Marva's yard
We're staying an hour or two's drive from Kingston, with Marva in Denbigh, near May Pen, in Clarendon.
Marva and Larry run a nursery from home, producing bougainvillea and other plants for landscape gardeners and other trade buyers - Marva is also studying, and teaches horticulture too. It's great to stay with gardeners. There's a lime tree, and a sweetsop, just outside the back door, a patch of sugar-cane, and about a million mosquitoes who love the pond at the bottom of the yard, and love our blood more. We were a bit freaked out by the mozzies at first, but we now have a routine of spraying the bedroom in the day and leaving it shut up, and smearing ourselves with repellent at regular intervals, which seems to be working fine.
Only Heather and Marva had met before, but I think we're all getting on fine. Marva is a hard-working, smart, determined woman with a great laugh, who is very happy to be living back in Jamaica (where she spent parts of her childhood), and especially to have had her two older children, and now Lamani, in a school-system which doesn't consistently fail black kids like ours does. Would she give up her family land in Clarendon, the house she built herself, and the caribbean climate if she could get her old job in Jephson Gardens back? I don't think so.
Larry is a thoughtful guy, with a clear picture of where he is and where he's going. He's a Rasta, brought up partly in the ghetto in Kingston, and partly with his dad back in Clarendon. He can't understand why people leave Jamaica for the "first world"; he can see only two reasons for going to the UK or the US - to get money or to study. Maybe he'll do one or the other one day, but first he has his own yard to finish building (where his dad lives), the nursery business to build up, and so on.
Between the two of them, the world has been blessed with Lamani - a small man with a large voice and a lot of love in him. He has fallen for Rosa and Melissa, in turn - his heartbroken cry of "lady gone" follows us each night as we head off to bed. I like his nearly two-year-old grasp of short sentences: when he's cross with me he tells me to "go up your yard!".
More thoughts and feelings after our first week here:
It's a third world country
- Shootings in the ghetto (two gun deaths a day in Kingston) and corruption in government and in the police force.
- The countryside could be Western Kenya sometimes, to look at - though other parts could be Ireland, or the midlands of England
- Many/most people (around Denbigh, anyway) living in their own yard, with their own little bit of land
- Lots of rubbish lying around - including many roadkilled dogs
- Many potholes, including some spectacular ones
British and US influences
From driving on the left, to press defenses of the "Westminster system" for the civil services, you can tell you're in what used to be the British Empire. Many people have visited the UK, many have family over there, calls to the UK are cheap, and there are lots of big houses built by retirees returning from Birmingham, London or Manchester ...
At the same time, Jamaica has huge US influence - on the TV (lots of US black sitcoms) and in music, in street styles, and through the many visitors from the US. And we're in the Americas: I think I'd not really taken that in till we got here - my distorted imperialist view of the world had Jamaica and Barbados as located in the far, far south-west of England, in some way - and I'm reminded of a south-western burr in some of the English spoken here, as well as of a US lilt ...
Great food, and family nearby
Larry's dad, Styles, often looks after Lamani, and has made dinner for us a couple of times - chicken stew, and snapper - he's a fine cook. We all like one or more of the patties, soups and fried chicken the Juici-Beef Patties chain offers all over the country; curry chicken and goat are both good; and of course there's loads of fruit.
As well as Styles, lots of other family live nearby. Marva's mum Macie (see above) is the other most regular visitor - she lived in Coventry in the fifties and sixties, working as a tailor and a caterer, until she came back to the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment