Without Due Care and Attention for our Nation’s Children, How Dare we Talk of Independence, Now or Tomorrow!

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was not the unkempt salesman’s loud enticements that led me to “buy something to hold, lick and suck”. I purchased two of his icicles, one for me, the other for a boy with a cast on his leg. I thought I might make his day while I awaited my appointment at the Castries Market. The aroma of fresh tuna mixed with cigarette smoke and stale body odour assaulted my nostrils. My mission: to interview a man who had made headline news on three TV stations last week, mainly because of the living quarters he shared with two kids, a three-year-old boy and his two years-older sister. Their home was anchored in the Castries Harbour. Since then, the boy had been struck in William Peter Boulevard by a car. He suffered three fractures in his leg, hence the cast, which didn’t seem to much bother him.

It turned out his news-making father had, from age seventeen, been a fisherman. Referring to his son, who was being fussed over by several nearby vendors, he said: “He’s a strong boy; he’ll get better fast.”

As for what had last week turned him into media fodder: “They make me look as if I don’t have my business together and I cannot take care of my children. They send social workers behind me, and they tell me to send my children by their mother because they say I have them sleeping in a boat. But I taking care of my children.” Which explained why he had been reluctant to talk with me, until he proved no match for my persistence.

Over salty market chatter that was both distracting and hard on delicate ears, our newsmaking fisherman (he requested his name be withheld, even refusing to share it with me) revealed he had fathered twelve offspring, five of whom lived with him until he had no other choice but to hand them over to their respective mothers. He had travelled multiple times to Martinique by canoe, he said, accompanied by the three-year-old and his older sister!

On 11 June last year, while he was in Martinique, he received word that his Ciceron home had burned down. He quickly returned to Saint Lucia “to report to the fire service”. He was given six sealed envelopes to be delivered to different government agencies. Only one responded, with $800 to help him get started in a new home. “None of the other call and tell me nothing,” he groaned.

“It’s not that I cannot take care of the children,” he assured me. “They eating, they sleeping. One going to school and everything.” He indicated with his head the little boy who had been joined by his sister. “Watch them, they happy.” (I was reminded of Thomas Gray’s “regardless of their doom, the little victims play!”)

I asked the little girl if she ever felt cold at night, sleeping aboard an open canoe. She shook her head from side to side, then quickly hopped away to join her brother and the fussing vendors.

Every morning the 48-year-old fisherman forks out two dollars to an attendant so he and his family can use the public bathroom near the Castries Market. He pays another two dollars to the driver of the bus that takes his five-year-old to school in Bexon. From the Castries Market he gets two buckets of water to do the week’s family laundry on the rocks at the market end of the Castries Harbour.

In answer to some more intimate questions from me, he said: “To be honest, my children don’t wake up in the night to pee or to eat or for anything else.”

In his current circumstances fishing has become something of a hassle: most of his few belongings are stored aboard his canoe; he keeps the rest in a locker at the Castries Market. If all of that makes you want to weep, cry not for our fisherman, dear concerned reader. By his own admission, he has “enough money in the bank to last some time”. He says he can cover his son’s hospital bills.  

When I asked if he planned to do with his children as suggested by the social workers, his response was: “Well, I did give them to their mother in front of the social worker and look, now he break his leg, she send them back for me because she know I am more responsible. If the social workers come back I will just tell them what I have to tell them.”

He revealed his personal relationship with his siblings is less than cordial and he has no friends who might offer a better place to live. The several women with whom he produced other boys and girls “cannot help themselves and they cannot check for me. That’s why I have the two children”.

He said he knew of family situations far worse than his own. He pointed out a man a few feet from our own position who spends his night at the market. “The only difference is our bed is in a boat,” he said. “Everyone knows how I care for my kids. When they put it on the TV news and the children went with their mother everybody here [he meant the market vendors] was vex, because they know I am a responsible man.” Responsible was the word he used most often in relation to himself!

Besides: “If government had want to help me, from day one last year they would have helped me. But I hear they take out the welfare fund for fire victims and so on. They don’t care about people like me.”

Remarkably, when I was trying to locate my story’s central figure, most of the folks I queried saw nothing abnormal about his living circumstances. All around us as we talked were many other unsupervised children surrounded by cigarette smoke, marijuana and alcohol, and I couldn’t help wondering where they went and what they did — or was done to them — when the sun went down.

Saint Lucia’s dirtiest little secret (that’s how Rick Wayne referred to it over 20 years ago — and little has since changed) has long centred on its homeless population. As bad and as condescending as it may sound, our fisherman at least appears to care. He sleeps where his babies sleep — however dangerous.

“There are those that can bear and those that cannot bear it,” he said, finally, triggering in my head the worst images imaginable. “My whole life has been on the sea, but for their sake . . . all I need, for them to be with me in a house.”

Obviously there’s much to this story that I have not included in this report, since space and time are against me. But then, it’s no secret that housing in Saint Lucia is the mother of all nightmares. I fully intend in the near future to concentrate on the consequences. For now, let me give the last word to the foreign affairs minister, Sarah Flood-Beaubrun. This is what she said in her Independence address this week: “If we cannot protect our children, it means we cannot protect our youth. We will lose Saint Lucia if we don’t protect our children.”