The Tribune

By BRITNEY DEAN

bdean@tribunemedia.net

WHEN Angela Ferguson retired from the Public Hospitals Authority and told her children she was going to look for a job, they had another idea.

“They told me mommy, don’t go look for no job,” she said, “take that retirement money and get yourself a hot dog cart, and a Jeep to pull it.”

Four years later, the woman known as “Fox Hill Anne” is up around 4am every day, loading her Jeep for another shift selling hot dogs outside St Paul’s Methodist Church in Fox Hill. She told The Tribune that one thought drove her into business: “I’m not sitting down.”

The money that comes in each day matters to her more than she expected. Asked what it means to earn an income of her own, Ms Ferguson said: “It means so much to me because when I was working we got paid by the month. Here you make something every day; even if it’s only a dollar. It means a lot to me.”

Ms Ferguson spent 11 years at the PHA, where she was a supervisor in the housekeeping department. She had never cooked for anyone but herself and had never been in the food business. With her children’s encouragement, she bought the equipment she needed and started out.

“Hotdogs are the easiest thing,” she said. The hardest part, she said, is the prep.

She began at Christie Park before moving to her current spot at St Paul’s.

Her days have the same rhythm as her working life, only now the job is her own.

“It’s just like getting up every morning to go to PHA, now I am working for myself,” she said. Packing the Jeep and heading out each morning feels like any normal day, she said, and she likes it that way.

Running the business has also changed how she deals with people. She said working for herself has taught her how to treat customers and how to talk to them.

“That’s what brings them back,” she said.

Her story comes as The Bahamas’ population grows older. The official retirement age is 65, with early retirement possible from 60. A 2024 Inter-American Development Bank report found that the number of Bahamians aged 60 and over had reached 48,000 by 2020, and projected that the group will make up 27.1 percent of the population by 2050. The report said many seniors face fixed incomes and rising living costs, and that ageism makes it harder for them to find jobs or start businesses. The IDB and the government agreed to split the cost of a $700,000 project to help older Bahamians become entrepreneurs.

Ms Ferguson said retirement is not about slowing down, and she urged other retirees to stay active.

“When you sit down and mope about, you just get older,” she said. “You just get up and go make things happen for yourself.”