Community

In the United States, small business owners are often considered the backbone of their respective communities, and as I learned today, the same holds true within the Jamaican community structure.  Today I had the privilege of spending my time with the owner of our hotel, James, who, while not of Jamaican decent, is from a family with deep roots in the city of Negril.  For three generations, his family has owned the Whistling Bird Hotel and Dining Club, and from the moment we began speaking, it was very evident that more than his land is permanently on the shores of the Caribbean.  I spent my morning differently than the rest of our team, as they went directly to the site, whereas I helped deliver some locally sourced materials to the site for our teams usage.  Locally sourced in our case meant sourced via a local, as James was gracious enough to both offer a better rate on cinder blocks, and delivery by his hand with his truck, and that was my first inclination as to how the community here worked.  Instead of gouging the prices to travelers passing through his hotel, he offered a helping hand to a cause that was close by him.  Originally, it seemed to make sense, he was clearing out inventory that wasn't immediately useful to him, but I soon realized it was more than that.  During our car ride over, in between sweating out any remaining ounce of water in my body, we got to talking about the experiences we both had regarding the Jamaican tourist industry, and perceived means by which it could expand.  I saw if from the perspective of a government that wasn't quite able to monetize and develop all of the available sources of revenue in its country, but the response I got from James was similar, but incredibly different in perspective.  He spoke of the same untapped potential, but in terms of what it had to offer citizens in terms of business opportunities.  After thinking a bit, he and I got further into a talk about local citizens, and offering them more means by which they could find  opportunity.  It was at that point I realized the two trips in "Betsy", his Toyota pickup, delivering brick to our worksite, weren't much different than picking up a few friends in the States on a Saturday and putting in a new set of brick stairs on your house.   All in all, they probably had a bigger impact than 500 dollars in property value in U.S.  He had that same sense of community that I've gotten used to from local chambers of commerce in the U.S., and it made me realize that in the U.S. we truly are just beneficiaries of the systems of economic development that have been in place for years and years.

You can understand the day to day examples of fortune within the U.S. very easily.  Quite simply put, the safety and relative ease of living most experience growing up in the States in middle class is not very hard to detect, especially in comparison to day to day life in Jamaica.  Today I learned that I there are subtleties that we couldn't even begin to appreciate as much as we should.  Things like small business loans and government subsidized industries in the U.S. are ubiquitous enough that they're able to give hard working citizens the opportunity to lift themselves into being their own boss and making a living.  In Jamaica, the people here care just as much about their neighbor as we do in the states, and it seems as though we simply are beneficiaries of circumstance, as they could just as easily find similar, if not more success if they had the opportunities that our programs give us.  I wouldn't venture to say that I made the rash assumption that they had no sense of community whatsoever, but quite simply I assumed their circumstances dictated they would be more self-concerned.

Experiences like today, at least for me, are sources of hope for individual communities of the world, and more importantly help me continue to realize that the "global community" is simply in need of better resource distribution.  I don't know if it is arrogance, at least not intentionally, that leads some people in the U.S. to subconsciously not realize the incredible capabilities of the belief in each other in other nations, but it does seem to be an issue we need to address in order to develop the world.  The sense of community here, from the highly successful resort owners, to the day laborers who worked for a lower wage for the school we constructed, is at a minimum, parallel to anything I've ever seen.  After working side by side with the laborers, and watching them hold the hands of students they had no connection to as they stumbled through work they had no idea how to do, I saw their sense of the greater good.  The elementary school children we built the school for today were always the end goal.  when concrete filler leaked through poorly mortared layers of block, there were no snide comments, only guidance.  When blocks were set unevenly, there wasn't a snicker, or a grabbing of tools, only a continuing pursuit of the goal, a better school for the kids.

In the end, I guess the first few days have given me more faith, but it was faith I should have had already.  Down in Jamaica, the people are just as prepared, if not anxious and more prepared, to make their communities better, they simply are at the whim of circumstance.  In returning to the States, I'd like to hep promote the same attitude in my community, and to also help enable people in environments like Negril find systems like the ones the United States has that enable further success.

-John