Day 222 - Personal vs Community Responsibility

image of burned house by
ChrisReilly, via Flickr.com

We were often puzzled by the choice of photos for the front page of the local newspapers in Barbados. For example, one morning, the largest portion of the above-the-fold section of the paper was a photograph of a woman surrounded by five of her children all sitting on what was left of the porch of her burned out home. The story accompanying the photo told of the woman having just returned from the hospital where she had given birth to a sixth child but the hospital authorities wouldn't allow her to take the infant home with her because her house was infested with rats. The next night, the house burned, leaving her without any home for herself and her six children, all fathered by different men. The unstated message was clear: someone needed to do something for this woman.

The response to that unstated message from most of the Americans at the embassy was why didn't the six fathers of her children do something to help her? Why should anyone else be expected to help her? Where was her sense of personal responsibility?

These questions kept popping up as similar tales of hard luck circulated the island, some on the pages of the newspaper, some on TV, some just by word of mouth. Most of the Bajans seemed to think that those with greater means should step in to solve the problems of those with lesser means. It was baffling to most of us.

About a year after my arrival, an event occurred at the embassy that wasn't directly related to this question of personal responsibility, but it led to discoveries about the underlying issues that explained many curiosities for me.

The event was a disagreement between an American woman, the wife of the General Services Officer, and a Bajan woman, the secretary of the Administrative Officer, over the use of the Bajan secretary's phone. Both women believed they were acting politely towards the other. Each misunderstood the other completely. To the American, the Bajan woman conveyed no objection to her use of the telephone. To the Bajan, the American woman was treating her like a stranger instead of like a colleague or friend. The result was emotions reaching the boiling point and items being tossed by at least one of the women at the other. There were no witnesses, or at least no objective witnesses, to clarify just what happened.

Because this event resulted in the split between the American and Bajan staff in that building widening to gulf proportions, Sharon, an American social worker who was married to a Bajan man and had lived on the island for more than ten years, was brought in to talk with all members of the staff in order to bring all the conflicts and arguments to the surface so they could be dealt with.

Sharon listened to our observations of Bajan culture and was able to explain the reasons for many of our misunderstandings. For example, we had all observed that many Bajan women had children without being married, without any stigma attached. In fact, several large companies in Bridgetown preferred to hire single women with at least one child because they were more likely to be steady and reliable employees. A single woman without a child was the least preferred employee because she was seen as not likely to stay or to be less serious about arriving on time and staying until the end of the day.

Now that much made some sense, but her next statement was completely unexpected. Sharon explained that it was the mothers who encouraged both their sons and their daughters to have children out of wedlock. The mothers encouraged their daughters to have children in the hope that they would have a son because only a son would guarantee her any financial security in the future; husbands didn't always stick around, but sons were sons forever. The mothers encouraged their sons to have children by many women outside of marriage so that the bond between the son and the mother of any of his children would not be stronger than the bond between the son and his mother.

That much information helped greatly to understand why the woman on the front page of the newspaper having six children by six different men was accepted and not criticized by Bajans. And since her children were all young, none of the sons were old enough yet to take care of their mother. But it didn't explain the expectation that someone else would be expected to step up into the gap.

Image of Oistens fish market in Barbados by garda,
via Flickr.com 

Sharon's explanation for another phenomenon that irritated us so much did help address that expectation. We all knew Bajans were charged only half what we were charged for fruits, vegetables, meats, and seafood on sale at the open air markets. But what we hadn't understood was that the vendors in those markets would give away their goods to Bajans who couldn't afford to pay. The guiding principle in the open air markets was that people should pay according to what they could afford, not according to an arbitrary number posted on a card. Tourists were wealthy in contrast to Bajans. None of us could dispute that. So tourists - and we were all tourists in the eyes of the open air market vendors - paid more so that those who couldn't pay at all would also receive what they needed.

Bajan society expected the community to take responsibility for every one within it, even those who may have made poor choices leading to the inability to accept personal responsibility. And I'm not so sure our insistence on others taking personal responsibility for their actions is better than expecting every member of a community to take the responsibility they have the means to take in order for the community to benefit.

Life got a lot more interesting and enjoyable once I understood those few small details of Bajan culture.