It is very evident today that the USA and Europe do not need our services anymore to help build their countries, but only see us as facilitators for their needs.
For many years, we (as West Indians), have migrated to those countries looking for a better way of life, better means to earn a regular salary, making some regular money legally to enhance our livelihood. We abandon our lands, our family and even our children to achieve such dreams and aspirations, but most who have left our shores usually end up being domestic slaves abroad.
What is usually available for them to do, are the jobs that their adopted country’s own nationals do not want to do for that little money, or not at all, like flipping burgers at fast food establishments, and babysitting children, caring for the elderly, and manning gas pumps, etc.
These same jobs could also have been done for ourselves and our family, in our own islands, if only such an opportunity were created for us at home, including payment of decent salaries and training in related skills to enhance service and earnings.
If we must get an education to improve our lives, it’s an additional investment for us, and we now have to work day and night to live up to our versions of ‘The American Dream’ or ‘Life in a Mistletoe European Wonderland’.
We have always heard the saying that “rather than being dependent on being given a fish a day, it’s better to teach us how to fish instead.” I say so in the context that if you can reverse the trend of our needs to also learn more at home about why and how to develop what we have to make us more self-reliant and more dependent on our home skills, then we will not have to flock to other people’s countries as we presently do, to continue this Modern-day Slavery.
If we learn how to turn our agricultural products into valuable local and regional products, rather than export our peas and beans and bananas, coffee and cocoa, sugar and tobacco, coconuts and nutmegs to other nations that refine and package them and resell them to us.
We have adopted a culture of buying back our goods from the nations we export them to, like selling cocoa and buying chocolate, selling coffee and buying back coffee powder, rather than making it for ourselves.
We have fish in abundance in our waters, but we buy them in tins manufactured by the nations we import our food.
We even import chicken parts that the Americans and Europeans won’t sell to their people, rather than support our own broiler industries and livestock farmers producing local chicken and meats and fish.
Today, our own local producers and manufacturers are burdened with an import bill so large that we can barely survive. Why? Because everything we use comes from abroad, and now we have to pay double the cost to obtain and feed ourselves, because we have been cultured to be dependent on food imports.
We need to go back to learning how to turn our animal hides into leather and begin to make our own shoes, because just like our fabrics, everything that we wear comes from foreign factories, as we do not manufacture the clothes that we wear.
Even the cigarettes we smoke come from abroad — and now they make and sell us the guns, and ammunition to continue killing ourselves.
When foreigners invest in hotels and resorts, it is mainly to satisfy their investment returns, but our people are trained to serve visitors from the USA and Europe better than other visitors who look like us from the same countries, to give Americans and Europeans the best of us, to meet their every need.
Cuba has helped us historically by training our nurses and doctors free of cost, but now we’re being told to cut them off and look instead to pay heavily for services in faraway countries.
What we do or learn tends to be for the improvement of those who keep us down, never for ourselves. And those who have put us where we are claim to be in our interest.
The problem we face in this part of the world is that we always assume that what others sell us or give us is better than our own, so we choose not to believe in ourselves and remain totally dependent on importing everything we need or want.
The Western donors are cutting back their aid today, after they went into Africa to exploit all the minerals to build their empires, and they are still in charge of our precious stones, gold and other minerals.
Every time they discover a source of material or mineral in our lands, they think of exploitation, and because of our lack of ability and equipment and know-how, we submit.
However, these tides must change; we must as a people begin to believe in ourselves in our skills and our people and our scholars.
We have to stop believing the grass is greener elsewhere. We need to re-educate ourselves to understand this reality, or else we shall perish, because we think the traditional donors now turning their backs on us are in our interest and are our friends, not realising that they are more enemies of our development.
Knowing who our true friends are is important, just like knowing how and why we are as we are and why we have been exploited throughout the years. So too, knowing the truth is even more important because for us to have a brighter future, we must understand the past as well as the present trends that have us subjected to this plight.
Every day our burden increases, every year is additional stress, and every day we hear another one of our young men died or was killed, yet we do not know the cause or the reason, so we have become a dog-eat-dog society.
We are like swizzling cow dung: still hoping to get rich using the methods used by others against us, to solve our problems. But awah, that has never worked and will never work as the international system was designed to screw us into oblivion and we are still helping preserve that failing system.