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The Fig Tree 
Volume IV In this issue: | Oh,
What a Lovely Surprise |
Oh,
What a Lovely Surprise There was a note on my desk that morning when I arrived at the American Consulate General's office that the Consul Benjamin Hauck wanted to see me in his office. I had recently been given a raise in salary and did not think that the Americans wanted to give me more money, but who knew? Mr. Hauck greeted me warmly and informed me that he had entered my name as a candidate in the upcoming Miss Bahamas Beauty Pageant. Mr. Hauck excitedly informed me that he felt that I was the perfect person who would be a good ambassador for the Bahamas, and that the Pageant was going to be a grand affair with interesting prizes and travel opportunities that awaited the winner. I did my best to hide my annoyance at this intrusion into my private life. I had no interest in parading around in front of complete strangers who would judge me on physical appearance alone. As it was, I had been accepted at St. Anthony's Hospital in Surrey, England to study nursing, and was leaving at the end of the year. I viewed these competitions as superficial and the preparations for same as a bloody waste of time. I adored Mr. Hauck, though, who had taught me so much in my position as receptionist/typist at the American Consulate General. I decided not to disappoint him and endure the upcoming weeks. There were many parties, dances, beach picnics and boat trips for all of the contestants at which I enjoyed myself, although I was not too excited with my prospects, having seen the other girls and deciding that I'd place third. Seeing the third-place prizes encouraged me to continue. The first judging was held on a Saturday night, with three contestants were chosen and the finals judging scheduled for the following Saturday. I was one of the three selected. It was a week of great controversy, you see, as one of the judges was an uncle of the finalist who was expected to win. She was really quite beautiful and would win with or without the uncle, in my opinion. The following Saturday at The Cat & Fiddle Club in Nassau, the place was packed to capacity with enthusiastic supporters of the three girls. My entire neighborhood -- so very loyal, supportive and clannish -- turned out in full. My mother, as a nurse and midwife, had brought many of these supporters into the world, and so it was double support for me.
I was called first and was happy to have it finally come to an end. The question was: "As we are neighbors with communist Cuba, should we as Bahamians worry about the communist influence?" I smiled and answered, "In spite of our geographical proximity to Cuba, the Bahamas has always shared a close alliance with the United States and as a result of this support and the United States anti-Communist stance, we should have no cause for concern." I remained on the stage while another contestant came out, who had been unable to hear the question or the answer. Second answer to the same question was "I do not think so." The favorite to win walked out to cheers and screams from her supporters. The question was asked, she seemed quite nervous, and as the pressure from her supporters was enormous - not to mention that having her uncle as a judge had made local headlines -- she smiled and answered "I do not think that we have to worry." After these answers, my group went wild screaming "Brenda's got it! Brenda's got it!" The five judges stood individually to call out their choices for runner-up and winner. The first judge was the favorite's uncle, and he stood and called his niece as runner-up and me as the winner. I was flattered and quite pleased. The other four judges did the same and voted the same way. In the audience someone called out "Oh Lord, it is unanimous." I was a bit confused, and thought that I had been elevated to second place and stood smiling. Someone pushed me gently forward, someone else placed a cloak around my shoulders, a crown was placed on my head, a trophy and flowers were thrust into my hand and I was instructed to walk down the runway. My mother shouted "That's my girl, that's my girl!" Then I saw the tears on her face, saw my friends laughing and jumping on chairs in the audience, photographers crowded around and then realized I had won. This was not longer a superficial competition and a waste of my bloody time. I had won Miss Bahamas. This was responsibility, commitment and such a wonderful, lovely surprise.
