Sidi Mansour vs Ma Baker

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Life in Kingston, Jamaica was sometimes like living in a war zone: occasional bursts of excitement — driving after dark through a ghetto zone, boarding up the windows as a hurricane approached — interspersed with long periods of boredom, for the city does not offer much in the way of amusement for a young family […]

Addicted to Alice

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

I got a chunky translation job last month, 61 pages of sobering and inspiring information about childhood in Senegal: sobering to read that children’s charity X allows a maximum grant of US$5 per month; inspiring when I think of the hundreds of people freely offering their time and experience to help others less fortunate than […]

Shaking Up Orange Street

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Part II of my downtown tour should be loading below. It took a little longer to finish than I’d hoped, partly because I wanted to make it look better than my previous clip, and partly because uploading it to YouTube is very very slow.
As I’ve recommended previously, if your bandwidth is as bad as […]

Jamaica rundown

Friday, March 9th, 2007

The opening match of the Cricket World Cup (CWC) 2007 takes place on Tuesday 13 March, at Sabina Park, here in Kingston. Throughout the last year, the complaints and criticisms of the organization of the event have dominated all discussions about the World Cup — lack of Internet access for pre-booking tickets, closure of public […]

Two cultures clash

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Talk of banning the “dance of death” is still doing the rounds here in Kingston, or at least it was this morning at the hairdresser’s. The dance in question is of course the “Dutty Wine”. In a country where new dance moves pop up every week, the Dutty Wine has shown unusual endurance since its […]