I Believe

Whilst in a Monday meeting with my coworkers at the NSTP,  we were discussing the upcoming graduation ceremony for the A Ganar graduates.  I pointed out that I would be busy that Saturday volunteering at the 3rd Annual 5K Run for the St. Christopher Children's Home, and wouldn't be able to make it to the graduation.  And when the theme "I Believe; I Can Achieve" was discussed, I was inspired to contribute a poem in lieu of attending.  So I spent the time in the meeting composing the following poem; it was all done in about an hour's time.

My friends, my mentors, they encourage me;

My parents, my teachers, they want to see

The best come through in all I do

And show the world that I, for true,

Am worth the sacrifices they’ve made.  For

This I believe; I can achieve more

When I study those that want me to succeed.

The finish line looks far away,

But I’m being careful not to stray

From the path that takes me to the top.

Until I reach, I nah gon’ stop.

Some may doubt, but in my soul,

I believe; I can achieve the goal

That I have placed before myself.

In school, I’d fight and sweat and strive –

But thanks to A GANAR, I thrive

On the knowledge that I can do my part

To forge myself a brand-new start

Preparing myself for life’s big test.

I believe; I can achieve my best

By taking seriously the chances I’ve been blessed with.

I may not grow up to be rich,

My clothes may wear at every stitch,

But I know that yet still more import

Is found in whether I’m the sort

Of person the highest riches affords.

I believe; I can achieve rewards

In heaven and earth by doing my best every day.

I was favored with the attendance of over 50 friends, neighbors, and fellow volunteers at my 'Thanks and Goodbye' party on the evening of Friday the 28th.  Waking up at 6:00AM to start the cooking and going all the way through until guests began arriving around 5:30 that afternoon, I was almost completely spent even before the fun began.  But with the help of my good friend who showed me the ropes in preparing each of the local dishes on the menu (i.e. Cookup, Ginger Wings, Breadfruit Salad, Macaroni Pie) we got through it and was able to serve everyone who showed up looking for some good food and a good lime.  The Peace Corps and my work office were both well represented, and plenty of other friends and neighbors showed up and stayed until 10:00 that evening, just as the Tiki torches began to die out.  It was a success in the eyes of all the guests, and I took the rest of the weekend to recover.

I have but 10 days remaining in the Caribbean.  Some things left on my last minute to-do list are getting wrapped up presently: I went by Caribelle Batik at Romney Manor and purchased the portrait batik of a SK rum shop that will hang in my office, whenever and wherever I have one.  I submitted my health insurance application today, a small benefit when returning home after two years abroad.  Additionally, I was able to negotiate a discounted rate at the Royal St. Kitts Golf Course in Frigate Bay, and hope to take advantage of it this Thursday.  Aside from those three things, I'll have the first half of next week to complete any remaining trivial things before catching my flight back next Thursday the 18th. 

Health and Happiness

I was down with strep throat last weekend – it was so bad earlier in the week that I had to go to the doctor's office.  To the relief of my swollen tonsils, I was given a prescription for amoxicillin and sent on my way.  My condition, while not so painful as to be debilitating during the day, was disastrous on my energy level and appetite: I found I could only eat about 2 small meals a day and had to separate those with 2-3 hour naps in the middle of the day.  And all this without a fever!  At the time, I couldn't make any sense of it, except to wait out the July 4th holiday (Peace Corps Staff must take this day off, which means I couldn't see the doctor that day) and hope it was only a case of strep throat.  The doctor, short of giving me a throat swab, opined that it was indeed strep, and not a worse infection.  Still on the antibiotics now, I'm back at work, though I still have mild symptoms in the evenings for now.

My landlord, longtime resident of New England, landed in St. Kitts yesterday, quite literally "out of the blue."  I had never met the man face to face before then, but he wasn't interested in getting to know me so much as apologizing for the state of the yard which, to his excited confusion, was "bad like he'd never seen it before."  He cited his ignorance of the degree to which the yard had been neglected, but given the constant reminders that I sent his way, this doesn't seem plausible.  Simply because he was incapable of imagining grass that had grown knee-high and thick as brush does not excuse him from being loathe to arrange to cut it for six months' time.  He will undoubtedly be staying in the unfinished two bedroom apartment adjacent mine, which means I will now have to manage my sound level a little bit more carefully.  No blasting dubstep electronica through my 6-inch speakers anymore!

Busy, busy at work today – the A Ganar Datacard is up for submission once again, so my job just became more hectic overnight.  A very basic Excel worksheet, the Datacard is just A Ganar's streamlined method for collecting and rapidly organizing the pertinent data that marks the overall success of a given program implementation.  However, for the likes of the NSTP, this sort of data entry demands are not the usual fare, and since the necessary data that goes on this Datacard has not been regularly maintained during the collection phases, a mad scramble to conjure the correct input mere days before it is due is the m.o.  Further, it is my boss who tries to do the rounding up, but she is so busy with answering phone calls, attending offsite meetings and handling special requests, that she hardly has the time or presence of mind to do these menial bits.  I am required for nothing more than simply interpreting and inputting the data once it becomes available, a job that really any office lackey could handle, if there were any other person trained (and willing to learn!) on handling MS Excel.  The reader will recall that I did lead a couple of trainings in basic MS Office applications just last summer here at the NSTP for my coworkers.  However, since none have had occasion to use it since, I am still the only one who works with it regularly and can boast any sort of comfort level with it.

