Rounding Off The Story

Here it is, already December of 2012.  I am writing from my new apartment home in Sandy Springs, GA, where I hold down a job at Aptean, Inc.'s new global headquarters.

I am very thankful to God for directing my path to this new development, but even more so for protecting me and seeing me through my 27 months in St. Kitts.  As with all PCVs, undoubtedly, I had my share of experiences when I didn't know if I would even want to stay any longer, but with God's help, I got through the tough times, the scary times, and even the boring in-between times.  Now when I'm not tailoring a database query or constructing a Crystal report, I am daydreaming fondly of the sunsets at Shipwreck Beach Bar, or leading the kids in a math activity, or hiking the rainforest interior.  I never thought I would be subject to the same truth that so many other volunteers before me had averred: "You will leave realizing you are taking more with you than you left behind."  But now, just a couple months after returning to the States, I know this to be true for me too. 

It was my pleasure before leaving to participate at the 3rd Annual 2K Walk and 5K Run in support of the St. Christopher Children's Home, my second occasion to do so.   This time, however, I volunteered to man the t-shirt distribution table – handing out shirts to all registered runners and donors.  It was a great success, raising in excess of EC$200,000 for the orphanage's 2013 operating expenses.  Plenty of people, Kittitians, Brits, Ross Students, and PCVs alike all gather in the interest of contributing to the worthy cause, and it has been a great joy for me and many of the other Hashers to align ourselves with the annual event.  The 5K race spans the length of the Royal St. Kitts Golf Club course, reaching all the way out to Half Moon Bay.  I ran the course in 2010, and I can say with some degree of confidence that the assertion that the path is only 5 kilometers long is a lie.  I know when I reached 5 kilometers, and I still had at least half a kilometer yet to go.  Anyway, having occasion to help out at the Children's Home myself, I know what a blessing the knowledge that all the resources the home needs are taken care of will be to the sweet people that help out there, and also to the kids. 

Well well, it's a new (and final) blog header.  Just in time to celebrate over 10,000 blog pageviews.  Woo!

Rounding Off the List

The Peace Corps purchased my ticket for the 18th of next month, and so I have precisely 27 days remaining in my term of service.  I accepted this reality long ago – at around six months out, I first started dealing with the realization that I had not long to go, and that I should temper my expectations accordingly.  On the other hand, as a rule, West Indians are reluctant to deal with rapid changes.  As I wrote in my sixth and final Volunteer Report Form:

Even positive changes are met with mild degrees of consternation, usually manifesting in the form of public grumblings.  The irony of it all is that, while my initial arrivals into work and social scenarios was met with some standoffish-ness and questions of "Why are you volunteering here?" those same people are now looking at me with deep regard and asking me to reconsider leaving.  As the stereotype holds, the nature of Kittitians is to focus almost exclusively on the present, largely at the expense of the past and future.  The curious practical offshoot of this is that a full two years after my arrival on island, people are surprised to hear that it is now my time to go.  And while I have since made peace with this, my last month or so on island, it is challenging for me to have to tell the long story every time about why I can't stay any longer.  I even include the reasons why I would want to stay, like what I would do if I stayed with the Peace Corps.  It all serves to simply make me consider every time just how much longer I have before I won't be required to answer those questions any longer.

I hiked Nevis Peak this past weekend.  It was really, really hard, and largely treacherous.  A two hour climb that involved over thirty muddy ropes, at least two flat rock faces that we had to cross laterally, and one great view that made it all worthwhile in the end.  As the reader may recall, Nevis Peak is visible from my home every day, and about 364 days out of the year it is ringed at the top by some puffy white clouds.  Hence the name: as legend has it, when Columbus (re-)discovered the smaller of the two islands, called Oualie by the Caribs there, he rechristened it Nevis (Nee`-vis), a derivative of the Spanish word for "snowy."  It stands exactly 3232 feet above sea level, the second-tallest peak in the federation.

The first "window" on the way up the slope. 
You can see we are still well below cloud level, but this would change very shortly.

 I can't emphasize how treacherous the hike up the slope was.  The exhausting hike climb was replete with ropes to aid the roughly 70° angle that was our ascent for a solid two hours.  It is always damp in the rainforest, and so the ropes were waterlogged and muddy.  This made for largely easy gripping on the way up, to our benefit, but once the mud and grime on our hands dried, and with no more water to wash them off, the ropes became much more slippery on the way down. 

Our guide, Evanston, made sure we didn't veer off course. 
There wasn't a lot he could do to prevent us from falling on our face, however.

