Funnyquote Friday

On a date a couple Wednesdays ago, I impressed a girl with my knowledge of Caribbean cultural tropes and expressions enough to warrant the comment,

"I never met a White boy who could stroopes before."

For the uninitiated, stroopes is the act of one person, as they say here, "kissing his teeth."  That is, it's a common singular oral gesture, used when expressing discontent or distaste of something or someone.  It's usable in largely the same situations that Americans might say "Pssh!" or something to that effect.  It rings synonymous with expressions of "I can't believe it!" or "The utter gall!"

I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on the important aspects of closing out my term of service.  Yes, I'm carefully getting through my necessary medical clearances; yes, I'm considering all the possibilities of what I might be doing when my term of service ends, scheduled for October 18th; but even so I wonder if I'm doing enough to put my respective institutions in a place for them to sustain the work that I put in place without my presence here.  As so many of the Volunteers getting ready to leave will tell you, this simple answer is usually "no."  That reality sinking in even as time slips away from me, in conjunction with a few pervasive distractions, some pleasant and some not, serves to sap my strength and motivation away from what should rightfully be the most significant and memorable three months of my entire term of service.  Instead, the uncertainty of what I will be doing following my term of service is stifling, and the ambiguity of what good I could be doing now for my organizations with the limited time I have left is disheartening.

Under Pressure

Ughh... I woke up this morning with sinus pressure strong enough to knock me out.  Unfortunately for me, I didn't recognize it for what it was until after I left home, or else a quick dose of sinus medication would have most likely restored me to my normal self.  But, instead, it's off to work feeling like my head is about to implode and my body drained of energy.  But I think I can still be productive, somehow.  Lately I've been spending the days at the NSTP office entering A Ganar trainees' attendance into the corresponding spreadsheet and calculating their training hours.  Not very engaging or inspiring work, but it takes a little bit of pressure off of a few others around here, freeing them up to deal with the countless other demands of maintaining a government agency while also implementing an island-wide youth program in the high schools.  So I'm happy to help out.

I was the recipient of a grand surprise this weekend: it seems that for the last x months the water bill for my building has not been paid. 

I was caught unawares,
They approached my home in pairs;
My bill was in arrears,
Confirming all my fears.

It took no less than three representatives from the Water Department (and a fourth to drive the get-away car, apparently) to inform me of the outstanding balance in excess of XCD 2,000.  Since I've never had the pleasure of meeting my landlord, he's certainly never personally signed a contract/lease agreement with me, and so in the... (calculating)... ninteteen months I've lived here, there has always been the possibility of this happening.  My neighbors, my APCD and I have always operated under the assumption that electricity and water were included in the rent.  Thankfully, this was confirmed when we finally managed to get hold of my landlord, who lives Stateside and tragically does not ascribe to the standard practice of employing an agent to manage his property down here on the island while he is away.  Instead, my lawn is turning into the untamed bushlands, and my water pressure is at risk of being cut off.  While no definitive resolution has yet been reached, we were successful in contacting the landlord and informing of the urgent nature of the situation.  Incidentally, my future rent payments remain canceled until such a time as the matter is concluded.  I'm not at all keen on the idea of picking up and moving to a new location all of a sudden, but I'm prepared for the possibility of such a necessity.

I enjoyed a long weekend this time last week, in honor of Whit Monday, taking advantage of the chance to release some of the pressure of all the projects I have going on right now.  Since a former PCV's parents were on-island, we took a big group down to the Southern Peninsula for an early summer Sunday at the beach.  It was a delightful romp for all of us, and pleasantly reminiscent of Memorial Day weekend Stateside.  (It always helps to have a bit of a reminder of home from time to time.)  Then a few of us capped it off by enjoying hot dogs and watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  It almost made me a little homesick! (almost)

My fifth trimesterly report is off, leaving just one more come September.  I was on the beach at Nevis on Saturday to finish it.  Those of us PCVs still here on St. Kitts are looking ahead to July, when our Close of Service week-long conference will be held.  This we know – what remains to be seen is whether our wishes for it to be held at any island not St. Kitts will come true.  If historical precedent is any indication, the St. Lucia staff will attempt to make arrangements with a hotel in St. Vincent, far far to the south of here, before pulling out and booking last-minute reservations at the Ocean Terrace Inn in Basseterre.  For my part, at least 79% of the appeal of COS is the chance to see all of our PCV friends from the other islands one last time.  But I'd sure like to augment that with the 21% appeal of getting to see a third Caribbean country during my term of service here.

The reader may recall that I was scheduled for two interviews the last couple of weeks.  The interviews went well, and indeed I am preparing for a second-round interview tomorrow.  I am highly reluctant to say more about it at this time, for fear of overexciting myself and adding more pressure to my performance.  God has already protected me thus far; I can't say enough how much it has eased my mind during interviews knowing that each one is not the end all be all of interviews, even for just that month or week.  Going through the process with two organizations simultaneously has allowed me to remain comfortable and just be myself during the interviews, and the effects are much more positive results, I hope.

Well, that's all the updates I have for now.  It's back to entering endless arrays of students' Present or Absent marks and adding up their training hours.  Then I need to make time for more work on this Ripple Institute website – it's shaping up nicely enough, but I still haven't made contact with the ICT Department yet.  All this to say nothing of organizing a training day for teachers volunteering at a possible Chess Camp this summer, and... oh! I need to contact the people in St. Lucia associated with the Chess Club there, and request info that can be used to persuade government officials here in St. Kitts.  And I need to do all of this soon, or else I fear that the trust these people have put in me and my ability to efficiently and effectively do this work will slip.

...No pressure.

Funnyquote Friday

The reception to my work on-island lately has been as variable as the weather this time of year.   In just the past week, I have been met with both extremes: at once I am praised and thanked for work I have not had a chance to do yet, and then again I am openly criticized for work that is proceeding on-schedule and showing great promise.  Fortunately I've managed to avoid becoming discouraged, or allowing my emotions to become equally mercurial.  Instead, I've managed to keep things in perspective here and maintain an even affect, though this was not particularly easy on Tuesday, when it wasn't just the students who were out to challenge my authority (although this happened in good measure) – it was a teacher as well.  Apparently responsible for the lowest-performing students in the sixth grade, she regularly sends three of her students for maths tutoring, which is two more than the median amount of all the classes.  When I went to pull out the three students as usual, she stopped me and casually informed me that she didn't believe her students were learning anything from me.  Stunned, I simply and politely responded, "Oh?"  She repeated, "I don't think my students are learning anything from you.  Do you think they are learning anything from you?"  I pointed out that, while the progress is slow, particularly for some students, that I believed that the work I was doing was indeed helping.  She requested proof: she asked to see the evidence of the work we were doing on paper for that day.  Since we have been reviewing for the Test of Standards (end-of-course testing) the last few weeks and have been working example problems on paper and in composition books, I obliged, though I was astounded at the gall and impertinence of this woman.  Shaken, I escorted the kids to the classroom, where they were no less unruly than the others had been that day.  We finished the session with less progress than I had hoped to achieve "under the gun," but since the work is largely cumulative, I presented the teacher afterwards with the notes sheet from our previous sessions.  She proceeded to quiz one of her students right there with the notes on the paper, at the entrance to her classroom, in front of me.  At this point I had had enough, so I walked away to collect my final gaggle of sixth graders.  She called after me, "Do you want to keep this sheet?"  To which I replied, "Yes I do.  I'll come back for it."

In my mind that day, I went through a dozen different ways I could have responded more assertively, esprit d'escalier that would have really stuck it to that careless teacher just looking for a scapegoat or someone to bully.  But I'm glad I handled it the way I did – I reminded myself of the support I have from virtually every other adult at the institution, and the positive strides several of the students have made in the handful of months we've been working together.  In this way I got over it in a few days, but I also don't plan to subject myself to that kind of unnecessary harassment again.  So believe me, if she abuses me once again, I will report her to the principal for unprofessional behavior.

My brother told me about a similar incident that happened to him at work recently, where a superior, tragically mistaken, alleged a lack of faith in his abilities.  I commiserated with him on the thoughtlessness of people no matter where you go.  I should have told him then that we have a saying for this down here, though I suspect it's not exclusive:

"Same s**t, different dialect."

Alternatively, I also have good news rife with positive life-changing potential.  I have recently made the acquaintance of a Dr. Izben Williams, former SKN Ambassador to the U.S., who lives on-island and who is involved in starting a youth development NGO in Basseterre.  His organization, picturesquely dubbed The Ripple Institute, has not yet launched and is looking for assistance in starting a website and online presence.  I received word of the need from a fellow PCV, and said I could help.  I've already begun work on ideas for logos, though I am waiting on the SKN Department of Information, Communications and Technology to identify and cordon the server space and domain for the organization's use.  There is no telling how long the turnaround on this largely simple task could take; fortunately, I can begin work of designing a simple website on my local drive.

As with everything I do here, the new work did not go unnoticed, and I have already received one proposition for website design assistance in the efforts of another volunteer.  This is fine; I welcome the sense of busy-ness that comes from having a full schedule, though I hope I can continue to create and problem-solve for as many groups as I can without sacrificing on potency.

Work at the AWANA chapter on-island is also going well.  A missionary couple from Indianapolis (this is their SKN blog) have set up the program at a church in Middle Island, and I go there on Saturday afternoons to be a team leader.  I never really got into AWANA in Hiawassee, even enough to be a Listener, despite my parents' diehard commitment to it.  But here and now, necessity almost demands that I be a Team Leader (Blue Team, so far) every week.  Though I must confess, I enjoy the Book Time with the children far more than either Council Time or Game Time.  I find it very inspiring to listen for the handful of kids that take the verses and activities in their books seriously enough to participate week in and week out.  Sure, there are the majority of the kids who didn't even remember to bring their study book, who are just there for the Game Time or the social aspect or for no other reason than their parents made them.  But every night I've gone, I've been able to find at least one boy or girl who was sharp enough and dedicated enough to have learned at least one section's worth of verses over the previous week, usually coupled with a willingness to study the next section for the half-hour we have devoted to Book Time.  These moments of successfully challenging the children and discussing the meaning of the verses with them has been more rewarding than I expected, and significantly more meaningful than simply watching our team outrun the other three teams around a big circle.

In other news, I received my first invitation for an interview, a mere 2 months after beginning my most recent job search.  Paired with this positive if dubious revelation is the fact that today is, by my understanding, the final day to hear back from the company I applied to last month, the one that I had devoted my entire April's free time to completing the largely abstract deliverable assignments.  Since I have not been scheduled for a telephone interview with that organization yet, I wouldn't be surprised to find out very soon that I have been passed over once again.  Despite these inauspicious results, I'm doing my best to stay positive, and haven't lost steam in continuing to seek out opportunities.

I wasn't exaggerating before: we really have had back-and-forth weather the past few weeks.  After the warmest March in recent memory, and an April that reintroduced rainstorms to the dry island, May has enjoyed equal shares of both phenomena, and seemingly on alternating days.  It's that time of year (again) when one has to pack both an umbrella and a pair of sunglasses, in the event that both are needed in the same short period.

Schrödinger's Catalyst

You know why I don't like "putting myself out there?" Because it forces the issue.  It begs the question.  It demands a snap judgment.  And all too often those judgments of late have been "No," "Not interested," and "Look somewhere else."

When I'm faced with any situation with only two actual outcomes, particularly when one outcome is in my interest and the other is not, the first decision I must make is whether or not I want to get involved in the deciding – "putting myself out there" as it were.  But what I realize now is that if I had any reason to be confident in an outcome being favorable for me, it usually meant I could afford to be patient with the deciding, and refrain from involving myself in the goings-on.  The converse, then, being when the odds are not in my favor, tends to lead to a speedy denial of my good fortune.  This phenomenon, occurring several times this past week in various aspects of my life, has been a source of great frustration for me, since it seems like despite my greatest efforts to the contrary, nothing I do has any meaningful effect on the outcome of someone's decision – even when that decision is in regards to my fate.

My job search, for example, feels like scaling a 20-foot rock cliff with few, if any, handholds.  Looking up at it from the bottom is daunting and demoralizing.  I have no climbing gear.  I have no compatriots calling down to me from the top.  I have no guides giving me advice from the bottom.  The only thing I do have is a map of the suggested route to the top, but like all maps, it doesn't give feedback on whether or not my toils are amounting to real progress.  For that I have nothing but my eyes and my fear of looking back down to tell me where I stand.  Even my search for a mate parallels this metaphor with unpleasant precision.  Yet society demands that I keep trying, that I keep offering up my fate to others, regardless of how well-equipped they are to make such influential decisions.  Wouldn't this company be better with me at the helm of their internal financial controls?  Wouldn't that company?  Wouldn't this girl be happier having the loving support of a man who is sensitive to her feelings and needs?  The answer is almost always yes, and has been for those few who have tried, but until another risks taking me on, I float on a deep pond of indeterminacy, making no headway in any particular direction.

All this, to say nothing of the single worst scenario: being trapped somewhere in the middle of being selected and being rejected.  The ambiguity alone is enough to make one distrust every life truth he clung to before subjecting himself to the whim of another.  Do Human Resources reps not remember what is was like when they began to search for jobs?  The two weeks..... four weeks...... two months...... four months (?!) between first contacting a company and receiving a final decision from them is unnerving and, frankly, inhuman.  Do girls know how dejecting it feels to be calmly explained to that I'm not their "type," only for them to be whisked away by the next guy that comes along, often in my company? (Especially when that guy is the same guy... twice, three times, now four times running...)  I have to remind myself that I am subjected to a very specific (read: small) social environment down here in SKB, one that I will be relieved to have extricated myself from when the time arrives.  But until that happens, I take solace in just having a little apartment space all to myself, where no one else has sway over me.

