Dear Bahamas Issues:

Please honor me with a little space in your website to rejoice at the situation I find myself in – I have lots of company and I am better off than more than 90% of the people on the planet. BY the way, this planet is heating up fast. I sense that in ten years or less we will have to take emergency measures to cool this planet. Start thinking about it! :rolleyes:

This week my garbage has not been collected. Thank heaven for garbage bins. Even though they are full, many places in the world would have to use bins like these to store food or water. We in the Bahamas are fortunate to be able to hope the garbage will be collected and to complain if it is not collected soon enough. These situations are above politics. Perhaps we can look at instituting local government in New Providence and privatizing garbage collection. Privatization seems to be the answer to all that ails the country now.

This week the power was off every day. I got to enhance my clock-setting skills and after cursing BEC profusely for providing me poison power all year, I prayed for relief from no-power in the stifling heat. My employees got to get paid for creating no value during those periods so I am sure they too are grateful. Does it make a difference to BEC? Of course not!

I am fighting the lure of purchasing a generator because that will only be one more thing to operate and maintain and protect from the people who steal. When I succumb to the lure and buy the generator, pray tell me why I should use BEC’s power except when I am operating at low loads? The power from a generator will be clean, and reliable and probably cheaper. They tell me they have generators that run quietly too.

Does anybody besides the victims feel BEC should be more responsible for destroying appliances, computers and other electrical devices. Most of us have been victims of poison power from BEC. When will this end? Hope and help may be on the way if Mr. Christie and Mr. Bradley Roberts, the MP, can have their way and privatize BEC. That is stock that may be worth buying.

After nearly two weeks BatelCo has yet to respond to my application for CLASS features but at least I got the opportunity to visit the Mall at Marathon and experience their wonderful air condition that cools the heated chaos in Batelco’s customer service (?) lobby. Now I am smarter for having this experience and I thank the powers that be for visiting this on me. Why me? But in all this I must remember to give thanks.

There are people in this world who focus on getting a meal everyday; people who eat less than I waste. For this I must give thanks and ask forgiveness. I assume we can do better in the Bahamas but who says I am right? Maybe we cannot do better. Maybe it is not better in the Bahamas. Maybe it never was. Maybe it never will be. I still have hope!

They tell me hope and help are here. Well I worry that something scandalous will happen with the Batelco privatization. I worry that the politics of corruption will return full force even while I pray that it will not. I see and hear so many people jockeying for “croney” jobs from our broke government that I fear sooner or later the powers that be will succumb to the pressure from their friends and cave in and appoint them all to something. But in the meantime I give thanks.

I am grateful that my hard drive has corrupted files because of the poison electricity and the frequent power failures. I am grateful for the costly and poor quality, low pressure water I have received these last thirty years. Yes, it has been that long! I am grateful for the phone service and the irregular garbage collection. Most of all I am grateful that I am free - free to dream about what a great little nation we could be.

Sincerely,



Ethric Bowe

:bahamas: I thought that this would just be another post bashing us Civil Servants - how refreshing to see someone else who believes that in all things we should give thanks! Civil servants must work under numerous constraints - admittedly, these constraints can include poor attitudes toward service, but in my experience the vast majority of us want to perform; let's hope that someone out there would occasionally recognize the good among us, and would express thanks for the work that we do, even in the face of adverse criticism.:bahamas:

Originally posted by junk_noo2000
:bahamas: I thought that this would just be another post bashing us Civil Servants - how refreshing to see someone else who believes that in all things we should give thanks! Civil servants must work under numerous constraints - admittedly, these constraints can include poor attitudes toward service, but in my experience the vast majority of us want to perform; let's hope that someone out there would occasionally recognize the good among us, and would express thanks for the work that we do, even in the face of adverse criticism.:bahamas:

No matter what problems we have with gov services here, alot of the problems are most likely to do with bad equipment. Some of the problems though that we as consumers see mostly, is the poor attitudes of the people at the offices where we pay the bills, and this will normally make the consumers believe the whole entity is the same. Id like to say though in my own experience with BEC, except for black outs, which ofcourse like everyone, made me 'heated' (it was very humid!:-)), I had a power problem on our street one night, 2 am on a saturday, and they came within 1/2 hour and fixed the problem.

Like ebo said, we should remember all the more unfortunate people in the world living with no electric, water, and no comunication or TV.

Also, remember their is alot of 'lousy' service and staff with bad attitudes in the private sector also, which is a very big problem that needs to be fixed.