 I did come close to falling to my doom at one point, where I was anchored by only a rope above me and my foot lodged in a crack on a flat rock face with about a ten-foot drop to the next flat area below me.  As I shifted my weight to step across to the continuation of the trail to my right, my anchor foot slipped, but thankfully did not dislodge.  If it had, our guide might have witnessed his first unconscious guest on the hike in the hundreds of trips he has taken up and down the mountain.

After two muddy and sweat-drenched hours, we finally reached the cloudy peak.

Yes, the view from the top was worth the climb; it always is, it seems.  While I was exhilarated that I had made it, the part of me that was sympathetic with my browbeaten body was disappointed that I couldn't be mad at the mountain for failing to deliver.  (Does that even make sense?)

It was Independence Week in the Federation this past week.  National Heroes Day, celebrated on the 16th of September and largely equivalent to Presidents' Day in the US, gave us Monday the 17th off from work, and Independence day is celebrated on the 19th.  This is the Federation's 29th year of independence from Great Britain.  I celebrated my doing something I had not done before: I attended the Governor-General's Ball at the Governor's Mansion on Wednesday night.  A formal event, I wore my suit and crashed the event with some of my PCV colleagues.  (This is, apparently, common practice: while no PCV has officially received an invitation in the three independence seasons I've been here, a handful of volunteers have, in fact, attended each year.)  Everybody was there; I saw people that I hadn't run into in nearly a year's time (small island, don't forget!).  In fact, so many people attended that they managed to run out of catered food a good hour before it was time to leave.  And they even ran out of drinks before the night was over, to the disappointment of many.

I'm hosting a "Goodbye" party at my home in a week's time: on Friday the 28th, I'll be cooking local dishes for upwards of 60 persons for a handful of hours at my apartment.  As you know, my space isn't nearly large enough to house that many people, so I'm setting up a shade tent on the lawn and some Tiki torches and having the party mostly outside.  And I'm not equipped to provide people with snacks and drinks for the entire night, so I'm having the party go from 4:30 (early, to accommodate those Atlantic-side denizens that require two bus rides to get home) to 8:30; essentially 2 hours before sunset to 2 hours after sunset.  Hopefully I will put the EC$100-worth of Tiki torches to good use in that time.

Keys to the Kingdom

I'm just going to leave this here...

This is the surprise gift basket that the UWI Project Coordinator in charge of the Smart Moves Strategy Board Games Summer Camp sent to my home yesterday.  Allow me to emphasize that this was a complete shock; she had requested directions to my house, ostensibly to send me a thank you gift, but I was envisioning something along the lines of a book or the long-lost Chess Display Board – nothing of this caliber.  And considering that I've been feeling under the weather the last few days, this came at an absolutely ideal time: I don't feel up to going out and grocery shopping, I can stock up on fresh fruits to combat this fever, and we are expecting a tropical depression to visit us in the next day or so.  (Barring power outages, I'll keep readers informed of the status here in the northeastern Caribbean.)

I went to church Sunday.  It was the first time in some months.  I've been having trouble reconciling God's plan for my life with my job search situation (sound familiar?).  The brass tacks of it all, and the part I have to come to grips with, is that whatever next step God has for me may not be revealed until the eleventh hour.  There is some precedent for this in my life, and so I would do well to keep the faith that, like He did this time over two years ago, He will have a next stepping stone waiting for me when it comes time to take that step.  With no clear vector from where I am standing, however, the reader will understand why it is so hard to stay positive in light of the prospect of time forcing me off my stone right into the river below. 

I'm working on the website for The Ripple Institute.  The ICT Department uses a rather sophisticated open source content management system called Drupal, which is more useful for corporate enterprise management of multiple websites and entities than setting up a simple non-profit web portal.  But the upside is that I am forced to sit down and learn a wholly different (and rather elaborate) system for creating an attractive and suitable website using software whose tenets will undoubtedly be transferable into whatever design work I find myself doing in the next phase of my life.  As for the website itself, though, I am exhausted by merely the prospect of having to plan out each of the 20+ different pages that will make up the core of the website, going through and (with no known shortcuts yet) creating and populating each one by hand.  What with the construction on the new house going up just a matter of yards from where I'm sitting at home, I feel a small connection to the 'locked workers toiling in the heat: they are building a house from the ground up, and I am constructing a website from the ground up.  And while one job is more physically taxing, both are equal parts invigorating and exhausting.  I'm just pleased to actually be working on something substantial after all this time of waiting on the ICT, to be honest.

Lastly, this is the link to the radio program that aired on Sunday at 2:30 on WINN FM.   It's called "Perfect Day" and my friend Dodd hosts the approximately 45 minute show.  To listen, just load the embedded player below.  Enjoy!

It's Over 9000!!!

