PCT to PCV

As of Friday, May 15th I'm no longer a trainee and am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!

The swearing in ceremony was held at the U.S. embassy, and we weren't allowed to bring cameras in, so I don't have any photos from the ceremony. Here's some pictures from the weeks leading up to it.

A few weeks ago fellow trainees Matt and Judy accompanied me on a SPA (Small Projects Assistance) site at Ewarton high school. The SPA projects are funded through US AID with grants written by Peace Corps Volunteers. We were visiting the project of a volunteer who completed service and left the island.

The project was a greenhouse built with the local farmers group with the intention of educating community members on the benefits of greenhouse farming. Because the greenhouse was constructed on the grounds of the high school, the agriculture students do much of the work. They also do other fun things like butchering and plucking the chickens for the school lunch. I have photos of that, but figured most people wouldn't like to see them.

This is the high school in the distance with some corn stalks in the front. As of yet all the only corn I've seen in the country was imported U.S. sweet corn (and very expensive.) There's a lot of trade economics that I'm not fully aware of, but the end result is a strange scenario where 75% of the food Jamaicans eat is imported, and you have weird circumstances like how powdered milk from New Zealand is so cheap it makes it impossible to have large-scale dairy production and cattle farmers dump their milk.


This is the front of my office. I would probably have to stand on the other side of the by-pass to get a shot of the entire office and both warehouses. It's really big. When I'm not on the road with coworkers I'll come here and help around the office. Exactly what that means, I'm still working out. I'm still working out what priorities I will be focusing on and how my skills would be best utilized. If anyone wants action pictures of me updating Access databases let me know, otherwise I'll continue with pictures of worksites and the country, like the ones below:

This is a typical country water supply. Many of the smaller communities are too small to have municipal water piped around mountains to their homes, so they may use something like the rainwater catchment here. This particular system is about 80 years old and catches rainwater that falls into the holding tank on the right where some of the workers are sitting on. From there it is piped into the pumphouse on the left which will eventually house 4 standpipes for people to fill water tanks, and for the rest to be pumped to a school located around the corner.

The view from the top. There are some cracks in the cement and the blocks along the edge that are in need of repair, which is were Food for the Poor comes in. FFP supplies the community with funds for the cement and labor to do the repairs.


Some of the workers posed for me for this one. It was fairly steep and I had to walk really slow. I tried to ask if they used a specific water/cement ratio when they were mixing the concrete, but I should have learned by now that cement work is more of an art than a science here. However, I've seen the photos from afterwards and the repairs seem to be holding up quite well.

Since I love showing off ridiculous photos of myself, here's one of me losing a sack race at the FFP beach outing in Runaway beach. I was close and tried to dive for the finish, but was a bit behind, and landed hard on the sand (which wasn't that forgiving.) I also embarassed myself playing dominoes by passing when I could have played, and later by locking up the board, both times causing my partner and I to lose.

Last week back at the Mayfair in Kingston, the last time group 80 will all be together until our Close of Service seminar 2 years from now. (Actually most of us will see each other a week and a half from now at the quarterly meeting, but still.)

Our farewell barbeque at the Powell residential building in Kingston. Everyone chipped in and I made a few other volunteers and I made a menu of cheeseburgers, vegeburgers, hotdogs, baked potatoes, chips and mango salsa, and brownies. That is the same bandana that I wore while flipping burgers at the hideaway over 5 years ago back at Michigan. We also had some cane, but no machette to cut them with, so we had to make due with the brownies and cake that Ann our Safety and Security Coordinator brought for us. Which was delicious.

The next morning we were sworn in as volunteers and had more cake. I'm incredibly relieved that training is over and both excited and terrifyed at the idea of being out on my own. Wish me luck, and thanks for all your support!