On Service (13 October 2003)

I've got a question. Why is it that in this country, service is a dirty word?

I'm not talking about the kind of service that we charge money for, the kind of service that makes us a "service" economy — though I could be. I'm talking about the kind of service that regards it as an inherent part of any blessing to give a bit of it away — not to the pastor who hooked us up to the Good-Things Pipeline, but to people who have given us nothing, because they have less than we have.

I'm talking about loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I happen to sit on a committee whose mandate it is to find out what it is we need to be teaching our young people in order for them to become productive citizens of the Bahamas, and not troubled, destructive, or homicidal. It's a committee that has been struck for the purpose of examining the place of service in our nation; we're finding it a tough, tough task. The reason? Most Bahamians, apparently, would rather cut off their right hands than accept the idea that service is a good or necessary thing.

Let me illustrate. I recently met a lawyer who confided to me that she hated lawyers. Too many of them, she said, are greedy, confrontational, and arrogant. She hates having to work in a profession that encourages those kinds of attitudes, and spends a lot of time thinking about how she can get out of it and into another career. Too few of her fellow lawyers entered the profession to help other people. Too many of them have an eye for the big buck, and not for the small man. Too few of them care about rendering affordable services to people who need it.

The sad thing is, we could easily have been talking of doctors, or of politicians, or even of certain clergy. More and more in the Bahamas, it seems that very little care is available to people who cannot afford to pay for it, be it legal, physical or spiritual, because very few people who can afford to are willing to give anything good away.

Now I have to admit I find this a most peculiar state of affairs, especially in a nation that proclaims itself "Christian". I was raised by a set of people who believed fundamentally in a cosmic law of reciprocity. The more you have, they taught me, the more you have to give away. Of he to whom much is given, much will be required. And the more you give away, the more you will get in the end: cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you.

When I was 16, I earned a scholarship to a place that reinforced that teaching. The United World Colleges were established in the 1960s for one main purpose: to work towards world peace by training students to be their brothers' keepers. We were thrown together for two years with people from all over the world, people very different from ourselves, and we were asked to live and work with these people in the hopes of learning how very similar we all are fundamentally. And the cornerstone of that education was the principle of service. Because we had been chosen, we had a responsibility to give back: to our fellow students, to our countries, to the world.

I came back to a country where service was a dirty word.

It was not always thus. When we were poorer, service was a good thing. Now it may be that this was because serving was the only way that Black Bahamians could make a living; the best jobs available to us were in the service professions, whether they were domestic servants, shop assistants, or (for the very gifted) secretaries, nurses, teachers, and minor civil servants. But beneath this lay a greater sense of collective responsibility in our communities. What one achieved was achieved for all, and what one earned, all shared. Adversity and poverty made us one another's keepers.

Prosperity has made us comfortable, and it has also made us selfish. It has taught too many of us that the important question is "What's in it for me?", whatever "it" may be. And so we have elections which are won on the basis of how much the voters think that politicians or governments will give them; we have talk shows in which callers' most common complaint is that somebody has failed to deliver; and we have churches that talk about salvation as though it were a commercial exchange between Christians and God. What we no longer have is a sense of interconnection with one another, a sense of our brothers' keeping. We should not be surprised that our children are sociopaths.

I believe that no individual is independent of the people around him. For one person to be wealthy, somebody else, somewhere else, has to be poor. As a society whose roots lie in some of the most heinous exploitation in history I believe that we ought not to be seeking to join the ranks of exploiters, but to be building a more level playing field.

I do not believe that the government must build that playing field for us. In fact, I believe it is the government's responsibility to give us the answer that John F. Kennedy gave the American people when he first came to power:

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

And so I believe in service. I believe that whenever a person has a surplus of anything — of talent, of privilege, of wealth, of luck — some of that surplus ought to be given back to people who have not got all that much.

I'm talking, in concrete terms, about legal aid. Clinics. Tutoring. Coaching. Giving bits of what we have so that other people can benefit.

And I don't see it as a youth thing either. I believe it's required of us all. I'd like to see a society in which, for one week a year, every Bahamian doctor or lawyer will provide services for those who can't pay; where every CEO gives up a week of time or salary to build houses — good houses — for the homeless; where everyone who received an education that is out of the ordinary gives up a week to share some of that education with people who are getting none.

You see, I believe there's a little trick to the principle of service. Asians call it karma; Jesus called it bread. Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you.

In sandwiches.