Mark Wignall | Where is love? There is anger in the air

At 7.30 a.m. on a Saturday in the depressed community of Turpitude (not its real name), Tish enters Paul’s board shop and says to no one in particular, “A gwine chap har up!”

Seventy-year-old Paul giggles ever so knowingly. He runs the shop with his wife Enid. He gives Tish what she ordered: $50 bag of weed, $20 grabba, and a special white rum and Boom.

Tish pours water in the special and sits on a bent-up plastic chair under a covered area at the front of the shop. Shanty, a 40-year-old labourer enters as Tish downs the drink. Ten years ago when I first met him, Shanty was normal. Now, his system can barely survive in normal mode if he doesn’t get a monthly injection courtesy of the roving Ministry of Health van. His story? Much too complex to lay out here.

Shanty smells ‘stale.’ His hair looks like it was last washed in pre-COVID-19 times. He gazes at Tish and laughs. He is barefooted. Tish raises her head. “Hey tinking bwoi! Me and you nuh inna nutten,” followed by a dictionary of boiling hot Jamaican cuss words.

As Paul sells Shanty a $250 sandwich, two slices of bread, light spread of margarine, and one Vienna sausage, I fix my eyes on Tish making her spliff, skin tight sheer yellow pants, yellow bra and cheap sandals. One could sense beauty struggling to make its way over the hurdles of ‘bad mind’ that Tish has allowed to define her.

She lights the spliff, tells me goodbye then leaves. The community of Turpitude has about 400 households. The road connecting it to the town square is not for cowards. It has a hint of being paved once; just as far as those who voted for the ruling party live. After that it is mostly rubble.

In the last year there have been two shootings, but the gunmen living there have not yet fully gone wildly ballistic.

CHILDREN ARE SURROUNDED BY HATE

A few children, boys and girls, are playing cricket in front of the shop. A conflict develops, and a girl is pushed to the rough pavement. A boy uses a piece of light lumber, the bat, to slap her. The girl grabs for a stone as Paul shouts at her, heads to an inner section of his shop and quickly makes his way to the front.

“Come!” he says to her. He gives her six frankfurters in a plastic bag, an onion, and weighs out a pound of rice. “Give this to yuh mother,” he says. “Tell har to pay mi when she have it.”

He explains. “Is Tish daughter. She is 12 and is a likkle warboat like har mother. But mi can bet you dat di likkle gal hungry. From di father leave Tish and tek up wid a girl ova ....... is pure problem. Tish cuss every man, and according to har ,when she and him did dey, all the odder woman dem did bad mind har ova him. Missa Mark, nutten no normal roun here.”

I sit carefully in the rickety plastic chair. A woman I know, a street-level political activist, approaches me ,but she, too, is carrying all of the high-volume social and economic burdens of waking up in hell each day. Accompanying her is her grandchild.

“As long as you gwine continue di loud cussing a don’t want hear nutten from yu,” I say. She is immediately transformed and a warm smile spreads over her face, the corners of her lips, her eyes.

“Sorry Missa Mark.” Then she begins to tell me how she got a low-level contract to bush a piece of roadway. “Mi tell di bwoi (political councillor) sey me haffi use four people wid mi. Me finish di work an him a sey is only two people mi use. Den if a even me one did do it, di truth is di work done. Mi want yu help mi fi get mi money.”

I tell her I know him and will talk with him. I buy her a cigarette and a white rum special. As she continues her slow trek up the hill, the cussing plays out as it had before.

Paul represents a rare island of care, hope, and decency. He survives even as many around him allow their humanity to sink beneath the waves.

ONE CHILD KILLING THE OTHER

Two Fridays ago I interviewed Dr Wendel Abel, consultant psychiatrist with 25 years practising his craft. I was trying to weave my way through what would make a female student stab another to death and the route to return to some semblance of normality.

Unsurprisingly, the doctor posited the view that genes of aggression in the Jamaican population have somewhat inundated our people to the point that we must immediately begin to reverse it if we want to recover our normality.

Among some of the fixes he suggested were school courses. Years ago, maybe in the 1950s, 1960s, we took it for granted that the home would naturally impart the basic skills of civility so that our children would have a start to set them right as they became young adults. That creates another problem. Who are the broad set of teachers in the Jamaican schooling system that will invest the time to deal with many of the children who have never had that needed push start normally applied in the home.

I hate to say this but I have personally observed that interaction. Sad to say it but a significant percentage of our schooling population are bordering on being young savages when they should be engaging in preparation for learning skills.

“I have tried for years,” said Edie, a teacher of 12 years’ experience.

“I’m sorry. I am going through the motions just to keep myself out of the way of a serious physical interaction,” she said.

 Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.