The Landing
Hotel & Restaurant
P.O. Box 190 Harbour Island, Bahamas
Harbour Island Teacher of the Year Says Reading is Key Staff and students of the Harbour Island All Age School have named Patrice Gail Davis Teacher of the Year, and Miss Davis has also ranked fourth among all the teachers of Eleuthera. In her fourth year of teaching at the school, Miss Davis teaches grades 7-12 with a homeroom assignment for grade 11. Reading is the key to success for the Island's students, she says. "The more students read, the better they do." And she adds that those students whose parents take an active role in their education are the ones who read more and succeed. In order to encourage reading in her classes, Miss Davis brings passages with references from everyday life for her students to read and also has them type the passages. A native of Harbour Island, Miss Davis's future plans include studying for a bachelors degree in computer science at the College of The Bahamas in Nassau. As the typing teacher, she is already instrumental in preparing students for the computer classes expected to be in place soon. The school currently has a room with 12 PCs and a newly donated Macintosh and expects to have a computer teacher next year. |
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Harbour
Island Beach Cleanup Millennium Project By Humphrey Percentie, Jr. As you know, Harbour Island has the most beautiful pink sand beach in the world. It is our obligation to carry this beauty forward by keeping our beach the cleanest in the world. Last fall, Hurricane Floyd transformed our beach in many ways. The erosion was immense, but with time the beach will regain its composure. There was a vast amount of bottles, plastic, tar and refuse that was deposited on our beach during the hurricane season. This will not simply disappear with time. In a period of a few short weeks after Floyd hit, there were more than 45 truckloads of driftwood and 230 bats of garbage hauled away from our beach. This was only the beginning. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Humphrey Percentie Jr., Vic-Hum Club owner and manager, along with two other workers, cleans beach from Ms. Pyne's Estate in the North to South Bar Estate. We remove cans, bottles, ropes, tar, plastics and garbage that floats onto our beautiful beach. We are proposing a program that will be the special millennium effort from Thanksgiving to Easter in which we will survey and clean our beach every morning form 6-9am. We are also planning to have a program where the entire beach will be raked from Christmas and Easter. "Rake the Whole Beach"
Hotel owners, homeowners and local businesses will be asked to support the
project for everyone's benefit. All contributions are by check and can be
given to our spokesperson, Miss Judy Allen, at Coral Sands Hotel. If you
have any questions, please contact her at 242-333-2350 or via e-mail at
coralsan@batelnet.bs. For more information, the Millennium Project can be
reached via P.O. Box 61 - Harbour Island, Bahamas
Tel: 242-333-2161. Let's work together to keep our island clean.
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| Got Satellites? Space News Discovers
The Briland Modem: IRIDIUM USERS WARILY CONSIDER SWITCH TO GLOBALSTAR By Ben Iannotta KEY WEST, Fla. -- Well-heeled residents of the Bahamas, who rushed to buy Iridium satellite phones in the wake of last fall's Hurricane Floyd, are feeling burned by news of the Iridium system's demise. But not so burned that they will not consider giving the new Globalstar constellation a try when it becomes available. "I'm getting inundated with questions. Is Globalstar the real deal? People don't want to get burned again," said Kimberly King-Burns, a part-time resident of Harbour Island and the producer of an online message board for Bahamians called the Briland Modem, located at www.briland.com. "Briland" is how local Bahamians refer to Harbour Island, King-Burns said. For now, the questions about Globalstar are moot because the 48-satellite constellation, built by Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, Calif., does not yet serve the Bahamas. The Globalstar satellites cannot pass calls between each other, which means they must transmit calls via ground relay stations called gateways. If there is no gateway in an area, there is no service. A new gateway in Puerto Rico will serve the Caribbean and Bahamas, but the facility is not scheduled to open until late summer, said Globalstar spokesman Mac Jeffery. Thanks to September's Hurricane Floyd, handheld satellite phones have become a must-have for those on the islands who can afford the $1,500 handsets and per-minute calling rates, King-Burns said. "This is not a luxury. It's the only means to communicate with the mainland" for months after a major hurricane, she said. King-Burns said the Briland Modem board sold 35 Iridium phones in the aftermath of Floyd. She estimated there are thousands of Iridium customers in the region including resort operators, government officials and hurricane relief workers. Normal phone service only recently was restored