I really did enjoy the Chess camp so much that I have come to realize that it is something I would like to do again – not necessarily in a camp setting, but certainly with children of roughly that same age group as a sort of extracurricular activity at a school.  I keep falling back on the Saddleback Knights  youth chess organization that visited my elementary school once a week and taught me the baseline strategy wherein my life's pursuit of stronger Chess has been grounded.  It was my great pleasure to be able to transfer all the things I learned from those before-school sessions in 4th and 5th grade unto this group of youngsters.  Their willingness to learn was, of course, all the difference, and I hope that kind of buy-in could be expected in other settings as well.  But until the time I find out, I have these pictures to remind me of a successful first attempt:

My cubbyhole of a classroom.  Thankfully I was away from the hubbub of the other students.

Day 1 practice.  The students had just learned how pieces move for the first time.

Day 2 instruction: Check, Checkmate, Stalemate, and Castling.

One of my most promising students.  I hope she has the opportunity to continue practicing after this summer.

Some haggling over end-of-session rewards may have taken place.

Day 5 final group – we were all a little reluctant to leave that day.

The glazed expression on everyone's countenance bespeaks of an exhausting week, but also rewarding!

Today is a work holiday in St. Kitts, probably honoring Nevis's Culturama weekend, which is its mid-summer Carnival.  It has its own jump up (read: J'ouvert) and everything, but it tends to be significantly smaller celebration than St. Kitts' own winter bacchanalia.  I haven't had the pleasure of experiencing Culturama myself, but two SK Carnivals is probably enough for me anyway – I'm not concerned that I'm missing out on anything.

And lastly, a big "Thank You!" for everyone that has followed along with my blog for the last two years; yes, here on the two-year anniversary of Chris in the Eastern Caribbean, I'm thrilled to say that we finally reached my goal of over 9000 pageviews!  So, as per my promise, here is a special surprise to commemorate the achievement:

In the Lee of the Stone

Despite the otherworldly silence that I had managed to keep for the greater part of January, things continue to happen here on my little island.  Incidentally, I've got some good news, some bad news, and some as-of-yet neutral updates to share with the reader.  (And pictures!)

Let's start with the bad news this time.  There was a burglary at another Peace Corps Volunteer's home last weekend, the second at that particular location.  It's clear from the M.O. that not only was the criminal most likely an acquaintance of the victim, but also that surveillance was being kept on the volunteer's home immediately prior to the incident, as the victim was away from the premises for no more than a few hours, by her reckoning.  In this case, they broke into a hard-to-reach second story window that was not barricaded, and proceeded to work their way through the cordoned-off second floor to the victim's apartment downstairs.  Furthermore, without actually making a big mess of things, they carried out several high-value items that had been placed in hidden-away locations around the apartment.  When I received word of all this, I was taken back to the feeling I had when someone attempted to break into my apartment, and I tried to amplify the unsettled feelings of insecurity and betrayal with feelings of remorse and helplessness.  That meager attempt at empathy was enough to alert me to two truths: first, that I would be unable to grasp the full extent of my colleague's turmoil, and second, that I had been very blessed to make it this far without any equally fearful invasions of my own safety.  Especially with the documented rise in violent crime in the Federation in the time I've been serving here, I feel more than ever like I've been kept in the lee of the stone, a place where I am in the middle of all of the turbulence of life, yet return unscathed from the plow's blade.

There are more employees at the NSTP than ever before.  I was surprised to come in to work today and find the premises practically inundated with people.  Besides the trainees, who are here for the last weeks of their Basic Electricity and Hospitality Industry courses, there are 40% more employees in attendance since before the Christmas holidays.  I'm unclear, as monetary concerns are paramount and all new operations by the NSTP are on hold until monies are sent over by the Ministry of Finance, whether or not the addition of full-time employees to the payroll is a wise step.  For that matter, I'm as of yet unclear exactly what purpose more than one of the individuals in questions serve in the organization.  And as if the premises were not constricted enough, the addition of 10 "new" computer monitors, of the 20-inch CRT variety (i.e. MASSIVE), were just donated from TDC, Inc. to the NSTP's computer lab.  The downside?  We already had more flatscreen monitors than operable computers, so they're definitely not needed in the computer lab.  They can still find use as objects in a computer repairs class, though the issue of Where to keep them in the meantime? goes unresolved.  They are currently eating up whole cubic yards of space in the already-cramped computer lab, my bastion of air conditioning, electrical current, and productivity. 