No word as yet on my prospective employer's hiring decision.  I am becoming increasingly disconcerted by their extended silence, it being now a week since I sent a contact e-mail their way.  All in all, the process involved in getting hired by this little non-profit, and the valuable time they have hijacked from my last half-year on island has been thus:

03 April
Application submitted
05 April -  28 April
Completed assignment deliverables
May
Wait for interview selections
May 29
First-round interview
June 05
Second-round interview
June 12
Reschedule third-round interview
June 19
Third-round interview
July 02
Send last contact letter

It's a harrowing ordeal, going through the hiring process.  I shudder when I think that my latest contact e-mail is sitting in an employee's inbox, and all the while he's thinking, Oh how laughable - he still thinks he has a chance at a job here!  I'm not even going to bother responding, I'll just let him sweat it out.  For a company that was careful to alert its applicants when they were taking an especially long time in May to make a decision, it seems inhumane to have waited to respond to my personal e-mails now that I've gone through the interview process.

Oh, and I almost forgot.  Here's the January highlight video, only 21 weeks late.

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

Overheard at Easter Monday activities at the ferry terminal:

"Boy, I wish my camera had a phone on it right now."

Last week I promised myself and you, my readers, that I would try my hand at a 10K / 6 mile run very soon.  I got up the energy and the nerve on Thursday, when I ran all the way from my apartment to the airport roundabout on the east side of town, and all the way back.  By my reckoning, it's almost exactly 3 miles one-way, and a small but noticeable vertical displacement.  Furthermore, I forced myself to start out at nothing faster than a 10min/mile pace, and was able to maintain that the whole way; my final time was 1:00:09.  A perfect 1 hour of running!  My first 10K!  I was very proud, and not at all exhausted afterward – just far hungrier than usual.

A Ganar paperwork, data entry, filing and sorting and retrieving files at work is getting pretty dull.  At six months out from Close Of Service, this is where the typical Volunteer begins to ask questions like, "Am I doing enough to support my NGO?" "Am I involved enough in my community?" and "Will my organizations be able to carry on the work I've done after I'm gone?"  As I suspect is the case with other Volunteers, I am reluctant to seek definitive answers to these questions, already aware of their likely outcomes.  Instead, I continue with the day-to-day and try to give myself something positive to look forward to on a regular basis, which feels like I'm ignoring the real meat of the problem sometimes.  I hope this doesn't come back to haunt me in job interviews...

You know, self-efficacy used to exude from me like sweat after a run (refreshing and natural, but borderline antisocial to some persons more stiff-necked than myself), but the combined experiences of switching my major of study, cancelling a wedding, and fruitlessly searching for a job for 18 contiguous months had effectively curbed that.  So it's been a nice change as of late to experience some reaffirmations of my potency: starting on Monday, when I was getting chatted-up by a very attractive local chick; then on Wednesday, when I achieved 100 pushups over 5 sets for the first time; then again Thursday, when I ran 6 miles uninterrupted for the first time; and lastly, I guess I should include last week's response to one of my applications that wasn't a rejection letter.  Aside: at what stage in my job search do I have to be to not be emotionally affected by typing that I'm receiving plenty of rejection letters right now?  The mature stage, or the jaded stage?  It feels like more of the former, so I'm going to stick with that.

Oh, and some people still don't understand why I was scared of E.T. growing up.  Those people can read this comic.

Happy Friday the 13th, everybody!

Funnyquote Friday

Trying to find a fellow Peace Corps' home in Keys Village, I was given the following directions:  Get off the bus, and go up the hill.  Take the second right off the main road.  Then,

"Keep going until you pass the squished frog."

What makes this extra funny, is that my traveling companion and I did actually find this remnant of an unfortunate amphibious excursion, the latest victim of mindless road rage and an unwitting landmark guidepost.

This is my last week of work on the Serious Ting before it goes off for approval in St. Lucia.  I'm pretty excited about how it's shaping up, and as usual I look forward to seeing the end result in print form.  I've cordoned off this weekend entirely for putting the final pieces together, and exporting the result.

I've spent every evening this week visiting a different high school in town and interviewing applicants of the A Ganar project for official USAID paperwork purposes.  Every evening beginning at 5:00 and going until after sunset, trying to coax thoughtful responses from 4A6 students (high school seniors, lowest achievement stream), I am exhausted by the end of the day.  The result has been that when I get home in the evening, I'm too tired to cook and eat simple high-carb meals like PB&Js or Mac&Cheese.  As the week has progressed, I didn't have the energy to get up early to perform my usual workout regimen, which has made me feel even more bleahhh...  So even though it is the start of Lent this week and I was hoping to use that as further incentive to keep to my new self-improvement activity, I'm likely going to have to wait until this weekend to continue going with that.

My mother, in response to my laments of loneliness here on my island, mercifully and charitably (though guilelessly) recommended I read the book of James – given that was the material her church family is currently exploring in a sermon series on that book of the Bible.  But anyone that knows the book of James knows that it is hardly applicable to someone that sincerely needs a morale boost.  Instead, she should have recommended the wise words of Holland-Dozier-Holland via the dulcet chords of Phil Collins.  Now, far be it from me to compare this favorably against scripture; I'm just saying that in this great big world and full life we've been given, inspiration can come from all kinds of different sources.

