A return to the people and places of Jamaica

In Jamaica last week, I had a marriage proposal. Here’s how it went.

A smiling man, fortyish, who was dropping his little daughter off for tennis lessons at the convent hostel where I stay in Kingston, paused to chat. “You are Canadian?.” he said. “Yes.” “Were you born there?” Me, surprised: “Yes, I was.” Pause. “Are you married?’ Me, big smile, “Oh yes.” “Oh well then, you can’t take me back to Canada.”

I really don’t think it would have worked out.

I go out on the street every morning at seven to buy a Gleaner newspaper for $60 Jamaican dollars, (that’s 60 cents Canadian), from the Gleaner lady, Winsome. Many pages today lament the departure of Barack Obama. There are also glowing pictures of 14 11- year-olds who are top spellers in their various regions. They are coming to Kingston to compete in the National Spelling Bee. The words they will encounter would stump me and everyone I know.

We are three women from the Peterborough area. I’m with Joyce Mackenzie and Cathie Morrissey to encourage two school projects they support, and me to present my book Jamaica Journal: the Story of a Grassroots Canadian Aid Organization to people I have featured in that book.

We are three amigas for sure. Joyce has been a volunteer in this work for forty years and, this time, resisting family trepidation, she rents a car, drives on the left and proceeds into Kingston’s teeming inner city, an area without legible street signs and numerous one-way streets. Cathie is serene. One day, when they are lost, a man on a bicycle says “Follow me!”

Together they labour to bring together the Kingston Rotary club with teachers to enable a grant to materialize from the Global Fund of Rotary, initiated by Dawn Straka and Paula Wagar of Peterborough. This grant will bring a computer lab to a deprived little school called Tavares Gardens.

I am busy seeing old friends and enjoying their delight as they open the book. Fabian Brown, the consummate community organizer who employed my husband John at no salary in 1998, now works at the Spanish hotel chain Bahia Principe on the North Coast. He is training manager and works to build the self-esteem of 1,700 Jamaican employees. Fabian also ran recently in local elections. He was ahead for a while but then his opponent, it was reported, began handing out $15 to voters for their support. Fabian said such a practice demeans the voters, and he refused to do it. He lost by 75 votes.

Angela Stultz, another longtime partner, came by. She now works for the National Housing Trust as a social development officer in a deprived area called Frog City, where people are “outside the system.” paying no tax and pirating electricity and gas. Therefore, they do not qualify for the generous loans for housing which the NHT gives. Angela must bring them in from the cold. If anyone can do it, Angela will.

More adventures. In a shipping container converted to a usable space, we heard a steel pan band rehearse. It was a learning experience: to talk to the all-woman group and see the various pans, sizes and tones. As Raymond Yip Choy of Fleming College will remind me, “Pan is Trinidadian!”

And for Catholics and Anglicans specially, I must mention we participated in an activity in a little baking room off the convent, where Sister Grace Ann makes the communion hosts for the two churches for the whole island. We mixed flour and water and spread the batter on a kind of waffle iron for one minute of baking at high heat. Then we punched out the round wafers and bagged then in hundreds, thinking good thoughts of all the people who would be receiving these hosts during services.