Jamaica

KINGSTON, Jamaica - It is midmorning on a Monday in Kingston. There'd been rain earlier, so in a neighborhood called Trench Town, where Kingston's poorest residents live, the unpaved streets resemble butterscotch pudding. Goats rummage through piles of moldering trash. A half-naked woman shuffles by, her head wrapped in a bandana imprinted with a design of $100 bills. Leaning against a half-fallen cinder-block wall, teen-age boys loiter, drinking beer and passing around a marijuana cigar.

In Jamaica, soccer is king and Machel Millwood was one of its most loyal subjects. "It's like the No. 1 sport with, maybe, cricket," said Millwood, whose speed, skills and athleticism have made the Towson University forward one of the Colonial Athletic Association's premier players. "You go to a high school soccer game there, you'll have more people than at a MLS [Major League Soccer] game here." When Millwood left Kingston for College Park in 1996, he was a member of the Jamaican under-17 national team and so advanced in the sport that the high school game in Prince George's County was easy pickings.

NEW YORK -- The diamondback terrapin dug herself a hole in the middle of a sandy trail at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge along the south shore of Queens and went right to work, apparently oblivious to the biologist crouching 20 feet away and trying not to breathe. In just a few minutes, she laid a dozen inchlong eggs in the hole, filled it in, danced her wide-webbed back feet on the sand to tamp it flat and ambled back toward the water. Before the turtle, a sturdy specimen with black spots on her face and a barnacle on her back, could get far, the biologist, Professor Russell L. Burke of Hofstra University, scooped her up and set her in a bucket with two others.

Mr. Potter, by Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 195 pages. $18. I know it's a thuggish thing to ask, but I wonder how many readers there are, in 2002, for Jamaica Kincaid's prose. Let's start with the first sentence of Mr. Potter, her new novel: "And that day, the sun was in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, and it shone in its usual way so harshly bright, making even the shadows pale, making even the shadows seek shelter; that day the sun was in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, but Mr. Potter did not note this, so accustomed was he to this, the sun in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky" That's not the whole sentence, but it is more than half, and I wonder how many readers there are, in 2002, for that brand of lyricism, that repetition, in rhythm and word choice, with which Kincaid attempts to re-create consciousness itself, and resurrect her dead father, the titular Mr. Potter, whom she never knew.

A visit to disease-ravaged Uganda. A drama about the European slave trade, told from the perspective of the Africans who did the trading. A comedy touching on the role of women in Senegalese society. And a documentary about how Jamaica is suffering under the practices of the World Bank. The African Diaspora II: More New Black Cinema from Africa and Beyond, a four-film series opening tonight at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is more than just a look at films by or about Africans. It is, says organizer Gabe Wardell, an attempt to expose Baltimore film audiences to works that might otherwise pass them by, as well as to remind them that Afrocentric cinema encompasses a wide variety of viewpoints.

FOXBORO, Mass. - In a dramatic turn for the positive, the U.S. national soccer team was able to restore order with a dominating second half that earned a 2-1 win over Jamaica yesterday afternoon in the friendly confines of Foxboro Stadium. The biggest news was yet to come: The U.S. team qualified for its fourth straight World Cup appearance next year in Japan and South Korea with some unexpected help from abroad. Shortly after forward Joe-Max Moore's second goal of the game, on a penalty kick, broke a 1-1 tie in the 81st minute, word spread of developments in two other qualifying games.

On June 20, the U.S. men confidently walked off the field at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts, a 2-0 winner over Trinidad and Tobago that astoundingly put them a stone's throw from advancing to their fourth straight World Cup with the 10-match final qualifying round only halfway complete. Since permitting just one goal during a 4-0-1 start -- comfortably putting them atop the six-team region from North and Central America and the Caribbean with 13 points -- the Americans have floundered with an injury-riddled attack overshadowed only by a suddenly dysfunctional back line.

I wake, as I fell asleep, to the crashing waves. On other vacations, the fantasy of sleeping by the ocean hasn't quite materialized. Either we're too far from the shore, we've had to shut the windows and run the AC, or there's been a little hurricane or some such. But this airy white room with its big four-poster bed is perfectly cooled by breezes and a ceiling fan, and it overlooks the sea. An early riser, I slip out of bed without waking husband or baby. I tiptoe out to the wide veranda that encircles the house, roofed in some areas, latticed in others.

U.S. Navy holds major exercise in South China Sea HONG KONG - The U.S. Navy held an unusually large exercise in the South China Sea, three days before sending a battle group into Hong Kong for a port call. There was no immediate response from the Chinese government to the drill Friday by two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups - described by the U.S. Navy as a "rare meeting at sea" - but one defense analyst said yesterday that it was a show of force to China. VW workers in Mexico strike for pay increase MEXICO CITY - Workers at Volkswagen AG's Mexico plant walked off the job yesterday, bringing a halt to the German automaker's production of the new Beetle, which it exports to 80 countries.

NEW YORK - It was an unlikely setting for a hurricane hunt. The sun blazed. A gentle breeze tickled Jamaica Bay, which lies between Kennedy International Airport in New York and the ocean beaches of the Rockaways on western Long Island. Instead of looking skyward, three scientists buzzed across the sheltered waters in rented skiffs, stopping occasionally to sink a slender metal probe into jigsaw islets of green salt marsh. When they finished, a bay farther east and a sunny day later, they were muddy but exuberant.