Funnyquote Friday

There are multiple ferry companies that service the route between Basseterre, St. Kitts, and Charlestown, Nevis.  However, one of the companies has inexplicably stopped running since before the new year – the Mark Twain, as it is called, has grounded its boats "until further notice."  This means that other companies, in order to fill the now vacant timeslots, have tried running more boats to meet the demand.  The Sea Hustler, for one, has a half-passenger half-vehicle ferry that I had not seen running before this month, but now see all the time.  The locals commiserate with me on the drop in quality of these "new" additions to the fleet: in the words of my Nevisian coworker,

"The Sea Hustler – it doesn't really hustle..."

In fact, it takes a few minutes over an hour for this unideal ferry to traverse the miles between wharfs, which means that after its 7:00 departure from St. Kitts, it reaches Nevis at 8:05, with a scheduled 8:00 departure time.  With minutes to board, and scurrying along the water, it reaches St. Kitts at 9:10, and prepares for its 9:00 departure.  With a boat that loses 5 minutes every hour, it only makes sense to schedule it for hour-and-a-half runs so it can reasonably maintain its timeslots and not make all its passengers late.  But since the hour-by-hour method is the way it has always been done, there is too much inertia to overcome, and this almost certainly will not change.

Progress on the Ting is coming along nicely.  With several articles typeset already, and work put into the holistic look of this new issue, I'd estimate that I am on track to meet my deadline of February 26.  No decision on the cover artwork yet, though that might get pushed nearer the end of the month, once the tone of the whole magazine has been established. 

In other news, things at work are getting a little strained.  Now that my Intro to Computers class has ended, and the A Ganar project has started up, I have effectively run out of projects at work to keep me busy.  So my time is mostly filled up with small IT trouble-shooting, a task that is so coarse and unnerving for me that just one out-of-control situation is enough to make me unsettled.  It's hard to explain how stressful it is being the "go to guy" – since I am apparently the senior staff member in terms of experience with these tech issues – and yet not really being properly equipped to handle 60-75% of them.  The expectations of my coworkers is that I know these great and terrible secrets about their computers, and that I can magically flip their console upside down and, with a wave of my hand, fix all their computer inadequacies.  Since this is not the case, 60-75% of the time I fall below expectations, which is a heavy performance anxiety burden for someone like me, who's not used to being so unhelpful.  This, combined with the fact that I don't have much else going on there, means that my job satisfaction at my primary assignment is suffering right now.  I'm considering calling a meeting with my boss and my APCD for the end of the month – I don't want to do it sooner, due to my being busy with Serious Ting goings-on.

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.)

HARD WUK Wuz Hyah!

Objectively speaking, I cannot blame my lack of updates the past few weeks on the usual biannual laziness (read: May and December), and instead refer the reader to the long, long week of activities that the NSTP had planned out for its 25th Anniversary celebration, observed this year.  Beginning Sunday, the NSTP was a collective guest at the Antioch Baptist Church in Basseterre.  That is to say, staff and students from the NSTP filled the center row or pews, and a special comments were made by each of two representatives of the NSTP - the interest of which was quickly overshadowed by the announcement of one parishioner's 90th birthday, which received tremendous acclamation.  All the same, it had been a long while since I was in church, and God used the opportunity to share with me.  He taught me, along with a reading from 1 Thessalonians chapters 1 and 2, to remind me of a simple truth: that success in my mission here will not be measured by my ability to help those that do not want to be helped.  This reminder altered first my perspective on closing out my assignments here a year from now, when the Peace Corps pulls out of St. Kitts for the foreseeable future, and second helped me to deal differently with day-to-day setbacks.  Just last Monday, in fact, the printer failed to print in black ink, and despite my best efforts of manually cleaning the printhead, would not submit to its share of the labor.  Even replacing it with its older predecessor has proved ineffective.  But rather than get discouraged, something that would be very easy for me given that in the interim the onus is on me, the IT "expert," to print copies in demand despite the lack of working hard-copy producing printing devices.  Did I mention the copier has been out of toner for a few weeks?

The rest of the week was no less hectic.  Monday was capped with a three-hour Facilitator Workshop and Professional Development Seminar hosted by the NSTP and patronized by our sister organization Project Strong, as well as ministry education officials and a keynote speaker from local conglomerate TDC, Inc.  On Tuesday, I submitted the final copy of the World AIDS Calendar, a project begun by my PCV colleague as a fundraiser for the Ministry of Health and as a tool for HIV/AIDS awareness and stigma reduction.  The cover art is to the left; it is a collage of works prepared by school children on the importance of accurate AIDS information.

Wednesday saw an office-wide excursion to Nevis with the Electrician class to see the new developments in alternative energy being installed here in the Federation.  Already, a fully functioning wind farm exists on Nevis, supplying around 3MW, sufficient to cover half of the island's electricity needs at every time except peak demand.  Furthermore, eighty acres on the western side of the island have been cordoned off for the new geothermal energy-harnessing plants, whose wells are scheduled to begin drilling come March 2012.  Both fully renewable and eco-friendly energy sources, the combination of the two would fully cover the energy demands of Nevis and St. Kitts for the foreseeable future, with enough leftover to sell to neighboring islands.

