"You Come Back Next Year, Miss?" -- Pt. 2

Most of the kids aren't orphans, even though it is called a mission trip to an orphanage. That is how I always heard it described in our church. Roughly 5 of the 33 usually in residence are "true orphans". The rest are abandoned, one way or another. Some of them have mothers living nearby who cannot afford to raise them. They and their siblings by different dads ("baby daddies") all live in the home. Many of the children there are siblings or cousins. Some of them have parents in other countries, like England, working and sending them expensive gifts. This is apparently a very common situation for children in Jamaica, being left behind while parents emigrate for work. I learned this during the hurricane, when one of the boys, Winston, came out wearing a very expensive wool sweater he said his mother had sent him from England. The next year, the dad had sent him a nice bicycle. Even though he lived there with his brother, Nordido--Dido for short--, the gifts always came to Winston. The last year I visited, both boys were gone, off to England apparently, to be put in boarding schools there. I had spent a lot of time with Dido the summer previously. He was a melancholy boy who had a kind of delay to his speech. He would hang on me as much as he could, literally put his arms around my neck and hang. He is the one, in the picture above, hanging on me and looking so sad.

But back to that first year, the year of the hurricane. The kids had a television now, a fact that shocked some of the veterans of the trip. It was in the living room of the house, a dank, dim place that smelled of piss. I think it was the couches that smelled like that. The kids would congregate in there all day and watch TV, especially with the rain outside. The girls enjoyed fixing each other's hair. They would endlessly fix and play with anyone's hair, and they really liked our white people's hair. Combing and braiding and pony tailing, endlessly. The TV allowed us to watch updates on the storm. We hadn't taken it very seriously the first day or so, but by the time we found out it had been named Dennis, we knew that was a bad thing. What we did not know, but that our loved ones back home knew, was that it was a giant whopper of a storm and it was heading directly for where we were. What we did not know was that loved ones at home were worried and crying and asking everyone they could to pray for us. And what I do know is that prayer works, because that storm took a right turn north and skirted the island, and that what would have been a great big category 4 storm became a category 1 or 2. Still windy and rainy enough that the schools on the island were closed and all the little children had to say inside for fear they would blow away. Still big enough that the electricity was pretty much out all the time. Our biggest concern was not so much damage to the old stone building we were staying in, nor even flooding since we were up so high. Our concerns were trees down and blocking roads, or the main road that paralleled the northern coastline being washed out and our return home being delayed. Because Montego Bay is on the exact opposite end of the island from where we were. We travel a good 5 hours all the way across the island on that northern coast, until turning south, straight up into the mountains.

The TV actually did not tell us all that much about that storm itself. It told us, in an endlessly repeated message being run along the bottom of the screen, how to secure our dwelling places with plywood and plastic and duct tape. Bits of the Psalms ran interspersed with these messages, scripture proclaiming God's great protection during wind and rain. The messages also told us that when we had finished securing our own dwellings, we should then go out and help our neighbors secure theirs.

The carpenter traveling with us got up early and quietly put plywood over all the windows. We moved all our possessions out in the sheltered hallway in case the windows flooded. We filled buckets of water so we could flush the toilets. We sat in the dark and sang hymns and read the same psalms that had been broadcast on the TV. The wind roared. Roared. Water lashed and pelted the walls and windows. The room did begin to flood. People swept the water into the bathroom. We did not sleep much that night. In the morning, we noticed the quiet and the calm of the eye passing over. We could hear not roaring wind but cows mooing, and we knew that to be a good thing. We went out and saw branches down all over. The dogs that hung around the place were huddled together in a sheltered alcove on the porch. These aren't nice dogs that you want to go pet. They are suspicious and snappy and have skin conditions. They are the kinds of dogs you toss food to, but don't expect any kind of tail wagging happy companionship from. Suddenly the wind picked up again, but in the exact opposite direction. Trees that had been blowing horizontally to the left were now bending to the right. It truly was amazing. We hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Irish since before the storm had began. We could only wonder where they were hiding. They would surface again soon enough, however--most certainly at mealtime.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai