By Marlon Bute
It was a Saturday not long ago when I was reminded, in the starkest way, that despite all our talk of progress and development, there are indignities of our past that still prevail and weigh us down, keeping us stuck in a bygone era when we perhaps did not know much better and even if we did, we could not have done much then to help ourselves, constrained as we were by the circumstances of the times.
I had arrived in SVG from Canada a week before that revealing morning, and as I often do, I had taken to walking. On that day, the mission was clear: walk from Arnos Vale to Lowmans Hill. I especially enjoyed the Lowmans Hill leg, maneuvering inclines which, to my memory as a child, had never been challenging. These days, it is as if they have grown steeper, and every step towards the promised land, my childhood village, felt like an accomplishment.
Lowmans Hill was a community in which balance seemed instinctive. Whether deliberate or inherited, people lived in a way that met their needs while honouring the land. There on the hill was a place called Overyonder, where elders and children alike spent countless evenings and weekends. It was an iconic landmark, my father’s playground when he was a boy. He is now 84. Two decades ago, there was a grand ground-breaking ceremony to upgrade Overyonder, and Daddy was chosen to cut the ribbon.
That was the end of Over Yonder. It disappeared as a cricketing pitch and as a centre of sporting and cultural life. The government never returned after its grandiose ribbon-cutting.
Lowmans Hill was historically special in the sense that it was at once urban and rural, sitting under the shade of St. Andrew’s Mountain. Its proximity to Kingstown never diluted its rural charm. Fruits, provisions, livestock, charcoal — all were part of daily life. In the 70s and early 80s, many depended on charcoal to cook their meals. The charcoal came from logs of wood stacked neatly to make coal pits, buried in branches and dirt and then lit. The mound-like hills smouldered for days, small holes cut atop them so the fire could breathe and the smoke escape into the sky.
My walk that morning was bright and clear. The day was still young, but had already begun to come alive with the honking and movement that make Kingstown buzz on a Saturday. Yet Kingstown itself had not changed much in more than twenty years. The streets were still colourful with tents and umbrellas from which were sold pots, pans, onions, ketchups, clothes, and just about anything you wished to purchase.
However, unlike before, the vendors now seemed everywhere in their heroic attempts to eke out an existence. I have always held these people, mostly women, in high regard for their sheer determination and faith. For it must take an awesome amount of faith to load baskets before dawn, before roosters crow, and head to the capital uncertain whether one would make enough money to return home or buy groceries.
Sometimes, instead of walking straight into Kingstown and then on to Lowmans Hill, I would walk up Town Hill, through Cane Garden, and on to Arnos Vale before heading to Kingstown and then Lowmans Hill. I had grown fond of walking through Cane Garden because of the picturesque view it offered of the city and the ocean. Cane Garden had once been a proud middle-class and upper-middle-class neighbourhood, but from the looks of it, it had fallen into hard times. Too many houses had rotten galvanised roofs, fascia boards, and windows, and the once-impressive lawns seemed no longer a priority. I could not fail to notice how many homes appeared abandoned.
There were no visible signs of improvement in the capital either, except for its briskness. Many buildings, especially the central police station, were in dire need of maintenance. The station’s steeple was disintegrating, and its once-welcoming doors stood bare, the paint long peeled away. And its wooden louvres, which were supposed to offer some privacy, were falling apart, giving a glimpse of further decay within the nation’s number-one disciplinary institution, which by nature represented structure and order. Electrical wires sagged from poles that looked tired of standing.
On the main road heading to Leeward, just across from the Reddock family home at New Montrose, and a few hundred yards from where the roads to New Montrose and Stoney Grounds intersect, stood a white building, its fading paint and unkempt condition plainly visible. Its doors were flung open. Nothing about it was remarkable, except the woman seated comfortably at the entrance.
She was heavy-bosomed, dark-skinned, bearing the look of someone well acquainted with hard work. I slowed my walk, greeted her warmly, and she greeted me back. Behind her, something caught my eye: a concrete structure, perhaps eight feet long and three feet high, divided into compartments. It resembled the concrete sinks that occupy backyards across St Vincent.
“What are those for?” I asked, though I already knew it was a concrete sink. I just could not imagine it being used for hospital laundry.
“We scrub the linen in them,” she said.
“Linen?” I repeated.
“Yes. Before we put them in the washing machine.”
“You mean you still scrub them by hand?”
“Yes,” she replied, and sensing my disbelief, added, “We wear gloves.”
I was not reassured. Gloves can only offer so much protection when one is handling heavily soiled linen. So I asked the question I hoped would bring comfort.
“Do you have hot water?”
Her answer stunned me.
“No,” she said.
I was speechless. In 2025, in a country where many households now have washing machines and hot water, these hardworking women were still scrubbing contaminated linen by hand, in cold water, inside concrete sinks standing in for what should be stainless steel basins.
Concrete is porous, a trap for bacteria and microorganisms. Stainless steel is non-porous, easy to clean, and the global standard in hospitals and everywhere hygiene matters.
Yet here was this woman, who could be my mother, my sister, my aunt, my neighbour, working in conditions no modern healthcare system should allow.
And it has to be understood that the washerwoman does not stand alone. Her story is tied to a much wider history of Caribbean women who resisted their harsh conditions through work, creativity, and sheer force of will. Our women did what they had to do. Many engaged in small farming, animal husbandry, and what we once called trafficking, travelling to sell or trade agricultural produce. Some became vendors with trays or baskets. Others became nannies, babysitters, cooks. And some became washerwomen, laundresses, whose labour held households together.
The washerwoman, whether bent over a stream, knees high in a river, clothes plunging against boulders, or balancing on her head buckets of water from a standpipe to a basin at home, became a symbol of labour and survival in the Caribbean household economy. Many children were fed, many were clothed, and many were sent to school because of the labour of our Caribbean women, our washerwomen, our laundresses.
This is the lineage from which the washerwomen of today descend. They descend from ancestors who resisted through hard work. Women who met their harsh conditions not with surrender but with labour, dignity, imagination, and sheer will. And they found no shame in their work, for it was honest work.
Surely we can do better.
Surely we must do better.
This is 2025.
We speak of approaching first-world status, and that is fine. It is a worthy aspiration. But this reprehensible, shameful absence of a fundamental pillar of healthcare — a proper laundry with suitable equipment and hot water to kill harmful bacteria — is still not in place.
Our womenfolk, who mostly occupy these positions and who traditionally have been among the most hard-working and poorest in Vincentian society, are left to confront, face to face, the ignominy of washing dirty linen for public use in concrete sinks, without hot water and without modern standards.
Such indignity, endured daily, only compounds a hazard which, if we cared, we could fix easily.
And all of us, as users of the hospital, as visitors, as workers, as citizens, ought to be concerned and ought to want the best working conditions for our people.
It must be fixed.
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