One lady come from UK, go down a Bull Bay
Come fi bury her relative, that is what they say
She hug up Tom, she hug up Sue, hug up Mary and John.
And before you know it, quarantine pon di land.
Quarantine, quarantine, quarantine, quarantine pon di land.
Dis coronavirus mek quarantine pon di land.
Bom bom dey, bah dah dem teh, bah dam teh, bah dam dam
Pickney dem excited when di Prime Minster say
No more school for 14 days, noting to do but play.
Push back all the exam, was not part of the plan
Everybody stay a yaad, Quarantine pon di land.
All di supermarket, full of people all day
Buy out all the Lysol, and sanitizer, and spray
Pack up with di tin meat, pack up dem van and pan
Preparing for the Acts Lord,
Quarantine pon di land.
Every village doctor, say that dey have the cure
Tek garlic and saltwater and you will have it no more
Anoint yuh head with olive oil, wear mask and wash yuh hand
For you cannot escape di quarantine pun di land
In March, my grandmother who lives in Jamaica sent me a song called Quarantine Pon Di Land on WhatsApp. This folk song spoken in Patois captures the history of what is known about how Covid-19 came to Jamaica. Receiving this song from my grandmother was my red flag that Covid-19 was coming closer to my shores. The threat of Covid-19 spread gradually across the world in 2020. Shortly after there were 5 cases announced in Jamaica, schools were closed, but many businesses including Call Centers employing over 300 people kept running. The quarantine the singer describes wasn't really a quarantine. Today, movement is only allowed between 6 AM and 6 PM around the island.
On March 21st, 2020 I flew home to Jamaica in the middle of my Spring semester. I escaped in time to land in Jamaica two days before our borders closed indefinitely. The number of cases of Covid-19 on the day that I wrote the following notes was 25 in Jamaica. More than 300,000 people had contracted the virus worldwide. There were 15,208 cases in the USA. Today in Jamaica there are 288 cases. There are 2,707, 356 cases worldwide and 880, 204 cases in the USA. The spirits of the world, my family, and my friends have changed since I wrote the following notes. The diary entry below is about arriving home to Jamaica, a country with a few cases at the time, and coming from a state with a high number of cases. Coming home meant I was potentially a threat to the people I love, just like this woman from the UK in the song. I could have been asymptomatic. I could have been within the incubation period and put my family at danger not knowing I was sick.
My mother is the Director of the Medical Services across all 11 prisons in Jamaica. In March, she was preparing the correctional facilities for the impact of Covid-19 by dedicating areas for quarantine and isolation inside of each facility. We decided that it was best that I spend my government mandated 2-week quarantine at a friend’s house to protect my mother from contracting the virus, and therefore prevent her from unknowingly spreading the virus to institutions as she completed her visits. I’ve never returned to Jamaica and not been able to return home to my mother. This situation signaled immense unstability to me. The kind friend who hosted me is a Jamaican completing her third year at the University of Florida.
Leah’s house is very spacious. There’s a mango tree that drops mangoes on the roof every 10 minutes. BUDOOF. We slept on blow up beds in the living room to minimize the areas of the house we were in contact with. Croacking lizards lulled us to sleep at nights and, in the day, I entertained myself by chasing these reptiles out of the house. I especially enjoyed throwing hygienic products at them, like sanitizer bottles and baby wipe packages.
Was my mother’s health more important than my friend’s moms because of her medical position? Everyone involved accepted the importance of my mom’s work and the need to put me somewhere else while I figured out if I had the virus. By staying with a friend, I put her family at risk too. Lea was also needing to be in quarantine, so it made sense for us to do it together.
Most mornings I woke up to the sound of Aunty (Leah’s mom) spritzing hydrogen peroxide on the grill. I opened my eyes to auntie with her blue cloth in hand, wiping diligently away at our potential invisible germs. Aunty learned that a cruise ship that was severely affected by the virus noticed that the virus lived for as long as 17 days on metal surfaces. So, every morning, she got up and wiped the same places. These spaces included where Leah and I ate dinner the night before, (Leah and I had a special quarantine table for ourselves), the chairs our shirts pressed on, the padlocks we opened to visit the dog and see the sun, the window opener we twisted to let in the light, and the TV remote.