An aural reader would say that I have a lot of negativity surrounding me right now, and I'm not exactly clear what I've done to invite that upon myself (apart from putting myself out there, which is already having a negative impact on my continued ability to do so).  Despite this, I find myself buoyed by some unseen force, preventing me from slipping into another depression like I was wont to do so often last year.  I credit this shield from disaster to the faithful prayers of my friends and family back home.  When I was struggling with my roller coaster of emotions last year, I discovered after the fact that my Sunday School class had disbanded previously.  Confident I was a frequent standby on the prayer requests list there, I was suddenly shown that I didn't have a SS family to lift me up on a weekly basis anymore, and I believe I felt the effects of that (or more precisely, felt no effects because of that).  Now, however, that has changed, and I want to thank everyone that continues to remember me in prayer – without your love and support, I would be an ineffectual basket case down here.  As it is, I'm at least a somewhat effectual basket case.

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.)

Sugar Mas Is In The Air

The cats are earning their keep.  As you may recall, I'm watching my girlfriend's cats while she's on winter vacation in the States.  In under one week that I've been watching them, they've already managed to trap and kill four cockroaches and a centipede!  Nebula is the more personable of the two; she finds plenty of opportunities to find me and rub up against my arm when I am at the computer table (like right now).  Pigeon stays mostly to herself, but they both make their presence felt when it's feeding time.  The effort on my part is miniscule, as it would turn out: cleaning two small litter boxes and feeding the cats twice daily is hardly a chore, and more like fair wages paid in the name of free cleaning service.  (No cobwebs when you have two diminutive, omnipresent wanderers!)  Mostly they're a pleasure to have around, whenever Nubs isn't trying to pull my septum out of my head.

The Christmas concert was Monday the 19th; it didn't offer quite as many "edgy" pieces as last year, and eliminated all of the performances differing from singing a traditional Christmas carol.  Fortunately, my friends and I were in attendance foremost for the music, but I was disappointed to see that, perhaps, the planning committee felt that the free thinking, alternative works of poetry and dance (a few of a more political persuasion, in fact) were not in the spirit of the event.  Whatever the reason, we still enjoyed reaffirming our now veritable Christmas tradition of singing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus as loudly and as functionally correct as possible at the end of the service.  That's one thing that, come this time next year, I expect I will miss about not being here!

J'ouvert was a fun ride again this year.  What with it being my second go-around, I had a jump on most of the other Caucasoids that partook in this year's reveling.  Oh, and before you ask, I'm sad to report I have no picture and video this time, due to my one planning oversight: double-checking to see that the camera I brought along had an actual battery cartridge loaded in it.  Apart from this, the measures I took were largely responsible for the whole day going off without a hitch, so to speak.  I caught a lift to the meeting place no earlier than midnight, which means I had at least 3 hours of sleep before joining the others this time (plenty if you're not planning on staying up any later than noon).  I brought along both food and water this time, as much to sate my inevitable morning hunger as to avoid a regrettable migraine should the threat arise.  Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I remembered to bring ear plugs along!  I cannot overstate how critical these little devices are at a j'ouvert jump-up.  Lastly, I did virtually all of my alcohol imbibing at the meeting place before going on the march, where the drinks were mostly harder stuff like mixed rum punch and the like.  By writing in big Sharpie® letters on my hand "BEER," I didn't even have to shout my order to the bar-trailer attendants over the cacophony of the soca blaring from over a dozen amps 100 feet away.  In the end, I had the equivalent of 2 beers during the march, which settled in nicely with the principle of always following hard drinks with beer chasers, and not the other way around.  All of this planning went a great way towards making sure I actually enjoyed myself during this year's revelries.  Now if I could just find a girl to wuk up with...

I think Peace Corps are the street performers of the world.  I say this for a couple reasons: first, because the similarities are too clear to me to be denied.  We move from a place far away to a new home, often with little or no experiential concept of the place we're going, and always end up trying to make a living doing some good works under impoverished means.  Even the people we're trying to help ultimately are presented with the choice to pay attention, or else to simply ignore us completely.  And, depending on who you ask, we probably have a comparable success rate.  Furthermore, we choose to live our lives under the wary eyes of the entire community we serve, winning some hearts and minds and confounding others.  Perhaps the last one is not unlike life everywhere for most, but when the only real currency one traffics in is personal contacts, and when one has as pessimistic an outlook as myself, a single bad connection is a tougher drain on morale than half a dozen good ones can make up for.

The second reason I've been cogitating on this is because I find myself at a vulnerable point in my term of service.  With a whole three weeks to devote in part to secondary projects, namely the ones I have let languish as the 2011 work year wound down, I nonetheless prove to have difficulty summoning the emotional energy to tackle them, fearing that my best efforts will somehow prove fruitless.  So instead of being able to address these concerns by actually trying to do the work on a given day, I am hamstrung into lounging around, choosing instead to read Fahrenheit 451, or catch up on my virtual baseball team, or write this blogpost.  Can anyone offer me any clarity on where the fault in my emotional expectations lie: in the inflexible goals that I set for myself before the holiday began, or in the fear that I've doomed my own productivity by not following through on them?  As someone who derives so much of his self-esteem from his own sense of productivity, this question is deeply concerning to me; yet even as I write it, I realize that the true answer is probably a third option that I have not considered at all.

Funnyquote Friday

When Ms. Cuffy started her computer on Monday morning, there was nothing functionally wrong with it.  Yet upon opening her internet browser, she was greeted with a pop-up that informed her that her system had been infected by malignant viruses, hard drive and memory errors, registry errors, trojans, network problems, and all kinds of mean, nasty things.  Not wanting her system to be at risk, she dutifully clicked on the "Fix Errors" button for the SystemFix alert. (Link is to an info page about the virus.)  She was not prepared, then, for her system to reboot, and systematically rewrite her Windows system files such that her Start Menu and desktop was now empty save for a single shortcut to SystemFix.  Even booting up the system in Safe Mode did nothing to alleviate the situation.  When I saw the effects the malware had wrought on her system, I recognized the severity of the situation and immediately phoned IT support staff for the Ministry of Education.  The worker at the other end began with the most basic litany of questions, like inquiring if the system was running slow or not booting at all.  I explained the situation in full orchestration and four-part harmony, and inquired if the MoE had a corporate license of Windows that he could bring with him in case we needed to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows on it.  He didn't say that he did, but in his voice he seemed concerned about the nature of the damage, so I suggested that he should come by the office and inspect the machine for himself as soon as possible.  At this point, he asked me,

"So it not turning on, or it just running slow?"

Incidentally, he didn't make it out to the office that day.  In fact, here it is Friday, and he still hasn't come by to check it out.

And a late happy T-giving to everyone.  Readers may remember that I missed the island goings-on last year due to sickness, but thanks to one of my colleagues rushing a carb-laden plate over to me, I was able to enjoy the delicious food even so.  This year, the get-together was held at the same place, but hosted by a wholly different volunteer.  We had another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and I reveled in the polite company of all the volunteers, friends, neighbors, and new acquaintances that were there.  There was pigskin tossing, card playing, music listening, fat chewing, merry making, and all kinds of groovy things going on there.