Finally, on Friday, I was up at 5:00 AM to head into town for the fitness "walkathon" hosted by the office.  Sporting my new T-shirt with the 25th Anniversary info emblazoned on it, I walked about five miles from the tamarind tree in Greenlands to the Sir Kennedy Simmonds Highway roundabout in Frigate Bay.  Leaving at 6:30, I arrived at 8:30, to a lovely rainbow and a light breakfast.  Due to the ensuing rain, however, the motivational speakers (one was none other than my APCD) had to be moved from the idyllic outdoor sanctuary under the trees to a stuffy classroom back at the office.  But we got through with the ceremony, and around noon I cashed in the goodwill that I had built up all week and bought a lift home, whereupon I slept for a solid two hours.

In other news, my food selection of late has been long on grains and proteins and lipids, but short on excitement.   In order to combat the diet doldrums, every other month or so I stock up on hot dog items and conjure up a meal once or twice a week.  (Not counting special spectator sporting events!)  This habit has led me to make the following observation: eating two hot dogs is just a little bit too much for my stomach.  That is, the preparation time is substantial enough that I am generally very hungry by the time I start on the first hot dog.  Then, after inhaling the entire first one, my hunger has peaked but not yet begun to appreciably decline.  So I begin the second with no sense of fear or indecision, only to be confronted with a sudden wall of pain about three-quarters of the way through the second hot dog.  The final two bites, then, are decidedly unpleasant: thoughts of "Why??  Why am I doing this to myself?" pervade my mind.  A pall of regret hangs over my decision to ingest the last four or five centimeters, but I bite the bullet (so to speak) and finish my cursed meal.  The diagram to the right further clarifies my deliciously deplorable experience.  Well, here's to Tomato Soup and Stir Fry the rest of the way.

I just finished November's highlight reel, so I've added it below.  Truth be told, I'm already working on the December flick, chock full of bits from the NSTP's busy week; but that will have to wait until next month to be posted.  In the meantime, enjoy:

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Work Is A Dish Best Served Fast

Wow, Thanksgiving week got here fast!  I guess that's what happens when the first three weeks of the month are spent away from the familiar.  And while it was a long three weeks, with enjoyable diversions and manifest chances to catch up with friends and family, the time seems to have been compressed to a pinpoint now that it is all over.  But I have a relaxing Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday to look forward to – my first one, after missing last year's due to a brief brush with the dengue.  Furthermore, I'll be walking with a dish that my girlfriend is preparing: a Jewish noodle casserole called Kugel.  Since somebody already offered to bring green bean casserole, and yet I was looking forward to making that myself, I volunteered to prepare it for my girlfriend's Thanksgiving get-together, in exchange for her T-giving dish.  So I'm excited to try it for myself for the first time!

Life at the NSTP continues, in spite of my absence, and new IT issues at the NSTP seem to have cropped up (quite literally) overnight: tighter "parental controls" need to be placed on a few of the desktop computers in the newly expanded computer lab, while Ms. Cuffy's office desktop seems to have become infected with a particularly hostile virus, apparently rewriting many Windows system files and rendering it essentially unusable.  I'm crossing my fingers that the Ministry of Education's IT Specialist remembers to bring a corporate copy of Windows with him, in the event we need to reformat the disk.  I have also been tasked with designing and publishing the NSTP's corporate Facebook page.  An opportunity to familiarize myself with the website controls, and especially develop some much-needed marketing experience.  So I'm right back to being busy here at National Skills.

Even as I write this, I am enjoying listening to the hospitality class start a new unit in the adjacent classroom.  They are discussing general cooking knowledge, the instructor deftly tugging at the trainees' previous experiences and wrapping them around new pillars of technique to be employed in the kitchen: how long does shrimp cook? what is christophene and when do you use it? what is salt fish, and what is the process for preparing it? what does 'au gratin' mean? what is linguine? what are three common uses of breadfruit?  Some of these I know the answer to, and some I am learning on the fly, no different from any of the 15-20 year olds sitting in the classroom right now.  It is interesting, and I sincerely hope that when I teach my two hour class on Wednesdays that I engage the students in the same way.  The most difficult part, perhaps, might be divining the individual students' previous experiences with computers, which can constitute a wide spectrum in even a small class.  But I have faith that the more time we spend in class, the more comfortable the students will be with me and the more willing they will be to share their own experiences that others can learn from.

EDIT: Ha ha, how out of touch do I have to be for posts without the funnyquote at the top to look weird?

Funnyquote Friday

When I go in to work at the NSTP, I have a few places in the office I feel comfortable working at.  The highlight video from January shows my work station in the central breezeway, where most of my coworkers can be found.  I like working there, but sacrifice strong wireless internet connectivity, desk space, access to a 110V power outlet, and air conditioning when I do.  All four of these things can be found instead in the computer lounge adjacent the breezeway.  Indeed, that is where I find myself as I compose today's post.  Well, one day my frequent Kittitian companion in the computer room, Maurice, commented on the state of the air conditioning.  As it had been blowing nonstop at full power for the whole workday, it was rather chilly in the room.  I observed that the air conditioning could stand to be turned down a little – his response:

"That's not air conditioning, that's cold storage!"

