Jamaican Birthday

The Peace Corps has three sectors in Jamaica; Youth as Promised, Environment, and Community Environmental Health. I will be serving in the Health and Sanitation sector, also abbreviated "WatSan" (Water and Sanitation.) Our stated purpose is to ensure "Jamaicans will create a healthier populace committed to action and move towards higher standards of community health by strengthening their knowledge and capacity to reduce incidences of lifestyle, water, environmental and sanitation related diseases." Our stated goals are "Goal 1; Community Health: Community members will improve their overall health practices. Goal 2; Water: Community members will improve their access to and use of appropriate water resources for good health. Goal 3; Sanitation: Community members will improve and adopt appropriate sanitation practices and infrastructure for good health." The majority of our training has been in our sector groups, and I have some pictures to share from a field trip we took to Port Royal (Home of legeondary pirate Captain Morgan, and filming location of Pirates of the Caribbean and Dr. No)

But first, a Jamaican birthday tradition.

I arrived in Jamaica on Wednesday, March 18^th, one week before my birthday. During training, when some of the Jamaicans discovered my birthday was coming up, I heard whispered “Ooooo, and you never had a birthday in Jamaica have you? Ooooo…” I had a vague feeling that some sort of prank was afoot. The day before, I called my friend Tex to have him update my facebook page, since I didn’t have internet access. I asked him if he knew anything about Jamaican birthday traditions, and he googled it. But like a true friend, didn’t tell me what to expect, and just let me know that I’ll be surprised.

I don’t have any photos of the flouring in action, however here are some of the aftermath.

So the tradition is that on a birthday, in addition sometimes to receiving cake, Jamaicans try to make you a cake. To that end something like half a dozen Jamaican children followed me around the corner of the block pelting me with bags of flour. When they got me pretty good on my shirt (which I had worn for the first time that night, and had on for about 15 minutes before the flouring), I thought they were finished. But they snuck up behind me and got me right in the side of the face, so it covered my glasses. The woman in the second photo was my host mother while I was training, and was in cahoots with the wicked children for the whole thing. But she gave me a smirinov ice and some pepsi for my birthday, and helped wash the flour off my shirt. Thanks Dawn!

After talking to my host brother, I found out apparently I got off easy, as many times they’ll flour someone in the morning so everyone they see knows it’s their birthday. Also, sometimes they use water so it sticks better. However, there were three more birthdays that week, and nobody else got floured. The girls tried to start a new tradition of throwing flowers on the person instead of bags of flour. We’ll see if it takes off.

Here is the Health sector of Peace Corps Jamaica Group 80 on the beach after a delicious lunch of fried festival and terrifying-looking fish (they had TEETH man, that’s not right.) The guys decided to strike a cheerleader pose.

We then went to visit a local school that had a Peace Corps volunteer in the past. All the kids were let out early so the school could prepare for the big standardized test the following day. The whole courtyard had some really great paintings of the water cycle, different types of teeth, and other random informative things. Here’re a couple pictures I took.

All in all, a very nice birthday. Hopefully just one of three I’ll have here.