To the best of my knowledge, we volunteers here in St. Kitts still have not received our living allowances for the month of February.  This means that rent, bills, and any other living expenses that come up at the beginning of the month are either covered by the leftover funds from the previous month, or else ignored until the funds do arrive.  Fortunately, for my part, I was careful to cultivate a EC$1000 cushion with which to weather just such a situation.  Most of my colleagues, on the other hand, were not so fastidious, and are now running into the same end-of-the-month issues that so many people living on tight budgets face, here and everywhere.  I do have one particular complication, though: my rent is automatically deducted from my savings account here, in a standing order for the end of every month.  But my monthly rent is greater than the monetary cushion I regularly keep (in what seems like an untimely oversight now), meaning that as of yesterday, my account is either in overdraft (in hardly any fault of my own) or else my landlord, who resides in New Jersey, has not yet received payment for this month's rent.  Either way, when I head into town today, I will have to go by the bank and take stock of the situation before spending any more of my standing cash.

I'm helping out at Beach Allen Primary School on Tuesdays now, tutoring a small group of students that have been selected by their teachers as requiring special assistance in mathematics.  We've had four sessions already, the last four Tuesdays in the month of January, and I'm starting to get to know the students a little better now.  One grade at a time, I pull out a single student from his/her classroom and gather the three to five children in a separate room, with stools, a chalkboard, and air conditioning.  Curiously, the last is such a disparate change from the usual for the students, that it oftentimes proves to be more of a distraction than a boon to the students' concentration.  But assisted by my bag of math implements and cadre of classroom activities, we put in a half-hour session where I give special time to each student that displays a need in a particular area that the teacher has identified in previous classroom time.  Already, in our short time together, I have seen dramatic improvement in the form of positive affect in one student, who, when she isn't acting depressed and moody, participates at a level that should categorize her as solidly mainstream, leaving her special-needs peers in the dust.  I intend on recommending to her teacher that she soon be replaced with another student whose needs in mathematics are more pressing.  So that might prove to be my success story for this trimester's Volunteer Report Form!

And work with the Serious Ting is gearing up at the same time.  It's now February (the reader may have noticed) and so my deadline looms now in the radar of my mind.  I plan to spend nearly all of my free time for this month on design editing the next issue, scheduled to be printed and distributed by April.  If I can maintain a pace of about 1 article per day, that should be sufficient to achieve my goal of submitting the completed first copy to St. Lucia for approval by Sunday the 26th, giving that week for final changes.  If everything happens in the planned timetable, then the issue will be all ready and in Volunteers' hands before the class of EC81 departs for their close of service.

Oh, and I got to go camping, too!  A few weekends ago, half a dozen of us went over to Banana Bay adjacent Cockleshell Beach on the Southern Peninsula to test our abilities to wield fire at will and engineer a makeshift shelter before sunset.  The experiment was a success, and I had a blast camping beside the omnipresent waves.  I even awoke before sunrise to see the Southern Cross just above the southern horizon!

The three-sided tarp shelter design was my idea.  It kept the wind out of our hair for the night.

A bright Sunday sunrise between St. Kitts and Nevis at 6:00 AM.

Breakfast is the camper's special: bacon and cheese omelet hamburgers.  <-- Not a typo

By all appearances, no worse for the wear.  (This may or may not in fact be the case.)

Photo Reel

It's so intense...

In a week graced with multiple rare acts of God, this last one was a pleasure to see: a double rainbow that popped up during a brief sun shower.  Just over the gardens to the East of my house, this picture was taken from my front porch yesterday afternoon.  At one point, the rain was coming down hard and fast on the right side of my porch, but the ground was completely dry everywhere on the left side.

The view of the Basseterre Harbor from atop the Ocean Terrace Inn

The weather was hit and miss during MST, when we volunteers spent the workweek in training at the Ocean Terrace Inn in Basseterre.  In this picture, of course, the weather is impeccable, but the other half of the time saw overcast skies and occasional drizzles.  That trend has mostly held up these last few weeks, and now mosquitoes are finding droves of lawns with standing water to repopulate.  The offshoot is that I can't keep my door open during the morning or evening for fear of letting in dozens of mosquitoes.

St. Kitts' 25 Most Remarkable Teens honored at Parliament, 23 November 2011

If I can be so forward as to say, the most important aspect of the 25 Most Remarkable Teens ceremony was the clear and dazzling display of government buy-in.  For a project that claims only one specific goal, to celebrate the positive achievements of today's youth contrasted against the seemingly endless flow of negative press bulletins and falling public sentiment, the program actually has many aspects that promote positivity and cooperation in the Federation, between youth and adults, as well as political parties.  For further details on the event, plus a retelling of each of the teenagers' remarkable stories, make sure to visit my colleague's blog.

What volunteers do in their spare time?

