Trench town

I am sitting in a circle of five Rastafarian Jamaican men. I felt no threat. Wow!

So much has happened to me in the last six months.

As I sat there, I had become the participant/observer that I had read about in many journals. I was watching everything intensely. There were strong positive non-verbals being expressed by the men.

In Trench town there were the smells in the gutter, the cooking stoves, and the sounds of someone making love in the next room, the cries of children, reggae blaring from the corner boom box radio, and the occasional gun fire. Everyone wanted a better life. The Rastafarian world view had an influence on this environment. Rasta’s believe and organise the yards for better health, less danger, and the sacred life of their religion. This was their attempt to keep sanity in the shanty towns of Kingston.

A 1970’s program that I became involved in was due to my embassy status as a technical officer. I was asked to come to the embassy for a special briefing for an assignment. The Toronto Addiction Research Foundation was involved with the LE Dain Commission into the medical use of illicit drugs. The Toronto foundation wanted samples of Jamaican marijuana sent to them for analysis through our diplomatic mail bags.

On Saturday morning I drove to a church on the edge of Trench town, one of the poorest areas of Kingston. The courtyard was surrounded with large concrete blocks with broken glass cemented on the top.

I met Brother Judah and walked down the muddy backstreets. We arrived through a hole in the corrugated iron fence to an inner courtyard. We entered a garden.

‘Where are we Brother Juda?’

Here, I and I live in the garden’.

The kitchen garden in Jamaica did not look like much like the European counterpart that I was used to. I saw that the plants were not arranged in tidy rows. The shade trees, Ackee, Mango and Breadfruit supplied the over story then the understory was a mixture of greens and root stock growing haphazardly as in the wild. Many of the plants were unfamiliar to me. Sheltered amidst the clutter of shrubs was a bush like plant about four foot tall with a foundation of boughs cluttered with flowers and seedpods. I asked the gardener who was working there what was it called.

‘Its Herbs, there are herbs for food and herbs for the mind.’

We walked further into an enclosure of the ram-shacked wooden dwellings made of packing crate timber. I were greeted by all his family as they thought that I was the ‘Doctor Man’ from the clinic. After children touched my skin and the wives sniggered at my hair, Brother Juda then took me to have a pipe.

The Pipe smoking ritual that followed was illuminating to me on many levels. I had my first anthropological experience. One brother brought out a hessian bag with the pipe. Another brother brought a one- inch roll of newspaper. We all sat down in a circle. The pipe consisted of a brown coconut with two holes in the top which was filled with water. In one hole was placed the ‘Cuchi’ which was a hollow clay tube with a small stone inside. In the other hole was placed a flexible rubber tubing. The paper roll had Ganja in it which taken out by Brother Judah and placed on a board cut up and sprinkled with water.

Prayers were said which blessed the herb sacrament in the name of Emperor Haile Selassie who in their belief system was a Black God. The pipe was lit with the newspaper as a torch. Brother Juda took a massive, big draw and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke through his nose with the words ‘Selassie be praised.’

The pipe was the passed on to the next brother counter --clockwise and when it came to me, all were watching what I would do. I took a medium hit, held my breath, blew through his nose with the words ‘Selassie be praised.’

All the brothers smiled, and some laughed. In about two minutes I was out of my body looking down at the circle and the yard next door. Wow! this was strong stuff, but it was not my first time with marijuana, so I floated along with the crowd. Two men started to laugh while one other sat motionless with his eyes closed.

Brother Judah then asked who I was. I said I was a teacher at the university helping to set up new primary schools in the countryside. That explanation of my job was well received by the men as I was helping the Jamaican people. When I was with the Rasta brothers, they involved me in their “Reasoning Sessions”. I vaguely remember this session.

Brother Juda: Tell I and I what you did as a young Bouy.

Me: I went to government school for 7 years with children that were Japanese, Chinese, East Indian, Native Indian, and European like I. We were learning together.

Brother Juda: What are I doing in Jamaica?

Me: I am helping train teachers. Have these brothers been to school.

Brother Juda: No brudder here can read or write.

Me: How do you learn?

Brother Juda: I and I talk with the young school children.

Me: In my country we have classes for adults to read and write.

Brother Juda: I and I need dat here.

Me: I can fix dat, man if I and I want?

The Brothers relish the input from some smart foreign people, not as an expert but as a Brudder, I shared more of my experiences of my schooling growing up and my summer work in the Canadian mountains.

Herbs and Reasoning sessions for the un- educated men tend to dissolve their cultural boundaries that were being broadcast to them by the government. The pipe ceremony had changed my personal perceptions which was not frightening. I felt among friends even if we were worlds apart culturally. Bureaucracy stress hierarchy while the Rasta network stresses equalitarianism, that is why they used the expression ‘I and I’ rather than you and me.

I asked if I could have a small sample of the Ganja for analysis and could Brother Juda tell me what it was called and where it came from.

I explained to the group that Canada was working hard to understand the medical uses and making it legal for medicine. We needed it for trials and to convince “Babylon” to change.

The Ganja was called ‘Lamb’s breath’ and it came from the mountains near Mandeville. It became sample number five when I sent it for analysis.

The Addiction Research Foundation of Toronto did the analysis of thirty-six samples of Ganja that I sent to them. When the printed results came back to me, they showed that the THC content was extraordinarily higher than other marijuana samples analysed to date. Mandeville and St. Ann samples ranged up to fourteen per cent THC. Canadian government cannabis grown in the Ottawa experimental farms and most street weed samples were only about two-point five percent THC. Sample number five was listed at twelve percent THC. No wonder at Brother Juda’s yard that day I sensed that I was at ten thousand feet and having mild hallucinations. It was a journey out of my body. A transient experience of higher consciousness.