Well, I got the 27 8x10 color glossy pictures (really, just 2 or 3) that Hands Across the Sea requests for their records and to be used on special thank-you notes to the contributors that helped front the money for the new library books at the school.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my USB-to-miniUSB cable with me to work, so I will not be able to retrieve those photos from my camera in time for this post.  So despite my intentions, readers will be forced to wait one more weekend for some neat update photography.  The real work with the school library, however, begins after Carnival, when the entirety of the library is being moved from upstairs, in the climate-controlled, well-lit, tiled, public space that I spent hours and days reorganizing, to its new home downstairs in an open-air, dim, humid, concrete-floored, former classroom.  The new school administrators' decision to move the library appears to have been motivated by reasons wholly removed from anything relating to me or the library itself, yet I feel my frustration over this myopic, unilateral change is not unjustified.

Oh, and it seems there's a football game this weekend.  Wouldn't want to jinx anybody like some claim I did last year, but I feel compelled to offer my cheers for the brave and bold in this battle for the hearts and minds of the state.  So here's to my Alma Mater, where the best and brightest get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected.

Lessons Remembered

I came down with a very mild dengue fever a week ago Monday, so I took that day off from work.  Now, one week later, I'm feeling better and more rested.  But I'm concerned that my effort to save money by further limiting my groceries to only inexpensive, easily-stored foodstuffs like spaghetti, tuna, or macaroni and cheese, is taking its toll on my body.  In Pre-Service Training, we were taught to eat leafy greens and plenty of veggies and proteins to try and stave off common illnesses.  Instead, it's just bread and sugar, bread and sugar, for every meal (and sometimes salt).  Oatmeal, cheese bread, or pop tarts for breakfast; spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, or sandwiches for dinner; leftovers for lunch.  With little to no variation for weeks at a time, my enjoyment and interest in eating is waning fast.

Well, I think I've finally reached it: the second of two anticipated dips in morale during a typical PCV's term of service.  Back during Pre-Service Training, we were taught that the average volunteer goes through two valleys in the span of a two year term of service: the first after six months, the second after one year.  My thought at the time was that I would have an irregular graph, something with dips and peaks at different times from everybody else.  As it turns out, I was wrong – my chart would look the same as the average volunteer's, and I'm currently riding through the deepest period of frustration and disenchantment.

In addition, I'm having some trouble finding things to write about these days.  Contrarily, I don't seem to have any difficulty being inspired to extrapolate some trends from the NSTP's new secondary-school trainees database, or the average points scored from all 462 different dice-roll combinations in Zilch.  It seems that my head is so full of numbers, I have no space left for emotions and words to express them.  That was one of the discoveries of my anxiety therapy some years ago, and at the time I made strides towards improving my ability to be more self-aware of my own emotions.  Short of any dramatic backsliding in this area, I believe the cause is more related to a dearth of variation of experience lately.  It was some time ago that I crossed from daily seeing or participating in some new and positive experience – now I find myself going weeks through the same routine, only to be surprised when I realize it's Friday afternoon and I've created nothing new for the week.  And I know myself well enough to know that is what I derive the most job satisfaction from: producing new and useful creations to the people and companies I serve.  But I can't seem to refocus on creating new ideas for projects at work when I have these unfinished, unmoving new ideas from months ago crowding the tunnel of my mind.

On Thursday, I drove with my host family to the grocery/hardware store across town, in order to pick up some lightbulbs that work on a 220V circuit.  I can now see in my apartment after 6:30 PM!  There was a bit of a scare at the checkout line, however: while I was carefully monitoring the total price of my groceries, knowing that I had exactly EC$185 on me, I forewent purchasing the potato chips when the total exceeded $165.  Then as I pulled the cash from my wallet, I noticed there was only $165 there – $20 had gone to purchasing the lightbulbs at the hardware!  Oh wait, I also had the change left over from that transaction.  In the end, there was just enough to cover the groceries.

Oh, and before I forget, here's to 6000 pageviews.  I think reaching 10,000 in my term of service could be a real possibility – and remember, I have a surprise for everyone at 9000!

TS Irene Does Her Thing

Let's start with the good news: My girlfriend, a second-year student at the Ross University Vet School, did well enough on her final exams to pass each of her classes, and indeed raise her overall GPA.  She will thus be allowed to continue her schooling here in the Caribbean.

...That might be about it.  In what proved to be a very difficult weekend for both of us, there were not a lot of upsides to lean on, apparently.  What followed this happy news was Tropical Storm Irene, which effectively knocked out all on- and off-island travel for all of Saturday and Sunday.  The flight that my girlfriend had been scheduled to leave on was booked Sunday, and summarily canceled.  However, apparently contrary to standard airlines procedure, she was not contacted regarding the cancellation, and did not find out about it until she checked online at the recommendation of her school friends, most of whom were also vying for available flights to the States.  By the time she checked, the earliest flight available was Thursday, four days later than originally scheduled.  In lieu of using her local phone and rapidly running down the minutes, she needed to get to a landline at the school, something that under the conditions of the storm proved to be difficult: we hitched a lift with a friend, whose car ran headlong into the first 18-inch deep puddle it saw, and flooded.  In a drive that takes less than 5 minutes, we were stalled outside the gate to the Ross University parking lot for about 15 minutes.

When we finally got to the student center, the facility was happily open to students, but naturally most of the services, including the coffee shop and telephones, were unavailable.  With no phone, breakfast or dry feet to comfort us, we walked about a quarter of a mile in the storm to the on-campus dorms, where we were able to use a friend's phone to call American Airlines.  By this point, nearly an hour after checking online, the first available flight out of St. Kitts left Saturday.  Over the course of a long and fretful conversation with the sales representative, even that changed to the following Sunday, meaning that all American Airlines flights were booked solid for a week.  What with students all leaving at the same time, in addition to the usual travelers, plus the two daily flights that had been canceled, my girlfriend could not book a flight in the time that she had to leave.  Unwilling to pay full fare for a trip that would now last, at best, 5 days, she refunded her ticket and is now looking for ways to occupy herself in the two weeks she has free now.

All this might have been enough to deal with, had it not been for an incident, somewhat existentially comical in nature, that happened Saturday night: while laying in bed, she heard creaking and cracking under her, and presumed the cats were being particularly vigorous and unrestrained in their faux boxing.  But instead, when she looked, she observed a perceptible incline in certain tiles on the floor of her bedroom, both directly under the bed and around the large vanity dresser.  She quickly jumped out of bed to safer, not-sinking ground, and alerted her landlady to the increasing displacement in the slope of her room, and the subsequent cracking of tiles at the joints.  Naturally, her landlady dismissed it, citing a similar incident in an adjacent apartment the previous summer.  This scenario would cause any reasonable person discomfort, but doubly so to one who was dealing with the realities that she will not get to see her family as planned, in conjunction with all of the stresses and concerns over the most difficult semester of graduate school she had faced yet.  The poor girl felt like the ground really was sinking right underneath her at this point.

