Conflicted Destiny - Season 1 Episode 41

Episode 8 years ago

Conflicted Destiny - Season 1 Episode 41

Once again I’m back from the hustling and bustling of the beltway life..so lets get right to it…42 more pages to go before I turn the thread loose for analysis and start living book #3..with that said, let get to to work..
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Chapter Eighteen



I remained unwavering in my desire to leave Spain and travel to America. Meanwhile, Maria Joana’s work leave was fast approaching, and she wanted us to travel to the Bahamas so we could see my family. By this time she knew I didn’t have a passport and all I had was my asylum card, which stated that I was Bahamian. She encouraged me to find a way of getting a passport so we could both travel to the Bahamas. Luckily, I was well connected in Barcelona and knew how to get whatever I wanted.
To show her support, Maria Joana gave me enough money to cover the passport expenses. I immediately contacted Kofi and told him that I needed a British passport. I could have asked for an American passport, or any other passport, but if I intended to end up in America, it wouldn’t be prudent for me to try to go through immigration again with a bogus American passport. Within a few hours, Kofi brought a bunch of passports, including some old British passports. I told Kofi to try harder—I specifically wanted a British European Union passport.
Within a day or two, Kofi came back to me with the British EU passport that I wanted. The name on the passport was David English. I had never lived in Britain, but I doubted that there were many black people in England with the last name English. Nevertheless, I had to take it; I was running out of time. Maria Joana’s leave started in a few days and we couldn’t afford to wait any longer. I handed some passport-size photographs to Kofi and paid him. A few hours later, he returned with the passport with my photo in it. I had become David English, 32. The age was about ten years off, but it was a problem that could be overcome, as most Westerners, in my experience, had difficulty discerning the age of black people. The next day, Maria Joana bought tickets for both of us to the Dominican Republic. We made sure it was a direct flight. I wanted to avoid a repeat of what had happened on my last attempt, so we chose to fly to the Dominican Republic and island-hop from there to the Bahamas.
During our twelve-hour flight I was a bit worried, since I wasn’t sure what would happen at immigration, but I was somehow reassured by Maria Joana’s presence. The fact that she was European would likely reduce suspicion as to my British nationality. Also, the Dominican Republic was predominantly mixed race—black and Spanish—so I figured my chances of being singled out by a black or mixed-race Dominican official were very slim.
As we went through immigration, I was confident. I collected Maria Joana’s passport from her and handed both our passports to the immigration officer. There was no indication that he was suspicious about me. The officer flipped through our passports and put an entry stamp on them. There was no visa requirement for Europeans going into Dominican Republic for less than three months. The officer handed back our passports, and we went outside to catch a taxi. I was incredibly relieved. I felt like I had just won the lottery, but I maintained my calm exterior.
Before leaving Barcelona, Maria Joana had made contact with someone in Sosúa, Puerto Plata, to rent a room in her place, so we took a taxi and headed there. Sosúa is a huge tourist spot and the locals capitalize on it by renting out rooms in their houses. We arrived at the location and checked into our room. The city was bustling. I was told it used to be a Jewish neighborhood. The majority of the people were mixed race, but there was also a large number of black and Spanish people; the rest were tourists from all over the world. Our plan was to stay in the Dominican Republic for three days before heading to another island.
Sosúa had fantastic beaches, so we indulged ourselves there. We also toured the town in the evenings and went to a club or two. It was three days well spent. After that, we flew to Providence Island and spent one day there, enjoying the serenity of the island. The next day, we flew out on a single-engine plane. The majority of the islands didn’t have big planes, so people generally traveled by boat, single-engine plane, or helicopter. Most airports on the islands were very small and the one on Providence Island was no exception. There were no regular flights and most airlines had only one scheduled flight out of the islands per day. So, if one missed one’s flight, one would have to wait a day or two before getting the next flight out. We hadn’t planned to go to Providence Island at first, but there was no direct flight from Puerto Plata to the Bahamas, or any islands close to the Bahamas. We left Providence Island the next day and arrived at Grand Turks and Caicos. We had to spend one day there because there was no flight that day going to the Bahamas. Grand Turks was one of the most beautiful islands I had ever seen. It’s a small island—about ten to twenty-five square kilometers— predominantly black, with magnificent beaches and very shallow water. The beach is incredibly clean and the water so clear that if you dropped a pin in it, you would be able to find it easily.
When we arrived on the island, Maria Joana and I were famished. We eventually found a burger shop, owned by a black guy who gave us a detailed history of the island, its population and demography. After that, we tried to find a hotel for the night, but everything was either fully booked or too expensive for us. The island was ridiculously overpriced. We had been astonished at how much we had to pay for the burgers we’d had for lunch. We weren’t willing to pay the exorbitant price for a hotel room, so we decided to enjoy nature instead. We went to a beach to camp, and I was surprised to find nobody there. In a stretch of almost five kilometers of pure beauty, there was only one man with his horse. We took a swim and, later that night, found a beautiful corner by the beach to pitch our tent. The next morning, we headed back to the airport and took a beach plane to Nassau, Bahamas. I didn’t anticipate that I would have any problems with my passport. At this point, my confidence was extremely high since I had gone through the Dominican Republic, Providence, and Grand Turks without a problem, and indeed there was no trouble getting through immigration at Nassau.
All the while we had been on this trip, my only preoccupation was what I would do when I got to the Bahamas. I had been living a lie telling Maria Joana that I was from there. She would expect me to know what to do and where to go. But I had never even visited the Bahamas and I barely knew what the people looked like. All I knew was that the island had a large percentage of black people, and it was about ninety miles away from Florida’s Key West. So before leaving Spain, I did a little research about the Bahamas so I would at least know the names of places. I also found a guesthouse at Cable Beach in Nassau.

To Be Continued…