Jean

I think I'll tell you about one of the caretakers here, a good one.

The ones that get me up in the morning most weekdays are really good at their jobs and are usually in a good humor. The first one I'll tell you about is Jean. She is the lead. She is a tall, thin (but healthy!) woman from Jamaica of about 40 years old. She always seems to be in an "up" mood, and is usually singing and laughing and dancing. She is very proficient at her job, and acts professionally.

I try to learn jokes to tell her because Broken English is her first language, and therefore she understands them. She tells lots of stories from her childhood in Jamaica. It seems to have been a place where the kids really had to toe the line and listen to teachers and parents. The school principal, she tells me, was a bad man who said all the teachers were "caca".

The other day, I asked her to tell me a joke, and she she told me about a time when she was a girl. She was at the top of a hill, and the latrine was at the bottom of the hill. She wanted to use the latrine, but she looked down and there was a man in a big hat, sitting in there, nodding up and down. She waited and waited and waited. Finally she went running, yelling, "Pa! Pa! There is a man a big hat who is just sitting and nodding in the latrine." So her Pa came running, and he went down to the latrine and found that what she was seeing was the shadow of a banana leaf.