When an EC80 couple, good friends to me and so many around the island, were forced to end their term of service a few months early, we volunteers congregated at their abode to wish them well in their travels (and to clean up some of the household goods that weren't coming with them).  In this case, everyone was guaranteed 2 rolls of toilet paper, but everything else was first-come, first-served.  The said older couple has recently moved nearer their oldest son's family in Alaska; if they read this, I extend once again my sincerest best wishes.

Peace Corps (unofficial) motto

One of the changes in the mood following MST is the now constant awareness of the impermanence of the vast majority of things one does here, whether big projects or small.  I feel like this decidedly melancholy sense is doubled for those of us on islands that the Peace Corps will be pulling out from following our term of service.  However, when discussing it with my APCD, she related to me a peace that she has felt about the situation recently: paraphrased, she felt like our job, now, was to "leave with dignity," with the knowledge of a job well done.  By extension of the Peace Corps' mission, it's as much a victory as a concession when we move out of a country, and maybe St. Kitts and Nevis is ready to move along for a little while without us?

Revisiting my inspiration for joining the Peace Corps in the first place, and with a vote of thanks to Jesse Cline, here are two good illustrations of what I believe the Peace Corps will mean to me in the coming years.
Comic A and Comic B

Shaking Things Up

St. Kitts enjoyed an earthquake of 4.7 on the Richter scale at 1:45 this morning.  It was just enough to wake me from the sound of the upstairs creaking, and from the shaking of my bed springs.  But it only lasted a second or two, and I was back to sleep.  To my knowledge, it's the first one that I've experienced since beginning here in August 2010.  I'm still very proud of my quake senses, the ability to wake up to an earthquake and immediately recognize it for what it is – Not mulling around in bed thinking, "Did I leave the dryer running again?" or "Why is the neighbor's donkey rubbing up against my house?"

I'm going to spend today working on two items: a fun and educational activity using Microsoft Word for the students in my Intro to Computer Applications class, and laying out a 2012 calendar in Adobe InDesign for the AIDS alliance, to be used as a fundraiser.  The former is proving difficult to conjure from the internets – I haven't found any activities yet that are suitable for students ages 15+ that have below average literacy rates.  I'm considering reaching back into my own experience and having one student, a different one every 20 minutes, pulled out from the regular instruction and placed in front of a word processor and continue a narrative that his/her peers have also been working on.  That could prove to be a nice deviation from the norm.  Now if only I could come up with another idea for a collective activity...  As for the calendar, I've been given the pictures already, so the rest should be easy; I'll post the cover art as soon as it is finished.

And as promised, here are pictures from Thursday's official opening of the books sent by Hands Across the Sea.  Enjoy!

Funnyquote Friday

Seen on a sign at the Rasta health foods vendor, Kalabash, adjacent the image of a trained gun:

"I don't phone 911."

The tables have turned on me – now I'm facing all new stressors with my Iron Band project, while my work at the NSTP is looking up with conclusions to old projects and the addition of new ones.  My fears for the Iron Band center primarily around actually having requests for bookings, and at the same time having students that do not have, in my eyes at least, a legitimate show to perform.  This leaves me in a confusing place: do I allow them to continue to perform shows, which they are keen to do, but which means transportation costs for shows in other villages, and which means they play for 45-second intervals for 5 minutes before I and everyone else is fed up with trying to make something go that won't; or else do I squelch the traveling until I invest some more time in trying to nail down a helper, someone from the Ministry of Culture who would be better suited to training the kids in musical instruction?  I do not know the answer to that yet, and in the meantime, I'm beating myself up in the knowledge that I am failing to prepare students for these high-anxiety performances, putting both them and myself in positions of uncertainty.

But the weekend is coming up, so I'm looking forward to relaxing at a friend's house and cooking Coconut-Fried Shrimp on Saturday.  I'm using a tested recipe, so I have high hopes for it.  And as promised, pictures today are from the Peace Corps' 50th Anniversary celebration, held on June the 3rd.

Seventeen volunteers from all over the U.S. are serving in St. Kitts right now.

A rather unflattering photo of me getting the Iron Band pumped up for their first public performance.

A quilt, composed of pieces of cloth contributed by students and guests in attendance, was auctioned off that afternoon.

Over 500 students, guests, and tourists visited our info and activity booths, including students from Maurice Hillier Primary.

The Peace Corps motto.

Links and Leftovers

Well, it's been a little while since I've done one of these.

By the way, Dad, I forgot to mention that I have your Father's Day gift: it's an XL shirt commemorating the Peace Corps' 50th Anniversary.

...which in turn brings to mind this little thought.

In other news, there's good news, and there's bad news.

Hurricane season has begun.

More important to me than the awesomeness of the instrument, is the music: anybody know something about getting sheet music of the piece that I can transcribe for marimba?

It's time I returned a little love to my most frequent referral source, PCJ.  Thanks, PCJ.

