Julie arrived on a Tuesday. I’d spent the time between my visit to St. Kitts and getting her in Puerto Plata waiting, in the capital and at a friend’s site, for my community members to get it together and get us the land for the library already. (They finally did the Thursday after Julie got here.)
She arrived without her bags, as has become typical for people traveling to visit me. The first night we went to a hotel with AC (thanks Dad,) and ate (and drank) our hearts out. It was all soda, I swear. The next morning we swam and walked along the beachfront. Then we went to Cabarete to meet up with some of my friends who were celebrating their birthdays. We spent the night at another hotel with a pool, and swam again later. We had pizza and went to some bars and saw a man eating fire! The next morning included a ice cream-cake breakfast, with some leftover pizza followed by a sweaty journey home. Julie had brought with her 2 checked bags (with which we were reunited in Cabarete) full of surprises for me, including over 50 lbs of books for the library! Traveling all over the north coast of the island with these bags was a little less than ideal, as was the fact that every single bus driver tried to rip us off. I handled this repeated situation a little less-than gracefully, but Julie was a good sport about everything. Once we loaded up on groceries, we headed back to my site and arrived tired, sweaty and quite covered with dust.
We spent the next few days trying to figure stuff out with the supposedly completed land agreement. It was a little annoying to have to wait for the answers from my neighbors, but eventually it all got worked out and I am happy to say that we should be beginning construction on Monday! While we waited we spent our days organizing the books that Julie had brought me and playing softball once it wasn’t quite so hot outside. We also played a bit with Lina and Kitty… mostly Julie.
A few days ago we went to the hardware store. We ordered some wood and nails and whatnot to build a bookshelf for the library. The first step was measuring, then sawing, which both attracted some viewers. Once we had it sawed we sanded the wood and then stained it. By that time it was dark outside so we had to leave the second coat of stain for the following day. That afternoon we were finally able to begin constructing the bookcase and found that bookshelves take a long time to complete! Again we had onlookers and trying to drive those nails into our low-quality boards with an audience was quite difficult. This is largely due to the fact that the onlookers were all males and they had spent the past 2 days making bets with one another whether or not 2 American girls could actually accomplish such a huge task as to build a 4.5 foot bookshelf.
Friday, July 24, 2009
St. Kitts Adventure
I arrived in St. Kitts just days after arriving back in my site after some time in the hospital. So, the vacation time came upon on me quite quickly, leaving me not super prepared for it all. Luckily, my friend Caroline had my back and had planned a marvelous week and a half full of activities for us to share.
It started with her and her friend Angel picking me up at the airport. I had woken up incredibly early to get my flight from Santo Domingo to San Juan. (Flying over Puerto Rico was incredible.) I then flew from San Juan to Basseterre. I was very glad to be greeted at the airport by both of them. Angel graciously drove us to the ATM, grocery store, and then to Caroline’s house. It was incredible! (I would undoubtedly spend much of the first few days with Caroline comparing everything to the DR, sometimes to the point that I must have been getting on Caroline’s nerves. I had to do this not only because this was my first time visiting a PCV in another country, but also because this was my first time visiting, for such a length of time, another Caribbean country.) Her “apartment” is lovely and very comfortable; it feels like it could be easily found in the US. We took our first day slowly, which I was more than happy to do, considering the lack of sleep I’d had the night before.