On my second Sunday I woke up to the roar of motorbikes. At least two motorbikes were racing in the road. I heard angry drivers honking back at them, and I could tell there was probably almost an accident. Sometimes I fell asleep to sounds that reminded me of gunshots. I never assumed though because tires sound this way too. When I would take a walk outside in the lawn, I was not allowed to go farther than the gate. The Jamaican government may have fined recent travelers to Jamaica not observing isolation up to 1 million Jamaican dollars. At that time only travelers to Jamaica within the last 2 weeks had any restrictions on their movement. One afternoon a vehicle I couldn’t see drove by with an announcement on health practices. It mentioned Covid-19, washing hands, and social distancing. I heard it repeat twice before the car drove away. On the last Saturday morning, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” reached me. It sounded like a passing group of grown men and women. I couldn’t see them. It became frustrating to me as an aspiring anthropologist that I could not follow the sounds of life that interested me during quarantine. One day I stood by the gate observing a lively interaction between a man with a leaf blower and a bored looking man in torn clothing who took a seat on the steps of a church. The man with a leaf blower proceeded to blow the leaves off the steps of the church without having the man move away. They were shouting at each other. I couldn’t hear what they were saying across the distance.
Leah and I were eating salmon, pasta, eggs, yoghurt, oatmeal, curry chicken, stew chicken, baked chicken, rice and peas, pigs tail, lychee cheese cake, almond cake, passion fruit juice, orange juice, chick pea burgers, fries, plantains, pineapple, boiled green banana, sweet potato, yam, mashed potato, white rice, ripe banana, apples, whole wheat bread, spinach, eggplant, broccoli, green banana, mackerel rundown, ackee and saltfish, dumpling, pancakes, callaloo, patties, chicken tenders, Ruffles, Lays, and mangoes. Between Leah’s mom, Aunty, and my mom, we got special treats every day. When my mom could she brought fruits, water, soup, and vegetables. Aunty often came back from store trips with patties, pizza, or dessert. I felt my mother’s love very strongly during this time, even across our differing districts. She missed me, but she explained that she had to see herself as both a mother and a doctor at this time. She needed to prioritize the wellbeing of her population, the prisoners. How many decisions would nurses, doctors, and other public health workers have to make between being with their families and saving lives? I imagined myself as part of Leah’s family. We became like children again, depending on Aunty to prepare food for us as it wasn’t safe for us to go in the kitchen.
Aunty gave me a pretty brown dish, bowl, and small plate with a knife, fork, and spoon on my first day. She told me I should only use those, and she gave another blue themed set to Leah. We got Ziploc bags to put our dishware and cutlery in. These were labelled with our names. I was reading articles that predicted that many Jamaicans would go hungry during this time. They predicted that those who had to go to work to get paid including cleaners, garbage men, gardeners, and street vendors, would have a hard time feeding their families for months to come. I had already heard that many Jamaicans had lost their jobs. For Leah and I, quarantine meant delicious home cooked meals everyday, exercise, friendship, Zoom class calls, Sims 3, online reading, and Grey's Anatomy. In other parts of Jamaica, quarantine meant job loss, hunger, theft, and depression. The internet, water, and light were unreliable during my time with Leah, signaling the widespread chaos over the land that barely nipped at us.
One day the government lengthened the mandated quarantine time to 21 days for anyone who came to Jamaica after March 20th. Quarantine would end on April 10th, Good Friday. Leah’s response to learning this was “God always says you can’t get away from him”. Aunty handed us a calendar to mark off the days. By handed I mean that she put it down for us on a surface, so we could pick it up when she wasn’t nearby. That’s what passing something to someone looks like nowadays.
Leah's family was extremely welcoming towards me. Leah and I grew very close in the two weeks. Still, on my second weekend I started missing my family. I asked my brother if he’d come to visit me . I asked him to sit in his car while I greeted him from 6 feet away. I assured him that we would not touch. He told me that he was too important to be put at risk because he was running the national campaign online for Covid-19. This means he was putting up the government’s Facebook videos. He asked me to stay away from him because if he “get sick, the whole of Jamaica will mash up”. This was a phone conversation. We didn’t speak for three weeks after that.
One weekday afternoon, Leah opened the piano cover, and began to play. Her mother responded from the kitchen, “Leah, stop playing the piano. You’re spreading your virus”. Neither Leah nor I had shown any symptoms, but our families had been treating us as if we had the virus for their own precautions. My dad came to visit me on my second Sunday. He had come from the barber. I asked him to bring masks because I coughed once or twice that week. I went outside to the yard and approached the gate. He remained seated in his car for a while. Then he got out to put a paper bag of masks on the grill for me to pick up as soon as he stepped back away from the gate. I tried to take the padlock off the gate, so I could open the gate and stand outside of the yard to talk to my dad. He said “You’re locked in? That’s ok”. In other words, it was no problem that there was a locked metal barrier between us. We weren’t going to be that close together if it was open anyway. So, my dad stood outside the gate, diagonal to me, about 6 feet away, and I stood on the inside of the yard. We talked lovingly to one another across the distance, but whenever I mentioned coughing, coronavirus, or a fever, I saw him take little steps back. He was afraid of me (a little). He has two little kids and a wife at home that he’ll be returning to once he drives away. He looked up at the sky a lot before answering any of my questions. When I asked him if he’d ever imagined that he’d have to greet his daughter this way he shook his head and said only in a movie.
