Who really pays?

Cost of living in Grenada is higher than Amy Winehouse in St Lucia, crawling on the floor searching for alcohol, crack and Blake. Quite frankly, I do not know how people manage.

Transportation has skyrocketed. A one hour trip from my tiny village to the town of St. George’s in a cramped minibus stuffed between the fat legs of and a bucket of fresh jacks, costs upwards one pound sterling. Taxis are rare and their prices are unfixed and often vary based on whether or not clipped English or mellifluous Grenadian pours out of the speaker’s mouth. Grocery stores selling American products are inflated to almost combustion point. Tropicana Juice for instance retails for $24 EC (6 pounds sterling). Basic items like  dental floss can cost upwards $9 EC ($3US). I weep at the price of bog standard French wine, comforted sometimes by the fact that Californian Zinfandel is okay and tastes a little bit like Sauvignon Blanc. Accommodation costs are eye-watering. A hotel that would only just lick at the edges of two or three star status in Europe sells for $90US a night, with maids who moan about guests returning about second helpings of limp bacon (the cheek!) and whose lips are constantly stretched into the perpetual fiasque of kiss-teeth. These days, lunch at a fairly nondescript restaurant no longer comes with added rice, macaroni pie or potatoes as inclusive, dishes have now moved to a pay as you go model, making the average price of lunch near $20 EC.

Yet still, nubile young bodies are berobed in the latest maxidresses, with shoes, purse, beads and earrings to match, attending the latest entertainment incarnation of bingo, Fish Friday, FoodFest, dance or fete, without complaint. Japanese cars saturate narrow roads to bursting point. Hundreds of tumblers clink in rumshops every day, every hour, every minute. Local food joints burst at the seams, keeping up with orders of fried fish, stewed chicken and rice and peas, at an astonishing rate. I often wonder, where oh where does the money come from?

This is why I was glad to take a look at the recently released List of Persons in Grenada hired by the Government and their salaries (something which was kept under lock and key by the last administration). In most developed countries, the salaries of public servants are often published as public, but in small island states like Grenada, where patronage and politicisation of appointments play some part, it is interesting to see the value we accord to certain services on the island. This list is not representative, especially as a vast majority of workers are hired by the Public Service Commission whose archaic salaries and even more archaic rules seem like a particularly bad joke, especially when compared to the modernised and seemingly index linked salaries I noted.

I was shocked that quite a few people are not being paid a living wage. Caretakers of public bathrooms (do they exist in Grenada still?) are being paid $43 dollars a day, just over $800 a month. Many people are earning just over $800- $1000 a month, included a vast number of clerical workers, who made $1380 per month. It is hard to believe that as a teacher in Grenada, I did not earn much more than this and managed to save some of it. How did I do it? How can transportation costs and food be provided for within this small sum is now beyond my comprehension. If one has to pay for rent, how is this sum a fair living wage? Especially when compared against the against the $5000-$8000 salaries of senior policy advisors?
There were notable exceptions however. A driver/security officer in the Ministry of Trade was paid $2000 EC a month, almost $700 more than a Human Resource Officer and an Outreach Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture. A glaring anomaly. Nothing has changed. Like the riddling of the lists with individuals and relatives and friends of the ruling party in the administration before, the list is littered with individuals who constitute the noblesse oblige of the ruling party. The son of a Consultant to the Prime Minister. The daughter of a friend of a Trade Advisor.

The big cash, however, lies in Ambassadorial positions. A basic $59,000 p.a. salary seems minuscule when taking into account an uplift of $102,000, entertainment of $6,000, and a housing allowance of $69,000. This can also include a clothing allowance of up to $1,500. Lawyers are not doing too shabbily either. Average salaries range from $5,000 EC with an uplift to stay within the public service instead of going into private practice of up to $3,500 per month. Inducements of up to $3,000 a month and travel can also be claimed. Plus one gets to live near a beach, in good weather, every day, paying minimal taxes. It is good to know that life can be negotiated to be sweet. What is not so amusing are the starting salaries for junior doctors. After almost 7 years of training, the salary starts at a meagre $3500 with inducements of up to $1500. Comparing the time invested, and the hours worked, I am not sure that this is fair. Especially when considering that salaries of up to three times more in teaching, nursing and the professions are paid by countries such as Trinidad & Tobago and St. Maarten.