So what all this means for me is that I was stuck away from my apartment for the duration of the storm, and even stuck in it for some.  Fortunately, though the rainfall was torrential, the winds and flooding were not destructive, and the island and my apartment look not too worse for the wear.  I had never planned on leaving my apartment through a storm without my being there, however, and a few oversights may yet come back to haunt me: I left my grill out on the porch after preparing Grilled Jerk Chicken on Friday night, and the exterior window in my kitchen was left open all weekend, ensuring that my previously-clean dishes got an extra washing, and the floor accumulated just a smattering of moisture as well.  By all appearances, everything else remained dry and intact.  Though I was caught off-guard this time, I'll be extra cautious and prepared to get even a last-minute lift back home in time for the next big storm, whenever that may be.

Funnyquote Friday

As I've mentioned, I'm the new layout editor for the Serious Ting, the Eastern Caribbean's Peace Corps Volunteer-prepared publication.  One of the common departments in every issue of the Ting is a welcome to all incoming PCVs, as per their starting class, (i.e. EC83 in this issue) as well as a farewell to all outgoing PCVs.  This time, our wise chief editor from Grenada decided to add a token bit to each outgoing PCV's profile, including a short message of advice from that PCV to the new class of incoming PCVs.  One EC80 from St. Vincent wrote, as his advice to other PCVs,

"Don't take too much advice from other PCVs."

Nice; I can't wait to see the smirks on people's faces when they read that.

Unilaterally preparing the layout for each article continues to go well enough.  All in all, I'll have laid out a dozen-and-a-half 1 to 2 page articles, two profile conglomerations of 50+ total profiles, the covers, and some special announcements and fillers.  I'm still on pace to be done by my deadline, the end of this month.  Even so, I'm starting to feel the fatigue of going through the same steps over and over again.  And even with 90% of the articles completed, the incoming and outgoing profiles represent an intimidating juggernaut of tedium that I do not relish toiling through.  The cover, on the other hand, is completed as well, but I can't in good conscience release the artwork to you, my readers, yet.  I'll wait until it has been definitively approved and printing has begun on the magazines, expected about a month from now.

In some unfortunate news, I went through a scary ordeal this week: my apartment was the site of an attempted burglary, shortly before dawn Tuesday morning.  Some person, whose gender, race, and identity I will likely never know, was attempting to take advantage of my (as since remedied) habits of leaving the porch light off during the night, leaving just one of the front windows open for a breeze, leaving my laptop out on the table in view of exterior windows, and declining to lock the deadbolt while inside, given it is a keyed entry from both sides.  I was not completely vulnerable - I had strong, unyielding burglar bars over the windows, a locked doorknob and hand bolt in the door frame.  However, the burglar's plan was apparently to bypass as many of these precautions as possible.  He (I'll refer to the burglar as a he, despite not being certain) got much of the way into his plan: (1) he first managed to remove the screen outside my center window, which was cracked open, and slide the window all the way open, (2) then he removed the screen on the window closest to my front door and reached inside through the open window, unlatching the lock on the closed window, and slid that window open, (3) and finally he proceeded to reach his arm into the living room, between the burglar bars, towards the front doorknob, in a clear attempt to unlock the door from the inside.  I was awakened by the sounds of muffled squeaks and creaks, what I initially mistook to be the sounds of yet another neighborhood cat being brutalized by some unseen, outdoor midnight assailant.  When the sound persisted, I sat up in bed and immediately noticed the shape of a man's head and torso cast in shadow onto an interior wall.  In one swift motion, my heart stopped and fell into by stomach, and I leaped out of bed, shouting loudly and as intimidatingly as I could muster, in an attempt to make my presence known.  For one long, daunting, hairy moment, the burglar, who was crouching and whose arm was the only thing I could make out in the dim light, hesitated; I'm still not certain why.  The most likely explanations are that either in that instant I managed to startle him almost as much as he startled me, or that, very simply, in his attempt to escape, he released the window he was holding up (which is unable to stay up on its own) and trapped his arm for a split second.  But in the heat of the moment, all I could think was, Oh dear, he's not running away.  This is bad.  But even as I took the time to formulate these thoughts, he was already out of the window, and taking off into the night.

For the next several minutes, I surveyed the scene, and took stock of my security firewalls, threats, blessings, and curses.  I wondered in passing why Bouncer, the neighbor's dog who lives upstairs, had not awakened to the sounds.  I noted that my landlord had recently been trying to replace the damaged security lamp on the front of my building, but hasn't been able to muster the Kittitian labor from his vantage point of Trenton, New Jersey.  I supposed that, had the burglar actually managed to reach far enough into the house, there was a small chance that he could have undone the locks and bolts and successfully entered.  I considered what kind of person, who was careful enough to try to not be noticed, would take all of these things in mind, but not that there was a person in the house at the time; did the burglar also carry with him something to defend himself with?  Would I have been in danger had he managed to actually break in?  These thoughts, coupled with the eminently pervasive feeling of being unsettled and anxious, caused me to lie sleeplessly in bed for the next couple hours, right up until dawn.  When I finally woke from some fitful R.E.M. sleep around 10:30, I called in the necessary reports to various Peace Corps officers, and they helped me through that tough first day.  My office's administrative assistant, a good friend to me, was even kind enough to visit me that morning; I can't express how relieving it was on my sense of safety to have another person in the apartment at that time.  After spending much of the night being terrified by every new shadow, or curtain movement, or dog bark, my nerves were frayed and my mind was highly, again, unsettled.  I would remain that way for the rest of the day, even through the evening when I went with my girlfriend to see Harry Potter at the theater.  The more I told myself that things were going to be okay, that I shouldn't worry, that I had taken the necessary precautions to ensure the strict unliklihood of this happening again, the more it became clear that I was far from being over the anxiety of it all.

Now, three days later, I am feeling much better.  I'm sleeping normally again, and I feel firmly ensconced in my little fortress of an apartment.  I have taken to leaving the porch light on all day and all night now (only useful at night, obviously, but hey, I'm not paying for the electricity), and sealing up all three façade windows whenever I'm not awake and in the apartment.  Additionally, I'm locking the doorknob, the hand bolt, and the deadbolt every night, and I found some plastic stubs that insert into the window screen frames that lock them in. 

Generally I would give you all of these updates at different points during the week, but given my busy schedule and my state of mind, this is the first opportunity I have had that I have been able and willing to post a log entry.  So, soldiering on...

