Greys’ coming

My students just love to play in my hair, I can’t get them to stop. They look at it, they comment about it, they touch it.

Last week two of the older ones were standing beside and a little behind me as we examined something on a computer screen.  Suddenly one exclaimed “Miss you have grey hair!”.

I must tell you my blood ran cold. The thing shook me in a way that turning 40 never did.  Suddenly I felt aged and saw my mortality – grey hair! grey hair! My GOD it’s here. I felt cold, my heart froze, my breathing got choppy, I wanted to put my head on the desk and cry.  It’s as if she’d said Miss you’ve got x number of years of life left (x being a small number of course).

I’m a little calmer now, and truth be told it was only one strand. But talk about being rattled.  Two summers ago I read a book about greying proudly and naturally. I guess it was preparation and I’ll try to do that. But Lord please bring it on slowly please

and the Water Keeps Running…

Many months ago the garbage men broke my neighbour’s pipe. They emptied the rubbish bin and then as they do, they threw the empty iron pan into the yard. Oopps, it fell on the length of pipe leading to the metre. It instantly started spraying water.  I wonder why that length of pipe was exposed like that, and I wonder why we hold some professions to a lower standard in the way they do their work. Why do garbage pickup personnel throw the empty bins anywhere it pleases them instead of replacing them where they were found? Anyway this post is not about garbage men.. or maybe it is.

A  concrete block was used to kotch up the pipe. One would assume that this was a temporary measure to stop the leak, but the use of the block stretched into weeks, then months.  You’ve guessed it, the neighbour is  a renter.  It is my personal opinion that  a homeowner would have fixed the pipe.

It gets worse, the neighbour has now moved – to a different house across the road and one house down on the same street. They can stay in the living room and look at their old home.  During the move the block was dislodged. The water has now been running to waste for 3/4 days. Are they unaware of it? Of course not.  They walk and drive past it, it makes a spewing sound which we can all hear, AND they keep going back to the yard to take up left over possessions.

But I guess it is no longer their problem and so it is left to run. As to the homewoner, who knows who that is?

What really gets me though is the ability to be so casual about it – I no longer live there so I do not care. As I’ve said already in this column/blog, there is something missing from the Jamaican psyche/buildup.  At our core, a factor that makes up reasonable and mature human beings has not developed properly.

Maybe it’s because we no longer go to Sunday School.

Road Rage

Is it arrogance, ignorance or just a plain lack of morals??  How can you fire gun shots into into a public passenger vehicle? And over a car?

Why does someone like you have a gun? Is it licenced? Did your money buy it (the gun/the licence)? The same money that bought the expensive SUV?

I agree that the taxis are the absolute worst drivers on the road but you know what .. they are followed very closely by drivers of expensive cars, especially young male drivers, with too much money and very little upbringing.

And it is very obviousl that there are several Jamaicas. For some people others not of their world just do not count. So a young man on his way to/from school gets shot it the head by the driver of a BMW because his taxi driver hit the SUV. Confirming what we all know eh … things matter more than people here.

Rainy Days

So it rained for almost three days and mashed up my weekend to boot. But I do like rainy days as long as I’m at home so I’m not really complaining. The guilt normally comes form hearing about the towns in the rural areas which have been flooded out or cut off.  So far so good this time around.

Three Miles

For some time now I’ve been concerned about the U-turns being executed in the Portia Simpson Square.   They happen at the stop light but more often at the school beside the post office.  I find these especially dangerous and the perpetrators are mostly the small vans and the taxis.  They will turn across you from the left lane in order to go right when you and they are travelling in the same direction; and they push in front of you when you are travelling towards the square from the Waltham Park Road end.

Is this all legal, and so close to a police station too.  When will this stop. when someone dies?

Or maybe not even then!

Road Markings

Last summer a Jamaican who has been living in the USA for a number of years expressed some reservations about coming back to Jamaica and being able to drive on the roads. He was concerned that most roads had no white lines especially no lane dividers. I had not thought much about that topic before that point but found after I came back home that I was actually looking for and counting the white lines.
I have found that it’s about even; some roads do have white lines and many do not. Many of those without white lines are roads which had the lines previously bu they have been patched, repaired and patched again and again and the lines have disappeared.  It is obvious too that drawing back the lines is not a priority because even in busy Half Way Tree, some of the road markings are not redone at all, or it takes a mighty long time for it to happen.

Recently though I’ve been looking more at how motorist treat the lines rather than just the existence of the lines themselves. And to be frank I can see why it would be a waste of money to draw any more white lines. We drive as if they are not actually there.
Back to Half-Way-Tree: there are several places where the arrows in the road way indicate that only one lane is to be used for turning. Yet everyone turns from the middle lane anyway often just missing some poor fool who actually presumed to go straight in a lane marked with a straight arrow. Even the JUTC buses turn right onto Hagley Park Road from Constant Spring Road from a middle lane. And they do the same thing by Eastwood Park in order to get into the bus park.  Not to mention the taxis. But private motorist almost all do it as well. And they are annoyed at anyone who gets in their way or points out that they’re in the wrong lane for turning.

The lines at intersections that mean  stop before this point are also a joke.  in fact it’s more like a challenge than anything else. We roll over and past it and stop almost in the intersection (sometimes in the intersection actually). This makes it difficult for large vehicles to execute a left turn onto our road and also often prevents the people with the right away from actually proceeding across in front of us because we are blocking the road.

As for the line down the middle of the road, how many times have you seen the vehicle in front of you riding down the middle of the road, right over the dividing line because he’s either trying to pass between two vehicles on a 2-lane road or he’s is waiting to see which lane will go faster ?

Our selfishness and self-centredness is more apparent every day.

Driving would be a great experience if it were not for the other drivers!