First Impressions

Virtually the first thing you see as you fly westwards into Jamaica is the Blue Mountains – soaring, ragged peaks covered in greenery, the tops poking clear of the clouds as you fly parallel with them for a few minutes, the bulk of the island hidden below. Then the mountains fall away to leave a huge bowl-shaped coastal plain filled with the sprawl of Kingston, a narrow causeway leading out to what looks even from a modest height like a couple of scalextric pieces stuck together and left floating in the sea. ‘That must be a private light aircraft runway,’ said the middle aged Scottish couple sat behind me. ‘We can’t be landing there.’ No sooner had they started wondering where Norman Manley International Airport actually was than we did a tight u-turn and began our descent towards what was effectively a small sand bar a couple of kilometers out from shore with a strip of tarmac on top. I had time to wonder how many planes over the years and managed to overshoot and ended up in the Caribbean before we touched down safely and ground to an abrupt halt before we plunged nose first into the briney blue.

Just as we landed, the guy I’d been sat next to the whole flight looked at the book I was reading about volunteering abroad and asked, ‘Do you do voluntary work? So do I.’ The guy’s name was David and he’d been living in Brixton for the past 12 years, currently working for an organization called Catch-22. He was apparently over in Jamaica for a few weeks to arrange for his kids to come live with him in London after their mum sadly passed away earlier this year. We swapped numbers and agreed to try to catch up before he left for the UK again.

Immigration and customs were straight forward enough, except for some reason the passport control officer I was left with didn’t seem to believe I had confirmed voluntary work for six months – she instead gave me leave to remain for three months, telling me I’d have to make an entirely unnecessary trip to the Immigration Office in Kingston by September 2 if I wanted to ask permission to remain for the remainder of my intended stay. But by this time, after a solid 18 hours traveling, I didn’t much care, I just wanted to get to where I was going and rest. So I was very relieved when a slim, middle-aged man with a beard and glasses walked straight up to me outside the airport brandishing a print out of the photo I’d taken that morning and posted on my blog – the wonders of modern technology. The guy introduced himself as Lewis from the Caribbean Christian Centre for the Deaf and we were soon on our way in his minivan on the two hour drive to Mandeville. And as an additional welcome, the sky was overcast, keeping the temperature down to a very bearable 26 C.

It’s gotta be said that the first things you see on the ground as you drive away from Norman Manley Airport haven’t exactly been designed to make the best impression on the visitor. Then again, I guess these are the realities of life in Jamaica. After crossing the causeway back to the mainland, which is undergoing heavy construction work to make it two lanes each way, Mr Lewis gave me a guided tour of the huge, mud-encrusted cement works, a sprawling flour processing factory, before we passed on the outskirts of a ‘bad area’ known as ‘Town’, the Rae Town prison, and began to circuit the far edges of the notorious West Kingston slums. It seemed slightly odd that perched in the middle of all this near the waterfront is the towering, gleaming Bank of Jamaica building – talk about two worlds colliding. Some of the worst-looking corrugated-iron-and-timber shack communities looked like they were built on rubbish dumps, and I quickly got the idea that you can distinguish the better off areas from the ‘bad areas’ by the number of buildings made from bricks and concrete.

Leaving Kingston behind, we took a gleaming new toll road which slices through a very green area that you could easily mistake for the UK. Beyond this, as the road narrows to a single lane again, we started to pass through a series of towns and villages gearing up for Friday night – dozens of people walking, talking, eating, drinking or just plain hanging around all along the roadside outside a procession of stalls, stores and one-room bars, a large number brightly lit with neon signs and fairy lights, many thumping out heavy reggae beats. Whereas we seem to spend most of our lives indoors in the UK (perhaps understandable given the climate), only venturing out to get somewhere, life here looked like it was played outside on the streets (or, more accurately given the lack of pavements, the roadside). I watched all of this passing by with the setting sun turning the sky ahead deep pink then purple then navy, reggae and hiphop blaring from Mr Lewis’ car stereo courtesy of Kool 97 FM (which I decided I liked as soon as they made an appeal between songs to help find a listeners’ green and blue Macaw – ‘it’s wings have been clipped, so it won’t be hard to catch!’), and one ear turning numb from the warm wind as Mr Lewis roared along with the windows wound completely down.

The night began to close in and the road got narrower as it started to wind its way upwards into the hills, but none of this seemed to deter Mr Lewis from his love of speed and a good overtaking manoever. I’d heard Jamaican drivers tended to be somewhat aggressive on the roads despite the huge number of potholes, pedestrians, animals and other miscellaneous obstacles, but even I was surprised at some of the daredevil darts around vehicles in front that most drivers seemed to take for granted – and I like driving fast. After one final steep climb, just as a steady rain began to fall, we reached Mandeville in one piece, which after the exotic difference of all the other towns we’d passed through looked ever so slightly drab and familiar – very British-style buildings and winding, illogical road lay-outs, a large town square and even ‘the Manchester Shopping Mall,’ Mandeville being the principal town in Manchester parish. They say Mandeville is the richest town in Jamaica, its gentle hillside climate attracting first the British merchants and more recently hordes of Jamaican ex-pat returnees from the UK and USA, investing their life’s wages from oversees in opulent bungalows, villas and mansions for their retirement. It’s definitely a town where brick outdoes the shack.

A few miles further on and we reached our destination, the small, dispersed settlement of Knock Patrick perched up on a series of rolling hills. You reach the CCCD via a long drive that curves upwards, ending in a long oblong-shaped courtyard of two story buildings, the majority at the far end housing the main school rooms and dormitories. Though too dark by now to look round properly, I was impressed by the neatness and location of the place, looking down over a valley on each side. I was shown to my own very spacious apartment, given a good meal of rice, beans and stir fried veg, and then left to my own devices to get some much needed sleep – and once I’d worked out how to put up the mosquito net, sleep indeed I did, helped by the mercifully cool night.



The Dog

  

'Sunny' Jamaica - Overlooking Knock Patrick from CCCD





As I write this I’m sat on a veranda with a dog at my feet looking out over the mist-shrouded hills as a steady rain falls. It is quiet – the 40-odd kids who are residents here are all in their dorms, it being the norm for Jamaicans to avoid the rain like the plague (they do actually believe the rain itself makes you sick). It’s quite a contrast to this morning when the sun was out and I got to meet some of the kids for the first time – producing a cricket bat caused a mini riot and I spent a good three hours trying to instill some kind of order over the on-going free-for-all over who got to bat next. I had been worried by extremely basic grasp of American Sign Language would cause problems, but we all seemed to get on ok – they did actually do as they were told when I told them who’s turn was next so the bigger kids didn’t hog all the action, at least. It’s hard picking out their names because they fingerspell so fast, but I will hopefully get used to that.