Keep Moving

Got a new camera! And while unloading all the old pics, I found a few to toss up here.

My old street with a plane landing in Kingston.

Fellow PCV Angela with some gigantic potatoes, or yams, I'm not sure which.

The site of an old bridge that was washed out, I believe in hurricane Dean.

While on a trip to look at sites for the new bridge, some kids who were swimming demanded that I take their picture. Seems to happen with kids that whenever they see me with a camera they demand I take their picture, and get excited as all hell when I show it to them on the screen afterwards.

Me legging it to take a look at a spring catchment up in Jambos Pond

The catchment. The water naturally flows out of the mountain side, and is blocked in to channel it into pipes, which go down and feed the community. This particular one is enough for the community, but because there's a mountainside it needs to hop over the community will be installing a pump and additional piping to get to more homes.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) Chris, with Mike and Toni, two awesome people who got me hooked up with internet, and are my winemaking partners. We currently have a 3-gallon batch of passion fruit wine brewing now.

Their cat eyes Angela suspiciously...

PCVs Angela and Sara overlooking Mike and Toni's future house. From this view on a clear day you can see the Caribbean to the North and South, and also the Blue Mountain peak, the highest point in the Caribbean.

Me striking a pose. Someone with photoshop skills add some lens flairs and maybe an eagle in the background and this would be the most perfect picture of me yet.

Out with a coworker and some PCVs checking the foundation for a Food For the Poor house. The recipient applies for the house with a letter of support from their church or community group, and then builds a foundation. We then send our contractor with a container of material to build a house. Here we're checking the dimensions, in this rather artistic shot that fellow PCV Thinh took.

Another shot by Thinh. I love how it can be downpouring and sunny at the same time here.

Action shot!

Almost ran right into this little guy. Then the same thing happened again a few hours later when I was picking some peppers. Amazingly I've come to grow affectionate for spiders here, but I guess I'll take sides with anything at war with the mosquitoes.

Jerk & Flirt 2k9.

Coworker and some of his community trying to jump start a car. It didn't work, but they had fun.

And the first shot of 2k10, the sun setting in Portmore just a few hours ago tonight. It's a new year, with new days, new nights, new friends, and new experiences. In less than two months, there will be a new group of volunteers on the island, group 81. If I could have one wish it would be that the year leaves with no regrets.

Goat dem mi seh

Whole heap of things to talk about over the past few months. And because I’m lazy, I’ll let the photos do most of the talking.

First, a few of my site in Portmore:

A scene of Kingston, viewed from Portmore (Waterford specifically, I think.) Those are the docks I ride past on the coasta into town.

The gullies don’t drain properly and as a result all the litter (that isn’t burned) is collected in the stagnant water, where algae and mosquitoes thrive. One of my secondary projects is trying to work with a recycling program to set up more recycling points in the city, and also to make presentations about the harmful effects of littering and burning of plastic and rubbish.

Here’s a view of my pad. I appear to be journaling at the moment. Oh, those potatoes on top of the fridge? I forgot about them for like a week, and they turned into brown mushy water.

My bedroom. The keyboard you see set me back almost my entire settling in allowance, but since I could not bring my accordion down it was an essential purchase.

And now, GOATS!!

NUFF GOATS!

GOATS AND BABY GOATS! (kids!)

Fellow PCV Matt inoculating some goats. The injections are antibiotics, which prevent the goats from getting worms, making them healthy so when the time is right they can be turned into delicious, delicious curried mutton.

The inoculations are part of a project by my agency, Food for the Poor, where we aid in the goat rearing at a local prison in Spanish Town.

Matt’s done this before, but this was my first time. I was a little hesitant my first few goes, and one of the goats bucked and bent the needle in half. Later on I was shaking a bit, but was able to prick, inject the full 10cc of antibiotics, and release the goats in about 5 seconds, which I hope the goats appreciated.

A somewhat disturbing portrait of me. There’s just something sinister about someone smiling behind shades dripping in sweat and holding a loaded syringe in latex gloved hands.

This one I just thought looked cool. It’s a close-up of the zinc roof on the model double unit house at the Food for the Poor office. I took it as part of a quality control guide for inspecting the houses in the field after construction.

That's all for now. Next on my agenda is trying to join a local reggae group and become the "token white guy" on the keyboard. Wish me luck!

Long Bay Birthday

Quick update, just some pretty pictures and brief descriptions.

Long Bay, Portland, on the North coast of the island. We were celebrating another volunteer's birthday. Here are some of us on the beach (we're the white ones)

Gavin and I decide to strike some poses.

It took hours of special effects to get the hair to stand up just right for the "wistfully gazing across the sea on a Friday afternoon" look I was going for.

A moonlit stroll on the beach. I set my camera to a long exposure time to use the moonlight to light up the shot, I think it turned out really nice.

Another one from that night, although the flash of light behind the clouds was a bolt of lightning.

Now a few work pictures.

A rainwater catchment and the open storage cistern. We're looking to design and construct a covering for it to keep garbage and animals out, as well as a safety measure to keep children away.The water is held in the cistern, then piped across the road and down to the communities below. Here a woman fills some water jugs. In the rural communities with no piped water, families may make several trips a day to the "water shop."

