THE EDITOR, Madam:
I MUST identify myself as one of several Jamaicans who have taken flight from 'paradise'. Because to tell the truth Jamaica is hardly paradise for the average Jamaican.
At the time when I took flight, I was a trained teacher and graduate of the University of the West Indies with honours, had my own apartment, working a full-time job and getting ready to start doing my postgraduate studies. I loved Jamaica so much that after graduating from the UWI, I went back into teaching, though I could then have gone into other fields.
After sitting down and evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of what I was offering to my country, and what my country was offering me in return I realised that I could be doing much better, for myself. I realised that on my salary I had to raffle my bills at the end of the month. So I found that I could either pay my utility bills and buy food or pay my utility bills and buy clothes. No way could I do all three things at any month-end.
Well, I then decided that I needed a part-time job to subsidise my salary. To facilitate that job I would have to cheat a few hours here and there form my regular teaching job. Which at the time I could hardly afford to do.
Then I decided that I needed a car, and I found that owning a car was in the same league as buying a house. However, I decided to pool with co-workers, join a 'pardner' and see how soon I could accumulate money to afford a car.
In the long run I gave in. Living in Jamaica is a major stress if you are intent on working a regular, honest 9-5, and ambitious enough to want to own house and car, wear bling bling, eat food and pay bills. As a young, promising and hardworking teacher there was no happiness. There were too many uncertainties. That's when it hit me that I had to flee, that the 'Jamaica land that I love, nuh love I'.
Politicians, you made your beds by handing out guns to young men to fight political wars in the 1970s and 1980s. The guns are still in working order but they are fighting a different kind of war.
Air Jamaica ticket counter in Montego Bay was robbed, so what? Look how many poor women with their last hundred dollars were held up downtown! Women whose fingers were cut off for a ring, lost an arm for a bracelet. Look how many females were relieved of their handbags with just their survival money!
This is just a word to all the politicians, business men and women and all those who have sacrificed us and our country for their own benefits, pork barrel politics and whatever else they call it including Mr. Stewart. They all have done to us what the 'white man' did to Mother Africa, over 500 years ago. They have looted, robbed and raped our island and turned us astray.
Politicians have taken away that which keeps any nation, person or people striving for tomorrow. That which they have taken away is hope. It might sound simple and meaningless but 'where there is no hope the people perish'.
I have taught for seven years in several schools and the one thing you can do to a child is make him/her seem hopeless. There are no jobs, neither new or old, and the ones that were stable, don't seem so stable anymore. There goes the jobs for teachers!
I have never been in a school which had too many teachers! Mr. Whiteman seems to forget that in the high schools where students have options, some classes will have as few as two students or as many as 70 students. But the fact is, Mr Omar Davies went to the IMF and Jamaica is on the path of structural readjustment again! So that the IMF can dictate how many teachers, nurses, doctors, to lay off.
Well, I love Jamaica but there has to be a better way. I honestly don't see an end to this mess, things are only going get worse or remain the same. But survival is the name of the game? Guess what Mr. Stewart? Deal with it!
All I can say is that the island is ripe for a revolution.
I am etc.,
TASHA
E-mail:
tasha_ann111@email.com
New York, New York
Via Go-Jamaica
