Unity Church

I went to church on Sunday morning. I’d been curious to see a Jamaican church after my weekend trip to Port Antonio. Port Antonio is a lush, quiet town with some of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen in my life (but that’s another story).

I had seen glimpses of the church-going culture around Kingston, older men standing around at bus stops on Sunday mornings, dressed in full suits despite the sun’s merciless glare. On the bus route to Port Antonio, my curiosity was stoked by a fleeting glimpse of a church service being carried out underneath a marquee; rows and rows of immaculately dressed Jamaicans, gathered in the shade for what I imagined to be a highlight of their week.

What really convinced me, though, was that I met a preacher man; but a nice one this time. We had a minister staying at our house over the weekend; he was from Detroit, Michigan and had come to give a weekend sermon at the local church, the Unity Church. The minister was a very interesting man. He talked intelligently about religion and seemed fascinated by the world.  He was the kind of man who would casually refer to you as “my brother”. His conversation was peppered with heartfelt statements that, out of an English person’s mouth, would sound miserably sarcastic or unforgivably sanctimonious. “My brother”, he would say to me, staring me in the face, “we need to care about young people because young people are the future of our world”.

The minister didn’t doubt his duty to make the world a better place; but, fortunately, he was genuinely interested in the world he was trying to improve. Making the world better was not a personal mission; it was just the way things were. I warmed to him. His positivity was fairly infectious. In the mornings, as I sleepily attempted to navigate the kitchen without talking to anyone, he would greet me with a hearty handshake and a hug.

Hilariously, the minister’s wife, who had accompanied him to Kingston, was a take-no-bullshit corporate lawyer who wore her conservative politics as a badge of honour. In a manner that I found strangely reminiscent of George Bush Jr, she labelled her husband’s constant focus on helping youths and improving the world “radical”.

So, I found myself at the Unity Church on Sunday morning. It was a very hot day and I was already drenched in sweat by the time I got to the church. An old man with a friendly face shook my hand and welcomed me as I arrived.

I could see why people would want to go to a church like the Unity Church.

To call it a friendly place would be an understatement. Early on in the sermon, the speaker asked the audience if anybody was attending for the first time. Along with a few others, I stood up. The speaker welcomed us and told us that she hoped we would come regularly, but if we didn’t, she was nevertheless honoured to have us, and we should feel welcome to come again any time we wish. Everyone clapped for us, and the band played us the ‘Welcome song’. After I left, several people thanked me for attending their church.

Also, there was a band; a fantastic band. They played music without any singing, which was wonderful, but they also accompanied the hymns, often with the kind of sound that I wouldn’t associate with churchgoing hymns; conga drumming, ska-era piano and brass sounds and some seriously virtuoso trumpetry. As the service commenced with the crisply attired church crowd launching into ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ to the tune of ‘Kumbuya’ (rambunctious tambourine-shaking and all), it was difficult to suppress the thought that the people here might actually look forward to coming to church.

The minister spoke about fear and courage. Not in an abstract way, but in relation to how he saw these concepts affect the lives of normal people – fear of failure, fear of poverty. Living in a constant state of fear. He was a former psychiatrist and he was obsessed with the psychological impact of fear; how it cripples the mind and leads people to close themselves off from the world outside. He read out the definition of courage twice.

- Courage is the quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face difficulty, pain or danger without fear.

It was an interesting morning.

Towards the close, the main speaker was beginning to overdo things a bit and had to rein herself in, with some help.

- Anyway, Jesus tell me to shut up me mout cos ‘im do de rest.

 

Beverley Hills

Beverley Hills is a posh community in Kingston. It used to be a gated community but now they have a one way system that makes it tricky to drive through it unless you really need to. And a private security firm overseeing whatta gwan in the area.

The houses there are all very big. This is my house.

This is the view from the balcony (again).

This is the view on the way to work.

And this is what I see as I walk through the front gate.

That is all.

Body Language

Jamaicans’ body language is fascinating. People in downtown Kingston are animated, loud. Initially I thought that people’s bodies and their mouths were communicating totally different things. This is because, to a British person, what people's body language communicated seemed rude or aggressive. However, people seemed generally quite nice to each other. What was going on?

