Tales of Town

Ok, so it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve found time to update the old Joe Blog - what can I say, I’ve been busy. Well, I use the word ‘busy’ in its loosest sense, enjoying as I am the first extended period of having absolutely nothing to do I’ve had since I left university, and believe me, it feels fantastic. Besides, it is getting seriously hot here now. Getting out of bed is enough for me to get a sweat on, never mind actually doing anything.

Dodgy tash courtesy of barber

I have, however, managed to drag myself out of my semi-permanent siesta long enough to hit the road and leave Old Harbour a few times, which, after five weeks with only a day and night in Clarendon to show for  it, was long overdue. My adventures have taken me east to Kingston and Spanish Town, Jamaica’s current and former capitals, the largest settlements on its industrialized southern plains and as (in)famous today for their ‘garrison’ gang-run ghettoes as their historic and economic significance.

The trip to Spanish Town came about out of the blue. My original plan for the Emancipation Day holiday weekend (first weekend in August) had been to hit the beach, but on the Friday evening, just an exhausting marathon game of football was winding down in semi-darkness, the fringes of Tropical Storm Emily, which had swept over Puerto Rico and Hispaniola that week, decided to start dumping her load over the southern Jamaican parishes, signaling the start of a pretty stormy and soggy weekend. With the beach not looking such a good idea, my friend Monique invited me to spend the holiday with her family in Spanish Town, where she had just moved from Old Harbour.

My first piece of carving, a Calabash bowl

Spanish Town was founded as Jamaica’s first capital by the original Spanish colonists in  1534, under the name of St Jago de la Vega, and remained the island’s first city under the British until 1872. A century-and-a-half later, it’s hard to believe that this was once the administrative centre of one of the British Empire’s wealthiest colonies – bar some old-looking stone and brick buildings, it looks and feels like a typically Jamaican market town, i.e. ramshackle, noisy and with little of obvious immediate interest to see or do apart from shop and people watch. It is also notorious as the one place outside Kingston with ghettoes to rival those of the capital.

Before I came out here, I had promised myself (and my mum) not to take risks while I was here. Visiting one of Spanish Town’s tough residential neighbourhoods was perhaps not exactly following this advice. The week before I went, Spanish Town made the headlines for three gruesome murders in which the victims, including a middle aged female pastor and her daughter, had been beheaded. Rumours were that a particularly nasty gang called the Klansmen were behind the killings. But one thing I’ve realized in the time I’ve been here so far, if I’m going to get the most out of this experience, I have to trust people. I knew Monique was not someone who would put me in any kind of danger, and her invite to visit her family was so kind I would have felt rude refusing anyway.

Marlie Mount car stereo clash

We took the bus on the Sunday morning, my first time in one of Jamaica’s crowded minibuses, passing east through what is mainly sugar cane country with the strangely haphazard St Catherine hills abruptly closing the horizon in to the north. Being a Sunday, Spanish Town’s normally bustling centre was relatively quiet, with dozens of route taxis waiting lazily in the hot morning sun for the slow trickle of custom coming through. We caught one heading for Gordon’s Pen, where Monique’s family live, winding through what I guessed must be the start of the foothills of the ‘country’ to the north, a semi-rural landscape of gullies, fruit tress and large, zinc sheet-enclosed yards. Then we hit a problem – just as we reached Gordon’s Pen, the road was blocked off by yellow scene-of-crime tape.



Bop! Bop! Bop!



I’d caught enough of the conversation in patois between the driver and the other passengers to understand there’d been a shooting somewhere up along the road that morning and part of the road was blocked off. It turned out it had happened right on the turn off for the track down to Monique’s family’s home. She was distraught – the shooting had happened while she was on her way to fetch me from Old Harbour, and she couldn’t stop apologizing, clearly worried about the impression this was having on me. Quite frankly, I wasn’t bothered – I didn’t feel in danger, I wasn’t in the least bit scared and I certainly didn’t want to turn back for Old Harbour. As they say, shit happens.

After an aborted attempt to sneak through the crime scene to the turning on the other side, halted quickly by a police photographer, we had no choice but hop in another taxi and take a circuitous route round to the other side of Monique’s home. As she wasn’t familiar with this way, we got out too early had to walk five minutes or so along white chalk tracks enclosed on both sides by high zinc fences. I was very aware that I was now as far off the tourist trail as I was likely to get in my six months in Jamaica.