to some areas, she said. On March 6, Motorola Cellular Services Inc., a primary marketer of Iridium services, began advising customers in writing that the Iridium system might be turned off. The letter said nothing about refunds, and a special Web page set up by the company does not mention the issue either. However, Motorola spokesman Scott Wyman said in an interview that people who have bought Iridium telephones from Motorola since January would be eligible for refunds. On March 17, Iridium's attorneys informed the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York that attempts to find a bidder qualified to take over the struggling company had been unsuccessful, forcing the company to end service at 11:59 p.m. EST that day, dismiss most of its employees and ask Motorola to begin deorbiting the low-Earth-orbit satellites. The Washington-based company asked the court to release $8.3 million to cover the costs of winding down Iridium's operations and said it would move its remaining employees to offices in Reston, Va., to oversee the disposal of Iridium's ground-based assets. The only publicly identified bidder for Iridium was Eugene Curcio, president of Venture Partners Inc., Rolling Hills Estates, Calif. Curcio told Space News he planned to use the Iridium satellites to provide telephony service to underserved parts of the world for between 30 and 50 cents per minute. Existing Iridium customers would have been able to keep their service under the plan, Curcio said. Some Iridium customers are furious that they were not given more notice of the system's impending shutdown nor offers of refunds. Richard Haskell, a part-time resident of Harbour Island, is one of them. He said his son is sailing around the Caribbean on a 30-foot sailboat and was counting on his Iridium phone as a safety device to go with his marine radio and emergency satellite beacon system. Although Haskell said he would consider buying a Globalstar handset, he said he will be wary this time. "Nobody's going to lay down $1,500 again without some assurance that if [they] go out of business, [they'll] give you back your $1,500. I can't imagine that the market won't be sullied badly by this," Haskell said. Haskell said he has submitted a demand for a refund in writing to Motorola, but he has not heard back from the company.
Globalstar's marketing plan does not include assurances about procedures in the event of failure, Jeffery said. "No company offers you a service, and says, 'Oh by the way, we'll give you a refund if we go bankrupt,'" he said. Jeffrey said Globalstar is convinced its service will be a success and that company officials are not even talking about bankruptcy scenarios. King-Burns said her advice to Globalstar is to focus on honest marketing. "You've got some real snake oil salesmen out there," she said. King-Burns said she learned through her own research that her region is not yet served by Globalstar. Jeffery said Globalstar has gone out of its way to tell customers that the company is rolling out its service step by step. "We learned a lot of lessons from Iridium. One of the them was you don't overhype this," he said. Globalstar's U.S. service provider, Globalstar USA, which also will serve the Caribbean when Globalstar's Puerto Rico gateway begins operating, is offering Iridium customers rebates of as much as $495 to entice them to switch, said Toni Carinci, a spokeswoman for Globalstar USA, Walnut Creek, Calif. Although Globalstar service is not yet available in the Bahamas, Carinci said Iridium subscribers in the region are eligible for the rebates and can contact Globalstar distributors to make arrangements to take advantage of the offer. Iridium phones never became hot sellers in the Florida Keys, a chain of islands in the southernmost part of the state that escaped Floyd's wrath. Carl Aufrecht of the Keys Sea Center on Big Pine Key said he sold seven or eight of the phones for $1,495 and $2.35 a minute. "To have that security on your boat, that's cheap," he said. "But in order to get it into the hands of a lot of people, the handsets are going to have to be a lot cheaper." Globalstar phones cost about the same as the final Iridium price of $1,500, but Globalstar is promising per-minute rates of $1.50 or less. Jeffery predicted the handset prices would go down, but he could not say by how much. Aufrecht said he doubts a satellite phone company can survive based on the post-hurricane emergency market. "A system can't be supported by people who are letting the phone sit there waiting for a hurricane. The system needs continuous service," he said. "There's no individual market that's going to be a million phones. But collectively, you add it up and it is attractive," Jeffery said. Some people in the Bahamas are hoping Globalstar will be ready by the peak of the next hurricane season. "I think [Globalstar] is going to have a windfall. We here in the Bahamas are petrified of the 2000 hurricane season," said Sharon King, Kimberly's mother, speaking from her home on Harbour Island. Staff writer Sam Silverstein contributed to this report from Washington.
