Articles

LIGHT AND DARK IN JAMAICA: A CANADIAN'S DIARY

by Rosemary Ganley

Plunging into a new culture offers one a privileged glance, which may be both appreciative and critical, back at the place called "home." I take this plunge willingly, for my own soul's sake, each year.

     Jamaica is a dynamic and changing, turbulent, restless, threatening and beautiful society. Come to think of it, so is Canada. It may not appear that way so quickly, and its standard of human life for most of its people, a standard I applaud and hail, hides much of the turbulence, the restlessness, the threat and the beauty. Canada's crises are in the range of manageable: such phenomena as the Harris government policies in Ontario, the Alfonso Gagliano affair, the Human Resources Canada scandal, the utterances of the Craig Bromells of the police force, the Dudley George killing.

     The reasons that Canadian society can and does deal with its daily crises are many. One is the relatively high level of citizen knowledge, education and involvement. Another is the stability provided by a large middle class. A third is the achievement of basic needs having been met.

     In Jamaica right now, none of these conditions exists. Hence, every visit here induces in me new dislocation, a scrambling for balance, the seeking of new intelligence and the acquisition of fresh information.

     I am in my fourth month here in Kingston, now. Some of my adaptive behaviours surprise and amuse me. I, a Northern, white, past middle-aged, feminist teacher and Catholic resister, find myself attaching a crucifix to my rear-view mirror, and taping the lyrics of my two favorite Jamaican hymns to my dashboard. They are: "How Great Is Your Faithfulness" ("Morning by morning, new mercies I see"), and "Tell of My Love to the Islands." Then I can belt them out when stuck in traffic. Twenty-five thousand additional cars appear each year on our narrow roads. I can sing almost as loudly as the dub and reggae music coming from the boom boxes in the cars beside me.

     This car, by the way, is the second smallest on the road, a Suzuki Sprint. Fr. Jim Webb S.J., long time pal, and courageous Jesuit superior for Jamaica, who was raised in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, lends me this car each year. Off-season, it is parked downtown in the yard of the boys' high school, St. George's, and when I arrive each year it has a dead battery and four flat tires. But no problem, within the afternoon, with the help of the mechanic under the mango tree on North Street, all is fixed.

     One moves with great irony from such homey considerations to cosmic and dire ones. Reading the Jamaica Daily Gleaner provides the input. In this small and insignificant island, I hear much more than I do in Canada about the big world outside. The mighty, multilateral, decision-making bodies, which we had no hand whatever in appointing or electing or ratifying, hold our very lives in their mostly blinded maneuvers. Our fate is tied to them; our vulnerability is deepened by them. The just-concluded United Nations Summit Conference on "Financing for Development" in Monterey, Mexico, will utterly dominate our future.

     It sounds to us here as if the big boys are getting it at last. But the proof will be in the pudding. We have learned not to trust the big boys' words. And we fear and recoil from the policies of the U.S.
When world leaders like Michael Moore of the World Trade Organization say "Poverty is a time bomb lodged against the heart of liberty," he understates the case. Furthermore, our own homegrown intellectuals put it more pithily. Last week, Leroy Tayor, a former Catholic, who lives in the city dump, Riverton, spoke to our visiting Ontario students. He said, "Violence is because of too many dogs, too few bones." That was the evening there were so many student tears, we went through a tall box of Kleenex. One of the youth had worked with children ages 5 and 6, who told her they had slept outside their one-room house in West Kingston, on the dirt, the night before, because "Mommy had a visitor on the bed, and she has to have visitors for me to have lunch money."

     When Kofi Annan tells the conference in Mexico. "We live in one world, not two, and no one in this world can feel safe or comfortable while so many are suffering and deprived," I realize that what I am seeking by living here is a small and limited experience of that unsafe and uncomfortable feeling of the vast majority of human beings. When international development NGOs, in a report called "The Reality of Aid," say once again that our survival is tied more to fair, (not "free") trade arrangements than to financial assistance, we know they are right.

     Then we hear U.S. negotiators say that they will not let the global economic system be changed, because "it serves too many people well." These people doing well, writes Jim Hug S.J., of Washington's Centre of Concern, are principally "the fair- skinned people of Europe and North America, and Third World elite's elsewhere. The refusal to face the need for structural changes in the economy in the face of the 80 percent, about 5 billion people, who access barely 10 percent of global income is truly staggering".

     Here in Kingston, U.S. Ambassador Sue Cobb provides a succinct summary of U.S. ideology. I heard her say last week, "We strongly believe that free trade is a powerful force for development. It creates individuals as free as possible to realize their God- given potential based on economic growth."

     The FTAA (Free trade Agreement of the Americas) has us stymied. It is scheduled in 2008, to be the largest market in the world, with 800 million people in 34 countries. But we can't compete. We have no oil, a decaying infrastructure, a hungry population, a depressed agriculture, undercut by cheap U.S. imports. I face moral choices every week at the market. I won't buy imported food: apples, chicken, carrots, peanut butter. I will buy citrus, hard dough bread, fish, mango sauce.
It is all so up-close and personal.

     Just when wringing one's hands is at its most frenzied, a beam of light shines. This week I was admiring a sculpture of a black Madonna and child in the garden of a nearby Catholic Church --where Jamaica's well-to-do have been galvanized into social action by a prophetic priest named Richard Albert. Of course this is the tropics...all windows were open to catch the breeze.

     I hear a booming voice "Rosemary! Are you here to use my photocopier for your feminist propaganda?"
"Yes, Richard, and I will leave you copies!"
"I can't stop right now," he replies, "I am on my way to Brazil for two days."

     I soon learn that Richard Albert has befriended James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, to whom he showed Jamaican slums last year. Wolfensohn is a faithful Jew, an Australian. He has asked Fr. Albert to come to a directors' meeting of the Bank in Rio to speak about the dreadful impact of World Bank policies on the poorest. So my pastor, (actually I have two parishes, this one and an inner city "roots" church), is lobbying the World Bank.

     Yet there is hardly time to mull over and rejoice at that, when word comes of the murder of Eucharistic Minister Gladston Wright at his small business, by men demanding extortion money.

     The sorrow, grief and fear return. The darkness and the light are starkly present each day. The Good Friday/Easter of our lives recurs rhythmically, dramatically, in this poor city, this poor country, one which is never entirely bereft of grace, humour and courage. I am blessed.

Rosemary Ganley is assistant Editor of Catholic New Times. She is spending four months in Jamaica teaching a gender and faith course at St. Michael's Catholic Theological College in Kingston. This is her first piece for The Social Edge.