Min' De Bisickle. Boyz On De Block.

"Min' out for mi bisickle, Daddy!" My head spun around and I just caught sight of the wheels of a mountain bike in my side mirror.

Don't ask me how I found myself, with two young children, leaving one of Barbados' schools, then ending in a narrow dead end that was just wide enough to fit my very small car. Once I realised that I could not get through I had to do a 20-point turn to get out of this little alley. "Uncle Dennis, I can smell smoke. "Those boys have some stinky cigarettes," said Lizze. "Smoking is bad for you!" screamed my five year old daughter.

I pulled alongside a group of young men pulling on their spliffs. "Look," I said. "You could see that I had to turn the car around to get out of this dead end and you have the bicycle parked on the fence. So instead of moving the bicycle, you sit and watch me manoeuvre then say 'Look out for my bike'? I guess your world is the one that spins around you, dread." The youth looked at me and I stared back at him. Then I drove on. "I hear you, Daddy," I heard as I pulled away.

"Why did he call you 'Daddy', Daddy?" asked my little one. I smiled and offered no answer.

Barbados does not have the extensive hard core urban problems of an economy that has faltered for decades, as one can see in Kingston, Jamaica,or the simply abject poverty that is evident in Haiti or Guyana in this region, but it has its poor and indigent, and they are disturbingly young. They do not look like people that have been cast away because of physical or mental disabilities, but they do not look like people interested in going further than where they are on the street corner. I may be doing them a disservice, but I have hung with 'boys on the block' and they are often anything but lacking in capabilities.

I have not studied the 'boys' in Barbados to know how they have reached where they have, but I recall seeing that the previous government tried to put up some feeble-looking make work projects for them when I first arrived here in 2007 (see Nation report), with 'Project Oasis' and opportunitiesto buy overpriced weed-whackers and become gardening 'millionaires'. I remember laughing heartily when I read, that the "Boys On The Block Committee would continue to traverse the country looking for special young men with business on their minds". I was sure there would not be a meeting of minds about what was good business.

What was good about this brief meeting was that the children did not see the 'boys', but just noted their smoking, and then made the connection only children seem to: "Obama smokes too, Daddy!" In their minds they were linking these boys with a figure that they knew and were starting to admire, and found the one degree of separation. Priceless.