What happens when the conversation you dreamed of joining turns out to be very different from the one you expected?

And what do a Permanent Secretary, a BMW, an old Ford pickup, an unwanted Jeep and a woman named Pam have to do with becoming part of Jamaica?

In this episode of Notes from Between Worlds, I return to the beginning of my eight years in Jamaica.

It starts with a thought from Gabriel García Márquez: perhaps life is not simply what we lived, but what we remember — and how we remember it in order to tell it. Memory makes its own choices.

From there, the story moves to Kingston in the early 1990s: my first meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture, an unexpected question from the Permanent Secretary and the realization that international cooperation looked r ...