Proud of the Garifuna links home, abroad

31.JULY.09

Editor: I am delighted to see that links between the Garifuna at home and abroad are being forged. In April of this year, I visited Livingston, the major Garifuna community in Guatemala, and left feeling ambivalent. Hardly anyone knew about the Vincentian connection.{{more}}

The head of the cultural centre did, of course, but there was a great deal that I felt he should have known: the various hypotheses about how the Garifuna came to inhabit SVG, for example.

I felt certainly proud of them for having preserved their language, while being at the same time fluent in English and Spanish (as far as I know, they are the only Guatemalans who have English as one of their mother tongues, perhaps because of their close links to the Garifuna in the Bay Islands of Honduras and Punta Gorda in Belize).

I hope that one result of this exchange would be the teaching of Garifuna to the Garifunas/Callinago/Caribs of SVG.

H.N. Thomas