I really need to get around to reaping this list of all its goodness...

And, as promised, more pictures!  Highlights from Cinco de Mayo follow.

It was a 'stache bash.  Most absurd/glorious/super 'stache wins.

My girlfriend didn't mind my 'stache submission for the day.  I, on the other hand, was eager to shave afterwards.

A wild and crazy time was had by all.

Allow yourself to bask in the cuteness of my friend's pup, Beau, about 1 month old at the time.

Well, ultimately I did win the Super 'Stache contest.  A fun and memorable Cinco de Mayo.

IST 2

Finished Inter-Service Training on Friday, so I'm officially all trained up for another six months.  Due up: Mid-Service Training, come November of this year.  Which reminds me– I need to ask off for the first couple of weeks of November for my brother's wedding.  I hope the two don't overlap...

If there is one thing that IST is actually good for, it's the (albeit mild) external motivation to take a second look at stalled projects, consider some alternative routes for success in those projects, and the very welcome inspiration to create some new projects at the same time.  I jotted down notes on a few new ideas, as follows in order of closeness to actualization: (a) scheduling a Teacher training in Math Activities before the start of the school term in September, (b) start up an IT training course at the NSTP, possibly in combination with another PCV who has experience in PC hardware repair, and (c) a boy's abstinence club under the auspices of St. George's Anglican, in conjunction with the junior priest there, Fr. Christopher Archibald.  I don't have any personal experience in Youth ministry, but I think this kind of thing would be pretty simple, as long as community buy-in was high and activities were kept diverse and entertaining.  I'll keep everyone updated, of course, but in the meantime, pray for motivation and fortitude to finish my current projects before fully diving into these others.

VOW honours 100 women of Nevis

I did get to go to Nevis on Tuesday, as expected.  On the left is the promotional poster my fellow PCV and I developed over one 6-hour session.  The first 2 hours were spent just trying out different ideas and creating corresponding blank templates for the art.  Since the project will eventually be printed onto 2' x 3' posters, signed (by yours truly) and sold, the blank image was set up to be 24" x 36" at 300 ppi – a mistake, since the resulting filesize would be 1.85 GB.  A simple "save" command in the GIMP of a file that size took longer than 5 minutes.  We eventually settled on a more feasible 100 ppi, to be expanded upon completion if necessary.  The final product, about 6-7 times larger than the image to the left, is still 7.5 MB, one of the largest PNGs I've ever made.  The revealing of the artwork came on Thursday, and was well-received, according to my sources.  Certainly the Institutional Partner on Nevis, who led the event, was pleased with the result.  The design for the woman came from previous artwork that Voices of Women had used in previous promos, but the trace of Nevis and the collage of photos is all original work for the poster.  Here's hoping that my fellow PCV and VOW, her women's empowerment NGO can utilize the project as an effective fundraiser.


I just went through my backlog of photos, so I'll post a small collection from a different event for the next several posts.  (Yay pictures!)  Today's batch is from all the way back in March: St. Patrick's Day, to be precise.  I visited a fellow PCV's class at Sandy Point Secondary for the afternoon and tried out a couple of my Math Games, to much appreciation, participation, and excitement.

Playing "Honey Comb Home" with about 20 second-formers from SPS.

The tactile experience of rolling the dice was a positive causal-relation activity, easy for the students to grasp.

The teacher, after watching one class, got excited enough to get involved in the second round.

Afterwards, we all went down to Old Road to celebrate St. Patty's Day and engage in some local dominoes action.

D. Connor Band Bangs On The Door

The Iron Band had their first "gig" on Thursday, playing for their fellow students during morning assembly.  Since it was the last assembly of the second trimester, the principal was willing to fit in a timeslot for us and observe our progress over the last three weeks.  The students, to no ones' surprise, were very nervous at the prospect of playing for their peers, and some of the younger students even tried to get out of playing on stage, citing fears of being laughed at.  I explained that they would not be the only ones up on stage, and that when all was done, their fellow students would be cheering and dancing, not laughing at them.

This ultimately proved to be true. However, it wasn't clear from the beginning that this would be the case: the musicians' collective stage fright manifested by freezing each one when they got on stage.  So rather than starting out with a bang, they kind of started out with more of a whimper, hardly even playing until after (what seemed to me like) a few minutes.  Finally, they got moving around, and the audience, far from being inclined to dance, still was transfixed on the beat and the motion on stage.  So in the end they earned their applause, and I can only hope that this experience will translate easily into increased confidence for each of the students on future performances.

