The roosters just started crowing

it's 11:32pm??

First Day in St. Lucia

I'll add pictures later.

Yesterday was my first day in St. Lucia! The plane was half an hour late, so everything once we got to the island was also delayed. Lots of loading and unloading all our baggage, including carrying some of it up a hill, was involved. After dinner, I tried to find internet, but it's not available in the building I'm staying in. Today I found out that down the hill, where I am now, and where our meals and training are taking place, has fairly good connection.

We've been very very well fed. I don't think there's been any dish I haven't tried, even if it has onions! There's been fish at every meal, including breakfast. I feel like I've already gained a couple pounds. Lots of fruit and vegetables, though, and lots of starchy ones at that--like green banana and breadfruit. These items, as we learned today in training, make up almost half of the Eastern Caribbean diet. Lots of legumes, fish (of course), and some meats, too. Today boiled dasheen was served with lunch--it tasted like taro root, and felt like a slice of not soft tomato (actually it felt like yellow plantain, which is also a starchy fruit).

Lots of training the next several weeks, and lots of training today. But the two most exciting things today:

The US Ambassador to the Eastern Caribbean came to speak to us. I have a couple pictures of her. They gave us these coins that they had made. Well, they're more like medallions. It was neat.

But the really exciting thing was that they gave us our full assignments! I'll be living in Vieux Fort, on the southern tip of St. Lucia (so I'll get to see St. Vincent on clear days), working in the Ministry of Education in that district. My job description includes things that I had been describing before I even knew exactly what my job would be: helping teachers with students that need extra help, developing ways to assess those students, working with schools and the Ministry to develop extracurriculurs, working on various projects like that as needed.

It looks like most of the other people who knew they were going into "youth development" are going to be teaching or working in schools as teachers' assistants, or something like that. I like to pretend I got a more important job, although I know it's not true. I do like it, though. I think it will really give me good experience in developing programs though. I'm really looking forward to it.

I also found out the host family I'll be staying with for 7 weeks is a married couple, although I don't know if they have kids or not. I'll be living in Vieux Fort.

I don't have a transformer yet (EC uses 220 volt outlets), and when I asked a St. Lucian who works for the PC here she said they cost like EC$250--about $93 USD! :-/ I only need one, since the only thing that I have that plugs in is my laptop. The woman I was speaking to said that my host family might have one, if I'm lucky. Well, actually I'm looking now and I might just need an adapter, since my computer's power thingy says 100-240v. That's good. And either way, I think I'll look around at prices first anyways, since it looks like I might be able to get one for $20-30USD including shipping online.

For some reason, the microphone on my webcam wasn't working with Skype, so after several other things I uninstalled Skype, but now I can't reinstall it--it says the setup file isn't a Win32 application. Anyone have any suggestions? I really want to call my mom. :(

Training, Day 2

Second day, it was a full day spent in the hotel conference room. I gotta say, this is just as if not more interesting than college orientation. Though we were tired and needed breaks, it was still well organized and most of the activities were effective in getting their points across/starting a new topic.

I went to lunch at Subway, got a footlong, I'm saving the second half for tomorrow morning. For dinner my roommate and I had planned on going to Versailles, a place a lot of peeps went to last night, but it's kinda far away, so instead we went to La Patagonia Argentina. The outside was dimly lit, and there seemed to be thick blue curtains in the windows (though in reality they were thin white ones with blue light shining on them), so it seemed sketch at first despite the good reviews. Once we got inside, however, we found a very lovely, low-key-but-classy little restaurant. The food was pretty good. I had the Pollo 'Santa Cruz' (chicken stuffed with spinach and mozzarella, with potatoes on the side). Ashley had Tiras Asadas (short rib, with a salad). We agreed it was a good restaurant and that we were glad we didn't walk a long way at night for the other place.

Tonight we had to repack some stuff, on the off-chance luggage gets lost in transit, so we'll have some clothes and our toiletries in our carry-on. However, the main prob I see with this is that I have more liquids (in <3oz containers) than can fit in a quart zip bag. :-/ I guess I'll see how it works out in the morning, if I have time.