I suspect that some of the low salaries are without doubt, the result of the bloated list of workers that fill its pages. Some Ministries have over 20 Technical Workers. Doing what? I have witnessed, with my very own eyes, individuals in the Botanical Gardens pulling out crochet needles during working hours. The government has become the paterfamilias in a system that rewards wastage and does not place a premium on performance, even at the highest levels. It is true that some workers take the proverbial piss; their lunch hour is sacrosanct and dare not be messed with (get off it lazdies and come to the real world where you grab a sandwich in 10 minutes) and the needs of customers are sometimes met with confusing indignance. The remedy however, is not employing a battalion of workers on low wages that are not sufficient to cover the cost of having an average life. The answer is promoting entrepreneurship and having the civil service only employ the best.

It has been reported that the Caribbean Diaspora provides a very useful safety net to cushion the blow. Their remittances of cash and food and household items go a long way towards improvement of life of Caribbean people- this is indeed admirable. However, the fact that there is some indirect welfare based on the bounty of relatives almost seems to obviate the will of government to make any lasting changes to the appointments system, and to modernise the wage structure of island states. This causes the prospect of lasting reform to fester and die.

Meanwhile, we continue to live in a land where the have- nots suffer the indignity of wages that do not allow them to break the cycle of dependency, where the job packages of senior officials are swollen by travel and inducements, where a weird system of contracts (of which I may be the beneficiary in future, let me not knock it too hard) exists alongside a dysfunctional public service, and where results-based packages are not used to incentivise senior policy workers. In other places, there would be mutiny or a strike, or some sense of uneasiness. But this, after all is, Grenada. We amble along, dress up, we do not complain. It is how it is.

(Photo from farm1.flickr- all rights reserved).

Conception Island

“Ay, long time I ehn see you- I didn’t know you pregnant again’

“Girl dat is the last one, Boyo saying de chile is not his”

“ Same ting yuh say last year when ah see you. Ent Boyo say that about the two before this one?”

“Yes but they have he mother features. Is me first two children and the one ah have for Redneck that doh favour him”

The history books tell us that when Christopher Columbus sighted Grenada in 1498 he called it Conception Island. It was an uncanny prophecy. Maybe he spotted the virginal white beaches with sand softer than a SilentNight mattress, perfect for clandestine night-time rutting sessions. Maybe it was the hidden hills that is now Old Fort, the ideal backdrop for furtive meetings prized for being outside of the view of persistent gossip. Maybe he observed the narrow inlets and coves that constituted Quarantine Point and saw its potential as secret mating grounds.

The island of Grenada, with its undulating hills and lush green vegetation is rich and fertile. Its people, too, are fertile but not so rich. In the year 2000, Grenada had an average birth of four children per woman (IFAD, 2000). This compares with 1.2 in developed countries. Bronzed, young, nubile bodies swell each year, tenacious yet audacious, to deliver more mouths to feed into the homes of parents who already do not have enough. Fathers are sometimes absent or disputed, but this might, perversely, be in the young mother’s best interest because if he lays claim to his seed, chances are that the following year, she will be pregnant again. Older women, three and four children in tow, meet new men who promise a better life, but who cannot be expected to contribute to a new family’s upkeep without having their own interests in the home, so a child is born, and then another, to counterbalance latent feelings of resentment of having to take up the slack of an ex lover’s responsibility.

“So how you go make out?”
“Ah ehn know nuh. It doh have work. I was waiting on some travaux but dem people giving who dey want yes”
“An what’s about yuh first chile fadder in America, he helping yuh?”

“He does send something now and then”

“You went an talk to the nurse about the contraception I tell you about the last time?”