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HISTORY OF THE BAHAMAS: Part I Christopher Columbus discovered the Bahama Islands in October 1492 when he landed on the island of Guanahani, the Arawak name for San Salvador. Columbus was really in search of the continent of Asia, where he hoped to obtain gold, silver, silk and spices. He renamed Guanahani San Salvador, meaning Holy Saviour, and claimed it for the King and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. On San Salvador, Columbus met a group of people called Arawaks or Lucayans-Island People. This Island however, showed no sign of Oriental splendor as Columbus had expected and in the urgent matter of finding gold he soon moved on taking with him several of the Lucayan Indians. After leaving San Salvador, the Spaniards discovered and explored Rum Cay (Santa Maria de la Concepcion), Long Island (Fernandia), Crooked Island (Isabella) and Ragged Island (Las Islas de Arena). No gold was found. On the 27th October, fifteen days after landing in The Bahamas, the fleet sailed out of Bahamian waters towards Cuba and then on to Hispaniola where some gold was found. The word Bahamas dates back to the age of discovery. It comes from the Spanish word "Baja mar" which means "Shallow Sea". From this word comes the name Bahama Islands-Islands of the Shallow Sea. THE ARAWAKS OR LUCAYANS It is believed that the Lucayan migrated from South America to the West Indian Islands in dug-out canoes. Often the Caribs, a very war-like people, chased them. The Caribs ate the Arawak men and kept the women as slaves. APPEARANCE The Arawaks were a brown-skinned people, quite tall, with square faces and slanting eyes. They had straight black hair and painted their faces and bodies with red, white, yellow, purple and black mixtures. There were three reasons for this, as the paints carried a religious meaning and magical effects, and helped to keep mosquitoes away. Another custom was to flatten the heads of new born babies by fastening them between two pieces of board. This was partly for fashion and beauty, but it also thickened the bone of the forehead, which was an added protection for them against their enemies of the Caribs. They led a very simple life. Groups of families shared houses and an ordinary Arawak family house was called a Caneye. They also shared other "things" that they obtained from hunting, fishing and farming. In terms of political organization, the Arawaks were ruled by a chief called a Cacique who was law maker and chief priest. His house was called bohio and was bigger than the other houses, rectangular in shape with a porch for visitors. In the Arawak society there was hardly any crime. Thieves were pierced through with a sharp stick and left to die. The Arawaks gods were called Zemis. The Spaniards were the first to discover the Bahamas. However, because of its poor soil, lack of anticipated mineral wealth and treacherous waters, they were not interested in settling. Instead, they depopulated the islands by transporting the Arawaks to work in the gold mines of Hispaniola. This happened over a period of twenty years and eventually the Arawaks all died from overwork, cruel treatment and exposure to new diseases brought to the Caribbean area by the Spaniards. After the death of the Arawaks, The Bahamas remained uninhabited for over one hundred years. To be continued...
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Letter to The Editor: Dear Dunmore Grouper, Editor-At-Large: In response to all of the reactions to the requests, I wanted to say thank you for your involvement. I am heading up this particular after-school program for developmentally-challenged students, but I think it is important for you to know that all of the donated supplies are shared within the school with those other teachers that hold after school classes for their students as well. I also am involved with similiar initiatives for the special needs students in Eleuthera, so any extra materials will not be unused. The supplies requested are pretty universally needed. To others who would bring supplies, donations of phonics or alphabet flash cards are great, as well as books that graduate levels of reading mastery. If you are unable to ship it directly to Harbour Island via G&G Shipping in Dania, Florida, then I'd to offer a US address that will get them here as well: Lang Fincher When sending supplies to Harbour Island, please address as follows: Thanks,
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