I haven’t written anything because we are not in Jamaica, that is my excuse for procrastinating. We are in our small apartment in Burlington Vermont where we will stay all winter and all the next year to earn money. The plan is to pay back our credit card debt, so we won’t be so poor all the time.

Bobo has a job working for a company that cleans up disasters: flooded buildings, mold problems, fire damage, crack houses…. all kinds of things.

I stay home and am a housewife. It behooves me to cook and clean what with Bobo working 70-hour weeks. I also have an online business at www.maybeitsmercury.com. (If you want to support me, and are in the States, please buy your supplements here. You get a huge discount and I get to keep some of it.)

This is the last Jamaica story I wrote just before we left for Vermont:

Last night we went to have a beer at a local bar in Sherwood. This bar is owned by Pompey and his wife Cynthia and their daughter Sally. There are other children, too, and various interesting toddlers. The bar hosts passionate games of dominos and poker. There is an electronic “poker box,” which people play with enthusiasm. Bobo won over a thousand Jamaican dollars on it so that paid for drinks all around.

Sally has perfected the “non-compliant stare” as someone described it. It is a real feature of the Jamaican customer service ethos. I finally got her to smile at me and felt very good about that and I have finally started to understand what people are saying, too. My sister and I were reminiscing about our childhood in Constant Springs and what it was like to suddenly be able to understand Patois and how Jamaican life, with all its wit, complexity, and vigor, opened to us.

The conversation that evening turned to driving. Pompey drives a marle truck and he told a story about a police van backing up in the wrong lane and his having to hurtle around it to save everybody’s life. The policeman was so upset he wanted to arrest Pompey, who valiantly refused to be arrested as the policeman was so clearly in the wrong. Later one of the passengers thanked him for saving her life! It was a great story! The audience consisted of Pompey and family, a disc jockey, an electrician and two others. (I am starting to be able to decipher who’s who.)

After Pompey was done, Bobo told the story about the youth with the loud music, who tailgated us on the fearfully dangerous road to Windsor. We were finally able to let him go past, and he immediately sideswiped a huge truck, complained it was the truck’s fault and blocked up the road for hours waiting for the police.

After that, Bobo riveted the crowd recounting how, in the States, you pick up all this free stuff on the side of the road. He got a good laugh describing how he carried a glass top table home for two miles, balanced on his head. Then about the humongous flat screen TV that we are still using.

Everyone was really interested to hear about how roadwork gets done in the States. Bobo described Prospect Street in Burlington, and how it closed down several nights in a row. How the big lights with generators were brought in and the giant machines that chew up the old surface. And the the “Barber Green!” Oh Barber Green! We would die for some of it! We have been living with the East Coast Highway project here in Portland now for three years! It is ruining everybody’s cars and poisoning everything with dust.

We head back to the States on the 14th. I will not post this story until we have made it. In Jamaica, you don’t tell people when you are coming and going. If “de bad mind people dem” know your movements, Bobo tells me darkly, they might follow you and drive you off the road or even kill you! I know about envy and the evil eye. I didn’t live in a village in India for ten years for nothing! It exists all over the world, although I’m sure it manifest differently in the academic circles of the USA, to the peripheries of which we will soon be returning.