“Me? dat does make people sick and big and full up. Plus dat nurse fass to much- she like to mind people business”.

Children are the opium of the poor. IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development- a specialised agency of the United Nations) tells us that 51% of the very poor in Grenada were under age 20. It is a cyclical cause and effect chain. Teenage or adolescent pregnancy was featured as one of the primary causes of poverty (along with unemployment). It was reported that many young mothers go on to have more children by different men and that this was particularly acute in rural areas. I do not think in any way, that only people of means should have children, but the lack of choices and opportunities available to the pregnant poor in Grenada, makes the thought of bringing more children into these circumstances alarming. Families survive on less than $5 US dollars a day. There is no welfare state to cushion the fall of poor housing and inadequate resources. Substance abuse features as strongly as the aged grog that is drunk by the populace, rendering lots of relationships abusive.

The statistics are frightening, but I do not need statistics to tell me that one out of every 5 Grenadian teenagers will have a baby before age 20. I did not need a UWI report to let me know that my neighbour’s daughter, who looked oh so promising, will be perched on the steps of her parents’ aspiring house, baby in hand next year, telling me that “children hard to mind yes” as if she didn’t know from her parents’ own recent experience. That the mother who spent years selling drinks/roast corn/fried chicken to local patrons or who cleaned the houses of more well to do neighbours and who harboured hopes of daughters becoming teachers and nurses and professionals, is still selling drinks/roast corn/fried chicken because her three daughters are now parents themselves and it is a tight squeeze in the little house she struggled to build. That at least one CXC grows every year in the tummies of the students of the local secondary school. That private abortions are used with alarming regularity. That one of the first things that one can expect is a pregnancy when a girl has left school for one year or even two. The Grenada Government’s National Strategic Health Plan for 2006-2010 states that a study conducted by Dr. Everold Hosing in a private clinic in 1994, suggested that for every 400 live births to teenagers, there are approximately 200 abortions. This is shocking.

“So many of de young children belly big too. An some of dem belly like mortuary. D pharmacy stop give de tablet, dat is why they pregnant all over de place. Me, ah too old for that”

The Grenada Planned Parenthood Association lays blame on the institutions of church and school, which continue to preach abstinence, even where the evidence is clear that teenagers are already sexually active. Some blame lies squarely on the shoulders of these catholic styled organisations but, the influence of school and church on the viewpoints of teenagers are very limited- teenagers have sex in any event even though they are told not to, why would they listen to school and church on the sticky issues of contraception?

I am more inclined to believe the study done by UWI and the United Nations which put forward that a combination of gender stereotyping and a lack of challenges are underlying causes. Manhood tends to be measured by the number of sexual partners a man has and the number of children that result from those relationships. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, breeding, a measure of virility, is also a measure of masculinity. Fatherhood is often equated to manhood. The report also states that at the same time, girls are offered few challenges or supports for their self-esteem outside of relationships with men and their domestic role. I take some issue with this because I know that women have been encouraged and have, over the years, continued to exceed menfolk in education and the arts. What is clear, however, is that childbirth certainly seems to offer some measure of validation and acceptance to those who perhaps have no other way of attaining such. These women breed to feel wanted, desired and loved.

“An yuh ehn hear me first daughter pregnant? She making ah chile for Jean boy by the pasture”

“I thought she was in college, you tell me she get seven subjects no?”

“Yuh ever see more? Not to say she ent see the situation”

From my experience, many of the pregnant poor want or actively desire children. This may seem bizarre on first blush because the presence of a child has significant constraints on income generation. However, particularly among young people- contraception and especially oral contraception is viewed upon negatively. “She on family planning” is often recited with distaste. An admission of using the pill, is a tacit admission of having regular sex, so it is preferable to rely on nature and the gods and to take one’s chances so to speak. Children are also the cement to relationships in a society where marriage is not the litmus test of commitment, and bearing a child is a tentative approach towards a long term future. Those of the pregnant poor who do not want children appear to be insufficiently informed about contraceptive options and rely on methods that are not foolproof.

