Dust in we face

Pass a rag on your face. Now watch it.

Nice, ent?

What you does call that colour? Muck brown? Dirty black? Soot gray? Construction dust yellow?

It have a breeze that does blow through town these days that dirty, dirty, dirty. It heavy with fine sand and dry mud. It in your hair, on your skin, in your mouth and all, till everything you eating have a kind of gravelly crunch like you by Maracas eating bake and shark in the wind.

Woman foot and them looking ashy, ashy, ashy, like if they didn’t grease it down with cream that morning; man shoes, from Tims to Stacey Adams, looking like they walk from the Cocal when they just walk two-three blocks in town.

Everywhere you turn is a new building going up. Office block, apartment, townhouse, car park, hotel. You name it, it building. And in town, most of that is government project.

Now, me ent no business head, eh, so I could be way off here. But from how I seeing it, it seem to me like we spending a set of money on putting up buildings when the real heart of town burning down. I talking about the people, especially the little boys who does be line off on Chacon Street when the day come, hustling for a dollar.

God alone know what they does be doing when the night come, but knowing town, is nothing good. Man in nice car go pull up cool, cool, and is gone them boys gone. And that is the ones who only hustling; it have boys who doing worse, going for the gun because they ent have nothing to live for and so they figure they might as well dead.

You would think that somebody woulda realise we have too much vagrant on the road. I not saying that the Government need to build a next building to put them, but why we can’t pay for a study to find out why it have so much? What pushing these people—young, old, black, Indian, man, woman and child—out on the road so?

But in a place where the Domestic Violence Coalition under pressure and nearly ready to close down because it ent have no money, it ent no surprise, nah. The coalition doing the work the Government not doing, or can’t do, but when it come to money, Miss D and them have to scrunt and go hat in hand all over the place to get a little penny to pay they staff. So what is homeless people to ignore? Nothing at all.

Some people was giving me a drop home the other night and we happen to drive through town. The man nearly rip off he back axle on a road that pave bad and he woman start to quarrel about how town roads so bad. She want to know how the Government spending so much money on all them new building but they can’t fix the road.

I had was to agree with she, yes. The pavements and all mash up, like if we in Beirut and bombs going off too regular for we to fix the damage.

But the dust flying. We keep on finding more ways to spend the little bit of money we getting from oil and gas, till it come like we money really just blowing in the wind like that same dust the construction raising.

My neighbour trying to build a house for the last year and she can’t finish up to now. Since she start cement gone up, concrete blocks gone up, steel gone up. Labour gone up, too, and, worst yet, is because she can’t get labour in the first place because all the mason and plumber and carpenter working on government contract.

I glad for the fellas who making paper off the Government in this construction boom, but I sorry for people who have to pay the price. And all like me so who want to build house and thing with small money go suck salt.

But the thing that worrying me more than that is what we going to find out in ten years about all them building. Just like how the pretty, pretty airport have a ugly backside, I shaking in my shoes to imagine what bobol and corruption we go hear about when Miss Thing and the children she age reach big.

Because, like my friend the Prof did tell me over lunch a day not too long now, it have nothing that could hide money like construction. “You think it’s a coincidence they’re starting all these projects? A stadium in Tarouba that nobody wants?” he ask me, he green eyes narrow, narrow, he half-Yankee accent sounding more Yankee because that is how he does talk when he vex.

No, Prof, I don’t think is a coincidence. But hope springs eternal in the human heart and I going down wishing, praying that this time we politicians go know better.

That when the dust settle, we ent go end up with dirt still in we face.