Cayman Islands - What the brocures don't say. Part 2

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So anyway...

Caymanians, as a people, hold a few interesting surprises. Before I came out here, I’d thought that problems with inbreeding were pretty much confined to the European aristocracy. Not so. Considering that historically Cayman consisted of small isolated communities with virtually no intermarrying even between villages - any way you look at it, a few generations like that and you find yourself swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool. A young Caymanian woman was telling me, with great frustration, about the dreadful problems she has with dating: Every time she takes a bloke home to meet her mum she finds out that she’s his cousin. Much as I’m inclined to giggle about the matter and notwithstanding the fact that most Caymanians wouldn’t admit to it if you questioned them in a dark room whilst showing them videos of their mother, aunt, sister and first cousin being tortured (which wouldn’t be hard to do as they’re all liable to be the same person anyway), inbreeding is a genuine problem here. Chronic hereditary illnesses are shockingly prevalent, and represent a real pressure on the islands’ healthcare system.

A lot of Caymanians are also obscenely fat, of course, and that doesn’t help. This is not genetic; the local diet has to be seen (for gods sake don’t eat any of it) to be believed. I have nothing to back up the claim, but I reckon they’re worse than the Americans for eating crap out here (in fact, I heard a Caymanian complain to me about America that the food doesn’t have enough grease and salt!). Caymanians, in the forty odd years, have embraced junk food with a ferevent passion. They not only seem to consider KFC actual food (which is in itself a considerable marketing coup of the colonel), but seem to think it the cornerstone of a balanced diet. Obesity is rife, around two thirds of the patients we get in the hospital are diabetic and pretty much everyone is hypertensive – it’s scary. Still, despite the fact that they all marry their relatives and have arses that can be see from Cuba on a clear night, somehow they all somehow manage to live until they’re ninety (which is awkward, as no one’s thought to build any nursing homes or care of the elderly units yet) so they must be doing something right. Personally, I put it down to a complete lack of stress in their working lives - which brings be back to what I was talking about in part 1.

So, as fewer Caymanians than one would expect take up the opportunity of an education, generally they get themselves a junior (but not too junior) position in some kind of business and ‘work’ their way up. As it’s virtually impossible for a Caymanian to get sacked – particularly if they’re working with ex-pats (and if they manage to do something so spectacularly wrong that they are, they’ll just get another job), it really doesn’t matter to your average Caymanian whether they do their job well (or at all) or not – they’re just out for as easy a ride as possible, which is what their society has taught them from day one that they can expect from the world. This is why so much out here in terms of basic services and utilities works so badly. The Caymanians tend to get promoted by osmosis and as a result a majority of the native population ends up sitting comfortably in and around the middle-to-upper management strata (and, if the health service is anything to go by, would have difficulty managing it’s way out of a wet paper bag with a clearly marked fire exit). This is, of course, where Johnny Foreigner comes in.

I’ll use the Healthcare Authority (as its the part of the working world I know best) as a microcosm of society to illustrate this bit. Cayman, being rich, wants (and feels it righteously deserves) a first-class healthcare system. As there are very few native health professionals on the island (Why go abroad and train as a nurse, after all, when you can be a hospital manager anyway in a few years? You deserve it; you’re Caymanian.), this necessitates drafting in frontline staff from wherever in the developed world they’re willing to come. Fine and dandy, over we all come, earn a bit of cash, don’t pay taxes, soak up a few rays, shake our heads at the ludicrous way the place is run (but are quite unable to change anything because no Caymanian likes to have a foreigner tell them what to do) and cheerfully bugger off home at the end of our stay. Equally, as all the Caymanians are busy sitting in offices, being important and making up jobs for each other and all the ex-pats are well trained professionals (or they wouldn’t have been allowed here in the first place) who’s going to mop the floors, cart trolleys and generally to all the donkey work? Happily, there’s a multitude of Jamaicans and Hondurans desperately keen to earn Caymanian wages (even donkeywork on Cayman pays enough to support a family back home) and happy to do all the work that Caymanians won’t do for the simple reason that they don’t have to and that the white ex-pats are overqualified for. That’s how the society functions here; class delineation corresponds almost perfectly to nationality. It’s a situation that affords the Caymanian people a standard of living comparable to any of the world wealthiest countries whilst having very little part in maintaining said standard of living and so being totally dependent on foreign nationals to fill in the gaps left by an entire society cramming itself into the upper-middle class. OK, not all Caymanians fit into this picture of things. Some do other things; learn professions and so on. There are always the stupid and the lazy (lazier, I mean), the increasing crack-smoking faux gangsta section of the youth of the country, who won’t get jobs - aberrant factions of society, who don’t fit the pattern (one of my patients described himself as being from ‘the ghetto’ the other day – he meant a square kilometre up the road where the houses need a lick of paint and most families don’t run a second car). Generally speaking, though, society functions as I describe above and very nice it is too for most of us - particularly the natives. What I can’t get my head round, then, is the total lack of insight into the way things work and the constant underlying resentment of foreigners from the population as a whole.

Ex-pats, it is muttered (and written in very concerned and usually badly spelled letters to the newspapers), come over to the island, take jobs away from honest hard-working Caymanians (I’m told there is such a thing…) and end up taking Caymanian dollars off the island – weakening the economy. Weakening the economy? We are the economy. Where the bloody hell do they think all their money comes from anyway? Fish? Aside from which if there was a Caymanian capable of doing my job, there's not a chance in hell I'd be here. Personally, I suspect that the real problem is that they don’t trust us because a lot of us don’t go to church. I also think that the Caymanians resent us because they have this nagging suspicion that the ex-pat community is laughing at them behind their collective backs, sniggering and poking fun amongst ourselves. They are, of course, absolutely correct in that last suspicion.
Just because you’re paranoid…

If ex-pats, then, are for the most part grudgingly accepted as a necessary evil, Jamaicans/Latin Americans tend to get blamed for everything else that is wrong with society. The big accusation levelled at the Jamaicans is that they bring crime to the island. Jamaicans are implicated in a disproportionate amount of violent and drug related crimes, and therefore are considered a dangerous element and not to be trusted. The opinion is widely help amongst Caymanians that they’d be better off just sending them all home, if only that wouldn’t mean the Caymanians having to clean their own toilets. It doesn’t take genius powers of observation, however, to see that this argument doesn’t stand up. For as start, I hear from a policeman I know that an awful lot of crimes simply get attributed to fanciful gangs of Jamaicans because the witnesses/arresting officer/victim/judge turns out to be a relative of the actual perpetrator. Aside from this, the criminal elements of any society (taking for granted that white-collar crime is considered a legitimate way of life out here and so can be ignored for the sake of argument) will naturally be those in the poorest communities – those with the fewest options, the most to gain and the least to loose. Given that Caymanians are almost exclusively middle class and above, they’ve essentially had to import an underclass, and one that can never, by virtue of being foreign, hope to achieve the wealth and status of those whose floors they mop, old people they look after and burgers they flip. It’s no surprise, then, that this underclass contains a few people ready to fracture a law or two. That’s not because they’re Jamaican or any other nationality, just because they’re poor and, for better or worse, that’s how a modern, developed society functions. The Jamaicans get discriminated against horribly, particularly by the law, and for their part tend to live together in cheap and densely packed accommodation, work dog-hard for a few years, spend next to nothing and go home wealthy. Bloody good luck to them.

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