Jamaica, Part I

I landed in Montego Bay, walked outside and basked in the glorious, cloud-free sunshine. It was around noon and the area in front of the terminal was teeming with cab drivers yelling out destinations in patois (or, patwah) - the Jamaican version of english consisting of shortened words and continuous run-on sentences all spoken in a slurred fashion. It did not sound even remotely like English, especially when spoken fast. I met the pastor, who was to take me and my attending doc to the church clinic where we were going to work for the next four days. The clinic was in the mountainous region of Jamaica in between Montego Bay and Kingston.

While waiting for my attending's flight to land, the pastor and I spoke about Jamaica and religion (he was a devout evangelist protestant with a lisp, a head of mossy hair, a protuberant belly and a cane). Apparently, Jamaica has the most number of religious institutions per square mile of any country. He continued speaking of discipline, sins and redemption and I listened half-attentively as we sat on plastic chairs at a table still covered with empty Red Stripe beer bottles, with hungry, possibly tipsy flies circling above them. As the afternoon wore on, the heat only intensified the aromas of fruit, spiced meat and beer that hung thick over the canopy outside the airport.

With several hours to kill, we decided to grab lunch (chineese, of all cuisines). He continued speaking to me about his twelve years in Jamaica and how he had once been a lost teenager in Missouri, a casualty of teenage foolishness, and about how he had found God in a revival ceremony once summer night, and was now in Jamaica trying to save more lost souls. He was going deaf in one ear, and perhaps partly as a mechanism to ensure that he didn't overcompensate by speaking too loudly, he spoke in soft tones, ending his sentences in trailing "sh" sounds that added to the comprehension difficulties.

After my attending arrived, we set off to the car. The driver, Killa' (apparently, everybody in Jamaica has nicknames, and Killa' got his nickname for his soccer skills) was a tall, lanky appearing guy with a neatly trimmed mustache and a seemingly endless supply of patience. He negotiated his way out of the Mo' Bay traffic, deftly weaving in between cars and pedestrians as we sped past the resorts, the golf courses and the air conditioned buses that were taking American tourists to their all-inclusive vacations. The facade is paper thin; within minutes, the road turned to unleveled asphalt, the views from the car window turned from flowing golf greens to clusters of tin-roofed shacks with clotheslines strung haphazardly across houses, covered with brightly colored shirts and pants waving to me, welcoming me into the Jamaica proper.

The pastor had other business to take care of in the car before reaching the church, so we switched vehicles to a giant '80s style minibus (which apparently had just had it's engine rebuilt). Cars, like most other goods, continue to be taxed heavily in Jamaica, the pastor told me, and he had to rely on second hand vehicles for transport. I met the drivers, Beckman (apparently named after a English soccer star, which made me wonder if perhaps he meant Beckham, but I didn't ask any further questions on the matter) and Steve (one of the few guys on the island without a nickname, it seemed). We continue driving inland, past the new cricket stadium and soon, we were in mountainous terrain, the van faithfully chugging along at a blazing 45 km per hour. The vegetation was dense beyond belief, thick green vines wrapping around crowded trees, shrubs and grasses. Through the small openings in the thick vegetations, one could see farther into the forest; red stone hills rose at incredibly sharp angles, the angles of their valleys blunted by the forest below.

Amongst all this unperturbed wildlife, faint traces of human life showed; a canopy here, a thatched roof showing there. This was the cockpit country, home to a very reclusive group of Jamaica peoples who notoriously known for raiding British plantations back in the day of colonialism and for coining the phrase "Me no sen, you no com". They preferred their isolation, and the forest itself seemed to have embraced them with its sinous vines and thick grasses, shielding them from the prying eyes of passers-by tourists.

We continued on past some of the smaller mountain towns: Albert Town, Wait-A-Bit, Clarke's Town. We drove past the sugar cane fields as the fires were being set in order to convert the dried sugar cane cellulose into charred remains; this will serve as fertilizer for the next year's crop. The men working on the fields were silhoutted in black against the conflagration behind them, making for a visually assaulting scene. As we approached the end of our trip, we decided to stop for some grub. At a roadside stand, Beckman and Steve hungrily tore into their jerk pork while I nibbled on a piece of hard-dough bread, sympathetically given to me by the shop vendor as he did not have any other vegetarian options to offer. The night had turned cool, and I was enjoying the unpolluted view of the stars offered by the Jamaican sky, one replete with multitudes of shimmers stars in hues of blue, red and gray.

Steve returned to the van only to start exclaiming loudly in patois. I had no idea what the matter was, but within seconds, Beckman too was gesticulating wildly, spewing heaps of English sounding syllables with no seeming beginning or end. He opened the hood of the van and started looking around. Now, it became clear that the van was not starting and these guys had no idea why. As if sensing automotive distress by telepathy, four other guys appear out of the nearby shrubbery, each speaking rapidly in patois. One of the them pulls out a cell phone and uses the backlight to try to see deep into the recesses of the engine. He points to a wire and then yanks it out, then motioning Steve to try starting the car again. No good.

As the evening wore on, guys passing by on the road would stop and come by to see what was going on. One guy tried to jump start the van with his battery by removing his battery then connecting his battery to the van's battery not by jumper cables but with two metal spanners. By the time an hour had past, Beckman had resorted to punching the starter motor with his hand. We even pushed the van back a few feet, up a hill and then back down the hill, but to no avail.

Suddenly, without notice, Killa' shows up, now in a different car and with his wife and kids in the back seat. I was starting to get the feeling that I was in a Carribean version of a S.E. Hinton novel. One of the guys in fact did bear a striking resemblance to my internal image of Sodapop. A few more attempts at starting the van and the guys decide that the situation is hopeless. More to the point, the store owner, who had been quietly putting up our nincompoopery all night was getting testy. Also, several of the guys working on the van were getting pretty intoxicated and had became belligerent, and were starting to yell at Steve for his lack of skill in starting a car while it was being pushed down a hill. Beckman for his part looked like he had just swallowed a sack of lemons; he was panting and complaining of pain in his stomach (only later did I find out that Jamaicans, including portly Beckman, often called their chest their stomach).

So, we decide to abandon the van at the roadside and pile into Killa's car, finally reaching the church around midnight.

All this, and clinic work hadn't even started yet.