Some of our women, especially younger women, do not have sufficient say over their bodies- men dictate how they have sex and when they have it- they are not independent or assertive enough to demand the use of some form of protection. Sex happens when it happens and children, too, happen when they happen. From my experience, planned parenthood initiatives and reproductive clinics are not sufficiently outsourced into the rural areas – they are based in the capital-and they do not work alongside the already struggling family units. Family planning also has a negative reputation about being only about pills and injections and coils, the holistic approach of timing is often never broached. The agencies often intervene when it is already too late. The result? Aborted education, pre-term families, stuck in a quagmire of poverty.

“So give me a change nuh, yuh know how things hard already”

“No I ent know how it hard cause it look like yu having more regular sex than me” (chuckling)

“Ay... yu ehn easy nuh. Doh watch that man. Children must mind”

A Man, Two Heads and a Bucket

I could imagine the consternation of the female police officer on duty in Grenada, confronted with a seemingly ordinary man, who proceeded to pour out two decapitated bleeding heads from a bucket onto her desk.


It was probably a hot day, as it often is in Grenada, the sun perhaps broiling concrete buildings with impatient heat. She was probably used to domestic altercations, the odd praedial larceny complaint (“dey tief me damn callalloo!”), occasional rumblings and breaches of the peace after a few overloaded glasses of overproof rum at the local rumshop, and slices of juicy gossip in between. She probably thought nothing of the man heading towards her with a bucket. It could have been ripe purple melongenes, ready for the selling, bunches of home grown carrots, fresh from the earth, pleading to be bought and consumed, or sea scented slippery fish, recently skinned and gutted.

She certainly did not expect to see the freshly dead faces of two men, one with eyes bulging, caught by surprise at an act of sheer lunacy. She was probably right to faint, as I can imagine no rational, sane reaction to this wanton depravity. For, in the unruffled verdant green forest environs of the Balthazar area, Steve Gorrie, a handsome, seemingly normal, 32 year old machine operator, fond of landscaping and farming, allegedly hacked or sawed off the heads of two men with whom he shared a meal only moments before, with no evidence of an altercation or a dispute. My grandmother would say "Am ouais!"

According to unconfirmed reports, the proprietor of the farm, an ex police officer, a respected and intelligent business man with an interest in resuscitating the farming industry in Grenada, invited Gorrie and a friend to assist him with some task in his nearby property. My cousin Yvonne says the word "if" is weary and weighted and on this occasion it certainly was. Stories of cheating and tabanca and grudges were conceptualised and dissected, then hastily dismissed. No one could understand what motive would have persuaded a man to eat and drink with his compatriots and then to chop not one, but two heads off ten minutes thereafter, as easy as Sunday morning. Gorrie allegedly said that he “felt” like killing the victims. I have heard reports of him requesting a bucket of KFC as a meal on the night of the killings. The fact that he had no reason actually does not surprise me, the evidence points to a suspicion on my part that he is deeply and clinically psychotic.

What puzzles me, however, is that there are a number of very salient questions to be asked and holes in the account that has been related. It is not easy to kill a man by hacking off his head. A particularly sharp instrument is needed; something along the lines of a Samurai sword. Secondly, the person swinging the instrument must be very strong. And thirdly, an incredible motion or swing would need to be levelled to ensure that the vertebra is cut straight through. Gorrie may have had Olympian swing, but a machete that is used to cut coconuts or grass is hardly sharp enough to execute such a lethal blow, not when combined with the seemingly underpowering strength of his lithe, small frame. Then, having established that it is not easy to cut a person’s head off with a swing of a machete, I find it difficult to conceptualise how a man could be able to do such a thing twice, without the aid of suppressive measures. This leads me to believe that the heads were decapitated when the victims were already dead.

