Hi, my name is Akeem and I recently moved to the US to live. Before coming here, I lived in Jamaica. Now growing up in Jamaica can be fun, but there is one thing I always dreaded: Saturday morning chores.

On Saturday, while most kids elsewhere were probably sleeping in or playing video games or watching cartoons, my mom had us doing chores. She had a strict “Jamaican mom” mentality that the weekend was made for cleaning. My house wasn’t very huge. It was a one story, 3 bedroom house. My brother and I shared a room. Not much to clean, right? You’d think that.

“No child gets up on a Saturday and doesn’t do any work.” Are the oh so familiar words mom would say if when we tried to complain, we being my siblings and I. I remember waking up early one Saturday when I was much younger and just lying in my bed reading a book, not wanting to make any sounds in fear of mom waking up and sending me outside to do something. Her list of duties ranged from dusting the furniture to raking up the leaves from the many trees that populated the front and back of our yard to handwashing mats and when I got older, to washing my own clothes. Mother always said that a child needs to be able to take care of himself when he’s older and that I’d need to learn the necessary skills to survive and as such, when I was able to wash them on my own, my school uniform would never see the light of the washing machine. I had to hand wash them every weekend.

Summer time and holidays in general were even worse. Mom didn’t take the time out while we were there during the week to clean, she still waited until the weekend. And us, as stupid kids, being home all week with minimal chores, we had a field day. We gave ourselves even more work to day when Saturday morning came. Mom was always quick to remind us that we didn’t even try to clean during the week and we’d always retort that she didn’t tell us to. And then she’d ask if she had to tell us everything.

But it wasn’t all bad. Some of the chores were fun. They gave you time to think and sometimes me and my brother even made a race out of it to see who could finish first. However, there was one thing we hated doing. Looking back, I can’t even remember why we hated it, seeing as to how simple a task it was compared to others. The task we hated the most, was washing the dishes. Maybe it was the frequency of how often the kitchen sink would be filled with plates or just something that was off-putting to us for having to do it, but we hated it. Mom, on the other hand, hated our reluctance to doing the dishes.

“Akeem!” I heard that familiar call. I usually pretend that I don’t know notice in hopes that she’d call on someone else to do the dishes. And usually it works, but sometimes after calling on my brother I would hear him retort.

“I washed them this morning” or “It’s Akeem’s turn to wash them” And then Mom would come marching up to my room to retrieve me for my mission.

Looking back, those times were fun. After my chores, I’d get to go outside to play or go out with my friends. Now I have a dishwasher and mom isn’t so strict with the washing machine usage. My list of chores has decreased to simply just cleaning my room and well, while I loved my time in Jamaica, I love this short list of chores too.