The Tribune

By Jeffrey Butler

IN the ghetto/inner city, the stories are similar but yet each has such distinct details which makes them so interesting.

As I stopped by early one morning on my way to work, I met a 15-year-old boy coming from the foodstore struggling with grocery bags filled with bottles of sodas which his mother resells to try to make a profit to help out at home.

I said to him ‘I haven’t seen you in a few days, what’s going on’ and he said to me without a smile “bey, I just get out. I was lock up for jicking up this bey”. The only thing I could have asked him was why? Why would you risk your freedom, especially at a young age?

His answer was one that we all have been hearing, seeing and living with for far too long ‘he’s in one gang and I’m in the next one’.

“It all started one day at school when during lunch break ‘he try to take me for light’ so when I caught him slipping by the mall me and my boy run up on him and start ganging him. Make it worse my girl was wit me so you know ‘he had to get it’ (beat down).”

This 15-year-old boy had the nerve to say ‘he lucky I didn’t break the knife in him, I only pegged him a lil’ bit’.

At 15, this is the mentality of our young men in The Bahamas. What makes it a bit more disturbing for me is that they live less than a 20-minute walk from each other.

But let’s take this story back a little bit. He is child number six out of seven in his family. Growing up, his mother was somewhat of an entrepreneur working as a vendor on the beach and his father had started out as a street drug dealer who later graduated to drug trafficking where he found himself imprisoned for almost 10 years in the United States. No doubt this had a major role to play in the boy’s childhood and affected his social upbringing with his mother working every day trying to provide and his father locked up abroad.

This boy turned to the streets for comfort and at a young age found himself in a gang life that he now regrets. It is said that a woman can’t raise a man - although there are some clear exceptions to that where many single mothers have raised some of the best and brightest young men our country has to offer. This was not yet the case for this 15-year-old but, for him, there is still much hope and promise with his father being released and sent back to The Bahamas last year. He is trying to be the father figure a young man needs to stay out of our criminal and judicial system.

Although he is from one of Nassau’s communities that’s looked down upon as an area that one should not drive through without the door locked and windows up, there are thousands of law-abiding people who aspire for more. Even the criminals - or the ones who are considered a burden to society - have bigger dreams and aspirations than the situations they find themselves living in. I was given a sense of hope and happiness when I asked him ‘what is it you want to do in life, what do you want to be?’ Without hesitation he said ‘I want to be an accountant. I want to get out of trouble and be able to help my family.’

This says to me that, for most of us coming from the ghetto, our situations and circumstances do not define or determine where we want to go in life or who we want to be. Although he’s facing a charge of grevious harm which can be bumped up to attempted murder he still has dreams of being a successful accountant.

As I said, if we all take the time out to speak to our youth to find out what is it that influences them to take part in criminal activities and help them down the right path in life instead of passing them by, we can all help to build the better Bahamas we want to live in. It starts with us and it has to start with steering our youth in the right direction.

• Jeffrey Butler, 33, grew up in the Kemp Road area, where he now runs a daiquiri stand. He will be writing regularly in The Tribune about life in the inner city.