It's certainly been an eventful week.  I enjoyed spending the weekend on Nevis, where I said goodbye to my fellow volunteer whose term of service just finished.  Then we had her over to St. Kitts on Monday night for a goodbye dinner, before she caught her flight out Tuesday morning.  All of us here really enjoyed getting to know her, and we're sorry to see her go, but we're also happy that she was able to fulfill her two years here and spend that whole time helping the youth on Nevis become more mature, responsible adults, as well as better swimmers and Mandarin speakers!

Also on Monday I submitted the final changes to the Remarkable Teen pamphlet to the printer, and discovered that I found a caffeinated beverage at Rituals, the local coffee shop in town, that I like: a spiced chai latte.  Which, fortunately for me, is basic enough that I expect I can find it just about anywhere.  This makes the third beverage I have grown to like in just the year that I have lived on island.  The others, namely beer (in which drinking from a glass bottle does change the taste a little, but mostly just getting past the initial "I want to try it" to the "I want to like it" stage was what proved to be most crucial) and rum (in which it turns out that so-called "Caribbean Rum" marketed in the US is way WAY stronger and more pungent than the cheaper rums sold in the Caribbean) have also helped ease some of my limitations around social drinking.   Now whether its a bartender or barrista asking me what I want, I'm set!

Then on Tuesday, I visited my new acquaintance, Ms. Learnice Mitchell, down at the National Museum.  Her idea of using the auspices of the St. Christopher National Trust to publish a special pamphlet/magazine celebrating the renovation of the St. Thomas Anglican Church is taking off, and I'm happy to be participating.  It's the first time ever, I believe, that I've been brought on to a project in a sort of consultant role, where my expertise and opinions are valued and followed!  The resulting confidence boost and ego trip is rather exciting, too.  It really serves to confirm my belief that I would, in fact, be well suited for a career in consulting, whatever the consultancy firms and their hiring reps say.  I must confess, though – I may have made a bit of a power play to get the SCNT to take me seriously.  I did bring by a copy of my recently published issue of Serious Ting, in it 40-page full color glory, knowing that this was something above and beyond what Learnice envisioned for her project.  The result was as I had hoped: she nearly fell out of her chair when she saw what was possible if given the time, skill and resources.  Naturally, she now wants to bring the project as close to this benchmark as possible, but we're already running into the issue of financing – the moneys for printing would almost exclusively have to come from in-print advertisements, which means marketing a not-as-yet-seen product to the businesses around the island, specifically the ones that target tourist business.  Which, in turn, means that the content of the magazine should be appealing to tourists, and made readily available to them (perhaps to be sold?).  There are still lots of questions to be answered, so more on that later.

Then again, on Wednesday, I taught my first Intro to Computers Applications course:  from 1:00 to 3:00, I spent the afternoon in an airy classroom with 5 teenagers enrolled in the Certified Electrician course offered at the NSTP.  As part of the curriculum, two hours a week are given to supplementary material on working with computers, and I was asked to pick up that class.  It went almost exactly as expected: the kids were bright, felt engaged when we talked about something of interest to them (which wasn't the same for everybody, but everybody found something at some point in that span), and did whatever they felt they could get away with to disengage when they got bored (i.e. listen to an iPod, fiddle with a laptop, leave to use the restroom).  Still, we somehow managed to get through all of the material I had planned for that day, using up the full two hours – wouldn't want to set a bad precedent!  And even though the material is supplementary in nature, and the kids probably won't even be tested on it, I hope that they still learned something in the process.  Call me cynical, but even though the kids were grateful and clearly eager to take home the notes we copied for them, a finer investigation might just reveal the blank side of the paper being used at home as free copier paper, something that remains rare and expensive on island.

Furthermore, on Thursday, I continued working on a new project for my PC administrative assistant here in St. Kitts.  Her church is celebrating an anniversary (so sorry, I don't remember which!) this November, and she wants a highlight video to be compiled and prepared especially for this occasion.  A simple enough task, you say?  Excepting, of course, that the source material that she acquired for the video is actually film on VHS tapes – requiring a conversion that is certainly possible but for which I do not have the necessary tools.  So I left it to her: get me digitized copies of the source material, and I'll do whatever I can do.  She got back to me last weekend with the DVDs, which I inserted into my MacBook on Thursday to find, to my dismay, that the video had been converted as video viewable by a DVD player.  This meant that I had to spend about 4 hours ripping three 2-hour videos from the DVDs to my hard drive, into a .m4v format.  When I tried importing these into iMovie, I discovered, to my even greater dismay, that the encoding was slightly off, and I first needed to convert these DVD rips to MPEG-4, which would be readable by iMovie.  This conversion, frame by frame, took my computer over 7 hours straight, finishing off my day.  The good news in the end was that I was able to import the final converted ripped videos into iMovie (which took another 30 minutes) and managed to get some housework done, too!

Whew; told you it was a busy week.  So, what do you think of my new favicon?  (That little square to the left of the URL in your browser.)  Cool, eh?  At least until Ting soda bottlers find it and tell me to take it down...

My Hair Is Getting Pretty Long Now

I'm going to take this opportunity to catch up on a few items left over from this weekend.

