Easter in the Bahamas

As an anthropologist, I am a little frustrated this Easter morning, I have to admit.  In the States, today is the day when people can be seen hiding eggs and sending their kids to look for those eggs, died in pastel colors with all the people dressed in those same colors.  While every Easter tradition (colorful eggs and the hunt for them, bunnies, the idea of “rebirth”) has to do with the ancient beliefs of Ostara more than it has to with the resurrection of anybody, it is a day when people are happy and laughing – especially the kids after tearing into their Easter baskets full of chocolate and marshmallow candies. 

I was really hoping to see what Easter is like for Bahamian kids, to see if they have new clothes that are recently pressed and freshly polished shoes on their feet.  Or, maybe the little girls’ braids were redone for the holiday, spotted by the way the girls would toss their heads and show off new beads as I would often see on Easter in Jamaica.  Or, maybe, just maybe, we would be able to smell the cooking from every kitchen along every road we walked, conch (pronounced “conk”) being cooked in one of the assorted ways Bahamians know to cook it - stewed, cracked (fried), as a salad – with sides of baked macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, and peas and rice (yes, having lived in Jamaica, I go a little crazy hearing it said “backwards” here – and, there’s no coconut milk in it!).  Also, it would have been nice to hear some singing coming out of the windows on a church or to listen in on a sermon in order to understand the level of religiosity here in the Bahamas.

The frustrating part about all of this is that I was hoping to be in Nassau today in order to get the full understanding of how over half of Bahamians celebrate (or don’t) Easter as Nassau is home to over half the Bahamian population.  However, Dear Reader, the Captain and I are still near to the last place I wrote from, a small island called Frasier Hog’s Cay (pronounced “key”).  We anchored on one side of this cay on Tuesday with every intention of leaving for Nassau within a day or two; then a storm blew in and kept us there for “one more day”.  On Friday, we noticed a boat that looked familiar, then heard the boat name come over the VHF radio and realized that friends from Marathon had traveled the almost 200 miles to anchor about 100 yards from us.  One of the first things we talked about was the storm that was coming hard and fast, bringing winds from all directions as it moved about.  We can’t express our thankfulness to the Universe for always sending us exactly what we need when we need it: because of this chance encounter with “old” friends, Calypso’s Fire got moved to a safe and comfortable anchorage about two hours before one of the largest storms we have seen on the boat blew through.  Not that we were in real danger, we just would have been very uncomfortable.

So, here we (still) are, anchored off a cay that does not have many Bahamian people except those adults who move here to work in the marina, the two restaurants, or the one “airport” on this cay, all of which are here to cater to fishing tourists in motorboats the size of small hotels.  Don’t get me wrong for even one moment: I do NOT discount the people working here as Bahamians with their own piece of the cultural matrix.  But everyone here is here to work and their schedules don’t really allow time to sit with a random “tourist” talking about life in the Bahamas.  Overall, I think I’m just ready for more human interaction than the Captain and other American cruisers; I really enjoy my time with them, but I am ready to stretch my cultural learnings!

Instead of spending Easter weekend poking my nose in everyone else’s business, we spent the days installing a stereo into the boat (YAY!!!) and doing the housekeeping we had been putting off.  You see, we have had this stereo and the speakers in their boxes for over three months and I have wanted it installed for about two and a half months.  It is a scary event to alter your boat, though: cutting holes large enough to house 9” speakers into the walls of a structure that was built with every inch being taken into consideration for safety makes a stomach roll just a bit.  BUT, we did it(!!!) and now we have some of the most crisp music coming at us as opposed to trying to keep the computer speakers standing where we had put them as we’ve done for the past few months.  That first night, just to use the speakers appropriately, the Captain and I watched “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” as we ate dinner (I’m becoming reacquainted with the man people automatically think of when I say, “I’m an anthropologist”).

Another part of the housekeeping we needed to do was to finally organize our bookshelves; all this time, they have looked the same as the day we unpacked our boxes and just put everything up there to get it out of boxes and into the boat.  As the reality that this is our home sinks in more and more (no pun intended – trust me!), details like what the bookshelves look like can become overwhelming and the need to know where each book is becomes important because that’s how it would be in my home were it a house.  It should NOT be any different here and feeling comfortable in my environment will make this whole experience much more pleasant.  It was good to move the books around, it turns out, as some were the victims of window leaks we did not know about and have become thick with water damage and discolored with mildew on the bottoms of the pages.  They have been moved, but we now know to watch for those leaks during the next rains and have moved items that are not as important to the leak area.  (Anthro geeks and public health nerds will get this: one of my Paul Farmer books was a leak victim, nearly bringing me to tears). 

While organization and leak-knowledge are wonderful products of this chore, one of the best things for me was the rediscovery of my anthropology books, including the one I have begun reading to help inject some confidence in my ability to make something out of this whole experience: “Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes” by Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw.  It feels a little like a “beginners’” book, but maybe everyone needs that reminder, that booster shot occasionally just to get jump-started and back into the swing of something that has been missing for too long.  I am an anthropologist, I am a researcher, I am an explorer; but, lately, I feel as though I have been missing part of who I am as I have just been a bit of a whiner.  As a consequence of my rededication to my professional field, some of my blog entries may get a little long with my descriptions of all that surrounds me, but I hope that my handful of devoted readers will appreciate that quality in my writing style.  If not, let me know and I’ll make sure to keep the blog as the Cliff Notes versions of my fieldnotes!