Thursday was a great day for getting a feel for her communities. She used to live in one and then moved to another and continues to work extensively in both. In the morning we went for a walk around the other community and to the school-library where she holds reading hours with school children. (The kids are encouraged to come to school after the school year officially ends to get them off the streets.) I could tell that a lot of the kids really look forward to Caroline opening the library and letting them show her how well they can read. I was all-too-happy to let a couple of kids show me how well they can read. It was really cool to show them little tricks about reading and watch them reuse those tricks later in the stories. (I know it seems like I should have encountered this dozens of times already in the DR with the slew of books in my house. Problem is, the kids in my town who can’t read yet either don’t come to read or don’t want to read and would just rather look at the pictures (which I encourage). Also, I don’t know that I’d be so great with Spanish phonics considering I learned to read in English…) The library was incredible. It struck me that the donations of English books must just be so much more abundant than of Spanish. And while I am thrilled for Caroline and the success of her projects as a result of this, I can’t help but feel a little jealous. (I also can’t help but thank my lucky stars that the population in my community speaks Spanish and not some language that would be even more difficult to solicit book donations.) Later that day we went to the community library in the community where she currently lives. There we organized books. This library, like the other, had a large selection (I’d estimate at least 10,000 books), all which had been donated, many it seemed came from Britain (which such memorable titles as “Football Greats,” “Exploring Britain,” and “Victorian Times.”) Caroline and her community have reached the luxurious point of having too many duplicates and donations in less-than-ideal states that she and I worked to weed some books out of the stock. Lucky for me, there were a number of books in French and Spanish that Caroline believed would be wasted sitting on her library shelves that she was happy to release to me!
Friday was another day for the catalog of adventures that only a PCV could experience. We went to Basseterre (on the other side of the island from where Caroline lives) and met up with 2 of her friends to go south, onto the peninsula. Our first stop, I was thrilled to hear, would be to a shallow, relatively calm stretch of swimming area (once you past the super-slippery rocks) to snorkel around a ship wreck! It was my first chance seeing a ship wreck on a snorkel adventure. (I’ve been snorkeling in Cozumel, Maui, Cayo Arena 3 times (near my site) and now to this incredible ship wreck. I was SO glad to have the waterproof camera from my parents, to photograph the whole experience. (You are definitely going to want to check out those photos.) After snorkeling we moved southward to a beach where a Rasta guy named Leon keeps an incredible beach bar. While sitting and looking out towards the ocean we saw what we thought were two sting rays either fighting or mating, because of their flying out of the ocean. After a moment, almost simultaneously, we realized that it was only 1 sting ray flying out of the ocean and that the other fin was actually that belonging to a shark! Leon got a pretty good look at the scene with his binoculars. The sting ray itself was huge, and fin of the shark was also quite large, leading me, and the other observers, to conquer that the shark must have been over 7 feet long. Eventually the sting ray stopped flying around and there was a lot less commotion. We’re pretty sure that the shark won that fight. Later we watched another huge sting ray swim almost completely on shore. There was a pretty large group of kids no the beach who started to throw rocks at the ray, so after a little while it swam away. We stopped to take some great scenery shots on the way home before passing through a sand strip of beach accurately called “the strip.” There we watched the sun set. Then we headed to a house party of another one of Caroline’s friends and ate delicious BBQ food. The next stop was a “concert” which ended up being just a political rally. At one point, a few minutes after I’d made myself comfortable stretched out on the lawn, there was rush of people from the crowd running toward our group. It took me a second to realize what was going on, and I was glad for Caroline’s guiding arm. Apparently the people started running when someone yelled, “shot!” It had obviously been a false alarm, and we later heard that the reason might have been to distract the audience from the speech of a teen member of the labour party, who was believed to be gay. (A group of pro-labour party teens had been invited on stage to give a presentation.) This led me to ask Caroline about tolerance of homosexuality on the island of 35,000 residents. (There are an additional 10,000 residents of Nevis, which brings the country population of St. Kitts and Nevis to a total of 45,000.) She told me that homosexuality is heavily discouraged under Rastafarianism, one of the religious bodies on the islands. Others practice one of many sects of Christianity with churches all over the island. Culturally, homosexuality is taboo, and Caroline gave me accounts of Kittitians laughing (out of feeling uncomfortable) about the issue. After the rush, we couldn’t really get comfortable again, mostly me. I went back to where I’d been laying down to get my flip-flops (I’d run away barefoot), and Caroline went back to get her cell phone which had been resting in her lap. So, we decided to go. It was July 3rd and right around midnight, the labour party blew off some fireworks. I wonder if they knew the significance of fireworks on what had only just become July 4th for the Americans watching from the sidewalk outside the arena.