While investigating a water distribution system on the other side of the island, a group of schoolchildren were walking home. We couldn't drive much faster than a walking pace because of the roads, but it was a long walk and the pikni dem (children) definitely appreciated the ride.

Breakfast of Champions

Warning: personal reflections below. I promise it leads somewhere, but feel free to skip to the pictures if you'd like. I probably would.

Been a while since I've had time to write. Things have been a bit hectic lately, and there's been too much to get into details over - suffice to say it's a strange feeling consistently waking up and not knowing what city or country you're in. But I've started to get adjusted to the chaos - so to speak. For a long time I've been seeking order, familiarity. There was nothing more comfortable than to know that when I left the cereal on the table it would be waiting for me when I came home, or when I came to the office I would be welcomed by a long list of repetitive tasks to complete in a predesignated and non deviating fashion, and I could pick up the next day from where I left off. I actually really enjoyed my first temp job the summer after my freshmen year at college, where all I did was copy and paste excel spreadsheets for 40 hours a week, for 10 weeks. There is something to those routines, you get a feeling that life can be broken down into simple reactions. A closed system, no outside variables. You set the gears, wind the spring, and let it go. There's never any extremes, and you can expect the expected.

However, there's something horribly wrong with spending days and years never straying outside of your comfort zone. There's just too much more to life than existing. I used to be afraid of failure, of being dissapointed, of being hurt, but at least that's feeling something. I could feel myself growing numb to life, and I knew I needed a change. Maybe some time abroad could help this suburban white boy with the experiences he knows he needs but is still terrified of. Of course, it's not as easy as that. Everyone always says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or, as I heard yesterday, "it takes small bites to eat an elephant"), but the real struggle is the day to day - the second and the third and the six thousand four hundred and ninth step, where you don't have the anticipation of the journey or the excitement of the finish, just the frustrating grind of the middle. And even then, it's not just one journey with one destination. It's a universe of hundreds of dimensions you travel in. You're losing ground in one direction and gaining ground in the other, but you might be focused on a third where you're standing still. It's impossible to keep a running narative of all the ways you're evolving but you still try because we feel we must make sense of it all. Before I tried to manage this by cutting out all the variables I could and was left with a simple routine that I could manage, at the cost of real experience, and in a way, my humanity. That chaos that is real life was terrifying, and I knew it would be a long struggle to get used to it - the true chaos and not my false order.

It's been about a decade since I read this exert from Vonnegut, but it's been swelling in the back of my head all these years. I only read it once, but I could almost recite it verbatum:

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Ok, I said this was going somewhere so I guess I should finally segway into it.


Last weekend I went to the Ocho Rios Jazz festival (held of course in Kingston, Treasure Beach, and Ocho Rios - each about 100 km away from each other. Makes sense.) I wasn't feeling well in the morning and was debating blowing it off, but I kicked myself enough to get going, and I'm glad I did. The photo above was from the first night, there were about a dozen volunteers at the bar ($80 draft Red Stripe, hells yes.) There were a few group pictures taken, I'll try to get those from the other PCVs.

The next morning we woke up and headed downtown to the Burger King for breakfast (yeah, I know, but you get coffee AND orange juice with your sandwich and hash browns, so it's hard to beat.) From there we headed to Dunn's River Falls. We left early to try to miss any tourist or cruise ship groups, and aside from a row with staff over whether we should pay for the locker when we brought our own lock, it was pretty incredible. The water was just a bit chilly, but you adjust surprisingly fast to it. It felt great to put your back against the falls and let the water smash into you, a lot like a deep tissue massage. I could stand at a 30 degree angle backwards and the water pounding my back would keep me upright.


Afterwards we headed towards a more private river down the road. Here we are still dry, just overlooking this:

Let me explain something briefly. I cannot swim, and I am not comfortable in water. I was fine at Dunn's River Falls because it never got above my waist. When I'm in a pool, I'll stay in the shallow end, and I can swim (well, frantically dogpaddle) from one point to the next, and then make a beeline for the edge and hold on with both hands. When I'm underwater, I panick and try to breathe through my nose and will be blowing water out of my lungs for the next half hour.

To top it all off, this water was crystal clear. When I was in it I could see straight down to my feet, and in the middle I could not see the bottom. That was scary. And this, this was terrifying:

After jumping in, of course I paniked and water shot straight up my nose. Then I flailed until I got to the rocks and held on for life, shaking the whole time. My expectation would be that after the jump I would relax and be able to move around easier, but that did not happen at all. After jumping in here a few times, we moved up the river and then swam down a few hundred feet going over a few small falls. Every time I had to swim in water I couldn't stand in, I was terrifyed and needed to be coaxed (Thank you Matt, Melissa, Ang, and Chris for putting up with my wussiness.) And now I finally relate back to my introspective ramblings at the beginning of this entry. The easiest part was that first jump - everything after that was harder and harder. The chaos of not having a rock to stand on will always be frightening to me, but I can get used to it, like I'm getting used to the heat and the cockroaches. I didn't have any regrets that day, which is all I could ask for.

