Peter Espeut
HERE'S A quiz question for you: which part of Jamaica currently has between 1,000 and 2,000 residents and yet has no roads, no public water supply, no public electricity supply, no school or health centre within dozens of miles, no toilets (not even pit latrines) and no churches? There used to be a police station there, but the officers deserted it because of the terrible conditions under which they were forced to live. If you haven't got it yet, let me help you a little more: the area has no councillor or MP because it does not fall in any Parish Council division or any constituency; and, of course, it has no polling stations at election time, and has never been included in any national census of Jamaica (I always knew they were undercounting).
Stumped? If you are, I'm not surprised. Many Jamaicans feel that their (remote) communities are behind God's back, but the communities I am referring to take the cake. I spent three days there last week, and I was appalled at the conditions under which my fellow Jamaicans live, and the official neglect by Jamaican governments, past and present.
MARGINAL CONDITIONS
Much money is made here from the one commodity they produce, fish, but because they are so remote, the few buyers who visit there 'run t'ings'. It is a buyers market, and as the residents are dependent upon them for the food, drink, cigarettes, fuel and other supplies they bring, they are forced to sell their commodity cheaply after a lot of hard and relatively dangerous work; the buyers triple their money in a day or two of minimal work.
The conditions are so marginal, that few women accompany their men there. One community has no women at all! (They say they send their earnings back to their wives and children elsewhere in Jamaica). The other has a number of opportunistic ladies who make a small fortune daily (or more correctly, nightly) - four figures a time. As it was so succinctly put at a public meeting I held, "The ooman dem suck out the man money."
They were devastated by hurricanes Ivan and Emily, and I suppose because they have no representation in Parliament or elsewhere, they did not receive any of the assistance offered to others.
THE PEDRO CAYS FORGOTTEN
Where is this? Of course, I am talking about the Pedro Cays, lying about 100 miles south of the island of Jamaica. The British Crown took possession of the four islets on June 13, 1863, after a tussle with the Americans, and formally annexed them to Jamaica on June 1, 1882. Because they are inhabited and officially part of the nation-state of Jamaica, we are able to define ourselves as an 'archipelagic state' rather than as an 'island state', and are able, under the United Nations Law of the Sea, to claim exclusive rights to thousands of square miles of marine resources, including commercial fishing grounds, valuable minerals on and under the seafloor, and sunken treasure ships.
There is no dispute that legally these inhabited islands (and a few others) are part of the state of Jamaica, but I would argue that this is mostly in name only. These cays and their inhabitants fall 'behind God's back' in more ways than one. I have already mentioned some above. It is hard to understand why these Jamaican citizens, thousands of whom are resident here on Census Day, should be purposely omitted from the national count.
The sanitary conditions are appalling. The residents say that the government does not allow them to dig pit latrines, and so several times each day there is a procession to the part of each cay they have decided will be used for the deposit of solid human waste. It is pathetic while coming in by boat to see the many human figures - male and female - outlined on the white rocky/sandy seashore, squatting. I guess the only positive element is that the use of scandal bags is rare. If the Prime Minister were ever to visit, and needed to go to the toilet, where would he go?
The concrete foundations of wooden buildings erected for our fishers during colonial times may be seen. All were destroyed by hurricanes and not since rebuilt. Currently, the two inhabited cays are basically shack cities. The Jamaica Defence Force Coast Guard maintains a base on one of the cays, and the men camped there labour heroically under spartan conditions. I am grateful for the hospitality they showed me over the three days I stayed on the cays. The military are there for drug interdiction (I am told that the area is a rendezvous for traffic between Colombia and North America), and have no authority to enforce civil laws. I wish they would be better supplied with food, water and fuel to be better able to do their work.
Would Trinidad ignore Tobago, or Antigua forget Barbuda? We seem to have both ignored and forgotten the Pedro Cays.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist, and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
