At seventy years of age to be presented with a clean slate on which to write something is indeed daunting. As a pupil of five years old in rural Jamaica I recall having great difficulty keeping my slate, the surface on which I wrote my alphabet, from dropping to the ground and splintering into fragments. After repeated attempts by the pipsqueak that I was to keep my heavy writing tablet intact and off the floor, I despaired that I would never succeed at this activity they call “writing”. What joy we felt collectively when through some enlightened turn of civilization, technology allowed us to abandon the ponderous tablets of Moses and Fred Flintstone, Stone Age materials, and to chose the more flammable and delicate but eminently more practical tablet of the land of the Pharaohs – papyrus. I am sure a great chorus of “Yabba Dabba Doo! ” was heard from all students around the world, relieved of the yoke of stone tablets.
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This site is intended to be where people from the Caribbean who now reside in Canada can share their experiences of "then and now". The immediate stimulus for the website is a book in which I have related some of the experiences from my early life in Jamaica in the 1940s and 1950s and my uneasy entry into my Canadian identity. The book, "Caribbean Roots in Canadian Soil" is in the final stage of production and will be available for sale shortly.

I would like to invite and encourage other British Columbian expatriates from the Caribbean to add their voices to express their reminiscences of life in our countries of origin and their life in Canada. I know somewhere out there in the Central Interior, especially in Prince George, in the Okanagan, especially in Kelowna, in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island are expats waiting to share something to the wider community about their life before and after emigration. This could become an online journal, a monthly periodical to celebrate our Caribbean roots.

Send an email, add your voice, tell your story.

Garry G.

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