Shopping Downtown

The two days I spent with the Brown family will be among my best memories of my time here. I met Monique’s mum, Cherie, her older half-brother Pim, two younger brothers Kineal and Davian, younger sister Latoya and baby nephew (Latoya’s son) Anjay. Another brother, Oneal, was staying with relatives elsewhere in Spanish Town, while her step-father was in hospital after accidentally slicing his hand pretty badly. Their home, a reasonably sized two-bed bungalow, sits in a large yard that at the back seems to open directly onto common land scattered with other homes, again giving the impression that this is a half-way land between town and country.

The Brown family’s story is probably typical of thousands throughout Jamaica fighting a daily battle against poverty. Just under two years ago, Cherie went into hospital to have gall stones removed. Over the next few months, she gradually started to lose feeling in her legs and now can only move around with great difficulty using a walking stick. In her early forties, she has gone from being the main bread-winner to relying on her young family for support.

Monique outside Juici Patties near The Parade

At the time Cherie’s illness began to affect her, the family were living ‘up country’ in St Anne’s parish, where Monique and her siblings grew up. A year ago, Kineal and Oneal got into some trouble after being (wrongly) accused of stealing a neighbour’s DVD player. To get their own back on the neighbour, they blockaded the road outside their home to stop them passing through. This led to a confrontation with other neighbours, and a fight broke out in which Kineal was hacked in the neck, back and chest with a machete.  The wound in his chest punctured his lung and he was apparently lucky to survive, spending two months in hospital. The episode led to the family fleeing to Spanish Town to avoid further trouble, with the younger sister staying behind to have her baby and the mother and second oldest brother (only 19 himself) too sick to work.

Moment of non-vegan weakness

With no one in the household currently working, it’s obvious life isn’t easy for the Brown family, but you wouldn’t know it from talking to them. With no welfare system, a shortage of jobs and high cost of living, they get by the way many Jamaicans get on – doing whatever they can here and there for a bit of money or food, be it odd jobs, swapping favours with friends and family, living hand to mouth. And they do it with a laugh, a smile and their heads held high and proud. Monique spends her Saturdays working on the stall of an aunt in Kingston’s sprawling Coronation Market in return for a couple of bags of food and a small share of the takings she makes during a day. She also has a three-year-old son of her own to support.

I know I keep saying it, but the way the Brown family welcomed me into their home and treated me was truly humbling. The two days were passed being quizzed all about England, my family, my friends and anything else the brothers and Latoya could think of to quiz me about, playing draughts, playing with tubby seven-month-old Anjay (or ‘Mojo’) and watching TV (after two months without, I actually enjoyed sitting back in front of the idiot box, especially Kineal and Davian’s choice of Jet Li and other Kung Fu DVDs). And best of all was the food – I feasted like a king on rice and peas, steamed callalloo, dumplings, veggie chunks and pumpkin, avocado and mango (picked by the dozen from a huge tree in the yard), mainly prepared by Kineal and Dave, who excelled themselves as chefs cooking on coals or wood.



Monique in catalogue pose



I was only allowed out of the yard during daylight hours, and was taken down the road to visit some of the extended family in the ‘Big Yard’ Monique had spent her early years living in, a long rectangular space reaching down a gully containing six or seven buildings housing various cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews. On the Monday night, Monique announced she needed to head to the shop to buy some rice – when I offered to go with her, I was told flatly to stay where I was, Dave would go with her (I didn’t bother questioning why it was any safer for a 15 year old boy to venture out after dark). About half an hour later, they arrived back, Monique looking flustered and excited – about to leave the shop, they’d heard a commotion outside, and stepped out to see a group of armed police chasing some youths down the road. A standoff ensued, again blocking Monique’s way home. She said at one point she wondered if she’d be able to get home at all if both sides dug their heels in, and was relieved when the youths jumped a fence and disappeared, taking the chase away in a different direction. Monique later told me that she’d recognized one of the youths, armed with a gun, as her cousin.

The following Friday found me once again on the road to Spanish Town, this time on route to Kingston, changing from crowded minibus onto one of the bright yellow, air conditioned JUTC coaches that serve the main routes into the capital. The plan was to head to the Immigration Office to sort out the three-month extension to my visa I need to complete my placement here and then have a look round.

