It's all relative, part 2
Last month I went to visit family that was visiting from SVG and Barbados. It was really quite an experience seeing all the similarities and glaring differences between all of them and myself.
It seems that those that come from small islands have typically small notions of success, at least by our standards, and St. Vincent is a pretty small island. For many of them, getting off the island and moving to neighbouring St. Lucia or any of the other nearby islands is a big achievement for them. It would be the equivalent of say, moving from Sydney, NS to Richmond, BC, especially when you have never been farther away then 10 km from home. Ever. If you can make the move from St. Vincent to St. Lucia, then you are doing really, really well regardless of the reality. And people will play up this myth to their social advantage.
It's why I have so many relatives that believe that we live like kings. If we have a telephone, we must be able to afford to have it, and for us it costs nothing to operate. For this reason, my cousin Agnes ran up a $1600 phone bill ten years ago when she came to visit. She spent a couple of hours a day on the phone to her boyfriend in St. Vincent. (And she was pregnant with his child then; I can't believe this kid is now about 10! More on this later.) You see, she didn't realize that long distance charges were much different than regular charges, and even if they are, we are all LOADED anyway, so it didn't matter. She never did understand why my sister in law, who had spent that much on phone bills over the previous ten years completely lost her mind. It may have been the first time I was ever completely on her side on something.
If you make as far as Canada, the States or England, then you have REALLY made it. It might be like us here getting a job overseas and becoming a VP at a Fortune 500 company, making $200K a year and living that life to the hilt. Of course the ones that actually make it here quickly find out how different from reality that is. And there are a few possibilities that can occur.
- They realize that they do not have the education or the skills required to really get anywhere, so they find retail or housekeeping jobs to make ends meet. This is almost uniformly the extent of their careers, if you want to call being a clerk at Staples a career. (Don't get the wrong; I am well aware that you can make a real career in retail, working your way up and so on. But that is definitely not the case here.) This is a typical female type of thing to do. In fact, it seems that it's usually the women that come up here and do it this way. They then get pregnant fairly quickly before really settling on any kind of plan, and then start realizing that they will never reach the promised land, but their children will, because they will have grown up here. A common alternative is that they have some children and a "spouse" that they leave behind, and through their hard work and family connections both in the new country and at home, they are able to bring people they love into the new country over time. Again, this is mainly a female strategy. Why is that? I'll get into that later.
- Men that make the first move are typically coming up here alone to make new lives. They bring whatever skills they have and end up often as tradesmen or factory workers. Sometimes they end up in agriculture. They often leave behind girlfriends and children without so much as a goodbye. They disappear, sometimes without a trace. It's quite a bit rarer for men to come here and send for the ones they left behind. But when it does happen, those men are more likely to be professionals or the equivalent. Either way, they know that they aren't the kings they thought they'd be.
But somehow that doesn't get translated back home. They still believe that everyone living here is living in the lap of luxury. And there are good reasons for this. We are spoiled up here. I was listening to my aunt and mother talk about life back home when they were growing up. Their fathers disappeared, as did their sisters' fathers. Wait a second, let me back up a moment.
You see, back then, men would simply father as many children as they felt like, disappear and move on to the next victim until they decided to settle down for whatever reason. Men weren't really held to any familial responsibility at all. There were certainly no laws on the books to force anything to happen. The notion of sibling is, in a way, not a strong there as it is here. I realized a couple of weeks ago that in all my life, I had never met two members of my family that had the exact same biologicial parents: except my own (full) sister and I. Not to my recollection, anyway. My mother says that that things are different now; I strongly doubt this, though, as evidenced by the people I met that day. And so I have to ask the question: why is this?
Clearly this is hurting us. I don't want to be the family crusader here, and I am no sociologist, but as a society, this cannotbe a good thing for any modern population. Of course, if you want to live the way people lived decades or centuries ago, then that's your problem. But what are they doing right now? Not much of anything other than selling out to North American tourism (not so much in St-Vincent apparently, but certainly elsewhere in the Caribbean). My young cousin has a very dim view of men, as does her father, her aunts and grandmother. And they definitely should. Every single man in their lives has walked out on them when a child appeared, and for the younger ones, it will be like that until they are in their mid 30s and already have some kids of their own. If the female familial community weren't so tightly-knit, that country would be better off as a slave nation in the 17th century.
I can't say how available birth control is there, but it hasn't been accepted culturally, that is for sure. In fact, many of the social reforms that we take for granted have not been given very much time there at all. Sex education in terms of responsibility and functioning? Not enough. Help for single mothers? Not really. Help and counselling for the fathers (and punishment if necessary)? Nope. And gay rights? In St-Vincent they seem to think that violence surrounding hate crimes against gays wouldn't happen there the way it does in Jamaica. I am not so sure. In any case, they have a long way to go, socially.
And so it makes me wonder who and what I really am. Where are my allegiances supposed to lie? What can I do about the situation there? They are my people as much as the people here are, no matter how much they (urban black Montrealers, Vincentians in St-Vincent, les Québécois, whoever) may want to deny it. They are mine and I am theirs.
I suppose I need to start with my own family. All 721 of them.