Our regular lunch venue is Salad Scene in Kingston. You order your food from the till and then pick it up from the counter. Never, in my entire month here, have I once seen the young women who work behind the counter receive anything less than grief from collecting customers. The main kind of eye contact is the glare and, despite the presence of a reasonably straightforward system of numbered receipts, the customer side of the counter is a choir of kissing teeth.
- Ye cyan't wrap de ting fa me? [kisses teeth]
- Gyal me aks you fi tree wata  [kisses teeth]

In another example, today, while waiting for a bus, I saw a bus conductor jump off a slowly moving mini-bus onto the pavement in front of a smartly-dressed woman (he's already fallen below British standards of socially acceptable behaviour at this stage).  The mini-buses actively solicit customers. He then proceeded to point at said woman as if to say “You!” and then gestured at his mini-bus with an angry dismissiveness, as if to say “Come on, get on the bloody bus, get moving!”. This was his attempt to offer her a ride! She shook her head without saying a word and he jumped back on the mini-bus and it zoomed off.

But this is the norm. There seems to be a general expectation that people will shout at you, get to the point without any nonsense about politeness etc and you’ll likewise get to the point back to them. Lunch is a bit late? Need to get someone on your mini-bus asap? Just say so. There’s no such thing as a mumbling Jamaican.

My boss has a great example of Jamaican directness. A tall, attractive blonde intern from a few years back was inundated with total strangers shouting “Hey, white lady!” at her on the way to work, from as far away as across the road. Unsurprisingly, this annoyed the intern. My boss' advice to her was that, if anybody shouted out at her, she should simply go over to them and introduce herself (“Hello, my name is Sandra”). This solved the problem. How? Well, people continued to shout at her, but they now waved and shouted “Hey Sandra!” from across the road, which the intern didn’t mind at all. She waved back.

And the teeth-kissing is great. A generalised state of dissatisfaction. It’s like a socially acceptable “For fuck’s sake”.

Jamaican Love Songs: A brief history

1969
Give me some lovin’
Give it to me now
I need a whole lotta kissin' girl
Give it to me now
I need a whole lot of huggin' girl
Give it to me now
I said sweet sweet sweet loving yeah
Give it to me now

Girl you know it’s you that I love love love
So come on, and give me all your love love love

(The Pioneers)

2009
Rememer di first fuck
Remember di first time pussy hurt up
Push in a inch it buck and it stuck
Remember di two drop a blood pon yuh frock
Yuh tell mi yuh madda ago beat yuh fi dat
Two day lata me seeyuh come bak
Yuh tun big woman yuh come fi tek cock

Baby...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity
So sing for me...

(Vybz Kartel)

A brief introduction

Four weeks into my time in Jamaica, predictably having forgotten to pick up a diary at the airport, terrified of forgetting everything about my time here and feeling a strange need to share my experiences, I’ve decided to write something.

So where to start?

Home is a massive house in ‘uptown’ Kingston. Included in the cost is delicious Jamaican food twice a day and a balcony with a slightly better view than my old flat.

Work is a small human rights organisation in ‘downtown’ Kingston.

Weekends (so far) have been mostly spent on beaches.

 Home + work + weekends = life.

In between it all, I am trying to look and listen and see if I can catch a glimpse of something interesting….

Dominoes

Now that the school term has started, getting to work is a significantly bigger headache. Prior to the influx of neatly uniformed mini-Kingstonians, I had been impressed by Kingston’s bus transport system. Not only did the buses boast air-conditioning and music (one of the few places in the city where you could chance on some decent reggae, but more on that later), but they were pleasingly half-empty and, what’s more, so were the roads! London, I felt, could learn a lot from Kingston.

How things have changed. Thanks to the mass of schoolchildren, I now have to leave for work an entire hour earlier. Otherwise I risk being stuck in traffic on a hideously overcrowded bus. With a preacher man screaming at me.

Yes, the preacher. He is not there every day, but often enough. He’s loud. He’s intense. He’s full of moral outrage. He assumes that he has your full attention.

Fifteen years in London have hardened me to this kind of behaviour. Sharing buses and trains with singing/dancing/lecturing weirdos who had cheerfully waved goodbye to any notion of an objective idea of reality; such experiences instil a reflex. Certain kinds of behaviour, after a while, do not register. People drinking beers on public transport before noon? I don’t see them. I remember an early morning bus-ride in Stamford Hill; a man pacing up and down the bus, mumbling incoherently in animal-like grunts, with trousers hanging around his knees. He smelt horrific. Can of lager in hand, he’d sporadically scream abuse at some invisible enemy.