Tourist moment

Kingston’s status as Jamaica’s one real metropolis owes much to the biblical destruction by earthquake of Port Royal, the original British port located on an island opposite the current city infamous for its lawlessness, pirates, rum shacks and prostitutes, in 1692. Its natural harbour saw Kingston grow rapidly to be the biggest and richest city in the Caribbean, eclipsing even Havana as a strategic port on the route to Spanish South America, although Kingston nowadays lacks the faded beauty of the Cuban capital (mainly due to another devastating earthquake in 1907). The division into ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ roughly follows the boundaries of the original 200-acre settlement laid out by the harbour, with wealthier residents gradually heading north out of the crowded and bustling port town towards the cool mist-shrouded hills that rise up suddenly around the flat plain of the city. Nowadays, despite containing the city’s main business district, downtown is a place where even most Jamaicans would not consider wandering around at night, penned in on both sides by volatile neighbourhoods like Tivoli Gardens, Trench Town, Rae Town and Vineyard Town, while uptown is by contrast a place of shopping malls and leafy parks.



Devon House



Unfortunately the trip to get my visa extended was a waste of time – I’d been tied up that morning helping Stone get his passport signed, scanned and sent off to Everything is Possible ahead of a trip he’s meant to be making to England next month, and not realizing the Immigration Office closes at lunch time on a Friday, missed it by 15 minutes. On the plus side, it was a good excuse to make a return trip to Kingston the following Monday and see more of the city. Monique agreed to come with me again on one proviso – Monday we could go sightseeing, but today she wanted to take me downtown to go shopping, Jamaican style.



So no sooner had we arrived at the crowded main uptown bus terminal at Half Way Tree, where dozens of guys stand on the street corners calling out ‘gold me a buy’,  than we were jostling to climb on another minibus. As we were doing so, I felt a series of sharp tugs at one of my pockets and then watched a guy quickly melt into the crowd and walk away – an attempt at picking my pockets, but although whitey might not be from round these parts, he’s clever enough to wear trousers with button-down pockets when heading to Town. Having escaped still in full possession of all my possessions, my luck quickly ran out when I wasn’t able to get a seat on the bus. The ten minute journey seemed to take an age and left me with arms feeling like I’d just done a weight training session – the driver had a foot like a brick on his brake pedal and seemed intent on revving up to maximum possible speed at the smallest break in the heavy traffic. Stopping myself collapsing into the lap of some unfortunate fellow passenger every few yards was seriously hard work and I was very relieved when we could finally get off.



Half Way Tree



Like Spanish Town, the main clue to downtown’s historic credentials is the number of brick buildings enclosing the narrow streets, which is not typical of most Jamaican towns. We arrived at the Parade, a park area which serves as the main landmark and transport hub in this part of town, crowded on all sides with traffic and street stalls and a couple of pretty-looking churches, with statues of independence movement leaders Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, as well as Queen Victoria, marking the entrances. A short walk to the south west corner brings you to

Beckford Street

and the start of the main shopping district, stretching west to Coronation Market, the largest on the island.

I’m no stranger to big, busy shopping districts in the UK’s biggest cities, but I was still swept up in how crowded, colourful and noisy this place was. Maybe it was the narrowness of the streets, maybe it was the booming sound systems and near-hysterical Revivalist preachers, maybe it was the fact that as well as regular shops you had street hawkers jammed together on every available inch of pavement trying every trick going to attract the attention of passers by. It felt like you had an entire city’s worth of trade crammed into a few small blocks, and more than enough customers to fill every shop to capacity. And this was just the clothes district – food stuffs were concentrated in Coronation Market itself. I’ve never seen so many T-shirts, dresses, trainers, bootleg Ralph Lauren polos, Calvin Klein boxers, cheap football tops, jeans and assorted sandals, accessories and underwear in my life.



Dragon Stout on Independance Night



We caught the bus direct back to Old Harbour from just outside Coronation Market on a route that took us directly through Tivoli Gardens, a gritty scheme famous for its football club and legendary

Passa Passa street

party. Just past the football ground, which is within walking distance from the market, we passed maybe 10 or 12 policemen sat around on the edge of an open yard containing several rundown-looking four-storey tenement blocks, each carrying a huge automatic rifle and dressed in full body armour. I was told they were waiting for night to fall, when they would go on patrol enforcing a curfew aimed at trying to quell a recent flare-up in gang violence in the area.

