Making friends

I love making friends and I need friends. Our experience in Jamaica was difficult because we had a hard time making friends with locals, although we did make friends with some ex-pats. I think a number of things account for it. We stuck out like sore thumbs, and people tried really hard to sell us trinkets that we didn't need (or have room for, since we were backpacking) and we got swindled many times. Men were constantly making cat calls at me. We were traumatized by a man who followed us and tried to demand money, and we hardly felt safe the entire trip. We tried to find an NGO there but the only one we found was closed.  

I still have a hard time processing the trip. I learned several things about Jamaica that shed some light on the way things are there: We learned from our Lonely Planet that Jamaica's biggest industry is tourism. So any recession in the U.S. hits Jamaica pretty hard. It's biggest industry was once sugar cane, and the black population there now descended from the African slaves brought there to work on the sugar plantations, and none of the native Arawak people survive from when Columbus arrived. 

Jamaica has many all-inclusive resorts where visitors go. Just outside these resorts, it is known that there are many peddlers who hassle them to buy and so most people avoid leaving the all-inclusives if necessary. Therefore, most of the money is generated from these all-inclusives. And unfortunately, many of these all-inclusive resorts are owned by foreign companies.

After talking to some young men at a dance party, we learned that they didn't have the hope or expectation to end up with one person for the rest of their lives. At church, we learned that marriage is not common. 

Again, I am still not sure how to talk about Jamaica. We had a rough time. I was really disappointed that I understood very little about Jamaica, and by not making friends with anyone. I was too scared, and I feel really guilty about it. I have a hard time knowing what else I should have done differently, when safety was a big concern and probably what kept me from people and the culture. I think it hurts to think about, because it probably has much to do with my inability to make friends with people who I can't seem to relate to, who are different from me. I know that I could have had a different experience, but I am still not sure how, even almost a year later. It is a beautiful place, fascinating history and culture, and it somehow evaded me. I think that someday, we want to sail around the Caribbean, and maybe I will be better at entering cultures and making friends and we will go back to Jamaica.