Market Experience....Look up! a star!

Look up! Tilt your head way back and look into the very center of the faintly lightening sky of a Jamaican dawn. One loan star shines and blinks through scattered clouds. Think: everyone you know could see that same star, thousands of miles across the land. "What are you lookin' at?" A young Jamaican woman looks up with me, then when I say "one star in the whole sky", she looks at me like I'm completely crazy! Perhaps she only sees the old dirty tarps strung on ropes overhead, making a makeshift roof for the hundreds of produce farmers in the timelessly old Linstead Market. I keep glancing up, holding to my touchstone star. It's one world,one home,one time to live.
   When I peel my banana this morning, I remember the faces of the men who sold them ~ a family, young and old, standing in the dark street, overflowing with heaps of garbage. An old goat sifts through the debris. When I eat my pineapple and watermelon, I see the smiles and hear the welcoming greetings of the "deep rural" women selling inside the old market building ~ their beautiful mounds of cabbage, beans, peppers and ginger. Ginger! Huge piles of ginger root, and everyone buying it as a staple! Another man we visit sells us very large bundles of scallions and thyme. 
   The young man who sells tomatoes, cucumbers, plantain and green bananas by the tree branch)bunch) is a friend, as are all the sellers and farmers in this intimate yet bustling community.
Hand trucks made of wood with a steering wheel maneuver through tight aisles and filthy streets. Some young men sail by as if on skateboards!

   Here, because Linstead is small(unlike the huge city Kingston market), everyone knows each other. Everyone laughs, greets, asks if we are blessed this morning before dawn, helps, accepts....never astonished that I am like that lone star: one lone white person in a thousand faces of various darker shades. I have no pictures of the market..this is just another day, another town....it would not be wise or appropriate to take pictures while "integrating", as the Peace Corps calls it. At 4 AM, we wander through the happy hard-working market, my host family's mother connecting with patients and friends(she is a parish(county) nurse). People call me "miss" and "beautiful" and "lady" and "love" and "sweetheart"..men and women alike. In a harsh land of beauty, it is their way..,to give and help.
(top photo is ackee, a Jamaican fruit)