I presented my six months' worth of work on the Client Profile Database to the National Skills on Thursday.  The meeting was hardly brief – when we started around 10:00, I was through with all of the points of interest by about 10:45.  But the meeting carried on until 11:45, with the gaping hour devoted to questions, clarifications, details, and other minutiae.  I'm well enough used to fielding questions like this for upwards of an hour; I guess I'm just out of practice.  I was pretty spent by the end of it.  And the unveiling of this massive ≈2MB database spreadsheet was not met with the enthusiasm that I expected; but everyone seemed comfortable enough in the idea of using it, anyway, which is the good news.  Just a few cosmetic changes remain, and in the meantime I busy myself with finding new ideas for projects.  I already have a few good ones – maybe I save them for another post.

Thanks for reading this drawn-out post, and wishes for a good weekend from the Caribbean!

Funnyquote Friday

Seen on a used car advert at the grocery store:

"Too good to be true!"

It never ceases to amuse me when I unwittingly discover that I've been an ant farmer for, well, who knows how long.  This morning, when I took out the garbage, I found that the traces of tuna salad that had clung to a disposable plate that had been thrown away a week ago was the source of a formic parade extending from my trash can to a nearly imperceptible crack in the wall.  Thankfully the vespoids had not been there long enough to attract other critters, namely predators like centipedes and spiders.  That's one surprise I wouldn't welcome with such a humor.  (Ugh, just writing about them already has me jerking my head at every sudden shadow, afraid it's another octoped intruder.)

I'm finding this ordeal of being the Design and Layout Editor of the Serious Ting to be somewhat daunting.  NEWSFLASH:  I forgot how poor I am about managing open, very unstructured tasks.  And what I'm faced with, every time I go to typeset another article for this edition (due to go to print at the end of this month), is a blank page.  Not a wireframe template, not a sketch drawing, just a blank page.  And it's ferociously staring right back at me.  Mind you, it's not the blankness itself that is intimidating; this text-entry page is blank every time I sit down to it, which is considerably often.  Rather, I think, it's the nearly infinite possibilities that can go onto it, each with their own pros, cons, flair, authorship, contrivance, taste, look, and feel.  Should I use a background?  Should it be a full-page photo?  Or should it be a soft gradient?  Should I go light to dark?  Should it be a vertical or a horizontal gradient?  Or should it be circular?  Should it be behind text, or should they be separated by an opaque text box?   Should the box have rounded corners, or square?  Or should the box have a soft, embossed edge with no stroke?  Should each item have its own box, or should they be all in one?  Should the thumbnails be fully enclosed in the box, or should they hang over the edge?
...
Or should I use a border instead of a background?

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.

Funnyquote Friday

Your quote for the week is from one of my Iron Band students, a 6th grader with a real type-A personality:

"I'm sure Mr. Nelson [doesn't want to listen to your problems, he] would rather go home, eat tortilla soup and watch TV."

Maybe this bit needs just a little explanation: my Iron Band gaggle and I had just finished playing a memory game, used for the purposes of introduction, where we were all required to state our name and favorite foods.  I declared mine to be tortilla soup, which confounded a few of the students, whose other choices were Kittitian staples like chicken & chips, Chinese food, sōp (that's how to pronounce 'soup' here), goat water, and cookup, among other things.  And this girl, when she was putting one of her peers "in his place," explained to him, incorrectly, that I was less interested in sticking around after practice to discuss one of his concerns.  Of course, I quickly rectified the situation, but I couldn't help but laugh at her comment.

I've been struggling mightily with loneliness the past week.  Not usually one to dwell on emotions, I nonetheless can't seem to escape the painful feeling of emptiness that resides, omnipresent, in my gut.  (And before you say so, I don't think it's just hunger this time.)  My desire for some form of close companionship has recently supplanted my need for broader social circles, which I have managed to see bear fruit this calendar year.  And I'm very thankful for that, but in turn my spirit's gaze has moved on to a more personal need.

To use a metaphor, I've been presented with a number of doors since my arrival on island, but God has seen fit to close all of them so far, which has had a less-than-delightful effect on my self esteem.  And while it still can get me down, I have managed to find a positive way to counteract the negative effects: asking my friends, especially the lady friends, to keep a weather eye open for other potential candidates.  And without exception, this is met with enthusiasm; as it turns out, not only does my friendship with these lovely people carry some weight, but, quite simply, they love playing matchmaker!  So I'm able to turn around my disappointment with the circumstances infringing on my pursual into a positive experience we can share as friends.

And I know what some would say: "You need to focus on the task at hand, and not these frivolous things."  Well, I see the long-term wisdom in that, of course, and ultimately I don't want to sacrifice any time, effort, or resources on short-term or nonpermanent pursuits.  And so my prayer is, at the last, for God to either fulfill this desire common to all of us, or else squelch it for the time-being, in only the way that He can.

Frankly, I'm hoping for a little insight from the Stones.

I Am Who, Revisited

I hope everyone got a kick out of Friday's Funnyquote: it was an April Fools' special!  Please know that there's no way I actually take anything Mr. Sheen has to say seriously, any more than the media does.  Although I guess I don't have to worry too much, since I think the page received exactly one pageview all weekend.

I'm constantly astounded to discover how little I know about life – as I've mentioned before on this blog, that very idea goes against every natural inclination of my personality.  And if I can be allowed to qualify that statement, I don't believe that my assuming nature is borne out of misplaced pride or arrogance, but more of a steely self-confidence that serves to promote my ability to read people and complex social situations, deal with hardship and letdowns, and even compensate for my fears of being perceived as either too bold and overbearing or as too meek and wimpy.  What I've come to find is that a major part of maturity is discovering that the things we place so much import on don't really matter all that much.  Things like other people's opinions of oneself and the value of one's social contributions.  Things like social status and income levels, they don't affect our long-term happiness.  Of course I have long tried to live my life to reflect these beliefs, but much like Spring cleaning in the attic, every now and then I stumble across a long-lost gem when clearing through the cobwebs of my previous life lessons.  And that's the inspiration for this post.

My high school English teacher was my favorite academic and source of culture in backwater Hiawassee.  And one of her staple assignments that went to all graduating 12th graders was the production of a memory book that served as part creative writing outlet and part nostalgic memento.  I took full advantage of the open-ended nature of the writing topics in concert with my teacher's broad sense of humor for the first writing piece, entitled simply, "Who am I?"  I prefaced my responses with the explanation that I had long ago learned that the accomplished essayist was to answer his debater's questions with a restatement of the question.  So I complied, saying things like, "Who am I?  I am who knows 100 decimal places of pi but doesn't quite understand how a checking account works."  And with a little wit and introspection attached, I figured it was time for another go at it.

So without further ado, Who am I?

• I am who wears his heart on his sleeve, all day, every day.
• I am who has been told I have a Messiah complex.  Maybe so, but I'm more worried about that guy who said so and his inability to come up with less impertinent names for social maladies.
• I am who is a little less certain than I was yesterday.
• I am who can't formulate anything apart from a functional argument against the Multiverse theory in a question of practical application and its effect on my emotional expectations.
  
