The Tribune

ON a bright, sunny morning last week, the students, faculty and staff of LN Coakley Senior High in Exuma poured out of classrooms and gathered along the halls and in the courtyard, filling every available foot of open air.

Steel drums played. A glamorous Mrs. Canada was making the rounds. There would be prayer, singing, dancing, remarks of love and appreciation, a student Junkanoo rush-out.

It was the day before the 8th year of the Run for Pompey, the half marathon that unites a community as it raises money for scholarships. It was a day to welcome guests who would deliver more than the pre-race day words of encouragement.

They were delivering a gift -- a new school bus.

On that day, under blue skies and the sound of young, joyous voices, xenophobia was nowhere in sight.

No one thought about who made the bus purchase possible and whether they were local or ex-pat. Attention was on the bright blue bus all decorated up from hood to tailpipe, painted with a native sloop and a bicycle.

Students swarmed race patron Bahamian legendary sprinter and triple Olympic medalist Pauline Davis. They embraced and thanked race co-founders – a transplanted Canadian-born videographer and screenwriter, Kevin Taylor who has lived in Nassau for years, and Canadian journalist, author and communications specialist Jeff Todd.

An ex-pat, a transplant and a native Bahamian blending, proud to deliver a present that was funded in large part by another Exuma event, the Tour de Turquoise charity bike ride, also organized by a trifecta of nationalities that makes the magic happen.

Like Todd and Taylor giving countless hours to Run for Pompey, Howard Chang and family along with Friends of Exuma dedicate themselves to fund-raisers like Tour de Turquoise that last year raised more than $100,000 for Exuma.

BAF and Grand Isle Villas are stalwart supporters of both events, reinforcing the formula of together, foreign and local, we can work miracles. When we come together, good things happen. When we focus on the differences between us, we are stuck in place like boots in wet cement.

In moments like the celebration at a high school in Exuma gifted with the presence of powerful women, friends and a new bus, there is a glowing connectivity. It happens in Family Island events, an understanding, a peacefulness and acceptance between foreign and local, a hand-holding that is far too rare in New Providence where gates designed for security all too often lock out friends we might make, experiences we might treasure, cultures we might learn from.

If a cultural mix is a recipe for success, it sometimes feels someone forgot the spoon that stirs the wet and dry ingredients together and left them separated into two worlds. There’s the world of the Family Islands and the other in Nassau where if ‘ya born here, ya born here,’ and if you weren’t, you’re toast. You’re nothin’ if you ain’t Bahamian and can’t trace Grandpa’s roots back to someplace in a Family Island.

If that is the case, how do you account for all the people like Todd and Taylor and Chang and the Coughlins, who recently sold a business Bob Coughlin started in Cincinnati called Paycor, moved to Exuma and already are making a huge difference in the community? Their donation helped buy, refurbish and ship that bus to LN Coakley, the bus that will take students on field trips and to compete in sports events, to a holiday celebration or to the southern part of the island to study the waters of Moriah Harbour, a designated marine protection area.

Throughout the islands there are organizations like Friends of Exuma and Friends of Abaco. The Lyford Cay Foundations started out more than 50 years ago as Friends of The Bahamas. In the more than half a century past, the American and Canadian Foundations have funded more than 2,000 scholarships for Bahamians along with a host of other programmes, including the eight-year long college readiness initiative called FOCUS.

Even the NGO charged with protecting the Bahamian environment, the Bahamas National Trust, is a product of a mix of cultures. An expedition led by naturalist Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), set out to inspect and save the Exuma Cays from developers who wanted to buy and develop the chain of islands. That expedition included Bahamians named Russell and McKinney whose descendants still protect the environment. And it gave birth to the BNT in 1958 along with the world’s first underwater national park, the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, now 112,000+ acres, prime protected breeding ground for the declining population of the conch we depend on.

It is not just that foreigners who care about The Bahamas generously support so many efforts. They bring fresh ideas, innovation, new culture from food to music to social rituals and a different perspective. They generate business and economic activity. They invest in homes and schools and support businesses, fill restaurants, lend support in so many ways and often behind the scenes.

Every successful country recognizes the importance of importing people lest it risk stagnation. Yet in The Bahamas we remain afraid. Why, I ask, why? Do we not trust them? Do we think those who are generous are trying to buy favour? This is not a news flash. I have worked with some of the kindest and most caring of people, Bahamians and those not, who reach into their pocketbooks and give unstintingly. Their generosity is not patronizing; their involvement in community efforts is not to fill a day in which there is little else to do.

Most who were not born here but came here for one reason or another fell in love with The Bahamas and love is a strong motivator.

It’s a sad state of affairs that Just the word foreign makes a lot of Bahamians angry. It’s the craziest thing, given that those same people would not be here if some ancestor who was not a Lucayan had not been here.

Like it or not, we are all from somewhere else. As for that glamorous Mrs. Canada, she is a former Rwandan refugee who experienced years of unspeakable terror before making her way to another place where the door was open and she was safe. Today, married and the mother of three, she tours the world representing that country, Canada, sharing its message of welcome and the underlying intrinsic value of acceptance.

THE SHORT SCARY TRUTH THAT CAME OUT OF COP 27

Here’s a tidbit of just what might have been the most frightening fact to come out of the recent climate change conference in Egypt.

Researchers at Wales research university Aberystwyth said as the planet heats up, causing giant glaciers to melt at an alarming rate, those melting waters have the potential to unleash bacterial microbes that would leak into rivers and lakes, causing irreparable harm to humans and marine life.

According to the report, the researchers studied meltwater from eight glaciers in Europe and North America and two sites in Greenland, and estimated “the situation could result in more than a 100,000 tonnes of microbes, such as bacteria, being released into the environment over the next 80 years - a number comparable to all the cells in every human body on earth.”

The glaciologists urged quick action to slow the rate of rising temperatures that is in turn causing large chunks of ice to melt faster than predicted, adding to already rising sea levels while releasing the bacteria that has been growing inside the warmer sites.