Saturday was July 4th, and we were going to Nevis to explore and go to an expat party. We rode the ferry over to Nevis (it was a 45 min ride) with another one of Caroline’s friends. We were met by a number of her friends when we got to the ferry terminal in Nevis and we soon went to the Nevis Botanical Garden. It was beautiful, and a lovely way to spend the afternoon. After that we went to the party, which was at an old stone house, which had been beautifully refurnished. We passed a few hours there, listening to music and eating tons of delicious food. BBQ. I’ve missed it much. Eventually it got pretty late, and we all got pretty tired, and so we went to another volunteer’s house and spent the night.
Sunday July 5th we went to breakfast to a place that clearly caters to the large expat community on the island of Nevis (there are only 10,000 inhabitants of that island as it is, the bulk of which are expats.) After breakfast we checked out a few roof-covered restaurants on the beaches of Nevis but couldn’t do any swimming because of the rain. After a few hours we rode the ferry back over to St. Kitts.
Monday July 6th Caroline took me to a great store called Caribelle Batik which sells sarongs and other tropical-looking fabrics. It is located on the grounds of a relative of Thomas Jefferson (his uncle?). We also got to see the oldest tree on St. Kitts, which is over 350 years old. Then we went to Basseterre to look around and check out the PC office. It was much smaller than the one we have here in Santo Domingo, one more way I could compare PC in St. Kitts to the DR! Later that evening we went to a 6th grade graduation in her community which was quite interesting. It was certainly politically charged (Caroline lives in the hometown of the Prime Minister) and he was in attendance. The election is expected to be called in the next few months and the campaigns have begun. It was interested to get a sense for the political atmosphere of such a small country.
Tuesday July 7th we went to her reading hour with the kids at the school in her other village. The kids are very cute and once again I enjoyed listening to them read the same books that I grew up on. Later that day we took a walk with Caroline’s host sister to the coast near their home and got to play around in the sand and water. The sand up there was black, from the volcano, and the sand on the southern part of the island, the peninsula, was white. That night we attended a meeting held at the health center in the community where Caroline lives for teen mothers.
Wednesday July 8th we spent on a big circle around the island. We went to visit some shops and to see two plantation-inns, which were both lovely and probably very far out of our price-range. That evening we went to Brimstone Hill Fortress, a site I’d been looking forward to seeing since Caroline mentioned it to me in a pre-trip email. We went at dusk for a beautiful (rainbow-filled) sunset. It was picture-perfect. We met up with some volunteers later and went to get dinner and see a movie.
Thursday July 9th we woke up early to watch the sun rise over the “black rocks.” It was beautiful, despite the clouds blocking the sun for most of the sunrise. Later that day we went out to celebrate the birthday of another PCV at a touristy, though nice restaurant overlooking the port where the cruises park. Then we went to a seafood place and we all ordered pizza. Typical Americans I guess. We played with the Kittitian flag, trying to get it to stay upright for a photo, and seeing who could get it to stick to their head for the longest.
Friday July 10th was my last full day on St. Kitts. We did it right: day at the beach, nice showers and dinner at Caroline’s friend’s house and then we went out late, just like the Kittitians. We stayed out late, even later than some of the Kittitians and got one beautiful chance to dance, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t embarrass myself or anyone else either.
On Saturday July 11th we grabbed some breakfast with some PCVs and then took me to the airport, and so ended my St. Kitts adventure. All in all it was a great time, and I got to meet some wonderful people. I loved looking at the whole island, and trying some new food and listening to some new music, but most of all it was great to see Caroline.
It started with her and her friend Angel picking me up at the airport. I had woken up incredibly early to get my flight from Santo Domingo to San Juan. (Flying over Puerto Rico was incredible.) I then flew from San Juan to Basseterre. I was very glad to be greeted at the airport by both of them. Angel graciously drove us to the ATM, grocery store, and then to Caroline’s house. It was incredible! (I would undoubtedly spend much of the first few days with Caroline comparing everything to the DR, sometimes to the point that I must have been getting on Caroline’s nerves. I had to do this not only because this was my first time visiting a PCV in another country, but also because this was my first time visiting, for such a length of time, another Caribbean country.) Her “apartment” is lovely and very comfortable; it feels like it could be easily found in the US. We took our first day slowly, which I was more than happy to do, considering the lack of sleep I’d had the night before.
