The Kirk and Downtown Nassau

Today I went to the Kirk to meet with Jackie about staff training next week. She is a recently graduated teacher, spring 2006, and runs the Kidsup program. I also met Silverlene. She is the maid for the manse, once a week, and helps a lot with the KidsUp program. The church office is a very busy place, at one point there were seven people in there having three conversations at once, most of which was focused on crime and the prison system. (Hard enough to follow three, but with accent and dialect thrown in, it was quite interesting.) There is no facility for juveniles so they get put in with the general population. Dwight says that they try to keep them separated if possible they are way over capacity. What I found interesting is that there really is not a gang problem, but much of the problem centers around drugs. A significant amount of the violent crime seems to be random, people meeting each other in a club or on the street will have an argument over something seemingly insignificant which escalates into violence. The vast majority are from 15 to 35 years of age.

Anyway, I had the afternoon free so I walked downtown from the manse, just a few blocks, and wandered around. The harbor is very near the shopping area of Bay Street (or East Bay Street, it changes name somewhere but I'm not sure where). You can find anything here from straw products, wood carvings and handicrafts at the Straw Market, T-shirts on the street and in tourist shops to high end fashion and jewelry. Duty free liquor and Cuban cigars seem to be quite popular as well. I was looking for some Conch for lunch but was advised to go to a different area, a small distance from the main tourist area. I'll wait until Keri and the girls get here to go there.

I went back to the Kirk to get the car to come back to the manse. Stopped for some $4.87/gal gas and stopped by Montague Bay. There is part of an old fort there that was used as a defensive area two hundred years ago. It is actually very close to the manse.

Pictures: The Kirk, sanctuary and front; Bay, or East Bay street shopping area; The Bahamian Parliament House and Montague Bay which is on the East end of the Island.