Inside St.Kitts

There are few Caribbean islands as naturally physically pleasing to the eye as St. Kitts is. The island has a rather pleasing molding of towering mountains, gently sloping hills and flat lands grading gently toward the sea. And then there is the varying shades of green that touch the visual  senses when viewed from the air, or even from the lifting plateau of hillsides that settle along the eastern peninsular overlooking the ocean. This is nice enough, but the people are also beautiful.
 St. Kitts is not an economically wealthy country (and I am deliberately  refraining from indicating any form of statistical analysis here as these are so well documented in many other areas on the internet and elsewhere) but the people are rich with a spirit of peace and contentment unmatchable anywhere in the world. A visitor to St. Kitts would not imagine this being a poor country when he observes the quality of home construction, and types of imported vehicles driven by people whose grandparents were slaves just a few hundred years ago. In fact many of the people who live in these multimillion dollar structures with swimming pools and Jacuzzis, still have great-grandparents whose mothers and fathers experienced the tailwinds of the slave and colonial systems. Their relatives still reside in the ghetto.
 The richest thing about St. Kitts is its people. Kittitians are a people brimming with self-pride and a fierce determination to loom large; as large as anyone else, anywhere else in the world. To the mind of the Kittitian no dream is unattainable, and it is only a matter of time before they are going to be able to reach out and grab a hold of it.
 This is why looking good is important to the Kittitian woman, and this is why the by-bass road (The F.T. Williams Highway) streams with mostly female evening walkers. Looking good is wealth that reflects health, and both are currency. This is why the nail-technology business is expanding, and is about to receive an influx of nail technologist resulting from the controversial PEP program on the island, because the women must look good from fingernail to toenail and everywhere above and between.
And if there is one single thing that will sell in St. Kitts it is clothes; particularly women's clothes. It is the women of St. Kitts who keep the St.Kitts economy from imploding. They shop till they drop-sit-down-on-Fort Street.
 They don't work for much. Their salaries are tiny, but they make it work, because Kittitians must look good and smell sweet. It is the Kittitian pride in motion and I love it.
 Kittitian men are among the sources of that money women spend on the island,although not all of it. "What you going give me for me birthday?" is sung out across Kittitian city streets by many of these women, as sweetly as any R and B music that they have plugged into their ears; and these days they are not playing any games with child support.
 It is a lovely land in its geographical topography and also in the dynamic, fascinating energy of a people trying to survive, motivated by a pride that must somehow find a way.