It’s a hot, sultry Saturday, the air thick with humidity, the news crammed with combative politics, the atmosphere heavy with crime, hostility, intolerance and willful ignorance.

But not here. This is the Pollyberg gas station where Ahsham Nibbs has worked for 10 years or so, quietly dispensing goodwill along with good service – and, of course, fuel. He’s one reason the station has kept its reputation as a neighborhood business and kept a strong customer base despite months of disruption due to street repairs and renovations.

“Everything cool, Magras?” Nibbs asks a driver as a car containing a middle-aged couple pulls up to the pumps. “Look like you going shopping. You want my list too?”

“How much you getting, brother?” he asks as another car pulls in behind the first.

Meanwhile, he takes a moment out to direct the young woman driving a third car – whose tires he just checked – away from the air pump and back onto the busy street.

“I like dealing with customers,” he says. “I like to make them smile; they come in with a frown, they have to leave with a smile.”

Sometimes people even tell him that he turned their day around for them.

When he started at the station – formerly a Texaco, now Puma – he said he received some training in customer service, then, “I added my flavor to it … I always treat people the way I like to be treated.”

As if on cue, the driver of a passing car honks and waves. Nibbs waves back. Again and again, such greetings punctuate the morning.

Often confined under a cap, today Nibbs’ dreadlocks swing free down his back, proclaiming his commitment to Rastafarian life. He’s well aware that some people think he’s an anomaly, but he says he is not an exception, he’s the norm.

“Some people just have the wrong idea” about the Rastafarian movement, he said. They are confused by street thugs who’ve borrowed some of its style, but not its philosophy. “We don’t like violence at all.”

Growing up in Kirwan Terrace, Nibbs said he saw the rough side of life, but he also had what he sees as a great advantage: a strong traditional family.

His parents, Lawrence and Barbara Nibbs, raised four girls and three boys.

“There were seven of us. All lived in the same house,” he said.

And that, he says, gave him a perspective that not everyone shares.

“I have friends who never met their father. And we just don’t think alike.”

At 32, Nibbs is married and has started a family of his own. He and his wife, Shirley Nibbs, both went to Charlotte Amalie High School, but she was a year ahead of him and they didn’t know one another as teens.

“I met her right here in the gas station. I guess she’d been watching me for a while.”

As Nibbs tells the story, she made the first move, but he was happy to follow up. In December they’ll celebrate their fourth anniversary.

“I got a little girl making three in January,” he said.

His daughter is part of the reason he’s concerned about violence, crime, and gangs in the community.

“I go out and talk with the youth,” he said. “A lot of them are in trouble because they have no fear in their hearts.” They don’t fear God, or the police, or anyone. “Some of them, you get through. And some of them are lost. You just have to let it go.”

One of these days, Nibbs said he wants to get back to college. He dropped out of the University of the Virgin Islands after two years when he hit a rough spot in his life. But he’d like to complete his degree in business management and put it to good use.

“I’m a person who doesn’t like to leave things unfinished, so I want to get back to it, even if I have to go on-line,” he said.

Another car passes. Another honk, another wave, another smile.