Vendors want access to Nassau Straw Market to check merchandise

Straw vendors have been out of the Nassau Straw Market for 11 months now due to the COVID-10 pandemic and President of the Straw Vendors Advancement Association Celestine Eneas claimed yesterday that the vendors are being further frustrated by not being allowed in the market to check on their merchandise.

Eneas said she has asked the Straw Market Authority to allow vendors to check on their stalls, but has not been given the go-ahead to do so in almost a year.

“We haven’t been back in there as yet,” Eneas said. “Those people who left their work in the open, I can’t even get the authority to assist them with that. We got a slap in our face for 11 months.”

This paper reached out to Desmond Bannister, the minister with responsibility for the Straw Market Authority, for comment but no reply was received up to press time.

Straw vendors – who have been some of the hardest hit by the tourism slowdown – have been living off of $100 per week in social assistance, Eneas said. 

She called the treatment of vendors by the authorities “inhumane” and called on the prime minister to intervene.

“I call on Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis to stop these people from treating us so inhumane,” said Eneas.

“They are treating us as if we are nobody. We are the people that the tourists see first. We cause the money to circulate in this country.

“I’ve been in the market from I was a child, five years old. I’m a 66-year-old woman and I have never been treated and humiliated the way I’ve been under his administration.”

While the timeline for the return of cruise visitors is still uncertain, hotel and vacation home rental business has begun to pick up and could be a potential source of income for the vendors.

Eneas, though, said vendors have heard nothing from the Straw Market Authority or the government on when they might be able to return to business. “They called us in a meeting some months ago and they were talking about protocols and they were saying that they would put us on shifts… if that’s the case and that’s what it has to be, we are quite fine with that.”

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/vendors-want-access-to-nassau-straw-market-to-check-merchandise/