The return trip to ‘Town’ was no more successful than the first in terms of getting my visa sorted – my heart sank when I was handed the form I had to fill in and saw there was a 10,000 Jamaican Dollar admin fee (about 80 pound), which I didn’t have on me, although it did explain why I was only given three months leave to remain in the first place – making visitors pay the extension fee is easy money. Anyway, it left plenty of time to wander around Uptown, although the searing heat didn’t really make it a day for sightseeing. In stark contrast to Downtown, Uptown is a place of wide-open boulevards and modern shopping plazas and malls crowded around the concrete sprawl of Half Way Tree. It is also deceptively big – I’d figured we’d be able to walk down to the high-rise district of New Kingston and maybe catch a taxi out to Hope Botanical Gardens, where there’s a small zoo and famous vegetarian restaurant. But by the time we’d walked round Halfway Tree and out to Devon House, a tranquil and shady park set around a stately home built by Jamaica’s first black millionaire, afternoon storm clouds were looming over the nearby hills and threatening serious rain.



Bam-Bam, Joel and Stone on Independance Night



As expected, the back-to-back holiday weekends of Emancipation Day and Independence Day brought a couple of good nights out, starting with the Marlie Mount Car Stereo Clash within spitting distance of Mighty Gully over the road at the Marlie Mount Plaza. A car stereo clash is pretty self-explanatory – people turn up with their over-sized car stereo sound systems and compete for who has the best, judged by crowd reaction. After negotiating a reduced price on the set menu for the fish fry on the grounds that I don’t eat fish, and getting an incredible pile of fried breadfruit, bammy (fried cassava cakes) and festival (sweet fried dumplings that taste like fresh doughnuts), I stood back to watch the seven contestants battle it out. Judging was based not just on sound quality but on song selection in a number of different musical categories (lovers’ rock, roots, dancehall, soul etc.), with the idea being to get as many ‘forwards’ (a sign of appreciation from the crowd where people literally run forward on hearing a good tune, usually making gun gestures in the air and shouting ‘bop bop bop’) as possible. Straight away it was obvious based just on the quality of the sound systems that there were only really two crews in the contest, a bunch of older guys in a pick-up truck from Old Harbour and a group in a boy-racer hatchback over from Portmore. My appreciation of good stereo systems was vindicated when these two were voted through to battle it out in the grand final – personally, I thought the pick-up was the best, but the younger kids wiped the floor in terms of crowd reaction when it came to the dancehall section and they ended up snatching the title.



Purple Team dancers



I hadn’t really heard of much happening on the night of Independence Day, which fell the following Saturday, until Joel and Stone asked if I was walking up into town with them. After cooking up some soup and dumplings for them and getting gently told off by Joel for not dressing flashily enough for the occasion (even though he’d borrowed one of my T-shirts!), we wandered town-wards and I quickly caught on that this was a pretty big deal – Old Harbour was heaving. The centre of the action was the ‘Boardwalk’, a stage set up in a space off the main town square where dance competitions were held for kids and teenagers until about 1am. As well as some excellent organized dance groups, this was an opportunity for all the kids in the town to get up and show off their moves – the latest craze being the ‘cowfoot’, which involves putting each foot forward in turn while making undulating movements with your body. Alternative entertainment, for Joel and Stone anyway, came in the form of one particular girl who took something of a liking to me and wouldn’t leave me alone for love or money, earning me the unwanted nickname of ‘Sugar’ from my sniggering companions. I’m getting to be pretty good at turning down advances from women.

The other news from the last couple of weeks is that I’ve changed my mind and decided to stay in Old Harbour rather than return to Mandeville and the deaf school. The turnaround came after a conversation I had with the deputy principal at Marlie Mount Primary School at the end of summer school – she explained summer school was never the best time to host volunteers because the days were short and number of kids attending small compared to school proper, meaning there is not much need for an extra pair of hands. She told me that if I wanted to come back in September, I’d get a completely different experience – with two sets of six grades all needing PE at least once a week, plus football, cricket, basketball, netball and track and field teams to coach, there was a real need of help for the lone PE teacher, and there would also be opportunities for me to help with reading tuition. With reassurances that there was plenty for me to do at the school and that my help would be appreciated, it was an easy decision to make – my concern about spending an extra three months at the deaf school was that I would start to feel isolated and bored out of school hours. In Old Harbour, I’m starting to feel like I’m not just passing through visiting – I have made friends here, I have fun here, I get calls of ‘sir!’ when kids from school pass me in the street, people whose name I don’t know now say hi when they pass me in the street. I’m starting to feel like this is home.