• I am who in recent memory had a legitimate, life-altering existential crisis.  At first glance I guess I wasn't really expecting that to be on this list so soon.
• I am who has been told I like to hear myself talk.  Let me tell you about that.
• I am who habitually looks for hidden significance in numbers, but claims no superstitions. (For example, there are 13 items on this list!)
• I am who still cares a great deal about what others think, in spite of whatever I may say.
• I am who is occasionally astounded at just how lazy I can be.
• I am who can't stomach profound assurances of future performance based solely on previous trends, and yet amidst difficult situations fear foremost that change for the better is impossible.
• I am who will be the most pleasantly surprised if anything substantially positive for the peoples of St. Kitts comes out of my service in the Peace Corps.
• I am who never really bought into the phrase, "It's the simple pleasures..."
• I am who once expected the world of me, but now... I'm not so sure.

But the unanswered question still lingers.  Is this new watered-down perspective the key to happiness, or will my unfulfilled idealistic goals haunt me?  Is 'good enough'... ever really good enough?  Will 'settling for less' prove to be exactly that?

Maybe I still have some growing up to do.

2 Cups Flour, 1 Tbsp. Perspective

It's sad to say that, after only 5 months, I think I'm already at the point where I'm so inundated with the short-term, day-to-day, that it's hard to separate out the big picture of what I'm trying to accomplish here.  Where I should be thrilled with the notion that I am serving as a cog in a bigger machine (albeit of very slow-moving progress), content to make note of accomplishments when my time here is done, I can't help but wonder here and now if the small things I'm doing every day are making any real, permanent difference to the institutions I'm working with. 

I guess another way of putting the same thing is, I'm losing the battle with putting aside my own expectations of what progress is in social development work here in the Eastern Caribbean.  As I pointed out during PST, this is one of the top three challenges that I anticipated before starting my service, in conjunction with perpetual loneliness and being singled out or mistaken for a tourist or student because of my difference in appearance.  At the time, I identified two primary mechanisms for relieving these anxieties: spending time in prayer and the Word, and sharing in deep conversations with peers.  One has quickly dropped off in frequency (blame the Internet) and the other is lacking in several necessary parts.  The result is an unfortunate inability to appropriately deal with these psychological struggles, and a subsequent drop in efficiency in important things, like work and house maintenance.

This is, perhaps, an unfortunate realization coming up to my performance check-up scheduled for Wednesday.  I'm not particularly nervous, or anything, and I have my preparations for the meeting with my Institutional Point Person and my Assistant Peace Corps Director taken care of.  I'm just aware of my tendency to be very transparent, even when I try not to divulge certain details.  Heck, even my willingness to log these thoughts should be evidence of that.  But I chose long ago to err on the side of fully honest disclosure in all of my undertakings; a friend and mentor of mine once called this choice "a life without guilt."  There is some truth to this, to be sure.  I don't regret this guiding habit, but it would be untrue to suggest that it always leads me to the best option.  But that's a different post, perhaps.

There is a sign right across from my seat in my office, posted there by our Social & Life Skills adviser at the NSTP.  It reads, "Poverty of purpose is far worse than poverty of purse."  I don't know if you have to be in the Peace Corps to appreciate the wisdom of this reality, but I can say that all PCVs face this at some point in their service, perhaps those in the EC a little sooner than others.  It's part of the reality of working in the richest global region that the Peace Corps has any presence in: the perception that the good we can do here is, as often as not, regarded as limited.  And in my case, paired with an institution that has no cash flow to support daily operations, this can occasionally be doubly so.

The good side to all of this is that I've identified another method of achieving a temporary morale boost: cooking!  Thanks in large part to the hours I spent with my ex-fiancée in the kitchen, observing and participating where I could, I picked up a lot of helpful techniques to ensure some level of sustained success in my culinary endeavors, ambitions that I never knew I had.  But I've come to find out that I am so proud of my newly-evolving abilities that I have added a list of the dishes most deserving of praise to the front page of this blog.

Reservations for Château du CEC are now being accepted, but you'll have to call soon – seats are going fast!

Unfavorable Expectations

I figured out what I want for Christmas this year.  So if you want to get me one, just hold on to it until I get back to the States, since I won't be allowed to use it here until I am released from service.  (Thanks, you're the best!)

I've been having some bad luck with expectations lately.  Cooking expectations, project expectations, and other expectations more or less dramatic.  It should come as no surprise that stresses one faces in Peace Corps service have a tendency to sneak up on you, even when you are actively resisting their effects.  It's like continuing to hack down the same weed in your yard over and over, even as the roots spread out underground and unnoticed.  In my case, these stresses have come in the form of falling short of my own expectations, even expectations I had previously regarded with little concern.  As readers will recall, I've been very pleasantly surprised with my cooking ability, enjoy the freedom, experience and experimentation, and at a rate of two nights per week I'm not burning out of it quickly either.  But I noticed something last night after frying barbecued chicken legs: I was disappointed that they weren't better than they were.  This despite the fact that for a spur-of-the-moment decision to cook them, and for my second try at frying barbecued chicken, they turned out very tasty and mixed very well with the fresh vegetables and rice.  Yet I was hoping that they would soak up a little more of the barbecue flavor.  Really, they just didn't have enough time to marinate, or else they no doubt would have.  But the results were very satisfactory all things considered, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to feel down about them.

Similarly, I have some faulty expectations with a project at my school attachment.  The library reorganization project was and still is a challenging undertaking, pitting me, my best efforts, and a handful of students against a room full of disorderly and dilapidated books with a lot of inertial resistance to change.  So what if it took more than that first day to unshelve, sort, label, catalog, and reshelve all 1000+ books?  That doesn't mean our first efforts were any less fruitful just because we did not completely finish on that day.  I recognized, even at PreService Training, that marrying my own expectations of my performance on projects with the expectations of my counterpoints would prove challenging for me.  I know now, as I feared then, that my own expectations for myself tend to be higher than practicality will allow in my situation.  My timetables are far shorter than the typical Kittitian approach to productivity, and while I have not faced any particular resistance to setting my own schedule for things, I have been left disappointed when unable to finish a project in its anticipated time allotment.  This is ultimately harmful to my morale and to my motivation in proceeding with the project, and all because of my own presumptions of what defines "productivity."  So when I ask for prayer for patience, this is what I mean.  The ability to slow down my natural anxieties that I am not living up to my mandates, and instead acknowledge God's guidance in all of my projects here.

I miss everyone, but not nearly as much as I will during Christmas.  So find some time this month to give me a shout out on Skype; my birthday is in two Mondays, too.

Spread the word! Tell your friends!

Later post today, I know: I'm not feeling very well this afternoon.  My joints are achy and hypersensitive to the point that it's laborious to type.  But it was an even busier weekend than usual, so I'll try to crank something out all the same.

