I used to often hear the words ‘Sweet St Lucia’ and congrats about ‘What a beautiful island you have…’ and ‘The people are so friendly…’ But that’s in the past. Now, everything seems to have changed; every other day is a police report or grapevine report of a stabbing or someone who got shot.
The fire service has become the busiest department of late, people are in distress daily, criminality is on the rise, car theft is rampant, jobs are still a nightmare to get and daily you hear from the government of the day how much progress we are making.
This makes me wonder if there are two different types of Saint Lucians — the ones I see and the others spoken about.
Living today costs a bundle as there is a cost to everything and to get more it seems you have to live a cooked life as the cost of all types of services have gone sky-high. We seem to be living from paycheck to paycheck.
People are dying young for all kinds of reasons, the cost of death is as expensive as living, we never seem to have enough, yet somehow, there are some people who seem to have loads of cash, every foreigner building and investing on island is seeing profits ahead, but for the majority of people, this is not the case.
In fact, the new trend is to eat and dress as cheaply as you can but still look expensive, even though it kills you: Buy, Buy and Buy — and then Bye-Bye to life. There is no solution to this growing problem that seems to come with progress.
The cost of education from preschool to tertiary is astronomical; to have land, build a house and furnish it is beyond most people’s means. We hope and we even vote for a better tomorrow, but all our efforts seem to be in vain.
So, to me, the answer is to live one day at a time and pray that there will be a better tomorrow.
So sad that such a paradise has become a nightmare to live in, so sad when there seems to be no answers forthcoming.
The big plans of today do not take people’s needs into consideration, leaving each man and woman to fight for themselves. Only the strongest will survive and ‘Choo Mak’ for the balance.
Wow! What a time we live in…