Avia Ustanny, Outlook Writer

"IF A pig is hungry enough he will run you down and eat you."

This piece of wisdom we hear on our way to Mocho, a place in which we also discover that bulls dislike women - not that the fact deters woman farmer Oddette Eccles for whom tilling the earth and rearing animals are a calling.

Very little fazes this 34-year-old pepper, pear and sweet potato farmer who has declined to follow her seven siblings to metropolitan centres in North America and the north coast.

For Oddette, Mocho is a little piece of heaven.

For you, the uninitiated, Mocho is pronounced Mo-o-cho - like the coffee - not Mokko, like a hole in the ground.

Oddette's Mocho is a verdant place where everything happens at a slower pace and where, according to Mom, Muriel Eccles, "We are not divided. If we have one cigarette, or one cake, it is shared for everyone."

In this place of fertile red dirt and communal generosity, 52 districts - starting at Shettles, through Summerfield and Dawkins - come together to make up Mocho, an area which gets its name from the Mocho Mountains in that area of Clarendon.

COMMUNITY LIFE

The focus of community life was once farming. The church was also big in community life. The Eccles still attend a nearby assembly which began as a Trashy-mini - a structure made of coconut bows, red dirt and later stone nog. Now, it looks quite modern.

This is the secret that those who choose to stay in Mocho know - that there is no need to run after city life because, eventually, the accoutrements of 'civilised' living will make their way to the Mocho Mountains.

But, to get back to the bad-tempered bull. It is a fact that Muriel Eccles has repeatedly asked her daughter to get rid of him,to sell him to whomever would have him. Oddette will have none of it.

"She says that no one will care for it because it is so bad-tempered," Muriel Eccles told Outlook.

To save his ungrateful carcass, the young women keeps him. Generally, Oddette is like that. At age 23, she decided to come home from her first job as a cosmetologist in Linstead to look after her ailing dad. She later stayed to be with her mother.

"I have seen so many people suffer because their children are abroad. It's not going to happen to my mother," she told Outlook. "There is a lady down the road with 14 children. Every one is in the United States. She suffered before she died. I did not want that to happen to my mother."

Oddette is Muriel's 'wash belly' - her last child - but the daughter insists that she was never spoiled by her mother who was ever ready with the 'rod of correction'.

It is the grandchildren, she says, who are now given egg-shell treatment. But, she does not object, because included in the lot is her 13-year-old son Shane, a student of Denbigh High School and currently the only grandchild at home.

Shane will never have it as good as Oddette did, however. As a student of Mocho Primary School, Oddette recalls the glorious days when she would arrive at school on the first day in September with a new, sharply-pressed uniform, ribbons in her hair and bare feet. Her new shoes would have already arrived at their resting place under a bush and a rock where they would stay until the close of school. Everyone went to school barefooted. It was the thing to do. She also enjoyed playing marbles and cricket.

ONE OF THE GUYS

"I could climb trees and still do. I was one of the guys," the farmer recalls.

Now, she says to Shane, "Go to Sunday School. When you come back, you and I will go to the bull pen." His mother says he enjoys the farm, but cannot make up his mind what he will do later in life.

Shane recently won the outstanding student award for agriculture at Denbigh High, but she notes: "I feel he will become an engineer. He pulls everything apart. I am going to try to get him into Vere Technical High School."

Unlike her son, double-mindedness is an affliction from which the woman farmer has never suffered. Once she decided to stay at home with her Mom, farming also began to receive her undivided love.

Her first experience was a place called Allison's Farm in Mocho. She was a farm hand there until, as she says, "I decided to do things for myself."

Oddette now works on two acres of pears and peppers, yams, potatoes, tangerines, banana and plantain. Side by side with her in the endeavour is Garfield Sinclair, a man of deep belly laughs who also fathered her son.

Oddette and Garfield grow potatoes for the export market. Higglers come to Mocho and buy the other produce. The pepper is sold to Juici Beef, the patty company.

VIGILANCE

Farming demands everyday vigilance.

Oddette's day begins at 5:00 a.m., when she readies her son for school. She may later spend the morning hours selling for her mom at Mocho market.

The rest of the morning involves feeding the pigs which under her watch will never be hungry enough to eat a human.

"The other day the pig birthed 18 piglets," the woman farmer told Outlook proudly.

Then, it is time to go down to the farm where tilling is done by hired help, but Oddette cooks and assists in reaping.

The female farmer is also a Jack of all trades who is very handy with a hammers and nails. From time to time, she repairs leaky roofs herself. In this mountain community, the life she lives is a full one. On Sunday and Thursday nights, she can be found at the youth club where she is chairperson, and she spends Sunday afternoons tramping through the caves of the Mocho mountains with friends and taking photographs.

Life is most enjoyable. "I have never been tempted to live abroad," she tells Outlook.

Of her mother's children, only Oddette and two sons - one living in Ocho Rios and the other in Portland - are in Jamaica.

The remainder include a lawyer in Canada, a teacher in Brooklyn, New York, a daughter who manages a construction company with her husband in New York, a nurse in Miami and another son in New York.

FRUITFUL AND QUIET

"Mocho is cool, fruitful and quiet," Oddette says, stating that she also loves the miraculous way in which plants grow.

"Look at the potatoes. You put a little slip in the ground and take out a big potato."

It is not always easy, she hastens to add, as "sometimes you put in a lot and lose it. In dry times, plants can die. During 'Ivan', I also lost a lot, including my chickens. But, even though a crop might fail you, you cannot give up."

The woman farmer advises: "If you are the type to give up when difficulties come, farming is not for you."

In Mocho, the farm sustains its owners.

"We do not really need to buy food. We kill a pig or a goat now and again. There are callaloo, peppers and tomatoes. The only thing I buy is chicken because I don't have any now."

Oddette loves the farming life. Garfield Sinclair, her friend and partner says: "A lot of women do not like the bush. Oddette is exceptional."

The woman states, "I see myself continuing this way. I may do something else besides it. My father was an excellent cook and I want to do catering too. But, I think I will always be in farming."

Bulls notwithstanding.