THE last sentence of the story was the saddest and the most shocking. “Why did he have to kill her? He could have just raped her, she would never have gone to the police.”

That thought reeks of a depth of hopelessness and desperation that is horrible to even begin to contemplate. The words come from Diana, a 14-year-old girl from Portmore who, with her 20 year-old sister seemed to have been the only friends of Tamara Monique Gray also 14, murdered about a month ago.

Tamara’s story is told in one of the best pieces of reporting I have read for years, by an Observer reporter — Caroline Turriff, who I salute for doing for Tamara dead what few people did while she was alive: She treated her as a human being. In Jamaican journalism, that is sufficiently unusual to be remarked.

Tamara’s friend Diana told Turriff: “Many people would tell her she was ugly and retarded and would threaten to rape or kill her …No one here liked her… no one at school liked her.”

Turriff talked to all the main actors in this sad story, and dispassionately recounts their pathetic excuses, evasions, irresponsibilities and most telling of all, almost total lack of compassion and respect.

Diana stood up for Tamara: “She wasn’t ugly, she was a very bright girl,… But she would walk kinda funny and draw her words out and she had something wrong with her lip so people would call her cow-bite or retard. She often came and hid in our house.”

Turriff quotes Diana and her sister as saying “The other children at Greater Portmore High would beat her, cow-itch her, throw dirty food and chairs at her, steal her lunch money, give her dirty water to drink.”

Tamara wasn’t her mother’s favourite child, according to the principal of the school. He alleged that the mother “had totally rejected her daughter and didn’t like her and allowed her to go to school dirty and unkempt”. How he would have known all this is open to question, since Tamara was absent from school for four months before the principal noticed, and he did because she was reported murdered.

Tamara’s mother blames the Glenhope Place of Safety into which Tamara was dumped when she (the mother) told a judge that she couldn’t control Tamara. . Tamara, it appears, had gone looking for love in all the wrong places. According to Diana, when she wasn’t out somewhere, she was either hiding at her friend Diana’s home or she was closeted at her own home, “writing songs” according to Diana.

At Glenhope she was as unmercifully bullied, as she had been at school. The superintendent of the so-called Place of Safety says that she had no reports of bullying, although the children “knew nothing but violence and aggression” and would “tease” quiet children if they were not as ‘rough’ as the rest.

Her mother cared sufficiently to petition the judge to allow Tamara to leave Glenhope and come back home. After the judge granted permission, Tamara went to Glenhope, alone, to pick up her clothes. A few days later her naked body was found in a canefield. She had been raped and strangled.

A man was heard boasting that he had killed a 19 year-old girl. At some point, Tamara had been heard telling that man that she was 19.

Nuking the community

A few months ago, I reported on a survey done for one of the AIDS/HIV education and prevention programmes. One survey found that six per cent of children under 14 had attempted suicide, while another survey found that double that proportion of 10 to 14 year olds had tried to kill themselves.

The surveys found important correlations between the ambience in which the children lived and tendencies toward high-risk behaviours — violence, stealing, substance abuse and early sexual intercourse. The surveys recommended that if the children were to be rescued, they needed serious attention well before they reached the age of 10, because by 10, bad habits had already been established. In the survey of 10 to 14 year olds, nearly one in five children admitted intoxication (being drunk) from alcohol.

Major contributors to these behaviours is a breakdown of community, poverty and the lack of access to services such as schools and medical advice. The communities start cracking up in the homes, where fathers are absent, stepfathers and other males are predatory and abusive and the whole atmosphere appears to be every man for himself and the devil take the children.

It would be unjust, my critics will say, to mention in this connection structural adjustment, globalisation, devaluation, deregulation, privatisation, divestment, unemployment and poverty as possible contributing factors.

The most alarming fact about these surveys is that they were done in a parish which is a major beneficiary of the tourist trade and of bauxite, the main pillars of Jamaica’s economy.

If it is true of St Ann, what does it say about the rest of Jamaica?

Meanwhile, great things are afoot in our glorious homeland. Without consultation, investigation or apparent reason, the government is to amalgamate the parishes of Trelawny and St James. This, at a stroke, will unleash Mayor Solomon of Montego Bay on the peaceful, God-fearing people of Trelawny. As a parishioner, I dread the consequences. Messrs Patterson and Bertram alone know why, and they are not telling. Simultaneously, Mr Cartade is assisted to pillage our biodiversity on Long Mountain and Dr Vin Lawrence and Co is let loose in Hellshire, not to speak of the biggest economic and environmental threat of all, the Millennium Highway. Our fundamentals are sound. Indubitably! The IMF says so.

Brute Force and Arrogance

On the roots of the mangroves in Kingston Harbour and perhaps elsewhere in Jamaica, there grows a tiny animal, smaller than the first joint in the average adult’s little finger, an orange-coloured soft-bodied creature which looks more like a flower than an animal. The name of this insignificant beast is Ecteinascidia turbinata — known to its admirers as a sea-squirt. It is one of a number of marine animals which manufacture proteins that are proving effective in fighting cancer and may yield substances which may be able to defeat other diseases. A big Spanish drug company, PharmaMar, has bought the rights to a new drug derived from one of the sea squirt’s proteins.

According to PharmaMar: “ET-743 (Ecteinascidin) is the first and one of the most promising drugs in PharmaMar’s pipeline…. PharmaMar synthesizes ET-743 at its facilities in Madrid, Spain.

“Early trial results have indicated that ET-743 may eventually play a role in treating certain soft tissue sarcomas and other cancers. Anti-tumor activity was observed in all Phase I studies, which were conducted on patients with advanced-stage breast, colon, ovarian and lung cancer, melanoma, mesothelioma and several types of sarcoma … Ecteinascidin not only shrinks and kills tumours, it also restricts cancer’s ability to resist other drugs.

In the United States, a Nobel prizewinning chemist, Dr Ellis J Corey is working to perfect methods of synthesizing ET-743. They need to do this because the sea squirt is not all that plentiful and courtesy of the Port Authority of Jamaica and its toxic dredging programme, may soon be in even shorter supply.

It takes a ton of sea squirts to make one gram of ET-743. But the drug is potent. According to Michael Vatalaro of the AP, 5 kilos of the stuff may be sufficient to supply all the world’s research and clinical needs for a few years. Even if this is true, the sea squirt may have other surprises up its sleeve, so to speak. The animal itself needs to be researched thoroughly.

Jamaica, because of its rich biodiversity, and its habit of producing unique life forms, could, in theory, become a vast lab for discovering and exploiting the riches in Jamaica’s incredible number of unique life forms.

Even if, as in the case of ET-743 a drug can be synthesized, it first has to be found in nature. We could make a great industry out of our biodiversity. Who knows what is hidden in our 550 varieties of snails for instance? Nobody knew of the existence of a stingless bee found nowhere on earth but in Hellshire until a university team did a quick and dirty survey there in 1970.

And who knows what life forms are — in deference to yuppie culture — being denied lebensraum on Long Mountain? Scientists have catalogued thousands of animals and plants, but if they are wiped out, no one will be able to examine them. Destroying what we know is bad enough. Destroying what we don’t know would seem to me to be a crime against humanity.

Never mind, we have the tourist industry, bauxite, sugar and bananas and the Port Authority to keep us happy, if not rich.

Copyright &Copy;2002 John Maxwell