This is a brief story about my mango picking trip. On Saturday evening my host mom, Lurline and her friend, (we’ll call her Sue for fun) decided to go to St. Thomas to pick East Indian mangoes and they invited me to come along for the trip.
We left on Sunday morning about 9:30 am for St. Thomas. Being new to the area I assumed either Lurline or Sue would know how to get from St. Andrew to St. Thomas. I soon realized that this was a false assumption as we proceeded to get lost in Kingston. Finally, after much driving around and asking for directions, we made it out of Kingston and on our way to the parish of St. Thomas.
Lurline then asked Sue if she knew where in St. Thomas we were going to pick the mangoes. Sue simply responded, “By the school.” Now mind you every wide spot in the road has a school and this woman didn’t know which school it was or which town this school was in. We came upon a small town and asked a local if there were any East Indian mango trees around with ripe mangoes and he pointed up the road. We followed his directions and found a mango farm with a man harvesting mangoes for export to the USA and Canada. Lurline negotiated a price with him and we proceeded to pick some mangoes. The farm had two types of mangoes: East Indian and Julie. The Julie mango is what is most commonly found at the supermarket back in the states. The man was very kind and allowed us to try the mangoes and explained the differences between them.
Since the ones we bought were a little green, we proceeded to drive around some more looking for super ripe mangoes. After much contemplation my host mom, Lurline, decides to try to find her pastors house. This involved more driving along the back roads of St. Thomas. We finally found the pastors house but he was gone. So we backed tracked to a neighbor’s house and bought some East Indian mangoes from him. He was also very nice and gave us some Common mangoes and Black mangoes for free. I will say that out of all the varieties of mangoes I’ve tried thus far the Black mango is my favorite.
The return trip was pretty uneventful until we reached Kingston. Now for all of my family that doesn’t know anything about Kingston just imagine a poorly designed Los Angles in a third world country. When we arrived in Kingston Lurline was asleep in the back seat of the car and Sue (who was from Montego Bay, the complete opposite side of the island from Kingston) was driving. I noticed we had past the road we took when we left Kingston that morning and asked Sue if we needed turn around to take that road to get home. She said she didn’t know. Luckily at this point Lurline woke up and was telling Sue to turn around but Sue proceeded to ignore the request.
Needless to say we ended up in the slums/shanty town/ squatter settlement area of Kingston. Now you can imagine the looks we got. Two older black women and me, the only white guy around, on this street so narrow one car could barely fit. The slums of Kingston are a sight I will never forget. The houses made out 4 pieces of roofing metal. No water. No power. Definitely NO bathroom. The stench was unreal in spots. Luckily a few turns later we found a main street and proceeded home to Woodford (about 30 minutes north of Kingston) amazingly unscathed and no worse for wear. It was a very eventful day and I can say that I definitely won’t be travelling anywhere with Miss Sue driving ever again.
~Tom
~Tom
No comments:
Post a Comment