Ring deh Alarm...

Now that I'm back in the Caribbean, I though it appropriate to resurrect the blog so all you snowbound types up north could stay current.

This time I'm in Kingston, capital of Jamaica and its largest city. Definitely a shift from the tropical tea n' crumpets getup which was Barbados. More it's opposite, in fact.

With a population of about 750k, Kingston's about the size of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined, and one of the Caribbean's largest cities. After Jamaica's independence in the 1960s Kingston's population bloomed as people from all over the island came to find work within the new government's public labor schemes. By the 1970s, Kingston had absorbed many more people than it had work for, culminating in massive joblessness.

Today the unemployment rate for people under 30 hovers around 25%, contributing to expansive ghettos and a crime rate which makes it the #2 murder capital in the western hemisphere (after Port au Prince). Drugs are the main issue for current gangs, although interestingly enough, the gang warfare started in the 1950s and was initially instigated at that time by the newly-independent nation's incipient political parties. More about that in a future post.

Despite all this, Kingston has it's safe, upper sides too. Fortunately, that's where I live!


Here's my home, in the suburb if Ligenea, Kingston's upper east side. (You can click on any pics for larger versions.) The house is owned by a Gale, a biology professor at the University of the West Indies; and her husband Kingsley, a doctor at the Spanishtown hospital. They live here with their 2 kids, dogs, and nanny. In the back are three apartments that they rent out to university students.

I'm on the ground floor. Above me live Satchi, a Japanese girl working on her Masters in Jamaican history, and Nicholas, a Trinidadian undergrad in management. I share the third apt. with my friend Andy, who is a Phd candidate from McGill University in Montreal. Andy and I met in Barbados last summer, and as we both had plans to do comparative research in Jamaica, we decided to team up to make logistics easier.








































Above are pics of the inside, taken about a half hour after I arrived. It's a studio apt, pretty small and spartan, esp. for 2 people! It's a lot like living in a dorms again. But it's only for three weeks, after which Andy's moving a few blocks over to a nicer apt. for the duration of his stay.

Here's the view from my front door. Not the serene sunsets I had in Barbados, but the mountains are nice.

While our residence and neighborhood is safe enough, there constant reminders that we're still in Kingston. Here's the "fence," separating our property from the next. It's about 10 feet high. Note the broken bottles affixed the top.

The backyard of Gale's house is where her kids play. It's protected by razor wire.

Kind of makes you feel like you're in an Iraqi green zone, although after being here a couple weeks I can tell you that it's not as bad as it seems. To the east are more quiet residential suburbs, which continue to the village of Papine and the beginning of the Blue Mountains. To the south is the University, which also quite nice. To the west things start to deteriorate, although the ghettos mentioned above are still a couple miles off. Walking to the store or to campus during the day is no problem. Andy and I still like to be inside by dark, however. Probably the worst thing about it all are all the damn mastiffs and pit-bulls everyone keeps in their yards. They all bark, all night long.