The Tribune

By DR KENNETH D KEMP

ON an island where time already crawls, during rainstorms it can sometimes feel as though the world has just stopped spinning. Within this vortex, where the sun is blanketed by thick dark clouds and all forms of life have retreated to shelter, time feels suspended, like dust particles in the air without a breath of wind. For those who live alone, the quiet can be deafening leaving an eerie, palpable, feeling that you’re the only person on the planet.

Fishermen recognise this quiet because they hunger for it during times of labour. But on days like this, in the still of the early morning, for one on land, alone, as well as those at sea, it offers a coveted opportunity for self-reflection.

Approximately 50 miles south of Marsh Harbour in Abaco, lies a small and quiet settlement called Sandy Point where my patient (whom we will call) Carlos lives with his family. On the weekend, if not for the rain, the community would be buzzing with activity as neighbours hang their clothes to dry, feed their goats and chickens and bake bread to accompany their morning stew. In moments like those, Sandy Point comes alive. Friends from nearby settlements visit to exchange produce like mangoes, crabs, cassava, sweet potatoes and bananas. For children, it’s a regatta and a chance to play outside for several uninterrupted hours at a time.

Ordinarily, Carlos would have spent the day fishing with his father and brother but the heavy rain negated their opportunity. So, instead he sat and watched the rain fall as he slowly drank his tea. The smell of the rain bathed him in memories of his childhood, playing on the ball park with school mates and close friends. Bonded by their love of sports, they were his brothers and they were inseparable. Today, almost all of them are either dead or in prison and Carlos can’t help but feel grateful that he chose to walk a different path.

Their calamitous fate couldn’t be forecasted during those early years when they were on the park pretending to be undiscovered baseball stars. In fact, it never dawned on Carlos that he and his friends wouldn’t be together for the rest of their lives. They were together every day at school and because their parents were friends, they saw each other on Saturdays and then again on Sundays for church and Sunday school. Referring to each other’s parents as aunt and uncle felt natural. They might as well have been family.

But as they neared their high school graduation Carlos noticed subtle changes in his friend’s behaviour. There were days, protracted in their scope, where they didn’t show up for school and even when physically present, their mental facility was otherwise engaged with dreaming of a better life. Carlos now realises that’s where their personalities most significantly diverged because he couldn’t fathom a better life than the one he was already living.

In the mid to late 1970s, not long after The Bahamas became an independent nation, traffickers used the islands for the illicit transshipment of drugs. Cocaine and marijuana specifically flooded the nation and young men who weren’t addicted were easily corrupted by the prosperity of its sale, soon risking their lives over lies and blissfully ignorant of their own mortality. Carlos’s friends were pulled into the life slowly and so innocuously that he, and perhaps even they, never saw it coming.

As they became more distant, Carlos tried harder to stay connected. So, one day when one of his friends was beaten and nearly killed, he and a few others sought retribution but they were arrested for fighting before anyone was irreversibly harmed. He was 15 years old at the time. That night in jail, Carlos thought long and hard about the events that led him to where he was and he knew that this couldn’t be his future. But to secure his future, he’d have to let go of an aspect of his past; brothers he’d come to love and who for many years brought him so much joy.

No charges were ever filed but the following morning after Carlos’ release, the disappointment in his parents’ eyes nearly broke him. Not long after he got home, his uncle sat him down and told him that he was walking away from everything that his parents and church had taught him. He said that he was a man now and as a man he needed to decide, before it was too late, what type of life he wanted to live. God had granted him a second chance and Carlos decided to take it. He was never as close to his friends after that.

Since then, he’s spent his days fishing and eventually started a family of his own. Today, Carlos is 50 years old with five children who adore him and he has no medical conditions other than diabetes, which is well under control. He became my patient several years ago for an injury sustained to his right foot while fishing that has since resolved but he returns regularly for routine foot checks.

At his most recent visit to my office, Carlos said that his life is peaceful. His friends, on the other hand, have not enjoyed the same happy ending and in fact their lives have been entirely contralateral to his own. One friend was stabbed to death, two others were shot and killed in a targeted assassination and one was killed in a boat explosion. They were all under the age of thirty. Another one of Carlos’ friends was caught smuggling drugs from Jamaica to the US. He was subsequently arrested and is serving time in their prison.

There is only one of his childhood friends who is still alive and has never been arrested. He has a really nice home, a few apartments on rent and he appears pretty happy. But he, like so many others who’ve travelled a similar path, are addicted to the adrenaline rush of criminality and given the opportunity, he’d do it all again and risk everything for the chance to make more money.

Carlos’s take-home message to readers is to work hard, stay humble and live a life that your parents and children can be proud of. His advice to young people in particular is that being a gangster on television and in the movies may seem glorified but in reality, it’s a life ripe with fear and paranoia and it’s a dark path that leads to a lot of heartache and pain for you and the people you love.

When staring into the gulf of heavy rain, when your vision is obstructed, a strange thing can happen – you can suddenly see the world more clearly than ever. Memories are a peculiar, intoxicating thing and many people with shallow reserves of willpower have succumbed to this intrusion into their reality and then consciously drowned in the abyss. So, looking back at one’s childhood is only ever helpful if we’re presently content with the choices that were made. Sitting there with his tea and warm coconut bread, Carlos wouldn’t change anything about his past having reconciled a long time ago that his friends had a right to make their own life decisions and if their parents couldn’t talk them out of it, then neither could he.

Carlos’s story provides yet another example of how adversely drugs affected a lost generation of Bahamians. Even now, Carlos can’t shake the feeling that ‘if only’ things had been a little different during that era, his world would still be filled with the friends and family of his youth. Fortunately, he’s been able to enjoy a simple and happy life filled with a lot of love and laughter. And yet, while he has absolutely no regrets, for today, he’ll sit and watch the rain fall thinking about the time he spent on the ballpark with his friends, running around with no worries and hoping that feeling of happiness could somehow last forever.

This is The KDK Report.

• Nicknamed ‘The Prince of Podiatry’, Dr Kenneth D Kemp is the founder and medical director of Bahamas Foot and Ankle located in Caves Village, Western New Providence. He served as the deputy chairman for the Health Council for five years and he currently sits on the board of directors for the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation in his role as co-vice-chairman.