My doctor friend from home is here in New York, and with her arrives fresh stories of a proud people living under the heat of a Jamaican sun. She works in a local hospital there and the tales are downright funny and at the same time terribly heartbreaking.

A baby is gravely ill and the mother will not permit any medical attempts to save her because she knows "is the matey-duppy in the yard making her child vomit like that"; a woman walks in with her own diagnosis, “…is only a likkle fibroid, doctor. Nothing to do with chemotherapy.” Her medical records show, she has been told by every doctor on staff that she has cervical cancer. The "rude bwoy" cannot accept that he is HIV positive. He is still cavorting without a condom, insisting that he “couldn’t have aids, for he is not a maama man…”

She reminds me too of the kindness of the Jamaican people. The three-year-old boy with asthma comes to “look for his doctor” even when nothing is wrong. His mother never comes empty-handed: a roasting breadfruit, a bunch of callaloo, sometimes a nice piece of yellow yam. She tells me the poorer they are the more of what they have they will bring.

I knew what she was talking about. I recognized the stories, but I no longer know the intimacies of country life in Jamaica. Not with my heart. Not like that. I sat with an old friend in the West Village of Manhattan, over a plate of super-nachos with guacamole and black beans and felt very far away from my home. It’s not the big things that hit you. It’s the little things.

First you forget the fever-grass tea, then the smell of pimento drying on zinc, then the name of the woman who lives at the end of Bread Lane in Paradise Acres. Next thing you know, you only think of Jamaica as the sea and the sand and the lovely hotels they have built there. Before you know it, you are more at home on the subway than you ever will be on a bus running from Half Way Tree to Papine.

By the time some of us make it home, that Jamaica will be long gone. Already tourism and Cable TV has ushered globalization into the busy streets of Kingston and Montego Bay. Boys on the corner of Hope Road and Richings Avenue, look no different from the ones on Nostrand and Fulton; same hair, some clothes, same words in their mouths. Liguanea looks a lot like any small town in America. There is a sprawling MacDonalds dwarfing every building beside it, Wendys, Popeyes, Pizza Hut, Dominoes, KFC—you name it, they have built it.

The world as we knew it is disappearing. The Jamaica you and I grew up in is wearing winter jackets and speaking black American slang. If you can go home and you want to see it before it really gone fi true, you better go buy you ticket now. Make sure you head straight for Portland, maybe Buff Bay—anywhere on the north coast is too much of a tourist haven. Head south. Hurry up and go so you can come back and tell me know how many fast food restaurants have been added to the black beauty of that winding coastline.

Till next time,

Staceyann Chin