Trench town

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 became the participant/observer I had read about in many journals. I watched everything intensely. The men were expressing strong positive non-verbal's.

In Trench town, there were the smells in the gutter, the cooking stoves, 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 gunfire. Everyone wanted a better life.  The Rastafarian worldview influenced this environment. Rastas believe in and organize 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 1970s 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 in the medical use of illicit drugs. The Toronto foundation wanted samples of Jamaican marijuana sent to them for analysis through our diplomatic mailbags.

On Saturday morning, I drove to a church on the edge of Trench town, one of the poorest areas of Kingston. Large concrete blocks surrounded the courtyard 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 much like the European counterpart I was used to. I saw that the plants were not arranged in tidy rows. The shade trees, Ackee, Mango, and Breadfruit, supplied the cover story. Then the understory was a mixture of greens and rootstock 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 feet tall with a foundation of boughs cluttered with flowers and seedpods. I asked the gardener who was working there what it was called.

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

We walked further into an enclosure of ram-shacked wooden dwellings made of packing crate timber. All his family greeted me as they thought 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 filled with water. In one hole was placed the ‘Cuchi’, 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 was 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 then 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, and blew through his nose with the words ‘Selassie be praised.’

All the brothers smiled, and some laughed. I was out of my body in about two minutes, 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 university teacher helping set up new primary schools in the countryside.  The men received that explanation of my job 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 seven 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 schooling experiences growing up and my summer work in the Canadian mountains.

Herbs and Reasoning sessions for uneducated men tend to dissolve the cultural boundaries being broadcast to them by the government. The pipe ceremony changed my personal perceptions, which were not frightening. I felt among friends even if we were worlds apart culturally. Bureaucracy stresses hierarchy, while the Rasta network stresses equalitarianism, so 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 make it legal 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 analysed 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 percent 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.