The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

There is one memory that, no matter how many successes he racks up, Louby Georges can never forget.

He was in grade five at Uriah McPhee when the teacher sent him up to the board to solve a math equation.

“I was taking too long and she came up behind me, yanked the chalk out of my hand and said, ‘Sit down, you dumb self, Haitian’.”

It was the first time in his life that he realised being Haitian meant being less than human. There would be many more.

There was the time when Immigration refused to give him a travel letter to go to his grandmother’s funeral in Haiti, outright lying to him that there was no such thing as a travel document when he had evidence there was and he knew in his gut that no matter what he said it would not pierce the wall of ice and authority blocking his way.

Five years later, the same Louby Georges became a household name, the host of a Creole radio show on Guardian Talk Radio that was so popular it went from being aired once a week to occupying a one-hour slot every night until it was suddenly cancelled without notice.

That was in 2014, the same year Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell decreed a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented persons. Buses scoured the streets, scooping up people who did not have papers on them. Officers staged raids. There were roadblocks. And people were being rounded up, compared with those who protested, to cattle with tactics described as Gestapo-like.

No voice in the protest of how Haitians, including Haitian-Bahamians, were being treated was louder or more articulate than that of Fred Smith, QC. President of the (then) Grand Bahama Human Rights Association, Smith had the resources and reach to bring the plight of the stateless and the legal Haitian to the attention of the OAS. With a hearing set for Washington, DC, Louby Georges asked Smith if he could go with him.

“If anyone deserves to be called a hero in this country, it is Fred Smith,” says Louby.

The two, along with Joe Darville and Smith’s team at Callenders, have worked closely ever since and although Louby Georges is not the voice on radio he once was, he has an awesome task as the representative of OIM, Organization for Immigrant Migration, a division of the United Nations.

“I have been all over the world. Sometimes I can’t even believe it myself that I am able to bring attention to The Bahamas and be an ambassador for the country I love even though I was ridiculed and made fun of for my heritage as a child,” he says.

At one meeting in Sochi, Russia, the Bahamian from humble beginnings was chosen as one of 16 young people out of 30,000 to represent their country and meet the President, Vladimir Putin.

“I shook Putin’s hand and when he asked where I was from and I said, Bahamas, he asked me to repeat it, which I did and he had never heard of it. I had to explain to Putin where The Bahamas was but I was so proud to be the ambassador.”

This week, I went back with Louby to his roots. He showed me the four houses where his family lived on St. James Road, starting with the first, a one-room house with no kitchen, no bathroom, and everyone slept where they could, creating mattresses out of clothing on the floor. The second house had a bathroom, but no running water was ever connected. Louby would tote jugs, buckets and scrubbed oil containers to the public pumps for water, just like the men and women were still doing when we went there together.

“The atrocities aren’t so great as they were now that the situation is being monitored by organisations like OIM, the UN and the Human Rights Association, but not much has changed for the man or woman on the ground who is still struggling to make it,” he said.

His goal now – to rebuild the kind of community spirit, especially through sports, that allowed a kid like Louby Georges growing up sleeping on the floor in the Kemp Road area to go around the world singing the praises of a Bahamas he loves.revisitng

Taking a leaf out of their book

Can someone please explain to me why The Bahamas is under threat of being banned from financial transactions with the US if we develop a hemp industry?

Marijuana has been legal in Colorado since 2012 (though some cities have since restricted its distribution) and one state after another has followed Colorado’s lead, Washington, Florida, Maine, North Dakota among the earliest.

If I am not mistaken, 42 out of 50 states in the US allow some form of hemp or marijuana use though variations exist related to specifics of use – medicinal, recreational, industrial.

So why is America saying don’t go there, Bahamas. Could this be a case of do as a I say, not as a I do?

Maybe someone can weed out the real cause of suspicion of hemp use in honey, for instance, or clothing.

I am not a weed smoker, definitely from the wrong generation for that, but can’t help but think that something which grows naturally and heals topically without side effects has to be a lot healthier than processed meat and manufactured pharmaceuticals.