Grace Warren reflects on family vacations in Jamaica
The beat-up taxi that picks my family up at the airport in Montego Bay struggles to barely make it up Rose Hill. Along the hour drive from the airport, we pass the all-inclusive resorts where the other foreigners -- tourists -- stay. Our taxi instead turns off the poorly paved seaside highway and starts climbing the washed-out dirt road toward the lusciousness of the green hills. We pass through a couple of villages, finally reaching the one near our shack, up at the top of Rose Hill. About a dozen families share Rose Hill with Miss Peggy's tiny shanty store and dominoes table where we all go to play, drink Red Stripe, and dance.
Mom and Dad sometimes bring O, Si, Moo and me to our place in Jamaica for Christmas to get away from the commercialism of the holiday in the States. And because we all love it here. The people of Rose Hill are why we really love it. Their lives are so different from ours back home, but we seem to slip right into the daily chores and foreign ways of life there -- perhaps taking for granted the irony of needing affluence to experience poverty in a foreign country.
And this is poverty. The poverty of Jamaica is completely pervasive throughout the whole fabric of society -- palpable everywhere except inside the thick, salmon-colored cement walls of the resorts. Jamaica's poverty is caused by many factors, none easily solved, including IMF loans, widespread corruption, trade regulations, American foreign policy, and societal norms.
The families on Rose Hill, like much of the Jamaican population, sleep four or five children to a bed. They often don't know where they'll get their next meal. They know that there are no opportunities for improving their lives in Jamaica, and that only the United States offers that hope. But they also know that if they managed to get the money for an airplane ticket, it's next to impossible to even visit the U.S. because our government prevents it.
The bounty of the sea and a rocky patch of earth mean survival for our neighbors on Rose Hill. If the wildness of the mountain bush can be tamed, and if Jah permits, a meagre crop of cassava, yams, or tobacco is coaxed from the earth using only calloused and patient Jamaican hands and a machete. Two years ago, wires brought the wonders of electricity and were installed along the dirt road of this community. For the first time, a television was heard amongst the clicks and taps of the dominoes games at Miss Peggy's. Oh, what excitement! Now the Rose Hill kids could watch the same programs, the same music videos, and the same product advertisements that seem to shape American life. Certainly this is technology, communication, and globalisation at its best! But if you talk to Manley White -- father of ten and one of Rose Hill's elders -- he'll shake his head: "Wha-gwaan dere?! Me tell you wha-gwaan! Dem picknies, dey see dose tings, all dose fancy tings, and dem wanna ave dose tings. But me no ave no money, no body got no money far dem fancies. It give me pain in-side dat me can't get no tings far me picknies."
My sister, two brothers and I spend much of our days with these kids -- these picknies of Rose Hill -- hunting birds, picking ripe nezberries and mangos, kicking around a deflated basketball, and sitting on the edge of the old, cement foundation, looking down at the ocean a couple miles away. In the early 70s, Dad and Mom built our place here with a bunch of their friends. Our house is on stilts, and you can see the ground through the sizable spaces between the wooden floorboards, and slits of sunlight stream through the cracks between the planks of unfinished wood of the walls. There is a counter and a sink for a kitchen but no running water and no electricity. We get the water in buckets from the cistern down the dirt road like the other families on Rose Hill. Our house has two rooms with sponges for mattresses and a loft with another sponge, but the porch is the most used space of the shack and where there are usually several Jamaicans hanging out during the day or night. My family comes to Rose Hill quite often, and Jamaica and its culture have always played a role in my family's dynamics. We eat a lot of curry; we own chickens, pigs, a cow, goats; Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff are some of the first records I remember hearing; footwear is never encouraged; and patois phrases pepper our conversations.
It is easy for me to think that I'm unable to do anything about the economic troubles there. But now I'm aware, and awareness prevents me from turning my back on the poverty that plagues Jamaica and the people I love there. And now you are aware too, so let us advance human kind with compassion instead of apathy. Inform! Inquire! Advocate! Progress! Every time I board the jet that takes me away from my escape, my paradise, I am distinctly aware that for most Jamaicans, my escape is their prison. And although my tan quickly fades and I settle back into the life of excess most Americans are accustomed to, I try not to take things for granted. And I am now appreciative of every meal I have, every product I buy, every glass of clean water I drink, and certainly I appreciate the privileges and responsibilities of my United States passport.
Grace Warren is a student at New York University. She is also an intern for WHY's International Program.