Thursday was a great day for getting a feel for her communities. She used to live in one and then moved to another and continues to work extensively in both. In the morning we went for a walk around the other community and to the school-library where she holds reading hours with school children. (The kids are encouraged to come to school after the school year officially ends to get them off the streets.) I could tell that a lot of the kids really look forward to Caroline opening the library and letting them show her how well they can read. I was all-too-happy to let a couple of kids show me how well they can read. It was really cool to show them little tricks about reading and watch them reuse those tricks later in the stories. (I know it seems like I should have encountered this dozens of times already in the DR with the slew of books in my house. Problem is, the kids in my town who can’t read yet either don’t come to read or don’t want to read and would just rather look at the pictures (which I encourage). Also, I don’t know that I’d be so great with Spanish phonics considering I learned to read in English…) The library was incredible. It struck me that the donations of English books must just be so much more abundant than of Spanish. And while I am thrilled for Caroline and the success of her projects as a result of this, I can’t help but feel a little jealous. (I also can’t help but thank my lucky stars that the population in my community speaks Spanish and not some language that would be even more difficult to solicit book donations.) Later that day we went to the community library in the community where she currently lives. There we organized books. This library, like the other, had a large selection (I’d estimate at least 10,000 books), all which had been donated, many it seemed came from Britain (which such memorable titles as “Football Greats,” “Exploring Britain,” and “Victorian Times.”) Caroline and her community have reached the luxurious point of having too many duplicates and donations in less-than-ideal states that she and I worked to weed some books out of the stock. Lucky for me, there were a number of books in French and Spanish that Caroline believed would be wasted sitting on her library shelves that she was happy to release to me!
Friday was another day for the catalog of adventures that only a PCV could experience. We went to Basseterre (on the other side of the island from where Caroline lives) and met up with 2 of her friends to go south, onto the peninsula. Our first stop, I was thrilled to hear, would be to a shallow, relatively calm stretch of swimming area (once you past the super-slippery rocks) to snorkel around a ship wreck! It was my first chance seeing a ship wreck on a snorkel adventure. (I’ve been snorkeling in Cozumel, Maui, Cayo Arena 3 times (near my site) and now to this incredible ship wreck. I was SO glad to have the waterproof camera from my parents, to photograph the whole experience. (You are definitely going to want to check out those photos.) After snorkeling we moved southward to a beach where a Rasta guy named Leon keeps an incredible beach bar. While sitting and looking out towards the ocean we saw what we thought were two sting rays either fighting or mating, because of their flying out of the ocean. After a moment, almost simultaneously, we realized that it was only 1 sting ray flying out of the ocean and that the other fin was actually that belonging to a shark! Leon got a pretty good look at the scene with his binoculars. The sting ray itself was huge, and fin of the shark was also quite large, leading me, and the other observers, to conquer that the shark must have been over 7 feet long. Eventually the sting ray stopped flying around and there was a lot less commotion. We’re pretty sure that the shark won that fight. Later we watched another huge sting ray swim almost completely on shore. There was a pretty large group of kids no the beach who started to throw rocks at the ray, so after a little while it swam away. We stopped to take some great scenery shots on the way home before passing through a sand strip of beach accurately called “the strip.” There we watched the sun set. Then we headed to a house party of another one of Caroline’s friends and ate delicious BBQ food. The next stop was a “concert” which ended up being just a political rally. At one point, a few minutes after I’d made myself comfortable stretched out on the lawn, there was rush of people from the crowd running toward our group. It took me a second to realize what was going on, and I was glad for Caroline’s guiding arm. Apparently the people started running when someone yelled, “shot!” It had obviously been a false alarm, and we later heard that the reason might have been to distract the audience from the speech of a teen member of the labour party, who was believed to be gay. (A group of pro-labour party teens had been invited on stage to give a presentation.) This led me to ask Caroline about tolerance of homosexuality on the island of 35,000 residents. (There are an additional 10,000 residents of Nevis, which brings the country population of St. Kitts and Nevis to a total of 45,000.) She told me that homosexuality is heavily discouraged under Rastafarianism, one of the religious bodies on the islands. Others practice one of many sects of Christianity with churches all over the island. Culturally, homosexuality is taboo, and Caroline gave me accounts of Kittitians laughing (out of feeling uncomfortable) about the issue. After the rush, we couldn’t really get comfortable again, mostly me. I went back to where I’d been laying down to get my flip-flops (I’d run away barefoot), and Caroline went back to get her cell phone which had been resting in her lap. So, we decided to go. It was July 3rd and right around midnight, the labour party blew off some fireworks. I wonder if they knew the significance of fireworks on what had only just become July 4th for the Americans watching from the sidewalk outside the arena.