My girlfriend finally had her floor repaired.  As it turns out, it was merely tiles cracking above a solid concrete floor, with an inch of grout in-between; not really a threat to fall through to the floor below.  But this hardly explains the violent cracking and sharp angles of the sinking tiles – were they really just breaking and shifting the dried grout underneath?  This would have been hard to imagine for anybody that had been there when the damage was taking place.  But, after all that, a tiler came in on the weekend and replaced the cracked floor tiles, and my girlfriend and I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the dust and rearranging the furniture in her room.  So everything is back to some semblance of normalcy now, though she is still dealing with not being able go home for her two-week summer break.

I mentioned on Friday I delivered a presentation on MS Excel; this morning I finished the two-part Office Applications lecture with a demonstration of MS PowerPoint.  The class is very small: just two of my coworkers, and occasionally my boss drops in if she is free.  We spent two hours on each of Friday and Monday morning going over the bare basics of what Excel and PPoint can do; I was pleased with the broad base of topics we were able to cover in such a short period:
E1 > Cells, Rows, Columns, and Sheets
E2 > Basic Functions and Formulas
E3 > Charts & Graphs
P1 > Adding Text, Pictures, and Sound
P2 > Tools for Creating a Memorable Presentation
P3 > Examples
The participants were grateful for the free training, though one expressed a request for an even lower-level introduction to computer basics, seeming to have some difficulty grasping many of the concepts I covered in the overview.  So I may find myself doing some very directed, remedial tutoring in Windows and computer usage.

In addition, this weekend I continued to add to my Math Activities booklet with three new classroom games.  I have to thank my girlfriend here for her brilliant contributions to the creative process, the gem of our musings being one activity based on the traditional Towers of Hanoi puzzle, but reworked so that the shape of the constituent parts is reminiscent of Mt. Liamuiga.  I think students could really get excited about this one, not least of all since the problem is rather compelling in itself.  (Ooh!  I just came up with another game for dice and a number line – better write it down before I forget.)  I'm hoping to get to work with the Department of Curriculum Development this school year to distribute my booklet of ideas to schools that are interested in incorporating the activities into their math departments.  I'll include more details as things continue to unfold.

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!

Do They Have a 4th of July in SK?

Just another day here.  There were some fireworks at the OTI, but no plans for big celebrations apart from some volunteers heading down to the beach.  The policy is such that, as we are U.S. Government volunteers, we are allowed to request the 4th of July off as a home-national holiday – I just had no reason to ask off yesterday.  Instead I was happy to begin poring over the most recent course records of the NSTP in search of contact information useful in bolstering their client database that I prepared for them.

For my part, I am enjoying my first day of summer vacation with my first morning run in half a year, and by lounging in the sun (real tough here) for a couple hours.  I promised myself that, come the next visit to Hiawassee, I would actually have something to show for my time in the sun– (and thanks to the backlash from Arlene, water–) -drenched Caribbean.

I was invited by the primary school I volunteer at to attend their graduation proceedings next Tuesday.  The good news: a catered dinner precedes it, commanding EC$95.00 a head to non-faculty, but they waived my fee.  The bad news: the MLB All-Star Game is that evening, and I was looking forward to getting to see that this year.  /whine

My girlfriend got sick with a hacking cough this weekend, so I spent the better part of it trying to nurse her back to health.  At least she felt up to seeing the new X-Men film with me on Saturday night.  Conclusion: it really is the best one of the five, by a little bit.  Go see it for a cheesy action flick.

Jah Bless

I'm basically finished with the NSTP's newfangled client database, and ready to roll it out.  It's a 1.5MB MSExcel sheet of all 3000+ clients in the NGO's history, since its founding in 1986.  I am currently going through the list of names and spying out double entries and combining them into one to make the list more efficient and precise.  Then, when I'm convinced all the data entry is complete and comprehensive, I'll arrange the names, dates, and numbers in such ways as to divine a few telling statistics, (e.g. average number of courses taken per client, average number of days waited before client-course match is made, distribution of clientele by constituency) all useful in confirming for grant writing purposes.  And any moneys that can be made through any means, not least of all grants, is most helpful at this stage.

I had an absolutely wonderful weekend, sharing in a number of activities with my girlfriend of nearly 2 months.  We visited the "Eat Local Foods" Day festival in Independence Square on Friday, and had a lovely meal of ital, rabbit, monkey, and carrot cake, and we took home some five-fingers wine prepared by the students of an agro-processing course offered by none other than the NSTP itself. 

Then, come Saturday passed, we enjoyed a lovely evening at a friend's house in Trinity, cooking for her a meal of Coconut Fried Shrimp on a bed of Basmati brown rice and a garden salad.  The blessed evening was overshadowed, unfortunately, by a harrowing event, when a local dog that we had briefly come to know ran into traffic and got hit by a passing bus.  It all happened right in front of us, while we were waiting for a lift.  My girlfriend, being a veterinary student and a friend to all animals, was understandably traumatized, but she stayed strong and we remembered the recently deceased animal in our conversation later that night.

Fortunately, Sunday was a few more steps in the right direction, as we joined a group of fellow PCVs for a day off at the Ocean Terrace Inn, complete with snacks, pools, lounges, cable television, and most importantly, air conditioning.  You'd have thought we were spending the day at Disneyland.  It was great to get together with everyone again, and afterwards the two of us went to Port Zante for ice cream and a bus lift home.

I know I haven't been on Skype during the weekends very consistently, and I'm sorry.  Most likely, that will be my tendency for a while: available on Skype most weekday evenings after 5:00; and if I'm on during the weekend at all, it will be sometime during the day.

