February 9, 2024
The Caribbean is suffering under the weight of poverty, low incomes and people living well under the living wage, if we want to call that living. They say the poor will always be among us, but we didn’t realize it was going to be this many poor people.
The World Bank said the pandemic exposed our acute vulnerability and sent millions of people below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Latin America and the Caribbean went from 28.3 percent in 2019 to 30.3 percent in 2021.
To add to the misery, we are killing each other off at a rate that is the highest in the world. Central America and the Caribbean have the highest murder rates, with El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica notably higher than the global average. Central America and the Caribbean snatch the top seven spots in the world homicide rate.
What are we going to do? There may be nothing we can do aside form let another generation die out in hopes that the following one can be a little more progressive and blessed. How can we encourage conflict resolution when the conflict is incriminating? How do I tell the police or some authority figure that the guy in the next neighbourhood stole my kilo of cocaine and I need to get it back from him, or money in its place, or else every other half-wit will rip me off and take me for a joke or the Colombian that fronted me the cocaine will come and kill me for losing it? How does conflict resolution deal with that?
Better still, how do we re-educate the un-educated, give them new skills and simultaneously get the people in power to stop closing doors on us so we can get a chance to get over? You see, there is a lot of things we can unpack there too.
We just have to keep pressing towards the mark. Only things for Christ will last.