In search of goat

Dawn Ritch, Contributor

LURED by the promise of curry goat cooked over a wood fire in the outdoors, I accepted a politician's invitation to tour his deep rural constituency. I didn't yet know that it would involve 10 solid hours of bouncing around in his van.

We stopped at the first shop on a tiny country road, and I headed straight for a shady mango tree. I'd made up my mind that I wasn't going to ask any questions, I was going to listen. Also in our party was a trained social worker. I joined her and overheard the shopkeeper's wife saying that their seven children had to go back to school very soon. Once upon a time she used to take three crocus bags of breadfruit to the town market and everything sold, but now not even three dozen sell because nobody has any money to buy anything.

As a matter of fact she took seven breadfruit to market only the week before, sold five, had to leave one, and all she got from the day's sale was the cost of the bus fare to and from the town. To the politician she said that the water truck hadn't been through the district in over two weeks. He asked if the river ever went dry, and was told it did not. What was needed, he said, was a tank and a pump to bring the water up from the river to the district.

All along the road, cultivators and residents came out to greet him. He asked them to think about where the tank might be sited, because the walk to the tank would be shorter than the climb down the river. Everybody thought the tank was a good idea, it seemed to me mainly because they probably thought running water would have been an even more unlikely promise.

It seemed like we were stopping at every house, and after a few hours I began to suspect that the promise made to me of curry goat was looking shakier and shakier. I fervently hoped we'd be coming to a rum bar soon, and we did. But the barmaid wouldn't come out.

Eventually somebody from the community came in, beat on the counter, and out she came. White rum and Pepsi with lots of ice, a double shot. The bar quickly filled up with other members from the politician's convoy, and I knew I was buying that round. Heineken, white rum, I didn't even see when the rum cream left the shop. All I can say is thank God it wasn't the Pegasus.

The deeper into the constituency we went it seemed to me that the calibre of residents improved, as did the plantings. There were cocoa plants and nutmeg trees in abundance. All the older farmers reminded me of my late father, who'd spent a lifetime working in the outdoors with his hands.

Bowed

They were spry, lean and ramrod straight. One in particular had his cutlass balanced lightly on his hip, and looked like a man who could not be ignored, so I joined them and bowed to him.

He was saying that members of the opposing political party had come by and pulled out all the pipes and the culverts on the road and taken them away. And that it was he who had put those drums in to guide the run-off. And that if we thought his property had been torn up, we should look at the property behind him.

I have no idea whether he got any undertakings from the politician with whom I was travelling, but I wasn't holding out much hope any longer for my curry goat. All the more since I'd been recently told that I was sure of bulla and pear.

Eventually we got to lunch break about 4 o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived at a square. Not a wisp of smoke was anywhere in sight. This square was on the other side of the border of his constituency, and firmly in the camp of the opposing political party. I went into a cookshop, smelt chicken and asked for goat. A customer told me goat was up the road. So I went up the road into a tiny restaurant with a single table, and in search of goat though it was quite clear that there was no woodfire. The stove wasn't even on, nor was there a soul in sight. But they had goat.

After the politician arrived, the shop filled up with over 20 people in an instant, few of them from the convoy. The younger men all wanted money, the older ones wanted roads and water, nobody asked for a job, and not a few were drunk. The politician became agitated saying it wasn't even his seat, they were all firmly in the other camp, and none of them was in his convoy which now needed to be fed. All I got was one plate of curry goat because it quickly finished.

The politician despite himself, conducted meetings with the local residents, and of course the drunks each had a beer. Nobody wanted to go to the chicken place on the corner. I asked about that, and was told it was a shop supporting the opposing political camp, like the bar where I'd earlier got my rum. I replied that all his workers had nevertheless come in and drank, but he said that was because I was paying.

He, on the other hand, had to throw away the drink I bought him and go buy one in another shop down the road.

If he didn't do that, he said his supporters who live in the district would have been ridiculed by the opposing side for having a candidate who didn't know where his support lay. We went back into his constituency and it would be a good four hours before we left again.

At the next junction the young men wanted money, and the young women wanted a properly graded road instead of a gully course pretending to be a road. It takes two pairs of slippers to walk it when it rains, they said, and a thousand people live on it.

An old man in a torn-up T-Shirt came up to the social worker and said, "They want money but they don't want jobs, so how they expect to get money? I lived abroad for 27 years and I've been back here seven years. I pay $500 a day to five workers on my farm and they get a first class meal. I don't live here, I live in Meadowvale. What they want? They want to come home with me at night and eat food again?"

Earlier in the day I had also overheard the manager of a small lending institution telling the social worker that of loans to 100 farmers, 70 never repay and it's always the ones doing better. It's not easy to represent the people of Jamaica, and it's not cheap either. In our hearts I think most of us would rather be bribed than work. I could be bribed again with the promise of curry goat, because we are all doomed to live in hope.

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