I didn’t even see him. I only remember the episode because I noticed an older woman, who reminded me of my mum, sat next to me, in tears, horrified at the spectacle.

But the preacher in Kingston gets under my skin. I feel that the passengers don’t mind him that much. I will occasionally hear a faint “Amen” from a passenger or two. The preacher does not seem to have even the faintest appreciation of the inappropriateness of his sermon. His tone of voice is cleansed of irony, unwaveringly superior. You feel that he has never doubted himself.

The sum of these two factors is that I find the experience difficult to laugh at.

So, at the moment, I am quite pleased at having to leave the house at 7 o’clock in the morning.


On the bus ride home, you see interesting things happening outside the bus. Once, I saw a man walking around Parade (Kingston’s bustling, hectic main square) wearing nothing but a ragged T-shirt. The look on his face told you that, even if his body (all of it) was here, his mind was somewhere else. He drifted blankly through the throng of Kingstonians selling their wares on the street and shouting loudly at one another. Nobody noticed him.

People on the street selling goldfish which, cruelly, are not packaged in water. Surely they’re dead?

Groups of Jamaican men huddled around a small wooden table on the pavement, playing dominoes. I don’t know whether or not dominoes is the national sport in Jamaica, but it is very popular. It is a great game; you can set up anywhere with a surface, it’s easy to pick up, tough to master.

The premise is simple: match up your dominoes to the ones that have already been played. The first to use up his dominoes wins (I had never played before arriving in Jamaica).

Every Friday, our office goes down to Rae Town, a small fishing town in Kingston, to play dominoes, drink beer and be serenaded by the likes of Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin. The men who hang around the bar are seasoned domino players. One regular says very little, but breaks into a shy smile whenever he wins, which is extremely often. He doesn’t know it (well actually he probably does), but when I’m playing, I’m trying to figure out how he does it...

We play dominoes as competing pairs, which is when the game really becomes strategic. When I play against him, my seasoned opponent appears to have the power to know what pieces I hold in my hand. I am still figuring how this works exactly. I think it has something to do with memorising.

There are seven variations of each domino. For 6, there will be 6:blank, 6:1, 6:2, 6:3, 6:4, 6:5 and 6:6 and so on for each number. What the skilful domino player does, I think, is through some methodology I have yet to make sense of, keep a ‘running score’ of the outstanding dominoes. By seeing what domino you play, the experienced player can work out the likelihood of you having a 6:4 as opposed to a 6:2. As the game proceeds, my opponent becomes more and more sure what I have in my hand.

As I say, I have only just started playing. Perhaps after a little while it will become obvious and this entire ramble will seem a bit foolish. For now, I still don't understand why I keep losing...

Express Taxis

Without a doubt the biggest downside of living in Kingston is the need to get taxis everywhere after dark. Crime is a serious problem in Kingston.

Our house’s preferred taxi service is Express Taxis.

And what a service they provide.

-Good evening Express
-Hi. Can I get a taxi to downtown Kingston?
-Seven minutes sir

They give you ETA’s to the nearest minute. They always arrive early. And they get you to your destination in the fastest time legally (or thereabouts) possible.

It’s the kind of efficient operation that you can’t help but admire. After some investigation, I've worked out how the system works:

1. the operator calls out asking who is available to pick up the ride.

2. the fastest to respond (by their ‘call name’ – normally something punchy and easily recognisable over the radio) has ownership of the ride provided they get to the point of pickup within the operator’s ETA (seven minutes in our example).

3. If they get there even one minute late, the ride becomes open to the fastest driver to reach the point of pickup.

In practice this means that a driver, not being the allocated driver, who is around x minutes away from the pickup point, where x = ETA given to customer, could, and normally does, take the risk of zooming to the pickup point on the off-chance that the allocated driver will have just missed the ETA. For this reason, the customer will often find that the taxi scheduled to arrive in five minutes will arrive on his doorstep in two. For the driver knows the cost of arriving even one minute late in the dog-eat-dog world of Express Taxis. It’s the kind of self-assured, well-organised capitalist machine that Henry Ford would have approved of.

One of the great things about the system is that the players respect the rules. If a driver attempts to pick up a ride that has been allocated to another driver before the ETA has elapsed, then the rule-breaker hands over the entire fare he has made.

So there it is, an efficient, self-regulating free market system. And they said it would never work...