rainy weekend

Khaled has again succeeded in overflowing the 'washing' machine such that he has to squeegee out the living room, pushing water around with a duct tape device and cleaning the floors better than our mop, which you wring out with your hands. We have a rare weekend at home as our parish wardens meeting was cancelled due to heavy rain. I really appreciate these few days I have here at my house. It's funny that we came to peace corps to get away from the idea of a daily grind, especially for Khaled who used to have a 80 mile commute every morning, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Somehow we ended up commuting as much as ever. I take one 40 minute taxi every morning and he takes two, making his peace corps commute actually longer, time wise, than his commute in the states.
That said, I do like riding in our local taxis because its an excellent place to catch up on gossip, or 'passa passa' as Jamaicans would say. I recently learned, while smalled up in a taxi with 7 other people (not counting the driver), that two of the illegal or 'robot' taxis in our community mashed up.
Given that the physical area serviced by Schoolfield taxis ( the ones we take to come home daily) is equivalent to the size of a large suburb and takes 30 minutes to drive from end to end, on the good main road, you would think that there would be more than 1 legal taxi on it. But no.
On the Schoolfield route there are 4-5 taxis. The drivers are known by everyone on this mountainside, so well that I often find children playing taxi fighting over who gets to be Bashment and who has to be Ras (Bashment is preferred as he is a fun stuttering drunk who drives notoriously fast, but Ras is a young rasta often with an air of despair about him). So coming up with Bashment last week we came across an accident. What do you know but it was the two other regular taximen on the route, Delroy and Bobby, who got into the crash. There was much bemoaning of this event as everyone know that the cops just took away Ras's car because he didn't have his permit paper properly stamped. That left us with 1 functional taxi in a community of 1,000 people without cars. Can you imagine that in the states?
Not only do these people not have cars but many of them have shops to stock with all the accoutrements of Jamaican life. This includes flats of bully beef, tin mackerel, chubby soda, sweetened condensed milk, bags of flour, rice, sugar, packages of tang, soup mix, coconut milk powder, etc. All these things have to be bought in Santa Cruz, the nearest town, and taxied up to the bush for distribution amongst little old ladies and little kids hoping for a free sweetie.
Maybe that means the likkle pickney will have to sit on the bag of rice instead of on my lap next time. Lets hope Bashment realizes his importance to us at this time and stops drinking dragon stout before 2:00pm.
Also, passa-passa has it that bling-bling fi ya phone nah work if yuh get ee wet, so don't waste your fifty dollars on it. Ya hear?