If money were no object: a Blog Off Post
The following is a Blog Off post. A Blog off is a biweekly event that's sweeping the internet. It's an event where bloggers of all stripes write about the same topic. You can learn more on the Let's Blog Off site . As the day progresses, a table will appear at the end of this post and it will list all of the participants as well as link to their posts.
The gist of the Blog Off this week is an offer to muse and meander approximately what I'd purchase my loved ones if cash have been no item. Well, my cherished ones do not actually need something that can be bought with money so I'm forsaking them for this exercise. Well, that they had be welcome to enroll in me inside the factor I'm about to muse and meander approximately however it would not contain the exchange of products among us.
I've written quite a piece approximately an island in The Bahamas it is very close to and expensive to me, Cat Island. It has it has own key-word in my glossary it's so near and pricey to me.
I by no means made it over to my Cat Island in 2010 however I will trade that in 2011. I will.
I go to Cat Island for its isolation. I can relax there in its primitive loveliness like I can no where else. The combination of being cut off from the rest of the world and the hospitality of the Bahamian people touch me in a really profound way. The accommodations where I stay are pretty primitive but that just adds to the allure.
They're fascinating due to the fact I'm a white American on excursion. The residing situations for the Bahamians who stay on Cat probably do not keep the equal romantic appeal they do for me. The Bahamians I've come to recognize are a contented, generous lot. I doubt they understand it, however I've discovered extra from them than I have words to complex. Most of these training need to do with forcing me to see that most of what I tell myself is a want is an phantasm.
The poverty on Cat Island may not sense like poverty to Cat Islanders however it looks like poverty to me. No one is going hungry, but lifestyles at the Out Islands of The Bahamas is tough.
I read an article in the Cape Coral, FL Daily Breeze last year that talked about the conditions at the Old Bight High School on Cat Island. I've driven past that high school more times than I can count but the article talked about how the Cape Coral Charter School System donated 2,000 text books to the high school in Old Bight. Prior to their donation, the kids at Old Bight High had one text book for every five to 15 students, depending on the subject. I read another article last October in The Bahamas Weekly that was written by the Honourable Philip "Brave" Davis, the Member of Parliament for Cat and its neighboring islands. Old Bight High School had to close in the fall of 2010 due to a lack of teachers and the unsafe conditions at the school. As of last year, Old Bight High School had 13 teachers to its 134 students. Those 134 students had to be absorbed by the already over extended Arthur's Town High School, 25 miles to the north.
25 miles is an insurmountable distance whilst your number one mode of transportation is your ft. I can not help however think that because of a lack of sources, any chance of a better existence were given snubbed out for those 134 youngsters with that college closure.
My proudest possession is my intellect and it hurts me deeply to hear about the educational conditions on Cat Island. That a generation of kids just had their intellectual opportunities pulled out from underneath them rubs me raw.
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| photo from The Bahamas Weekly |
These kids deserve to be able to do anything they want with their lives and they can't do that without books and schools.
So if money were no object I might begin a foundation, an academic basis. A mistake a number of western aid corporations make is that they're western aid corporations. Mine wouldn't be within the commercial enterprise of making sovereign human beings bounce thru hoops to get money. Instead, my basis would be staffed and run through Bahamians, Cat Islanders wherever possible. My foundation would staff schools with Bahamian teachers and offer Bahamas-suitable text books. My myth basis could help to raise a technology of clever and proud Bahamians. They'd be a group of individuals who knew who they have been and where they stood as quintessential components of the sweeping records of the islands they call domestic.
But alas, my foundation is all in my head and likely to stay there. Unfortunately, money is an object all too real and the kids at New Bight High School got that for their big lesson this year.
It's unfathomable to me that schools near due to a lack of teachers and assets in a rustic simply offshore from the United States. A united states in which hundreds of thousands of North Americans and Europeans cross every year to unwind.
So maybe what there may be to do right here is forestall dreaming approximately money not being an obstacle to having basic needs met. Maybe what there's to do is discover a way to really assist. Schools throughout the evolved global throw away books via the truck load every 12 months. It's actual that Cat Island's colleges constitute a small, small portion of the total want, but they're the component I know.
What would it take to companion up with more than one faculty districts in Florida or somewhere else inside the US? Anybody recognise somebody who can make a connection like that occur? Anybody available want to lend a hand?