Good morning from Bridgetown. Bajan Bugle here, looking at the week’s happenings with the raised eyebrow of someone who has seen this particular sequence of events approximately forty-seven times.

Let me walk you through what is worth noticing.

Reparations Finally Have a Number

Barbados now has, for the first time, a quantified figure for reparations owed for the brutal system of slavery. The long-awaited tally has been released. This is, on any measure, a significant moment. It took the better part of a decade of technical work by the CARICOM Reparations Commission, the University of the West Indies, and a constellation of historians, economists, and legal scholars.

What I will not do in this column is tell you the figure. If you want the figure, it is in the Nation, and I recommend you read the work in full rather than let me summarize it into a soundbite.

What I will do is note that the figure is now a fact. The discussion is no longer about whether reparations are owed — that question was answered long ago by anyone reading honestly — nor about whether a number could be produced. The number has been produced. The discussion is now about what, if anything, the party owing the debt intends to do about it.

That is a different conversation. It is the conversation we have been unable to have because, conveniently, there was no number. There is now a number. The absence of a number was doing a great deal of political work. That work is now over. The ball, as they say, is in a different court.

Prime Minister Mottley has been careful about this one. She has not oversold the moment. She has let the figure speak, which is the correct posture for a leader who knows that international reparations discussions are measured in decades, not news cycles. I will note only that her patience is not unlimited and neither is anyone else’s.

Canon Massiah, 79

Canon Errington Massiah has died. Seventy-nine years old. An Anglican priest for decades. A Nation Publishing columnist for longer than most of the current newsroom has been employed. A national figure in the quiet way that only certain kinds of public lives allow.

I am not an Anglican. I did not always agree with Canon Massiah’s columns. I will tell you this: the man wrote with care. He wrote every week. He wrote with the authority of someone who had put the work in and the humility of someone who knew that the work was never finished. That is a particular combination. It is rare. Its absence will be felt in these pages and in the country.

The Bishop of Barbados has paid tribute. The Prime Minister has paid tribute. I will note that the tributes are warm and appear to be sincere, which is not always the case with public tributes to public clergy. Canon Massiah earned the warmth.

Rest well, Canon.

The Smoke Returns

The Asthma Association of Barbados is once again warning the public — and I mean once again, because this warning has now been issued seasonally for as long as I have been writing columns — that the burning of vegetation and garbage is endangering people with respiratory illnesses.

President Rosita Pollard has the thankless job of reading out the same warning every year and every year watching the same backyard fires. The regulations exist. The enforcement does not. The children with asthma inhale the smoke anyway.

This is not a new story. This is barely a story. This is a recurring condition of Bajan life that the Asthma Association dutifully flags and the rest of us dutifully ignore. Canon Massiah would have written about this. He would have framed it as a moral failure, which it is. I will frame it as an administrative one, because the moral framing has apparently not worked.

Ban the burning. Enforce the ban. Fine the offenders. This is not complicated. We just do not want to do it, and so we do not.

Forty Percent

This number did not receive the attention it deserved this week. The Barbados Union of Teachers has reported that children and teenagers now account for forty percent of calls to the national mental health helpline.

Forty percent. Of the mental health crisis calls in this country. Are coming from people under the age of eighteen.

Take a moment. Read that number again.

I have been watching this trajectory for a decade. It is not new. It is worsening. The social-media, academic-pressure, post-pandemic, economically-strained, climate-anxious generation of Bajan children is in a kind of distress that their parents’ generation did not carry at the same age.

The Ministry of Education will say it is aware. The Ministry of Health will say it is aware. The schools are aware because the schools are picking up the pieces every day. What is not aware — or what has chosen not to act on its awareness — is the allocation of resources.

A school counselor at every secondary school. A helpline that does not ring out. Community-based mental health services that do not require a three-month wait. These are policy choices. They cost money. They do not cost more money than the alternative, which is a generation of adults who do not function because their adolescence was not supported.

Forty percent is the kind of number that ought to reorganize a budget. I do not believe it will. I note the failure for the record.

QEH Back to Full Service

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital has confirmed that all operating theatres have returned to full service after the air-conditioning issues that had partially shut them down earlier this month have been resolved.

“Air-conditioning issues” is a wonderfully polite phrase. It is the phrase we use for “the air conditioning in the hospital broke and surgeries had to be postponed because operating rooms cannot function safely without climate control.” Which is a sentence that, in a country of our size and income, ought not to be possible.

The theatres are back. Surgeons are operating. Patients whose surgeries were postponed are being rescheduled. Good. I will note that this is the fourth QEH operational disruption this year, by my count, and we are not yet into May.

The hospital is tired. The nurses are tired. The doctors are tired. The infrastructure is tired. We renamed the hospital once and repainted it twice. Neither intervention fixed the air conditioning.

Bank Hall Fire: Man Remanded

A twenty-two-year-old man has been remanded in connection with the Bank Hall fire death case. I will not name him because the matter is before the court. I will note that the fire claimed a life, that the community is mourning, and that the remand is a step in a legal process that is, in this country, longer than it should be.

The courts will do what the courts do. The family will carry what the family carries. I will not pretend I have anything useful to add to this sentence.

That’s the Bugle for Friday, April 17. A reparations figure, a priest mourned, an asthma warning we have read before, a mental health crisis in the young, a hospital catching its breath, and a young man remanded.

Barbados continues. We take notes.

— Bajan Bugle