress. They’re certainly not building storm resistant homes, they haven’t got the money or willpower to enforce actual building codes.
How about air conditioning? Outside of Saudi Ar- I mean Trinidad and Tobago, you can’t run air-con in the Caribbean for more than 3 business seconds before the electric company is holding your first born up for ransom. It’s just too pricey. There’s an entire narrative here that no one is considering. The climate crisis can rapidly evolve into a health one. I record this very podcast in a 36 degree room on most days. Besides the fact that my little portable AC unit (I call her Jacinta) is a little on the loud side and I don’t want to apply too much noise reduction on my audio, she’s simply too pricey to run for the entire period of the day that’s most intense.
It’s almost as if the governments of the region have no actual plan to keep the region bearable or livable in the long term. But that would be crazy right? Right? If these summers are just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re being warned of the effects such heat exposure can have on everyone and even more so on vulnerable groups? Where is the subsidized energy program? Cooling centers? Maybe a shift in work hours to avoid the hottest parts of the day. So far there’s nothing. We’ve been told, it’s gonna get hot. “How hot? Really hot. Good luck.” Guys I think we might be in hell.
“Where de bus?”
We used to be a real country.
Listeners, this may come as a shock to you but I don’t drive. That’s right. This disembodied, melodious voice may seem to be emanating from someone who’s got their shit together but I don’t have a driver’s license. It has just never happened. To be fair I live in one of the most connected and walkable neighborhoods of my fair island. A supermarket, doctor’s office, hardware, school and the beach are all 15 minutes away on foot. But every now and then an errand or other interest draws me out of my neck of the woods and reality hits me like a brick. The transit network in Barbados sucks. Some routes have schedules that see buses pass hourly. What’s so bad about an hourly bus you ask? Well, the island terminates in about 30 minutes in any direction from the center. Yes it really is that small. How on God’s green earth does the local transit body justify hourly frequency? It’s simple, they barely have a fleet.
Barbados suffers from a glaring lack of accountability and foresight, at most levels of government. But the most glaringly public example is the Transport Board. Founded in 1955 by an act of parliament which consolidated several private bus companies, the board wasn’t always a shit show. In fact, we had a golden era. There was a time when buses would zip past by house every 15 minutes. Not hourly, not even bi-hourly. That’s right, 15 minutes. You could keep track of the time of day by just listening out for the rumble of an old Acme or Caio bus. Just before 2007, Barbados had hosted the ICC cricket world cup alongside several other islands. The government was keen to flex its infrastructural muscle and boom, 70 new buses appeared out of thin air from Brazil.
I, a huge fan of public transit if you didn’t guess by now, was in heaven. The routes weren’t perfect, the buses not entirely suited for our roads (there is literally an infamous video of an elderly lady trying to step up into one and failing spectacularly) but by gosh in my mind we had a functioning transit system. I could tell you any route number you needed, to get anywhere you needed to be, I had it all in the back of my head. Now I was still a kid in school so there was no way I could have seen what was coming next. Over the next decade what preceded can only be described as the most pathetic fall from grace I have ever seen in a public system. In just under a decade Barbados’s proud fleet of 300+ omnibuses dwindled to less than 60. The board was struggling to find funding, parts, staff, you name it. The golden era came crashing down and if you were to ask me how to get from point A to B in Barbados today, I'd say let’s bow our heads in prayer.
Today the fleet isn’t even numbered. The board’s too scared to say the size out loud lest they get universally laughed at. We bought a few electric buses recently but those are actually falling apart already. And the drivers seem keen on playing demolition derbies with the damn things. I can’t make heads or tales of the current route map. It was wishful thinking to think I could before, but today it’s like reading tea leaves. One quirk of the route map that’s never changed in the existence of two terminals in the city. Bridgetown is by no means a large city. You can walk the length of it in under an hour. Hell, in under half an hour if you are feeling enthusiastic. But it’s got two terminals. You need to see it to believe it. Maybe it’s a relic of an optimistic bygone era. I don’t know. I once heard rumors that the south bound terminal now and Fairchild was supposed to be built into some grand structure to consolidate all the routes. It’s hard to see that from the rusting tool shed they’re passing as the Fairchild terminal today. Every few years they repaint it. And last year they renamed it to the Granville something terminal and it promptly flooded in a rainstorm the next day. Divine intervention of some kind.
The sorry state of the bus system is the reason everyone here has a car and deeply believes you need one to survive. People here have become so car-centric, they’ve completely forgotten that you slow down before entering a roundabout, and that’s where you logically place a pedestrian crossing. It’s insane how many cars are crammed onto this tiny rock and even more so insane when you consider the price of them. Our government, which always conjures the horse before the cart, has thrown every tax and levy under the sun at car purchase and import. But they severely underestimated just how much vitriol they had generated for public transit. Barbadians are now more resolved than ever to never find themselves at the mercy of a public bus. Can you blame them? We used to have an old tv show called Bajan Bus Stop. The opening theme was a small band of neighbors singing about not seeing a bus, and guessing that it may have broken down. This decades old show was making fun of a dysfunctional and poor bus system all those years ago. And here we are again, singing “Where de bus” all over again. We’ve come full circle somehow.
Interesting as always, I really appreciate the research put in behind this and Chaufa.
On the instruction of Kweyol in schools, I concede that the economic benefit is potentially low but wholeheartedly refute the idea that there is no cultural benefit.
1) Kweyol, or Patois as we call it in Trinidad, is not just a language created for touristic purposes but a living cultural practice - see Paramin's Kwech/Creche Mas. I'd suggest you to understand a bit better the history of this language as it was spoken by both slaves and just as often the free coloured or latin creoles by the time it reached the south.
2) Kweyol is spoken in Dominica, St Lucia, Northern Trinidad, Guiria in Venezuela and the French Antilles, and was until recently the lingua franca on the migrant farmers in the southern Caribbean. The Venezuelan peons for example learned Patois before English in the Cacao plantations.
3) Kweyol is not just broken French, like Papiamento & Haitian Creole it is a language which borrows >80% of its vocabulary from French but with its own gramatical rules distinct from French. However, there is a level of mutual intelligibility with French & other French creoles: Seychellois, Reunionais etc. Kweyol speakers will have an easier time picking up French in later life.
4) The argument of "Oh but we already suck at english" is a poor one. There is ample research to suggest that bilingual children go on to out perform their monolingual peers and Kweyol tutelage does not have to subtract from English. We need better language skills in the region, not just English and getting children to become educated in another language early is the best way.
Anyway, all that to say, you sound like my Granny telling people its "farmer talk". Culture on our islands is rich, and I'd hate to see that be lost to our own negligence and ignorance.
All the best and great work.