Kingston, Jamaica: Kid Gloves
By Elizabeth Eilers

The sun scorches my pale skin.  I wear a white t-shirt, khakis and have sandals on my feet.  I’m in Kingston, Jamaica to do service work.  But in this heat, amongst this poverty, the word service strikes me as flippant, and I wonder whether I can provide any meaningful service in a brief two weeks.  The school children who line the road buy juices from the carts.  They joke among themselves, their uniforms slack, untucked, ties loosened, their backpacks lazily hanging on.  One of the young boys points to me and yells, "Hey look at the Jake! " It’s in a tone that is mocking, disgusted and angry.  I don’t know what a Jake is, but I’m sure it’s not a compliment.  Men from the other side of the street holler marriage proposals at me.  "Marry me, hey lady, marry me," Cackles follow their proposals.  I blush at their boldness.  Laughter spills out of them, as they and their friends react to my bewilderment.  I’m not sure how to respond.  So I try and ignore them, and keep walking.  Occasionally, I look up and smile.

I continue to walk farther from St. George’s, the Jesuit school and compound where I’m staying, into the rougher neighborhoods of Kingston where I’ll be working.  Women and men sit in the shade, lining the streets with their chairs in small clusters, fanning themselves as they talk and watch.  Sewage passes along the sides of the streets, and graffiti adorn the walls: Vote JLP, Marcia Davis, Chicago Bulls!  Know Jesus….. Know Peace!!  No Jesus….. No Peace!! 

This place is a paradox.  A city filled with shacks and shantytowns, where street wars are fought as government elections creep nearer, where the interest on U.S. loans compounds daily leaving only a fraction of their national budget for education and healthcare. The jungle is beautiful but inhospitable; the cities are where most of the population lives and they are dirty. There is the formal drug trade that makes poverty for some a memory, and then there is the informal trade of those who have little sharing the resources they have with one another that make survival a reality. All this, set against a magnificent landscape of lush vegetation and striking sunsets.

I walk up to a small grocery shop window to buy a pineapple juice.  A chained fence separates the cashier from me.  By the time I finish my juice, I’m at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying, and the sun is blazing high in the mid-morning sky. 

A woman in long braids opens the fence up to the courtyard of the Home.  The Missionaries of Charity Sisters immediately put me and the other volunteers to work.  They send the male volunteers to shave the crippled, immovable, men on the lower level, and I go with the female volunteers to the upstairs veranda to bathe the dying women.  The two-story building is a gutted square with a courtyard in the middle.  The courtyard opens up to the sky with Birds of Paradise and palms reaching towards the sun.  In each corner are large rooms with rows and rows of beds.  No one has their own room, just their own cot.  Despite the lack of privacy, I sense dignity here.  Every patient is handled with care; each person fed and bathed, each given the necessities for sustaining.

I’m assigned to Maria, a woman who only moves with the aid of her walker.  A sister, in layers of robes and traditional habit, shows me the showers, hands me a towel, and offers me surgical gloves.  Sister tells me to wear the gloves while I am working. I’m reluctant to take them and frightened not to. I decide to put the gloves on and walk beside Maria towards the showers.  Her feet shuffle; her walker creaks.  I help her undress.  Once she’s completely naked, she stands on the cool, concrete bathroom floor.  I guide her into the shower onto the wooden seat.  I test the water with my wrist and when it’s warm enough direct it onto her.  I stand awkwardly bent to keep from getting wet myself.  I soap her up with my latexed hands and move a hand under her left elbow for support as she stands under the water to rinse.  I sit her back down and soap her again, this time going over her more thoroughly.  I’m becoming more comfortable with this.  I go over her wrinkled skin, in the folds of it, behind the knees, up her thighs, around her privates, over her stomach, her sagging breasts, under her hairy armpits, down her arms, all over her back, and help her to stand once more.  As she holds onto my shoulders, and I her waist, I sit her back down on the ledge, and now kneel to wash her feet.  I’m bothered by my gloves, by my fear of disease and death, by my need to separate myself from all of this.  Yet, in washing her feet I feel a peacefulness begin to settle within me.

Maria has had a stroke; so it’s difficult for her to speak.  I imagine getting undressed and being so vulnerable with strangers must be difficult for her as well.  I picture myself standing naked in front of a stranger, and it makes me cringe. Here in Kingston, it seems people don’t have the resources to deceive themselves into thinking they can control daily life. 

Throughout the two weeks, I encounter other women.  Sylvia, has deep-set eyes, wears a handkerchief that hugs her short hair.  Her pug nose is pushed in.  She’s heavy, her cheeks sag over her bones and she’s missing teeth.  Her smile, beautiful and full, pushes her cheeks back to her ears.  She sits dozing and periodically waking for moments at a time.  She sees me and beckons me over to her with a wave.  I go and sit beside her and introduce myself.  She grabs my hand with her big, wrinkled, warm hand that is more like a paw, and squeezes it.  Her name, Sylvia, describes the color of her eyes, a silvery blue.  

"Me family left me.  They live in the States.  Do you know Pennsylvania?  That’s where they live.  No one left here to take care of me,"  She says in her patois.  "So one day I come to live here."  She shakes her head, closes her eyes, and continues,"It’s not right, no one should have to live here."

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