Caribbean

"The country was also better connected to the rest of the world. “There is not a politician, regardless of party, who would not agree that Columbus coming to Jamaica was a massive nation-building exercise,” Paddick said. Lee-Chin, who prides himself on being a nation builder in his native Jamaica, pointed to the subsequent rise of the information and communication technology industry there, and the creation of thousands of call-centre jobs. “That [was] enabled by Columbus because we brought competition and dropped the price so that it became economically feasible to start a call centre in Jamaica and the Caribbean,” he said. “When I saw that and I saw the impact it had on so many people’s lives, I thought, ‘Whoa! Can you imagine if this was done twenty years ago—how much more development there would be in Jamaica?’”"

"The first was, ‘If you could be anyone in the world who would it be?’ Early on Gibbs had assumed that people would probably prefer to be soccer stars, Brigitte Bardot, billionaires or someone glamorous. To his surprise, everyone he asked, after a little thought, preferred to remain themselves. He has been equally amazed by the responses to his second question: ‘If you could be any age, what would it be?’ Again, he’d assumed that older people would want to be younger, but very few did. Around 90 per cent of the people he asked were happy where they were and didn’t really want to go back. The third question he found most interesting: ‘What would you do if your aunt died and left you a lot of money?’ Invariably people said they’d pay off mortgages, buy certain things, travel a bit, but virtually no one told him that they’d radically alter their lives if they had access to money. The most dramatic example of this was a young English girl that Gibbs had started talking to in a Hong Kong bar. She’d told him her life story, how she’d been a chorus dancer in London, then had spent a few years working on boats in the Caribbean and was now working her way around the world, and how what she really wanted was to get back on to the stage. When Gibbs asked her what she’d do if her auntie died and left her £200,000, she said she would have a party with her best mates until it was gone. She then laughed and said, ‘Doesn’t that make a fool of what I’ve told you.’ Gibbs observes: *I find it amazing that through our genes nature makes nearly everyone content to be who they are, whatever their age and circumstances.*"