The “Other Side”

Normally when I tell friends that I am going to Jamaica to work, I sense that they envision me here with shorts and sandals on, hanging out under a palapa, and watching the sun sink below the horizon while listening to steel drums playing in the background on the beach! I feel their disbelief when I tell them that in all my years of coming here, I have yet to even see one of the famous Jamaican tourist resort areas like Ocho Rios, or Montego Bay, or Negril.

No, my visits here are to the “other side” of the island….literally and figuratively. My work takes me to Halse Hall, Clarendon Parish, about an hour’s drive west of Kingston, on the southern coast of Jamaica, and nowhere near any of the tourist spots!  May Pen is the closest town, if you want to look it up on the map.  There’s not much happening on this side of the island, except for sugar cane farming, the Jamalco alumina refinery that I come to work in, and the port from where they ship the alumina out to be made into aluminum.

I hate to say it, but the side of Jamaica that I see would never make it into anyone’s travel guide or vacation planner.  In so many ways, coming here is like going to the “other side” from my world back home.  Here, I see poverty, desperation, and hopelessness like you’ve never seen. I’ve often wondered what it is that finally makes a place and a people seem so lost. It’s as if, as a people, Jamaicans just can’t seem to find the right star to hitch their wagons to.  They’ve tried everything over the years….sugar, bauxite, alumina, tourism, space flight, information technology.  This is a source of great discussion in Jamaican society right now.  I read in the paper this morning one commentator’s opinion that it all boils down to lack of national pride, and lack of personal self discipline.  The population here seems to be locked in a downward spiral that the people can’t, or won’t, break.  The utter desperation that permeates their lives leads them into personal behaviors (crime, violence, thievery, littering, slovenliness), that they probably would never exhibit if they lived in another country where life was easier.

I noticed on one of my first trips here that, if you casually ask a Jamaican how he’s doing, the stock answer, from virtually everyone, is, “Not too bad”.  They never say, “I’m great!”, or “Doing well”, or even “Fine, thanks!”. This standard answer, “Not too bad” seems to suggest that maybe today is not quite as bad as yesterday…things are tolerable (but of course it’s early yet!).

Jamaicans, God bless them, have ample reason to feel hopeless and beaten. I heard on the local radio station that there have been over 600 murders committed in Jamaica so far this year. With an annual per capita murder rate of 38 per 100,000 people, Jamaica ranks sixth in the world in murders committed. Drugs, gang activity and other crimes are just a common part of life here. Petty thievery, burglary, and robberies are so common that they are more of a nuisance than anything else.  They tell me that murders here often just go unsolved because the police don’t even do an investigation.  They know, everyone knows, that the murder victim “needed murderin”, as they say in Texas, so they just inform the poor criminal’s next of kin and move on.  Political corruption, including police forces that are as crooked as the criminals they are supposed to be battling, is just an accepted part of life.

Everywhere you look you can see signs of this desperation and how it permeates all aspects of Jamaican society. The new toll highway that crosses the western part of the island (built by the Chinese a few years back) was originally equipped with standard lighting like you would see along any progressive country’s highways. Very few of these lights work now because the electrical wiring running between the poles has been stolen. I noticed on this trip that they are installing some new light towers with solar panels on them. Each tower has an evil looking, barbed wire barrier about halfway up the pole to keep people from climbing up and stealing the light fixtures, the solar panels, and the hardware!

I remember on one of my first visits here, we were making the drive back and forth between Kingston and the plant each morning and each evening.  One day we noticed a large cow that had been hit by a car and killed.  Of course there was no parish governmental service to come and remove the cow, at least not immediately.  The second morning, we noticed that the two lower front legs of the cow had been removed (only that).  Then that afternoon, the other two were gone.  Each time we passed by, additional bits and pieces of the cow were missing!  We learned that the people would take parts to make soup with.

Every once in a while you see a Jamaican that, in spite of the hopelessness in their lives, summons up the energy and optimism to keep moving forward by working hard.  I wrote about Mr. Wray, the newspaper salesman, in my last blog.  On this visit I also saw another motivated Jamaican who had decided to take matters into his own hands.  Driving on the road from the plant one day, there was a young man in the middle of the road who had made two makeshift “traffic cones” out of 5-gallon buckets.  He had filled the buckets with dirt and stuck in some palm tree leaves about 4 feet tall.  These two “traffic cones” were placed right in the middle of the road, and the young man was working to fill up two of the rather large pot holes in the road with his freshly-mixed concrete (I don’t know where the concrete came from!).  As cars drove by, he would frantically wave his hands and ask for money, since he had fixed the pot holes, yelling out to passersby that he deserved a few of their dollars for providing this service that obviously helped everyone out!  I was impressed by his originality, enthusiasm, and work ethic.  If only originality, enthusiasm, and work ethic could have acted as reinforcing additives in the concrete.  Sadly, two days later his nice concrete patches were pot holes again.

I’m actually quite thankful for my times here, working. Over the years, I’ve met some great people from all over the world who come to this plant to work.  Fortunately for me, I can experience the “other side” from a relative distance.  But I can sure tell you that coming here always makes me so very thankful for the many blessings I have in my life.  It puts things in perspective for me.  I thank God for whatever it was in his providence that made me be born into a life of plenty, blessed beyond belief with all I need in a peaceful, trouble-free part of the world.  I always think about what I can do, myself, to improve things here, but it just seems so pointless and….well, hopeless.  I’ve decided that the one thing I can do, as simplistic and minor as it seems, is to treat every Jamaican I meet with love and kindness, showing them respect and friendliness, regardless of how professional and clean, or how ragged and dirty, they may look.

Today, as I was leaving the plant, I stopped by and bought a paper from Mr. Wray.  I asked him how much, and he said, “$150 (about $1.50 US dollars).  I gave him $200, smiled at him and thanked him.  He smiled broadly at me, the whole time staring at my money clip with several $1000 bills, which I stupidly held in my hand in plain sight.  As I drove away, I looked at the cover price listed on the front page of the paper….$60.  Fine with me, Mr. Wray!

“Next time you’re passing by
A poor man on the street,
Wondering how he lives
A life so incomplete
Just remember, brother,
Should you stop and stare,
But for the grace of God,
You could be lying there.”

                                                     – Hal Ketchum
                                                                “Too Much of Nothing”