Can you solve it?

By Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon
CJ Travel Editor

Driving through the streets of Bridgetown, Barbados this summer, I saw them everywhere: roadside bus shelters featuring wooden nameplates.

Just as hurricanes used to be, the names were all female. “Christie” and “Cherisse;” “Leesa” and “Louella;” even the exotic and Eastern European-sounding “Maija” and “Naty.”

As we whizzed by a shelter named Cindy I asked my taxi driver if he knew the reason for the names. “I’ve never really noticed them before,” he said with a smile. “I’m a taxi driver; don’t really have much to do with bus stops.” Fair enough.

So on a run one morning I stopped to ask a woman leaned against a shelter named Marcusa.

Surely she, a presumably regular rider, knew why every stop I’d seen had a woman’s name. But she didn’t. She admitted to noticing the names but couldn’t say where they came from.

And she wasn’t the only one. Every local I asked either wasn’t aware of the shelters’ naming convention or knew of their names but not the story behind them.

So, months later, and none the wiser, I’m throwing my questions out to you, CJ readers. Do you know why Bajan bus shelters have women’s names? Are they named after specific people? How are the names chosen?  Enquiring, Barbados-loving minds want to know!