The students are now enjoying two weeks off for Easter vacation.  Since I knew the Band would most likely lose those four days of practice, due to the difficulty of scheduling meetings, I was amenable to trading that time for a little performance experience before May, when we'll be looking into scheduling our first real gig in Challengers, the next village up the Caribbean side.  Then, in June, all of the PCVs on island will head to Independence Square to host an all-day public meet-and-greet celebrating the Peace Corps' 50th anniversary this year, and I'll bring the Band by to play a set or two.  So the great news is that we're making noise, both figuratively and literally, and hoping that the possibilities don't end with just some out-of-town performances – eventually, a little radio or television exposure would serve to propel their fame much more rapidly, and a highlight video can't be far behind!

Mmm... new header.

A Kayak Counts, Too

Picture © Star Production International

This weekend saw the 9th annual StarMile Nevis to St. Kitts Cross Channel Swim.  Three PCVs took part in and completed the 2.5 mile race across the Narrows, including one of our number who finished 35th out of 100 with a time of 91 minutes.  Another PCV friend and myself did not take part in the race, but instead served as lifeguard assistants, manning a 2-seat kayak and traveling along with the field of swimmers.  Our mandate was to help any and all swimmers that required assistance, a water break, or help with their bearing.  And despite our willingness and occasional offers of service, nobody took us up on a water break.

Photo © Star Production International

As one might expect, the race is a grueling test of endurance, as the average swimmer is out in open water for around 2 hours, all the while fighting currents, swells, and the urge to stop.  Many swimmers even experience panic when they find themselves halfway across the Narrows after an hour of swimming, with only the boats around as a safeguard.  (An understandable sentiment, to be sure)  And on top of all that, imagine paying a fee of US$50 to enter?!  For my money, a free kayak trip between two of the nicest beaches in the Federation is good enough.

Photo © Star Production International

The water proved to be choppier than I expected, with swells between 2 and 4 feet in the middle of the channel.  It didn't cause any particular problems for us in the kayak, aside from merely drenching our legs and rears after drying comfortably in the warm morning sun.  But it did make following the swimmers more difficult, since the only marker of their presence was their yellow swim caps, and we occasionally had trouble seeing over the swells to locate swimmers that had strayed from the course.  And after an hour, the swimmers had sufficiently spread out to the point that this was trickier than it sounds.

Photo © Star Production International

But the bottom line is that everybody made it safely, particularly all of our volunteers, some of whom had never done open-water swimming before.  And my kayaking partner, who had never kayaked before, managed not to tip the boat over while we were out over deep water (or at all, thankfully).  The swimmers were able to partake in a special breakfast prepared for them as part of their entrance fee, and we were able to cheer them on and celebrate their arrival on Cockleshell Beach.

Nevis Nice

Should I feel guilty after all the fun I had this weekend?  I'm pretty sure there's a stipulation in one of the bylaws stating the limits of just how much fun a PCV is allowed to have while on official business, and I probably broke that rule between Sports Day at my school and this weekend's "Imagine" Fundraiser on Nevis.

The entirety of the second trimester at Kittitian schools is devoted to celebrating inter-school competition through the use of the traditional British "house" system.  (Many readers will be familiar with this system already thanks in large part to the works of one J.K. Rowling.)  The houses represented at Dr. William Connor School are the Red Panthers, the Orange Jaguars, the Yellow Tigers, (some prefer to say Gold) and the Green Pumas.  Each house has spent the last 3 months obtaining points for his/her house through academic trials, competitions, and good behavior.  But come March, the house points are all relatively equal, and so the trimester culminates in a grand Sports Day, not unlike a Field Day at a typical elementary school in the US.

A sixth grade boy helps the Red Panthers take this year's house cup.

The day encompasses a mix of track and field events for students of every age, but is very heavy on footraces, including 60m and 100m sprints and 200m, 400m, 800m, and 1200m runs.  For the shorter races, the teams select their four fastest sprinters, two boys and two girls, for each of four different age brackets: 7 years and younger, 8-9 years, 10-11 years, and 12-13 years.  Then houses earn points based on the finishes of their two entrants.  At most 8 compete in each trial, and the top 5 finishers earn points, making some races for second or third place as exciting as for the top spot!


The community comes out in full force to observe and cheer on their children, friends, favorite houses, etc.  As the races begin with the noontime heat in full force, spectators don't begin arriving until around 2:00.  But then it's an all day event of barbecuing, cheering on tight races, liming with buddies, and just supporting our outstanding students.  And as with so many things here involving official social recognition, the Kittitians take their Sports Day competitions very seriously.  Fortunately there were no altercations this year, as the top spot was awarded to the Red Panthers, who had a stranglehold on the house points lead from even before Sports Day began.  And so the day ended shortly after dusk, around 6:30, with a couple of exhibition 4x100m relays, attracting the fastest students and former students alike with no consideration for house affiliation.  It ultimately garnered the most delight from the fans, who were enthralled with two close finishes from the boys' race and the girls' race.

