It was a whopping 96 degrees in the shade last Thursday afternoon in the Grant’s Pen community as Liz complained to me that the drought was ‘mashing up’ her life.

Uneducated, in her late 50s and with grandchildren to look after, the only work she has ever known is how to wash other people’s clothes and, in general, satisfy their domestic needs like cleaning the bathroom, sanitising the bedrooms, washing the dishes, and keeping the kitchen clean.

“Mi have two work dat mi would normally go, but because dem don’t have any water, dem call mi and seh mi nuh haffi come,” she said.

The few days that she would work, even at cut-rate terms, would have put an extra $5,000 in her pocket. For now, during the drought, that has disappeared. “All mi do now is work fi some people near mi weh nuh really have it. So mi wi do a full day’s work fi all $1,500 because dem have likkle water in di pipe.”

My friend ‘DJ’ has a unique style of delivering his DJ presentations, but the music business is highly unforgiving and, where minor shows are sparse, he does mason work whenever he can get it. “Ah two work mi get and den get di call seh no water in di area. No cement can’t mix because di drum a water wi did ketch finish,” he said. The lost cost to him? $6,000.

Close to where I live it is common to see the poor trudging the streets with plastic bottles heading for an area where there is piped water. Trucks with the precious commodity are a feature. It happens just about every year and we never seem to learn.

The upper middle class areas contain households which can afford to install multiple plastic tanks, either gravity-fed or powered by pumps and air tanks. When all costs are added up, installing even a 650-gallon plastic tank with powered supply will average at around $100,000, too much for those so-called lower middle class households which are barely taking that home on a monthly basis.

And, of course, the idea behind installing a plastic tank is to harvest and store water whenever it runs in the National Water Commission (NWC) system. If the water does in fact run out, the only choice is to purchase it from private water supply truckers, another exorbitant cost on the household.

Jamaica has a mountainous ridge stretching almost all the way from east to west. We should have spent the last 40 years building huge collecting and storage systems on these ridges to gravity-feed water to the communities below. It seems that what we have done instead is rely on run-off from natural water supply systems, collect and store in mid-level reservoirs and dams and, in addition to feeding the treated and filtered water to the many urban areas on the relatively flat land, the NWC is also forced to re-feed water by powered pumping systems back up to the many rural communities still existing on hilly land in Jamaica.

We know, of course, that when the rains begin to fall in September or October, the economic water woes will have increased. And we also know that we will have moved from a full drought to the likelihood of severe flooding. We have been here before, we have seen it before, and still we do nothing.

Kay Osborne did the right thing

When Kay Osborne — a good, decent woman — resigned as executive director of Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), I was not surprised.

Of course, she had the option of remaining in her post and fighting off the many snarls and growls from those who had formed the view that while she was executive director she was a mere ‘visitor’ there. How dare this ‘visitor’ attempt to defend her honour, her integrity and her name!

For her to have remained would have taken away from the objectives — real and imagined — of the organisation. Unlike many others in the Jamaican society, I am one of those who happens to believe that JFJ was ahead of its time and it had performed well on matters that too many Jamaicans were prepared to fall asleep on — State injustice.

Just about two years ago I saw a policeman order a law-abiding citizen to lie on his belly while the policeman began to ‘crank up’ his firearm. What was the crime of the citizen? He had rented his premises to a young woman and, unknown to him, she was harbouring a man who was wanted by the police.

The fugitive was hardly showing his face in the community and it was when he dared to venture out someone saw him and alerted the police. Even at that stage the man who owned the premises was totally unaware of what was happening.

When carloads of police came the morning, they were all about net-fishing in suspecting all others who were in the area and especially in the yard.

As the policeman ‘cranked up’ it was a very street-wise man in his early 60s who lived nearby who said to the policeman, “Whey yu a go kill di man for? A weh him do? Di man a good citizen an’ a mi fren.”

The policeman became nervous as other citizens nearby became empowered. In about a minute he walked away and the man got up crying. He knew how close he came to death and, for what? The trigger-happy nature of too many our policemen.

JFJ has intervened in many of these instances and in others where, unknown to the public at large, certain policemen have issued threats of death to citizens living in poor, inner-city communities. How many lives have the efforts of Carolyn Gomes and JFJ saved in these interventions? They must be commended.

It is my view that at some stage the original objectives became larger than they were to the public. Something else crept in. Kay Osborne was about to be sucked into an area that would have totally made the objectives of JFJ irrelevant.

She resigned and now there is a big question as to how JFJ will go about salvaging what is left of its soul. I wish her well and know that she will survive and do quite well in her next professional pursuits. observemark@gmail.com