As I have stated many times over, Accompong Town is a very mellow and mostly uneventful place to live and, frankly, I really like it like that. Lack of drama makes for a predictable pace of life and allows one to concentrate on the little things that normally are obscured by the ebb and flow of emotions.

The dramatic breaks in this “Stepford Style” life are what stories are made from. One such dramatic break was the National Election on December 29th, 2011.

Living in the United States and being a little bit of a Political Junkie, you are constantly bombarded by personal attack ads and sound bytes from all sides of the political spectrum but for this election in Jamaica, the tone was fairly respectful and for the most part politicians on both sides discussed the problems and proposed solutions to them instead of going negative.

It was a constant barrage of the “Vote for Labor” jingle and the PNP’s Soca-style jingle that was a little hard to understand all the words as they were in colloquial Patios. Every once in a while a vehicle with bull horns on the roof would pass through the town extolling the virtues of the MP from North Saint Elizabeth. After all, under the Jamaican (English-based) form of government, the party with the most seats in Parliament gets the right to have their chosen Member of Parliament elevated to the position of “Prime” Minister.

Starting around Christmas (which was celebrated twice that year as it landed on a Sunday); through Boxing Day and on to the 29th, you started to see the familiar colors of the PNP (orange) and JLP (green) being worn by some people in the community and the discussions at the local shop in the evening were often spirited when the topic of the election reared its head.

Finally, Election Day was here and all the political advertising stopped as suddenly as it began when the date of the election was announced by Andrew Holness the sitting Prime Minister. In Accompong Town the voting place was the school on top of the hill and small groups of people intermittently made their way there to vote from morning until the polls closed that evening.

Around poll closing time, I made my way over to Winsome and Troy’s small store to listen in with a group of local residents to the results as they were announced. A group of three youth in their 20’s whom I knew some years back when they were barely teenagers asked me to play some dominoes with them which I gladly agreed to do.

Our two opponents, one wearing PNP Orange and the other JLP Green systematically kicked our butts as they had a system worked out to pass the information about each of their holdings of dominoes which made playing so much easier. I knew they were “cheating” but it was a friendly game so I just tried my best to get a few good plays here and there and surprisingly I did seem to manage enough to maybe even impress my partner as well as our opponents.

In the background, I kept hearing the results until finally a big cheer went up as the PNP and Portia Simpson Miller won a landslide majority. Our game just continued as if nothing even happened at all. The reason I found this so interesting is that I have been in Jamaica during three previous elections and have witnessed violence and bloodshed so I was a little nervous to see what would happen.

Around midnight, the guys wanted to leave to go to a dance so we fist-bumped our goodbyes and I headed back to my house somewhat bewildered by the calmness of this election.

The next morning, I woke up to a rising sun and a change in political leadership but Accompong Town had not changed and that was to my liking.

Peace and Guidance.