Partisanship Drama

If you think Washington DC is too partisan, stay away from Dominica.

  To begin, there is the current party in power- the DLP- the Dominican Labour Party. The Prime Minister Roosevelt Skeritt is the leader of that party and the deputy is the Mayor of the town, His Worship Cecil Joseph. (Yeah, the whole “His Worship” really threw me for a loop) Anyway, they are my favorite party because the Mayor comes in our office to say hi and chat with everyone, and I think he is very nice.

Another major party is the Dominica Freedom Party (DFP) led by a female, Judith Pestaina, with whom I think I will get to meet and interview for my project. There are smaller parties here as well, Dominica Progressive Party (DPP), the People's Democratic Movement (PDM), the Dominica Liberation Movement (DLM), and the Dominica United People's Party (DUPP). However, the party with all the drama is the United Workers' Party (UWP) whose leader is the former Prime Minister, Edison James.

So the UWP, after losing Edison’s seat as Prime Minister, began losing seats in parliament. For the last 10 years has really been dwindling until now, the drama is that there are three of their members of parliament boycotting their responsibilities in protest to “irregularities” from the last election in January (that’s three out of 21 members of parliament, all the others are DLP.) So the DLP said that if they wouldn’t do their job, their seats would be replaced. (I think it makes sense!) For a while, the UWP had organized a People’s Parliament, which I guess we would relate to holding town halls all over the island, but now are in the midst of trying to get people to boycott the by-elections which would replace the three from boycotting parliament. Crazy. Would we put up with this? Stay tuned for July 9^th for the replacement elections and I'll letcha know what happens! 

All that to lead to the reason I began this post and it is because of the rather interesting albeit unsuccessful campaign the UWP lead against the DLP. I’m breaking it down REALLY simple here, based on what I have overheard or been told, but basically they used this Question tactic to make people question the current administration. ALL over the island, big blue question mark speech bubbles were nailed to trees and light poles to make people remember to question the government when they are in their car driving through the rainforest, or along the beach. (Side note- when I was bumming a ride from two German tourists, they actually told me that the question marks were for if you got lost… they just weren’t really sure how they helped you find you way back. I wonder what bus driver told them that!) Obviously, these questions are pictures here, and as you'll see, one of them is even backward! I became obsessed with them for a few days. 

To follow up the question bubbles, pieces of 8x10 white paper are glued all over town- on buildings, over street signs, with these lists of questions like “Why won’t Skeritt tell anyone how much he paid for those trash bins?” and “Nurses have questions about why they don’t get paid more” etc. I LOVE finding a new question I haven’t seen before, it makes my day. However, I would like to recommend to my friend Mariah and all the Dem candidates running in November 2010- (Go Beebe, Blanch, Elliott, and Causey!) don’t just paint the town with blue with question marks!