With that ended, and lots of good pictures and video captured, I turned my attentions to the Pink Lilies/Voices of Women Imagine Fundraiser gala event on Nevis Saturday night, which I had agreed to participate in as drum accompaniment to a fellow volunteer as she read the poem she had prepared in honor of the event.  I was able to get plenty of sleep, then, on Friday night in preparation for traveling to Nevis the next day; and it's a good thing, too, because organizing free transportation over to Nevis for the performers was a logistical nightmare.  We ended up waiting 45 minutes for a free taxi trip (20 minutes) to the Southern Peninsula where we waited another 15 minutes for a short ferry trip across the Narrows (10 minutes) to Oualie Beach on Nevis, where we waited 10 minutes for a bus to pick us up to run us to the Old Manor Hotel in Gingerland (20 minutes).  And we still managed to arrive in-time and intact.

My fellow PCV and I at the gala event
that she helped organize.

The event was in part a fundraiser for Pink Lilies and Voices of Women, both NGOs concerned with gender equality and other social issues, and in part an awareness effort inspired by International Women's Day, celebrated on the 8th of March.  As such, the evening's programme centered on women's empowerment, individualization, and independence.  There was a fine turnout, (at one point fitting 75+ people onto a somewhat confined patio) which included most notably the premiere of Nevis himself, giving the event some much-desired visibility.  The programme of performances were highly-touted, and they killed all evening: a handful of Island Xpressions poets, an a capella trio, a Calypsonian, a jazz instrumentalist, and finally the headlining Kasanova Band.  All in all, the awareness goal of the event was met with vigor, with women's empowerment issues getting a sincere and often powerful look, and we men took some good-humored "mashing up" in the process.  And as for the fund raising goal, at EC$75 a head, I sincerely hope all the paid performers and the institutions themselves garnered a return on the order of what they had envisioned.  There was some talk about turning it into an annual event, so who knows?  Maybe I'll be returning for the encore event next March.

Sunday came quickly the next morning, and my Nevisian volunteer friend and I found time to go beach hopping and see part of the small island that I had not visited before.  I even got to play some pickup soccer in the sand – not only did my team win, but I scored the winning goal!  It was a real workout, but quite a satisfactory high point, especially since it was the first time I had got to play beach soccer since seeing some guys playing all the way back at PST in St. Lucia.  So between that, a round of pool at one of the beach bars, and a quiet nap waiting for the sun to set, we had a very relaxing island kind of day that was enjoyed by all.

P.S. It seems I forgot Pi Day yet again.

Two Empty Ends of Coconuts...

In a display of superior turnaround time, the pictures in this entry were taken (drum roll please...) last night!  In a widely publicized and highly anticipated experiment in the kitchen involving sharp knives, fish flanks and coconuts, I spent the better part of yesterday evening preparing a rather large helping of Coconut Fried Fish.  I took the liberty of putting together a picture compilation of the procedure as well, starting with the extraction of the coconut juice and meat:

After draining the coconut water into the container on the left,
I broke the shell into two halves by dropping it on the floor (no kidding!)

Using a rather simpleminded technique of scraping out the meat with a knife,
I managed to produce enough coconut shavings for my recipe.

Before and After of the knifing-the-meat-out method before resorting to
prying the meat off of the shell with a spoon.

The final collection of coconut meat; all of those good
coconut shavings!  I'm going to have to find another one.

The process took a little longer than I expected; getting all of the meat out of the coconut took about an hour.  And during it all I felt like quite the historian, finding myself in a situation where countless other humans thousands of years ago found themselves: upon being presented with a fruit not before experienced, having to decide how on earth to extract the delicious contents locked within.  I was pleased, therefore, to succeed in my attempts, though not without the help of a simple tool and a tile floor.  Progressing at last to the cooking portion, I populated the line in preparation of frying the fish fillets:

Dousing the fish fillets in coconut milk and egg whites before coating with
flour and a breadcrumb-coconut blend ensured superior coconut frying goodness.

The final product, after adding the flash-fried fish to a pan of fresh
vegetables simmering in coconut milk and citrus juices.

And look - a novelty cup to boot!  A souvenir from my uniquely island experience.

It was a fun experiment, though much more demanding than any of my previous cooking ventures.  Perhaps, in the future, purchasing pre-shredded sweetened coconut is the way to go?  On the other hand, I wouldn't get to add to my collection of awesome island drinkware.  I'm shooting for a set before the end!

P.S. Don't be the guy that asks, "What about the other half?  Don't you already have a set?"  It has a hole in it, silly!