Waste

Diary Monday 19^th September 1994. Jamaica is full of strength directed at what Europeans would call waste. Many ex-pats here experience a self-destructive level of frustration. Their inability to deal with the chaos and the lack of planning, or rather implementation of the plans and rules, leaves many with stomach ulcers. The other day I was waiting to get my vegetables weighed in the supermarket. A bag of onions and some cucumbers. Behind me there was a old iron-like English Lady. She soon started muttering when the man sitting behind the weighing machine was making it obvious that he was not going to weigh my vegetables. He was desperately looking for the person whose job it was to weigh my vegetables, a job honoured with plastic gloves and a white coat. He was wearing a grey shirt and casual trousers. Suddenly, from behind me the old lady reached out and thwacked the boy on his back who reacted and looked round, satisfied himself as to who gave the thwack and started looking around even more desperately for his saviour in the white coat and rubber gloves. I looked round at the lady and offered her my place in the queue to which she replied with a violent and resentful frustration in her voice: "to be very honest I don’t think I shall have the patience to wait at all” and bumbled off. I have encountered a deprecating impatience and cynicism with most ex-pats. They fill themselves with “western Efficiency” and do not realise that they have merely learnt a language of efficiency which cannot simply be transplanted to a country where time is honoured. The pronoundement of chaos, belongs to an ideology of chaos, it is a form of expression, of being. There is a misconnection between time and its calibration, between a desire to copy ways which do not fit readily, ways which become hollowed out without their “western Purposefulness” and a culture which has as yet no purpose but to free itself from the very thing it finds itself admiring and to establish its own self without becoming its antithesis. Purpose and efficiency is a matter of language and habit. There is as much chaos in “The Western World” only it lies hidden and removed bundled into concentration from which we can distance ourselves.