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| When Good News is Bad |
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The latest news on the market, is that a team of do-gooders, led by Mr. Kishu Chandirami of the Rams Group of Companies, is going to start a feeding program in St. Kitts in July.
This is good news. Good samaritanism is always good. Our Lord Jesus Christ approved of doing good. He told stories of heroes who did good. He worked good doing miracles and he loved to feed his followers. When some fishermen had toiled all night and caught nothing, he appeared and advised them to cast their nets into the deep and they caught a lot fish, so much, that they broke their nets.
The Master must have thought of the many poor people who waited for the fish and who were beginning to be depressed by the prospect of nothing to eat.
Christ liked to feed people. As a matter of fact, feeding the multitude was an aspect of his great mission. He even had to issue a mild rebuke to remind his followers that they should concentrate on his message rather than his food.
One of his most serious admonitions to those who listened to his preaching, was that they who feed and clothe their fellow men and visited the sick and imprisoned, have a better chance of making it into his kingdom than those who did not.
Feeding the sick and catering to the poor has long been a commitment of certain people in our community.
The late James Cardin, will always be remembered for his concern for the indigent and homeless poor, and his tireless effort to provide for them the comfort of a home. The Cardin Home founded close to one hundred years ago, is a living testimony to the practical love which Mr. Cardin and his supporters extended to the poor.
Kittitians of my generation remember Ms. Myrtle Woods of Prickley Pear Alley. I remember her as a dignified lady, who quietly and pleasantly went from street to street in Basseterre, begging people of goodwill to contribute to a fund to feed the poor of Basseterre.
Ms Woods had received her earlier inspiration from Millie Neverson, the mind behind the establishment of School feeding in Basseterre in the 1940’s. Ms. Neverson’s work was followed up by the establishment of the Children’s Home where orphans and otherwise disadvantaged children found comfort and love.
The Salvation Army has always followed a tradition of caring for the poor. The guiding principle of their founder William Booth, was that a suppliant could not pray on an empty stomach. From their meager funds which they garner by street-begging, they offer Christmas dinners and gifts to the unfortunate.
The Hope Chapel at Newton invites the needy for a bowl of soup every Wednesday at noon and one church in Mc Knight welcomes its clients to partake of the Lord’s Kitchen every weekend. And now Mr. Kishu and his friends, have joined the noble band of do-gooders.
He has two large supermarkets and a wholesale business. Being able to afford it, he has responded to the spectacle of hungry, dirty people, parading the town begging for bread. It does not look good; he does not like it.
I commend Mr. Kishu on his sensitivity to the problem. While it is true that he is rich and can afford it, there are many rich people in our community who would decline to give aid and succour to the destitute among us.
Mr. Kishu may have been motivated by his realization that things have not changed much since he came to St. Kitts in short pants over fifty years ago. When he came to St. Kitts to help out in his uncle’s cloth store, most of the people who flocked there to buy reels of thread and pieces of cloth were very poor.
At Easter, Whitsuntide, August and Christmas, they bought new clothes to wear to the various festive occasions. Just as it is now, so it was then. Kittitians loved a good time and they loved to dolze up themselves for it.
The store of Rupchand Sons, owned by his uncle, did a roaring business in the 1950’s when our people began the mass migration to the Virgin Islands, the Netherland Antilles, Great Britain, Canada and the United States. They bought clothes, shoes, suitcases and other travelling paraphernalia. The stores in Basseterre profited immensely.
The huge profits realised from the patronage of our poor people from their meager incomes, propelled Rupchand Sons to huge prosperity. From this base, Rams, as the business came to be known, became an economic empire. They owned one supermarket, then two; they went into wholesale and quietly bought out other businesses and amassed a fortune, which has been unmatched in their relatively short history.
Meanwhile the poor continue to buy from them from with meager earnings, which they make now just as they did when Kishu came to Basseterre.
A casual look around Basseterre, would show that the commercial configuration of the town has not changed significantly. Liverpool Row is still in the hands of expatriates, even more so now than then. In other areas of Basseterre, T.D.C. has developed from J.W. Thurston, while Horsford’s has remained intact with the same philosophy that shaped it more than one hundred years ago.
Yes, there is a handful of successful local people now, as it was then, the few exceptions to the rule.
This is what Mr. Kishu must have reflected on over the years, in which his business Empire has been built with local help and by local hands. Over all the many years, since St. Kitts had a white Administrator to now, that we have a Black Governor General, a Black Prime Minister and a humongous political apparatus buttressed by a bloated bureaucracy, there has been very little done to empower local Black people to become rich by running businesses.
The lot of the majority of Kittitians, silently but systematically charted throughout our historical development, has been to serve at the bidding of the expatriate masters. Add to this the political masters and we understand why Kittitians are still feverishly trying to leave St. Kitts for good; why those who cannot leave; groan in painful silence and why so many have given up on life, fallen into drugs and taken to the streets to beg when they are hungry.
I have not spoken to Mr. Kishu on this matter, but I am quite certain that in his reckoning of the years he has been here, he would agree that the situation of Black people in St. Kitts as compared with that of the expatriates is really not far removed from slavery, field slavery and house slavery.
I am certain that Mr. Kishu would agree that just about every Black Kittitian lives by the dictates of their masters, some of whom are also Black, just like the bad old days of the Slavery Plantation.
That is why some Kittitians are hungry, dirty, naked and homeless. It is the system. While I join in commendation of Mr. Kishu and his band, in stretching out their hands to feed the poor and needy, I cannot ignore that, underlying the misfortune of the destitute and the perils of the not-so-destitute, is the total neglect by our Black political masters to upraise and empower their brothers and sisters.
The recent onslaught on a few enterprising street vendors by their more powerful Black leaders, is a symptom of the illness which leads our Black people to steal and beg and walk about stink and dirty. |
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