Why then? And how would Steve Gorrie, mechanic operator, be able to kill two men, the first a bright proprietor and former police officer, the second, a ruddy labourer? And all within the short space of time between the Last Supper at the rumshop and the Heading to the Hills? There was, apparently, no dispute. Gorrie was apparently fed and watered at the home of one of the victims. Who knows, however, what discussion ensued such that Gorrie decided that he would act on this overwhelming feeling to kill his companions? The property was reported as less than 100 metres away from the home of one of the victims- it was odd that no witnesses have reported hearing or suspecting anything.

Did Gorrie then plan the attack and administer a lethal substance? Did he deliver a lethal blow that rendered them both unconscious? Surely someone must have heard a cry, a bawl, a chainsaw (if latest accounts are to be believed). A murder in open air without witnesses, without a sound, is highly suspect. It either suggests that he did not act alone or he acted with calm, calculated premeditation that ensured that he was fully out of sight and that there was no soundtrack to his violent feature. Premeditation is not usually a mark of the clinically insane. Or was the decapitation the first step towards removing all members of the body, to suppress the evidence? Did he get cold feet and decided that since he was last seen with the suspects, it was likely that he would be suspected and that the court of public opinion would convict him in any event? Or is this overanalysis and was he just a madman with good planning skills, a build like Rambo and almost obsence bravery?

(Onlookers at the courthouse where he was charged)

I doubt that I will have answers. In any event, we may not have coherent ones. Gorrie has been meted out the injustice of not even been granted a lawyer (and yes, even a cold blooded killer deserves the right to be represented so that when justice is served, it is seen to be served and will not be under attack). Regardless of whether or not these questions are answered, it underscores our need to understand the causes of psychoses and mental illness in the Caribbean. To my knowledge, the scenario of a person cutting of another's head has happened twice before in Grenada relatively recently. The latest incident I recall was of a young, mentally ill man who last year who cut off his grandmother's head and was seen eating from it. The New Today also reports a killing ten years ago in the St David's area where a man killed his ex girlfriend and her new lover by cutting off their heads and parading them in the streets.

Gory stories like these happen all over the world (although undue attention is given to this by the media) but what is clear is that on many occasions in the Caribbean, mental illness remains largely undiagnosed and untreated. No one would have thought that a man who had the presence of mind to jump on a plane to visit his father in Brooklyn last year, who had a good job and a home life that did not appear disturbed, could have the capacity to commit such a heinous crime.

In the USA, it was reported that Black Caribbean males have an elevated risk of developing schizophrenia (National Study of American Life) but in more recent studies, it was found that Caribbean males had no greater risk of developing this condition but were more than five times likely to be hospitalised because of a lack of early treatment (Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster). PAHO identified mental health as one of the main target areas for Caribbean cooperation. In the Grenada National Strategy Health Plan, it was reported that mental health services were provided in two locations- Mt Gay Hospital or Richmond Home but anyone who visits these institutions would know how basic the treatment facilities are. There is an obvious lack of a quality, structured approach to mental illness training. Dalhousie University in Canada has offered some support and has produced a document which focuses on mental health training for professionals in low income countries focusing on diagnosing and treating psychotic disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders as well as cognitive behaviour counselling and psychopharmacology. The aim is that community health workers and nurses would be trained to spot and treat those who are in need of help, to prevent stories like these making the front page of the BBC, Yahoo News, the Huffington Post and parading all over Twitter, making out our small island paradise to be some haven for the depraved.

In the meantime, I am now suspicious of any unstable man with a bucket. I-bear, the man I buy my beloved Copee mangoes from in Grenada, is a tad unbalanced, gets naked on occasion for no reason, and is prone to random fits of cursing and swearing over nothing at all. He often walks with a machete stuffed into a dirty "fine-bag" and I engage in general banter with him on my verandah. I usually refuse to capitulate to his "expat tax" demands of an extra twenty dollars for five mangoes. After this incident, I am on my guard. I think I will take my chances and brave the stifling heat and gossipy mosquitoes and head to La Source Hill to source my own Copees.

All photos by my brother Mikey Hutchinson. All rights reserved. Thanks Mikey!