Dear Editor,
I am a Saban and as time goes by and people come and go, I stop to remember how things changed on this small rock over the years. And I have to to give praise where praise is due.
Many Sabans have worked hard and sacrificed to make this island what it is today. So many come to our island and when they see her beauty, they want to tell us what we have to keep it that way. We Sabans thought ourselves how to take care of our island and still can do it.
There is a person in my humble opinion who has done so for this island for decades, and I have never expressed it to him before. But I want to remind my fellow Sabans about him. As a young man, he came back to Saba from St. Maarten and formed a political party, and the pride and fight he was able to stir up in us Sabans was never seen before.
For the other islands in the Netherlands Antilles and the Kingdom Saba was just a bystander who would speak only when spoken to and would be humble to receive whatever was handed down to it. This person if you ask me, put Saba on the map, where those in the Neth. Ant. and the Kingdom were finally told that the people of Saba and the island were just as important and counted just as much as everybody in the Neth. Ant. and the Kingdom.
Thanks to him we (Saba) was finally given her own seat in the Neth. Ant. parliament and recognized enough that we had our junior ministers sitting in Willemstad! Something that was unheard of, before he came back to this island. It was a mission impossible that he made possible! Who would have thought that we would have our own newspaper called the Saba Herald, where it was always about Saba and her people?
This person took it upon himself to document the history of Saba and our ancestors going back centuries. Without his work it would have all been lost and many want to take it over and not even their great-grandmother’s navel strings is buried on Saba.
In his years in office he made sure that everyone walked the straight and narrow, unlike what we see today. Those things would never be accepted.
Will Johnson is a man that loves Saba and is for her people and we need him back in that chair.
A proud WIPM supporter
Name withheld at author's request.