I was on Nevis all day Saturday for the follow-up to the march the previous week.  It came in the form of a video that will be aired on Nevis TV between the dates of Nov. 25 and Dec. 10.  Here is the link; please check it out. My fellow PCV on Nevis and I are very proud of the result, and hope that it will serve to enlighten and encourage the people of Nevis in this time of increased incidents of domestic, and organized, violence.  In fact, things are getting increasingly desperate here by the week: just last week a taxi carrying 17 tourists was held at gunpoint outside the gate to Brimstone Hill and robbed by a couple of criminals.  The resulting swift action by the cruise lines culminated in about half the tourism activity during peak season, and a call for higher security measures to be taken on island.  The reaction from the government was an eloquent reproach by the deputy prime minister and minister of national security (which you can see here) tying the incident to the repercussions for all of the tourism industries on island.  Still, what with Carnival and Jouvert approaching, the environment is a unique and mildly unsettling mix of "Good Will Toward Men" and "Watch Your Back."

But it wasn't all work over the weekend: I got to see each of the PCVs on Nevis at one point or another: one when we took to the beach for a few hours, and the other on Saturday night at this very chic yet amiable club that was celebrating its 1st year anniversary.  Here's hoping both it and I are around this time next year to celebrate lucky number 2!

The Good, The Bad, and the Gorgeous

I forgot to mention in my last post that when in St. Paul's parish on Saturday, I myself finally got to go Dung By Betty for a late dinner.  And it lived up to the hype – it's hard to beat the warmth and filling sensation from the heap of carbohydrates in a satisfying platter of chicken and chips.  (That's, of course, fried chicken legs and french fries with cane sugar ketchup.)  So that might have to happen again, whenever I'm on that end of the island on a weekend.

Tuesday was its own story, a deluge of frustrations, glories, disappointments, and surprises.  It all started with a vain attempt to install a wireless cable modem in my apartment, a two hour exercise in futility.  Somewhere between the technician arriving at 9:30 and him leaving at 11:30, it became clear that mere access to the two coaxial jacks in my apartment was not enough, and the entire wiring had to be investigated.  However, this involved searching the adjacent apartment, since my cable is apparently at the end of the line, and nobody residing there has access to the adjacent apartment.  Moreover, my property manager could not be lifted by phone, and it is presently unclear whether or not he even has the necessary keys.  The sad offshoot of all this is that I probably won't have internet access at home for another week at the least.

I explained to my school that I would be arriving later that day, and so they were expecting me around noon when I arrived.  However, my contacts both had arrangements over lunch break, and so I found myself again admiring the simplicity and elegance of Plan A but resorting instead to Plan B.  In this case, I walked into town, where I had a few errands to run and could pick up lunch for cheap at the bayfront. When I got there, I found both shops that had exactly what I was looking for... closed.  I did manage to secure some lunch, however, in the form of Ms. Moore's exquisite salt fish fritters and passion fruit juice.  Yet another example of a day-brightening meal, but one that my arteries can only handle once per month or so.  (Compare it to eating a BK® Whopper for lunch.  Would you do it two days in a row? No.)

I somehow worked myself back to school, where my counterparts were ready to sit and dialogue with me on the various projects I am spearheading.  Right now, those are the Math Games and Activities collection that you have heard of here before, and the improvement and expansion of the school library.  I have made a gesture of good faith in both projects already, showing my willingness to move ahead with the project and my comfort level with the implementation with respect to both.  Now, I am mostly waiting on my school counterparts to make a similar display of commitment, in the first case actually trying out a handful of the math activities that I have developed and recording notes for their improvement, and in the second case nominating a handful of students that would be willing to help take on the project of improving the school library.  Who knows, at this stage, what timing will be involved in either effort, or whether or not either project will get off the ground?  Patience is the key.

So ultimately what needed to happen at school did, and I found myself trucking back into town to try those shops again and to catch a bus back home.  Lo and behold! Both shops are open for service, and had exactly what I was looking for: double-sided wall stickers for hanging things on concrete walls, and about 30 yards of fishing line to hang a curtain of CDs in front of my washing machine and appliances.  (I don't know that I can be more specific than that now, but pics soon will clarify.)  So with the bus back home, I discovered that my electricity was out.  And just when things were starting to look up!  I still had several hours of daylight; in theory that's enough time to still cook dinner for myself and a friend, but after hanging the Federation flag and the world map on my wall, and grocery shopping for that night, I was left with about an hour-and-a-half of daylight – not quite enough time to prepare vegetables, marinate mushrooms, boil water and cook rice, sauté the vegetables, and fry mahi-mahi patties.  So we lit a few candles and waited for my neighbor to get back home.  My neighbor surveyed the situation, walked out to the fuse box, and replaced my apartment's fuse with another one, and Ding! everything worked just fine.

I was able to wright yet another miracle in the kitchen, this time with an objective judge not myself.  Despite the difficulty in trying to recreate the success of a seeming fluke the second go around, and the fact that I was partially cooking in the dark, I think the pan-fried mahi-mahi on rice with veggies and marinated mushrooms turned out very pleasing.

Did I mention I cooked for myself last night?  So, all in all, everything worked out as planned except for the internet installation.  That's the happy ending!

Funnyquote Friday

Seen on a sign at the strip at Frigate Bay:

"If you like it up North, stay up North."

A slightly darker quote this week.  The context is: at the strip where lots of fun (and some questionably legal fun) goes down, basically the message is, "Don't judge me."

Not a lot to add, just the usual plea for continued prayer for strength of body, mind, will, and character.  If I can get very personal for a sentence, I have been having a bout with my anxieties for the last few days, basically echoing the struggles I was facing in the States before starting down here.  Please pray that God would take from me this anxiety and replace it with the assurance that He has a plan for me here, and more importantly, will see it through.

Training is starting to wrap up, which is to say we have less than two full weeks left of PST schedule, and only three or four more full days of training regimen.  So hopes are high on that end, and just enough to keep us buoyant through the heavy homework and presentations we are expected to make in the coming days.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to St. Lucia..."

My first taste of island time, and a bittersweet morsel it is.  My class of volunteers (henceforth referred to as EC82) landed in St. Lucia around 2:00 this afternoon to find ourselves greeted with current volunteers from neighboring islands and hotel accomodators.  The current volunteers were, quite frankly, miffed at the special treatment we were getting, being put up in a fine resort hotel where we will spend the remainder of the week working towards meeting expected competencies and passing required modules.

Unfortunately, this means that I will not have cell phone coverage nor wireless internet access for the next week, as I am posting this from the hotel's single rental internet station.  I will summarily be out of touch for this time, and really I'll be too busy with work during that time anyway.  But I'm taking additional notes on my moleskine, so I'll be able to relate the events of PST (PreService Training) when I have a more stable internet connection.

We have already lost two group members, (30 -> 28) before leaving the hotel this morning.  The word is that 9 of 10 potential volunteers make it through staging and PST, so we may be due one more before the week's out.  It's a shame, because we've got a great group here, very enthusiastic and positive.  The work will prove to be very challenging, though, and that chipper attitude will be chipped at.  I'm being challenged by some anxieties of my own even now, but I'm trying to maintain a positive and carefree attitude as best I can.  Please continue to pray for me, that God would watch over me in an as-of-yet foreign land.