So, no debate! well that’s we!

I tried desperately to continue last week’s conversation with ‘Myself’ but he would have none of it. SVG is a place for ‘ole’ talk, cussing and commess, not for serious conversation, he told me. You see they don’t even want to debate in parliament! But where are the people? No answer! Well I can’t talk about the budget, so let me continue to talk more foolishness about the storm and how we build and rebuild. There are undoubtedly important things to continue to talk about, if not to debate in parliament.{{more}} We have over the past few weeks been putting our efforts, no matter how disorganized, into dealing with the after effects of our Christmas Eve storm. There is, of course, serious damage to the country’s infrastructure that has to be tackled. This is where our major problem lies. I have not heard much said, too, about the psychological damage that would have been caused, particularly to children in the areas affected. We need to put this on our agenda.

But let us remember in all of this that the rest of SVG is a disaster area. This view was more forcefully strengthened when moving recently through the bloc between the Aquatic Club and High Tide, I saw it almost in total darkness. All the businesses that seemed to have been flourishing there are now, it appears, mainly closed. We cannot depend on handouts from overseas. The country has to get to work and come up with a plan to deal with this national crisis. But this requires a certain discipline and maturity that has so far been lacking.

The storm has exposed a number of things, some of which, at least, we have begun to identify, if not to talk about, the destruction of our environment, paying greater attention to where we build and how we build. In the past, disasters meant to us hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. The freak storm that dealt a devastating blow to the Georgetown area a couple years ago should have put us on the alert and broadened our area of focus. We have to drive into our minds the fact that disasters can happen at any time. We have to reconsider how we deal with emergencies. With so many different people and organisations distributing relief, it would appear that no one can be sure who got what and who got more than they needed at the expense of those whose needs might not have been met even in the short term.

As we engage in the task of rebuilding or rather building SVG, we have to realize that the main responsibility lies with us. While we need all hands on deck we have to understand the plight of some trying to eke out a living. Too many of us not affected by the storm are battling to survive. We cannot be happy while others are suffering, for ultimately it is going to affect all of us in different ways. The anger on the faces of some of our people, particularly our youth, should cause us some concern. If you want to better understand the point I am making, pass through Heritage Square on a Friday afternoon and look beyond the music and drinking and on to the expression on the faces of our youth sitting on the steps of the RBTT Bank and elsewhere and if it does not wake you up then nothing else will.

No island can exist by itself but we have to put things in place that would allow us to meet and deal with some of our needs. The reality is that the building of our country has to include everyone, even those of us considered foolish. Remember ‘Desiderata’; ‘Go Placidly amidst the noise… listen even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.”

Some of us seem to be so oblivious to the alarm bells that are being rung that I often have to qestion myself to find out if I am going off the rocks and hearing and seeing things that don’t exist. I had to go back to my favorite Caribbean novelist to seek answers. His classic work, “The Wine of Astonishment” speaks adequately to our situation. Lovelace, describing what pertains in the Bonasse community, could easily be describing a community in SVG. He writes; “We is like a people after a shipwreck, Bee. You know, the ship sink and everybody jump in the water and we ain’t have no boats and each man have to struggle to save himself from drowning.”

“Save? But how we could save ourselves scatter like leaves without a tree to hold on to?”…

“But what we have to hold on to, Bee? Ain’t they destroy the church?

…Ain’t they mash up the boats to take us across the sea?”

“To them we is just clowns…and the only time we get in fashion is whenelection time come around and when they want a crowd of people to clap hands when they make their speech. They want a crowd of fools to argue and fight one another over which one of them going to rule over us”

Lovelace’s description of the Bonasse community fits ours to a tee. The problem is with the people of Bonasse who only after the damage had been done, began to realize that it all had to do with their failure to take a stand when things were getting out of hand. It might not be too late for us but nevertheless late enough. There are many kinds of storms. We have to deal with all of them.

• Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian.