Land and Sea of Contradicitions
28 February 2008 | Georgetown, Bahamas
Bill Mintz
Like everywhere this is a place of contradictions. Notice that I say that it is a place, not a land. This is barely a land, mostly a sea. The land area here is just a few widely spaced specks, but the water is huge and influences every aspect of life.
The people here are very protective of the water. Though seafood is the basis of all food here, there are fishing regulations that restrict the most common species, and they are generally followed. There are mountains of conch shells everywhere. The conch is a marine snail that makes the pink shell that you see on the shelf in almost every store that sells anything marine. The muscle is the edible part and it is a staple here. One can eat cracked conch, conch fritters, conch chowder, conch salad, and many other ways too. In an effort to protect the population of the conch the government has required that any conch taken be of a size that indicates that it is of sexual maturity. Amazingly the restriction seems to be followed. Also the Nassau grouper which is an important food fish cannot be taken from November through February. Again followed. There are signs, billboards, and pamphlets available in many places instructing people on the importance of marine conservation.
Despite the careful way people treat the water here, the land is treated poorly. There is junk and litter everywhere. There seems to be no particular control over emissions or waste. Garbage is burned, cars are dumped and left where they fail. Buildings fall apart and are left there. What little industry there is belches smoke freely as do cars and trucks. Even though gas and diesel is about $5.00 per gallon there dosen't seem to be any move to smaller cars.
Here in the Bahamas the people are as kind and as warm as can be. Friendly and pleasant, yet corruption is endemic in the society. We have been overcharged for almost every good or service that we have purchased. Even at a high end resort we were overcharged, and no one could produce the receipt and simply reversed the charge when we questioned it. It is absolutely necessary to check receipts, count change, and find out charges beforehand. The elected officials run on 'end the corruption' platforms. It doesn't seem that any of it is really all that malicious, just part of the fabric of society and accepted as such.
Even though people are so nice, Nassau has almost a murder a day. That is more than Chicago or Detroit in a city of only 250,000. The murder rate is just astronomical. I was told not to go into the city after dark, and that the busses would not stop to pick up passengers once the sun went down. Yet people went far out of their way to help us. Who are all these murderers? I guess I never met an of them.
The first settlers here were the Loyalists form the American Revolution. Looking to escape the newly formed United States they came here as refugees. Many of them became landholders and plantation owners and slaveholders. Today the Bahamian people are mostly black descendents of the slaves that the whites once owned. In the northern Bahamas the owners of most property seem to be the whites, as one moves south in the nation the residents and owners become predominantly black. Many people trace a long lineage here and have historic last names. Here in Exuma, where we are now, the famous last name is Rolle. Descendents of slaves once owned by a man with that name, they were freed on his death and granted his lands. Many of them took his last name as their own and now occupy the land that was once his. We met Tucker Rolle who is the owner of Compass Cay (pronounced key). He is one of the finest environmental stewards I have ever met. The schoolteacher in Georgetown is Crystal Rolle, kind, gentle and patient. From what I can tell there is good tolerance and cooperation between the races, yet strong separation. A black and white couple is still rare here and is referred to as a 'penguin couple'. We spent some time with another family on our boat one night trying to answer the question "who are the Bahamians" we came up with consensus, but no real answer.
This island nation has been good to us. Though expensive for us and fairly poor (another contradiction) it has been easy sailing, good weather and fishing. It has been a good intro