Funnyquote Friday

So there we were, eight of us, piling into the SUV with our swim clothes and towels after enjoying a relaxing Easter Monday on the Bird Rock Beach Hotel sandbar: a mother, her son and daughter, three PCVs, and two local friends. The stress on the tires was palpable, and there was apparently some concern about the ability of the engine to not die on the way into to town.  Indeed, even as the key turned and the engine started up, a sudden shudder through the chassis left nothing but the battery light ignited.  The older boy in the back seat, not wasting any time, called upon his younger sister, invoking a bit of mysticism that one can only guess had worked before:

"Love the car, Adrian.  Love the car!"

I've been trying to get around to posting a more in depth update about goings-on here in the Caribbean, but have been sidetracked by other pursuits of late.  My schedule remains basically the same: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are spent at the NSTP office, full-time, working on the Client Profile Database project, and Tuesdays and Thursdays leading Iron Band practice at the school.  The database has, however, taken on a new and exciting dimension: I just discovered Google Docs!  No, not really; I've known about them for some time, but this is the first time I've had to incorporate their leet awesomeness into my work.  Now I don't need to worry about overlapping copies of the 1.2 MB spreadsheet I've been preparing for months – one digital copy available at any terminal with an internet connection, which supports simultaneous editing in real time from multiple locations is all I need!

This came out sounding more like an advertisement than I intended.  And when you consider that Google owns Blogger, it begins to look even more suspicious.  Hmm....

Back To My Old Ways

Sorry about the delayed post; I've been much busier than usual this week, and all of my time has been soaked up in new projects and walking all around town.  The first new project is at the NSTP: In a swift and happy return to glittering familiarity, I was assigned to prepare a client information database in a MS Excel spreadsheet.  There's nothing quite as compulsively consuming as populating 25 fields with thousands of records of data over several days.  Haven't tried it?  That's okay, there are probably more rewarding ways to spend one's time – I just haven't found one yet!

What I have found that really intrigues me is a behavioral phenomenon I have recently begun to take notice of.  It is human nature, of course, after repeated exposure to certain things, to begin to ignore them.  In my case, there are a handful of things that, in the five months I have been on island, I have taken progressively less notice of.  Things like my coworkers' cellphone ringtones, cars honking loudly and rapidly as they pass, the squeaks of the S-hooks on my hammock... Oh, and that big ol' ocean in my front yard!

I can't write long; I've got dinner to cook.  But I'll be back Friday with a new funnyquote, I promise!

Funnyquote Friday

Due to my birthday falling on the week of Fall semester finals, rarely did I get to participate in the Anglican church's custom of honoring weekly birthdays and anniversaries.  So this year, when Sunday, December 12 came around, I took advantage of no longer being in school and having to devote all of my weekend to preparing.  When the call came halfway through the service, I and about six others (two couples, two individuals besides me) got up and made our way to the front.  I took my place on the right side, and Father Christopher Archibald turned to me and mumbled something I couldn't hear.  I leaned in and asked him to repeat it.  He said,

"Birthday or Anniversary?"

Heh, okay.  In all honesty, this of left me with some mixed emotions, but mostly I recognized the humor borne of the absurdity of it all.

Soccer this week went better than previously, so I'm praising and grateful for that.  I actually showed progress in not only a few phases of my game, but also in face-name recognition: I'd estimate that about 50% of the players out there were referring to me by my first name (another 5-10% as simply "Hey White Boy") and I managed to pick up about 5 names as well (out of 25 people or so).   There's still progress to be made, to be sure, but at least I wasn't the butt of people's aggravations this time.

I'm waiting for the right timing to move ahead with the two newest projects I intend on initializing this month: a client record-keeping database for use by the NSTP, and an after-school iron band program.  There are still materials and instructions I lack before I can contribute my portion, but I am taking steps to acquire these and get these projects in the machine.  Also, with regard to the Library Reorganization Project, I helped the DWC school with their student council elections for the year, and in return was given a list of 5 names of students that will be given the first choice to be dubbed the school's first "Library Monitors," a position that will hold some (middling) student government authority and some equivalent duties and expectations.  I hope there is a genuine interest among the students to carry out their duties, and I also hope that the teachers are willing to devote just a fraction of the effort to ensure that their students are, indeed, performing their duties as planned.  I alone will not be able to monitor their activities, but will rely on the faculty instead to do this.

That's all the big news from this week.  Looking forward to more big news from the smallest month.

I believe saying it makes a portion of my soul erode away: Go Pack.  Please just beat Six-Burgh.

Work and School Are Winding Down

I organized the youth novels at the primary school library on Tuesday.  I sorted them alphabetically by author, placed them on four shelves, and separated out the popular fiction series, like Goosebumps and The Babysitter's Club, and spread these out over two more shelves.  Still remaining to be sorted are the nonfiction books, i.e. biographies and science exploratory, as well as the first readers and beginning readers books.  The teachers' materials are almost completely grouped on the high shelves, and the adult novels are sorted and alphabetized away from the students' reading materials.  Unfortunately, my time is running short, as school will close up for winter break after this Friday. 