We check out at 6am, since with nearly 40 people it will take time to load the bus, unload it, get our tickets and passports and go through customs and security, all that kinda stuff. (I just checked the St. Lucia customs website, it looks like I don't need to worry about anything.)

Well, it's time for sleep since I need to get up at 5!

Training, Day 1

Well I guess this is technically "orientation," but sitting in a room for hours at a time listening and talking about what we expect and things like that certainly merits the title.

I barely slept last night: at 1am I finished packing and then measured my suitcases, finding that they exceeded length+width+height limits, so I had to unpack and repack one suitcase to another. I got most of my stuff, including the Jäger that Berney gave me for 6th month anniversary, but not including my computer speakers and subwoofer. :( Oh well, I have my iPod and the dinky laptop speakers.

Around 2am I got in bed, but I can't sleep much before something exciting or stressful, so at most I got 1 hour of sleep in at that point before I had to get up at 4:30 to go to the airport. I couldn't sleep on the first plane, then passed out for half an hour on the second plane, but not any more than that. And other than feeling a little tired just before dinner, I haven't felt as exhausted as I should. Hopefully I can fall asleep tonight though. :-/

Training so far has been kinda cool. It's not very boring, at least. There are around 35 of us, with a good range of ages. Many are recent college or masters grads, some are older, a few are somewhere in the middle. Lots of interesting people, in general.

I went with a group to dinner across the street from the hotel at a place called (I think) "Sabor Latino Cafe." I had yellow rice with pork. It was alright--the pork was mostly dry, but the rice was pretty good. My plate also came with fried plantains, which was a very tasty surprise! The sangría was alright, but the fruit in it was just the syrupy diced pear/peach/cherry you expect in school lunches. I wouldn't be surprised if the syrup from that was the sweetener used in the drink. The sangría was cheap, the food wasn't expensive, but I sort of expected a little more. I had good conversation with my dinner buddies though, so it was cool.

My roommate in the hotel is actually from Austin, too; she just got her MSW from UT.

Alright, time to watch Michelle Obama's speech and go to bed.

Leaving!

I'm leaving this morning (later, perhaps after a couple hours of sleep). I'm sort of nervous, but not too much yet. I spent several hours packing and unpacking and repacking, since I didn't bother measuring my suitcases until after I was done. I found out my large suitcase is a few inches beyond the limit, and the two combined were way past the combined limit for size, so I had to leave a few more things out and put clothes into a hanging/folding bag.

I think I'll go try to get some sleep. I don't know how well it will work. :-/ I'm also afraid I'll run out of reading material quickly, since I just started Caves of Steel by Asimov, and it's by Asimov, so I won't be able to put it down. I don't really have room for other books, though.

OK SLEEP

Donating

I went to the Blood Center of Central Texas today to donate blood, since I know I won't be able to for a while. I was sure to eat lots of iron-rich foods in the past few days, since the time before when I tried to donate here I couldn't because I didn't have enough. It went fine until I was halfway done: like the last two times I donated, I started to get lightheaded, and my vision went grainy. I knew better this time, and let them know how I was feeling early on, so that I wasn't scared I would actually pass out this time. Well, I guess two-thirds a pint of blood are still useful, right?

I got free snacks at least.

Actually, they handled it a lot better and more quickly than any other place has. Maybe it's because it was better staffed, or because some of the doctors were older and more experienced, but I felt better about their response overall.

One week to go

I'm leaving next Monday to Miami for my staging event. I'll be there for a day and a half, and on the third day, early morning, I'll leave for St. Lucia!

This week, in the meanwhile, I'm busy writing and completing to-do lists. Setting up this blog was one item, so now I can cross that off!

Another thing I need to do is get addresses from people if they want postcards or such things. Email me if yours if you so desire. Alternately, I'm sometimes on AIM or Skype, both with the same username.

Well, I should go work on other things in my to-do list, like cleaning the bathroom or putting music on my laptop. Boring, I know.



edit: I like Berney. He's a pretty cool d00d. Sadly, those are 0's, zeros, it's just sort of hard to tell. it makes me glad there aren't any o's in his name, 'cause otherwise I'd need to write them all with zeros, but no one would notice my insistence on his being l33t. Well he is, in any case.