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.

Day 221 - Rain Ants

Every experience in Barbados had a cultural layer to it, even getting to know about the flora and fauna.

The most important task when I first arrived in Barbados was to find a house. Because Barbados was a living quarters allowance post, I had to arrange with real estate agents on the island to see what was available. Unlike real estate agents in the U.S. who worked all day, every day, agents in Barbados worked Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That posed a few challenges since I was also supposed to work those hours on those days.

When one of the local employees in the consular section, Anthony*, told me his uncle had a house for rent and asked if I would like to have his cousin show me the place, I was pleased by the possibility of looking at it after work instead of having to ask my boss if it would be OK for me to take off early to see another property. My boss always wanted more notice than I could give.

Anthony arranged for his cousin to pick me up at the end of the day to take me to the house. It was a wonderful home, but I knew right away that it was too large for me to get it approved. And it was more open than the security officer would like. The house seemed more like two houses, one half consisting of the kitchen, dining room, and living room, with the three bedrooms in the other half. The two halves were joined by a covered porch, screened in on one side and completely open on the other, which served as the family room. In other words, the room where the family was expected to sit around to watch TV was outside.

Anthony's uncle, the owner of the house, was a judge for a Caribbean regional council which required he live on another of the island nations. His cousin had told his father about me, although I kept wondering how he could have had much to say since we hadn't even met, and he kept stressing that his father wanted me to rent his house. He was willing to accept whatever rental amount was my limit in spite of the fact that he could get more for the house if he rented it to tourists during the long tourist season. I kept responding with appreciation for his father's generosity and with compliments about the house, but I knew that I would not be able to rent the house because it was so much larger than was allowable for me. In order to get Anthony's cousin to stop calling me to pressure me into renting his father's house, I finally asked the security officer to check it out to give me the definitive "no" I knew he would.

After that, Anthony seemed much cooler towards me, as though my not pursuing a lease for the house had been embarrassing to him. In fact, my gut was telling me to be leery of any potential landlord who was that eager for me to rent his property when all the other landlords seemed to want nothing to do with Americans from the embassy.

image of ants with wings by wit, via
Flickr.com

Once we moved into our house on the hill, one evening as we were sitting in our living room, watching TV with the French doors leading to the patio open to let in the breeze, we noticed a swarm of bugs flying into the house. They seemed attracted to the lights, so we closed the doors to prevent more from getting in, and we turned off the lights downstairs and headed upstairs to get away from them. The next morning we found one of the walls in the dining room covered with these bugs. There were so many the only way we could think of to deal with them was to spray them with an insecticide and then brush them from the walls and into a dustpan and then dump them into the trash.

That day at the office, all of us Americans commented on this strange scene as we all found large numbers of these winged insects in our home that morning. I mentioned this scene to Anthony and asked if he knew what those insects were. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know anything about such insect swarms.

Since we Americans in the consular section lived all over the island, it was very difficult to believe we had all experienced something Anthony, a native, knew nothing about. I didn't understand why Anthony would pretend he didn't know what they were, but I realized I wouldn't be able to rely on him to give me a straight answer to anything else.

Still curious about these flying pests, I asked our next door neighbors about them. They explained that the insects were called rain ants because they swarmed just before it rained in the evening.  Our neighbors insisted you could smell them before they arrived. When Bajans smelled them, they shut all their doors and windows and turned off the lights until the rain came.

It took us a few more experiences with rain ants before we could recognize their scent. It took me longer than that to come up with a hypothesis for why Anthony would pretend he didn't know what they were.

*a name, not necessarily the right one