The Other Side of Paradise

--A short fictional story written by Bob

We have always considered the Abacos to be paradise with clear turquoise water and beautiful white sandy beaches.  A recent tragedy has opened our eyes to the other side of paradise. This is a fictional story written around a true recent tragedy of historic proportions.

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On Sunday morning, January 28, 2018, a fire started in one of three Haitian shantytowns on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour known as “The Mud.”  Before it was extinguished, 55 homes were completely destroyed and more than 170 people were displaced.  The cause of the fire was arson and the arsonist is in custody. 

Most of the homes in “The Mudd” were simple two-room homes constructed from wood. They were packed closely together and built on Crown Land—land that once belonged to the queen but has since become a sort of public land. In “The Mudd” there were 600 homes and 45 commercial shops, mostly non-registered businesses that escaped taxation.

Living conditions in “The Mudd” were barely acceptable by modern standards. There are only 100 septic tanks and six outside toilets for the 600 homes. (Of course there is no public sewage treatment on Great Abaco—this means that only one-sixth of the homes in The Mud had any type of human waste disposal.) Electrical service was frequently pirated from nearby electric poles.

Sandley & Widelene Lemieux, ages 74 and 71 respectively, were the oldest of the newly displaced victims. With all that they have been through in their lives, they found themselves homeless and with no possessions except for the clothes they were wearing on that fateful Sunday morning.

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Sandley Lemieux was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 10, 1944. None of us have a choice of parents or birthplace when our life begins.  Haiti was probably the worst place to be born—it was hot, crowded, and poor.  Sandley grew up among the back alleys of his poor neighborhood, speaking Haitian Creole in his humble 2-room family home.  Thousands of kids like him had little opportunity to do anything but follow in his parents footsteps.

Within a ten-year period between 1954 and 1964, Hurricanes Hazel, Flora, and Cleo and floods such as the one of the Grande Riviera du Nord caused nearly 10,000 deaths on the island nation of Haiti. Most of the people who survived the many natural disasters became homeless. 

Sandley, 22, and Widelene, his childhood sweetheart of 19, were survivors, even though homeless. In 1966, they found someone who would take them to Nassau by boat. The one-way trip cost them all the money they could pull together (about $50, some of it borrowed from friends) but they were determined to make a better life for themselves. So, they left Haiti homeless and with no possessions other than the clothes they were wearing.

They boarded the crowded 24 foot long fishing boat at 11 PM on December 1, 1966 headed for Nassau with eight others: two couples and four children. The trip took four days and nights on the open ocean. When they arrived in Nassau they were exhausted from the frequent bouts of seasickness and hungry. They sought refuge with other Haitians that arrived long before them and had settled in a shantytown on New Providence Island. Conditions in the shantytown were not a lot better than their homeland but they didn’t have to worry about being tracked down and shot by Duvalier’s henchmen. They were free and, most important, they had hope. In Nassau it was easy for them to find work—Sandley found day jobs, either as a gardener or in construction, while Widelene found work as a house cleaner.

In July 1973 The Bahamas gained their independence from Great Britain. As the new Bahamian government was formed, immigration laws had tightened and the government was cracking down on the Haitian shantytowns just outside Nassau’s city limits.  

The new law stated that “Individuals born in the Bahamas after 1973 are not automatically citizens and citizenship by descendant can only be granted if the father is Bahamian. Consequently, an individual born in the Bahamas to non-Bahamian parents can only be issued a Certificate of Identity that explicitly states their lack of statehood. Individuals in this position, mostly Haitian descendants, can file to become naturalized citizens only between the ages of 18 and 19. The filing process costs thousands of dollars and can reportedly take upwards of a decade.”

In his younger days, Sandler Lemieux was a
day laborer working mostly in construction.

At this time, Sandley, now 28, and Widelene, now 25, moved to Great Abaco Island to escape the legal scrutiny.  Since their skin tone was darker than the Bahamians of Nassau and they spoke a different language, it was difficult to assimilate into Bahamian culture. When they left Nassau, Sandley and Widelene had just the clothes on their back and two ferry tickets to Great Abaco.  They settled along with other Haitians on Crown Land in an area called “The Mud” in Marsh Harbour where the new Bahamian government was not likely to be so strict but his life in the shadows continued.

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