At work today, I held a meeting on the adoption of the new Entrepreneurship initiative, which I will apparently not be writing the material for, as originally believed, but may in fact be co-facilitating.  I told my coworkers that I would "reluctantly" pick up class facilitating duties if there were no other feasible options, and apparently there weren't.  So, assuming NEDD, the Ministry of International Trade's National Enterprise Development Division and our collaborating nonprofit on island, does not have another arrangement in mind, I will pick up teaching duties early next year when we get an entrepreneurship course on the ground.  I also received some positive feedback for the Career Development Handbook I had been revising, and we discussed options and roadblocks to implementation of the program in secondary schools on island.

So while I am baffled at my school project by the sheer undertaking of a project meant for much more than one person, I am simultaneously encouraged by developing routes in my work projects.  It was especially heartening to discuss the possible implications of successful career development and small business development initiatives in the meeting this morning!  But at the same time, it is frustrating to consider the reality that there is currently no system, nor even constituents, who have a practical stake in the continued maintenance and upkeep of the school library.  So one of my jobs as a Peace Corps volunteer responsible for instituting sustainable changes will be to create an environment or artificial device to ensure that there is.

In other news, I won't be able to afford Christmas decorations this winter; instead, the lights at the top of this page will have to do.  In lieu of holiday adornments, I am making a conscious effort to invite a friend over for dinner about once a week to help stave off some of the loneliness.  What with work and school winding down for everyone, most PCVs' primary projects will be on hold for the better part of December, so I have had success at booking visitors for nights that I cook anyway.  And as anyone that knows me well remembers, I enjoy to host very much.  So in lieu of playing soccer or steel pan lessons right now (both of which, in time, I will pin down and fit in), I'm playing host.  That, of course, extends to anyone that's taking a vacation to the Eastern Caribbean this holiday season.  Just give me a heads-up!

Jon, I responded to your comment.  Sorry about the delay.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Carnival

I had a relaxing weekend: just one trip to town to do some Christmas and housewares shopping.  No cooking, no real laundry to speak of, some basic house cleaning.  So with nothing much to update, I thought I would take this opportunity to write about the anticipated upcoming holiday events, namely Carnival, Christmas, and J'ouvert.  The December calendar looks something like this:

17 December – Official opening day of Carnival. 
If you're familiar with Carnival, you'd think that it was held during Mardi Gras, the week before Lent.  And you'd be right, except that apparently among all of the countries that hold a regular Carnival season, some refrain from competing for interest from the largest ceremonies, opting to hold their own at a different time of year.  St. Kitts holds its Carnival pre-Christmas.

18 December – Soca Monarch.
St. Kitts' own American Idol for soca stars.  Some of the island's best calypsonians will be there.

25 December – Christmas.

27 December – J'ouvert parade at dawn.
People begin to gather before 4:00 AM, and start off on the march through the circus by 6:00.  Historically, this took place the very morning after Christmas, but was bumped to the 27th this year.  I'm still in the process of looking for a troupe to join – it's a very big commercial endeavor nowadays, with many of the high-visibility corporations on island sponsoring catch-all, low-cost troupes.  Most of my friends who are also going to participate have already confirmed with one group called the "Red Devils" which just isn't for me.  So I'm still looking.

1 January – Grand Carnival Parade.

3 January – Last lap.
With no more days left to celebrate, celebrate the last day with one last go.

So that's what I look forward to following my birthday.  But won't I be working, you ask?  Yes, but I will not be going into the office starting the 17th, seeing as how it and so many other businesses are closed for holiday through the first week of January.  I have already taken steps to ensure that I have work to engage me throughout the month of December, namely the Entrepreneurship course initiative currently underway.  So no worries.

The highlights for November have been chosen, sorted, and recorded for posterity.  Enjoy.

Funnyquote Friday

Here's your quote for this week, fresh from my latest Skype conference with my good friend Michael:

"You know, algebra is just so useful, 

all of the time... I'm just sayin'."

Thank you, Michael, for that nugget of wisdom.  I can't help but concur, and point out that I have been conveying this sentiment for many, many years now.  But, hey, small steps, right?

Well, yesterday was indeed Turkey day, but fighting off a 72-hour bug kept me home from the celebrations at a fellow PCVs house.  I was able to contribute my green bean casserole in exchange for a plate of some very delicious and unapologetically carbohydrate-laden T-giving comfort foods, but I was heartbroken to miss out on the chance to share a special American tradition with my comrades.  Especially when I received a text asking if I had a football to bring to the get-together.  Imagine!  I haven't got to throw a football around since, oh, November of 2008, when Georgia Tech was gearing up to thwomp Miami.  Good times.

As an update, I felt well enough this morning to go into work for the first time since Monday.  I worked a little from home this week, and was able to complete the latest revision of the NSTP's Career Guidance Handbook, leaving only a handful of content decisions that need to be made by my counterparts before it is dubbed fully finished.  In addition, I am going to seek confirmation on my intention to begin working on curriculum for an Entrepreneurship class, an initiative that has been sought not only by my office but by the government as well.  I anticipate getting a basic skeleton of the program prepared before January, when I will work closely with my office associates to flesh it out with some practicality.  With no cash flow to fund common resources needed to run a class, we will be relying on what resources we have available, e.g. human expertise, the internet, in-office printers, etc.

Go Jackets!  Beat U (sic) GAg!

P.S. The November highlight video should be ready, on schedule, at the end of the month.