Sunday we went to a beach a few miles away for the last day of the jazz fest. I met one of the promotors the first night and was able to get a Peace Corps free entry, and was able to see these guys from Poland for the second time in the weekend:

They played a great set, complete with duelin' accordions, a rockin stand-up bass, and an insane fiddler. (They have free mp3s at their website here) When they got to their slower traditional songs I had a horrible longing for being back in Hamtramck, eating pierogi and drinking Zyvidek in Polish Village, but I settled for a red stripe and some chicken foot soup. I met up with Judy, another PCV in the minubus back to Spanish Town. We drove through some light rain, and I listened to some Iron & Wine while looking out at the mountains. I was home soon enough, ready for the next unexpected turn of events, and whatever's after that.

No Problem

Quick story about an accident on the road yesterday,

A group of us are heading back from MoBay (Montego Bay) yesterday evening, winding around the hills near Ewarton. Some of the people in the car were talking about the road conditions and how accidents can cause 5-10 hour detours around the mountains. Shortly thereafter 5 cars in front of us a flatbed tractor-trailer is approaching a hairpin turn. A sedan wants to pass the semi right at the turn so it speeds up right at the corner, turns too fast, and flips, landing on its roof.

A few of us get out of the car and walk over to see. Nobody is hurt, and a few drivers start to give their opinion on this particular driver's mental state. A crowd soon gathers around the car, and in one motion flips it upright. The trailer is motioned to backup up the hill to give room to move the car, and the cars behind it backup to allow him room. With the space cleared by the trailer, the uprighted car is maneuvered into a nearby driveway, and the road is clear. All the gawkers (myself included) are forced to run back to their cars to keep the traffic flowing.

All of this - from when the car flipped to when traffic started to flow again - couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes. I was mentally preparing myself for a late return home when the group flipped the car, and I stood amazed while the car was flipped and moved in less time it takes some people I know to parallel park. The driver was of course extremely lucky - if the car had flipped a hundred yards earlier or later it would have fallen off the precipice.

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!

Fish and More Fish

Went out with some Food for the Poor (FFP) employees this week for site visits, one to an ornamental fish farm and one to a fishing village. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera to the farm and only have a few pictures from the fishing village. My coworker took photos from the farm, so hopefully sometime next week I’ll have pictures of coi and angel fish, and of me struggling with a net to catch some goldfish.

FFP assists 17 fishing villages across the island, providing fishermen with boats, motors, lifejackets, and safety and mechanical training in exchange for contributions to the community they are based in and a commitment to safety.


Here is one of the FFP boats (all painted yellow and blue.) The fishermen can go an hour or so out to sea to catch fish, which are then sold to venders and then sold across the island. All the other boats were at sea, this being the first calm day in the past week. Of course it didn’t stay that way for long, and was raining pretty hard on the way back to Spanish Town. My coworker told me the rainy season should last a few months, and then hurricane season begins. Awesome.


These black rhino tanks are ubiquitous across the island. Where there is no piped water, the tanks are filled with rainwater harvested from roofs or from concrete-lined gullies, or purchased and shipped in trucks. Where there is piped water, it is frequently unreliable, and the tanks provide storage for the inevitable shutoffs. They also provide pressure for times of high usage, such as in the morning when or just after work. This tank is currently filled with trucked water, but will soon be connected to the municipal water system. Unfortunately, they are also teethed (stolen) frequently, hence the need for the locked cage.


Don’t ask me why, but I’m still fascinated by these little guys. I have vague memories of going to Disneyland when I was 5 or 6 and being more entertained by the lizards than anything else (all the rides terrified me. Even the teacups. Yeah.) Also, they eat bugs and mosquitoes, so I don’t mind finding them in my room.


After the visit was over I was dropped off at my host mother’s house on Jefferson street. Being the second largest city in Jamaica, we have the luxury of occasionally having street signs, most of our potholes filled, and pretty consistent running water and electricity. I’ll take some more pictures of my community, but after I become more integrated and don’t look like a tourist or a C.I.A. agent.


Here’s how I’ve been spending most of my evenings lately, doing peace corps homework and catching up on some reading. My veranda is very nice for this.


Bonus picture I grabbed of facebook. Here’s what the inside of a typical coasta (Toyota “Coaster” bus) looks in Jamaica, although usually there would be far fewer “whiteys,” and Jamaicans can usually fit 5 or more people in each of those rows. There are chairs that fold down in the aisle, which is great for packing in people but not so great when you’re in the back and your stop comes up. Each bus is unique to the Jriva (Driver) and will be covered in decals, and will sometimes sport dvd players, shag carpeting, and air conditioning inside. On the ride home from Kingston on Wednesday, I heard a reggae version of “Tracy Chapmen – Fast Car.” That, and a reggae version of “Harry Nilsson – Everybody’s Talkin’” have been the strangest covers I’ve heard yet here, although I’ve been assured that I’m sure to hear just about every type of music covered and sampled hundreds of times over. Now if I can only find some good accordion playing…