Saturday was July 4th, and we were going to Nevis to explore and go to an expat party. We rode the ferry over to Nevis (it was a 45 min ride) with another one of Caroline’s friends. We were met by a number of her friends when we got to the ferry terminal in Nevis and we soon went to the Nevis Botanical Garden. It was beautiful, and a lovely way to spend the afternoon. After that we went to the party, which was at an old stone house, which had been beautifully refurnished. We passed a few hours there, listening to music and eating tons of delicious food. BBQ. I’ve missed it much. Eventually it got pretty late, and we all got pretty tired, and so we went to another volunteer’s house and spent the night.
Sunday July 5th we went to breakfast to a place that clearly caters to the large expat community on the island of Nevis (there are only 10,000 inhabitants of that island as it is, the bulk of which are expats.) After breakfast we checked out a few roof-covered restaurants on the beaches of Nevis but couldn’t do any swimming because of the rain. After a few hours we rode the ferry back over to St. Kitts.
Monday July 6th Caroline took me to a great store called Caribelle Batik which sells sarongs and other tropical-looking fabrics. It is located on the grounds of a relative of Thomas Jefferson (his uncle?). We also got to see the oldest tree on St. Kitts, which is over 350 years old. Then we went to Basseterre to look around and check out the PC office. It was much smaller than the one we have here in Santo Domingo, one more way I could compare PC in St. Kitts to the DR! Later that evening we went to a 6th grade graduation in her community which was quite interesting. It was certainly politically charged (Caroline lives in the hometown of the Prime Minister) and he was in attendance. The election is expected to be called in the next few months and the campaigns have begun. It was interested to get a sense for the political atmosphere of such a small country.
Tuesday July 7th we went to her reading hour with the kids at the school in her other village. The kids are very cute and once again I enjoyed listening to them read the same books that I grew up on. Later that day we took a walk with Caroline’s host sister to the coast near their home and got to play around in the sand and water. The sand up there was black, from the volcano, and the sand on the southern part of the island, the peninsula, was white. That night we attended a meeting held at the health center in the community where Caroline lives for teen mothers.
Wednesday July 8th we spent on a big circle around the island. We went to visit some shops and to see two plantation-inns, which were both lovely and probably very far out of our price-range. That evening we went to Brimstone Hill Fortress, a site I’d been looking forward to seeing since Caroline mentioned it to me in a pre-trip email. We went at dusk for a beautiful (rainbow-filled) sunset. It was picture-perfect. We met up with some volunteers later and went to get dinner and see a movie.
Thursday July 9th we woke up early to watch the sun rise over the “black rocks.” It was beautiful, despite the clouds blocking the sun for most of the sunrise. Later that day we went out to celebrate the birthday of another PCV at a touristy, though nice restaurant overlooking the port where the cruises park. Then we went to a seafood place and we all ordered pizza. Typical Americans I guess. We played with the Kittitian flag, trying to get it to stay upright for a photo, and seeing who could get it to stick to their head for the longest.
Friday July 10th was my last full day on St. Kitts. We did it right: day at the beach, nice showers and dinner at Caroline’s friend’s house and then we went out late, just like the Kittitians. We stayed out late, even later than some of the Kittitians and got one beautiful chance to dance, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t embarrass myself or anyone else either.
On Saturday July 11th we grabbed some breakfast with some PCVs and then took me to the airport, and so ended my St. Kitts adventure. All in all it was a great time, and I got to meet some wonderful people. I loved looking at the whole island, and trying some new food and listening to some new music, but most of all it was great to see Caroline.
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