Bus a come (The bus is coming)

Growing up in a rural town in a Caribbean country was pretty exciting and rare despite poverty and the early loss of my 29 year old mom. But of the things I can reflect on now are (1) how ignorant people were of mental health issues; and (2) how they treated people with overt mental illness.

One of most vivid memories include the dis-affectionate moniker ascribed to me: "Mad Brown". I also learned to live with denial: I was merely different. I learned to fit in and had a mask that was so well-fitted to me that I believed I survived well, until now when parenting and marriage and friendships ask much of me...

So much for me for now. My other vivid memory involves a man who used to walk through my rural community. I was a boy between the ages of probably six and teenage years, watching the demoralizing treatment of this man. He walked with a cheese can and obviously depended on the handout of food and a few coins from my rural community members for his sustenance. He did not live in our community. He was a rare exotic figure, as rare as the two buses that each came once in one direction in the morning and once in the other direction in the afternoon. He was called Bus a Come, which means The Bus is Coming. What a name! To the people the man was nothing more than a mechanical machine that moved from one location to the next. To many people, he was a figure of a being than a full human being.

So I know where I stand if I would lay my soul bare in this Caribbean context. I may be little more that a moving vehicle that others would wish only arrived as infrequently as buses in some rural 1980's poor rural Caribbean community. Identifying as a mentally ill person would gain one as much compassion as a black man seeking to marry out of his ethnicity in the 1960's South, in the United States. Silence is the rule and still remains mostly that in many places in my former Caribbean community. I don't see it much differently in many transplanted Caribbean communities in the United States.