Earthquake and My Most Embarrassing Story Yet

Earthquake
So I experienced my first sizeable earthquake ever last week. It was the largest St. Lucia has had in roughly 20 years (7.4 on the Richter scale), and affected a good portion of the Caribbean. Nobody died, but houses noticeably shook for a good 10-15 seconds. It didn’t do any damage to my house, but some people had cracks in their houses, lost things off the walls, etc. Personally, at first I was just plain confused at what was going on, but after I realized what was happening I thought it was kind of exciting. Some people seriously thought it was the end of the world.

Embarrassing Mouse Story
Disclaimer: All animal activists should refrain from reading the following, as the contents might cause mild distress
It all started when I woke up one bright Sunday morning from a glorious night of rest, ready to leisurely make some French toast and eventually head off to church. I walked into the bathroom and something under the sink immediately caught my eye. As I eyed the contraption on the floor I was reminded that the day before I had decided my house would no longer serve as the play area for local mice. I was through chasing the little punks around trying to throw washing buckets on top of them to no avail. I had bought mouse traps from the store. Not the old-fashioned mouse traps either, the hardcore glue kind. No more games.
As I moved closer to the trap I spotted not one but two mice stuck to the trap. Score! I then progressed into the kitchen to check the other trap next to the stove. That one also had caught a little twerp. I then proceeded to ponder what the best course of action to take next was. Should I just throw away traps and mice together, leaving the critters to slowly starve? Or, should I humanely try and end their misery? I decided that the best course of action was, as terrible as it sounds, to try and stab the little critters to finish them off. After half-heartedly stabbing one of them a couple of times and not succeeding in killing him, I realized that I was just adding to its misery and that I didn’t have enough rage in me to continually stab him over and over. In all of my Peace Corps thriftiness, I then stupidly decided to salvage the trap with one mouse on it by prying the sucker off of it. Why not use at least one of the traps again, right? After all, doesn’t catching three mice indicate the potential presence of more scurrying about? Even though this proved a challenging feat, I somehow managed to pry the little critter completely off of the trap.
Now, the next step was to walk him far from the house and release him back into the wild, half covered in glue. This is where things get really sticky. My attempt to throw him off of the paper towel I was holding him with failed miserably, and the little beast ended up swinging back and landing on my arm, sticky side down. As I realized that shaking my arm was not going to solve the problem at hand, I started to freak out just a bit. I’m not terrified of mice, but when an angry, half-dead mouse was glued to my arm and wasn’t coming off, I started to get a bit agitated. I ended up ripping the critter off, along with a bit of arm hair.
The rest of the story involves a good deal of time spent uselessly trying to wash the stickiest glue imaginable off of my arm, as well as a walk of shame down to ask my host-parents for paint thinner (to assist in getting the glue off). They didn’t have any…

Volunteer Work at the School
Work at the school has been going alright lately, but I do at times feel like my contributions are minimal. The discipline issue continues to be a challenge, and sometime I feel like I’m doing more monitoring in classes than real teaching. Next term I plan to refine my involvement in the school, however, so I think it should get better next term. The school has a bunch of unused recorders, so I’ve been teaching myself to play it and will start up a music program. I also plan to start up a before or after school reading/math program and hopefully will recruit some of the older youth to help out.

Challenges in Development Work
Development here is quite a process. I’ve been working with the Development Committee here in Fond St. Jacques and just arranging a meeting for members of the group took over a month. There are a couple handfuls of very involved people in the community, but they are so busy serving on each and every committee, as well as having busy professional and personal lives, that they don’t have time to do arrange all of the development projects. We’re currently in the process of coming up with a new constitution and trying to get members from other community based organizations to serve on the committee.

Raining Cats and Dogs
So they weren’t joking around when they decided to call the period from June to November the “rainy season.” The amount of rain that we’ve been getting here these past few weeks is unreal. It’s so unpredictable too. One sunny day as I was hanging my clothes on the line to dry, thinking to myself “great, these will be dry in no time!”, it starts pouring rain. “Eh eh” I thought, annoyed as I look up at the quickly changing sky. One thing I’ve learned is to always keep an umbrella close at hand, because you never know when a torrential downpour is headed your way.

What’s Privacy?
So I’ve pretty much renounced any sense of privacy. One night I was making a pizza and one of the neighborhood kids came by. I reluctantly let him come in and help make pizza. After it was cooked I gave him a couple pieces and he went home for the night. A couple days later a whole mob of boys comes to my house insisting to make a pizza. A few days later one of the teachers at the school asks me how cooking has been going and adds that he’s heard I’m quite the fan of pizza. Since I’ve allowed one kid into my house I’ve had to be very direct about setting boundaries, as I don’t want my house transformed into Fond St. Jacques’ first zoo. For awhile, the same group of kids kept coming over every night at the most inconvenient times (e.g., while I was cooking, right when I got home), expecting me to let them come and just hang out, watch TV, etc. I had to clearly explain that my home is not the local hangout and that I also don’t have enough food to cook for all the kids in the community. I’ve since worked out a reasonable compromise with them that has worked well so far. They are welcome to come over to my house if the time is spent reading. I have a few children’s books and got a few more from the library in town. I’m pleasantly surprised how well they’ve responded to it. Learning to read is one of the challenges that many of the kids here face. It seems that oftentimes they memorize words but haven’t developed phonemic awareness, and thus have trouble sounding out unfamiliar words.

Ant Invasion
So the mosquito situation hasn’t been as bad here as it was during training, but ants occasionally invade with full force. As much as I try to be very clean and dispose of every crumb and granule of sugar, sometimes when I wake up and walk into the kitchen I feel like I’m in the middle of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Ants! Or maybe his movie was Birds. Anyway, you get the picture. Until I saw how attracted ants are to sugar I thought my sweet tooth was unrivaled, but now I’m not so sure.

Mwen pa pyes touris
One difficulty I’ve faced since being here has been distinguishing myself from the tourist crowd. It hasn’t been too much of a problem in my community, but when I go into Soufriere to buy groceries taxis ask me if I need a ride, people beg for money, etc. I feel torn because part of me wants to give some of them a bit of money, but at the same time I don’t want to set a precedent, especially since word travels fast, and I don’t actually have a ton to give anyway. Anse Chastenet, one of the top hotels in the world, where guests pay $1000 plus a night, is within walking distance of town. Jalousie, voted the world’s most romantic hotel, is also close by. I’ve started saying “mwen pa pyes touris” (I’m not just a tourist) to some of them, and that seems to detract them from persisting.

At the same time, there are occasions when acting like a tourist has its benefits. Some friends and I went to the beach at Anse Chastenet (the hotel) to do some snorkeling. I am pleased to say that I successfully managed to beat the system and sit in the “hotel only” lounge chairs under the shaded umbrellas without getting asked to leave. Usually every time I try and do something slick I end up getting caught, but fortunately a female PCV friend of mine was with me so we blended in with all the honeymooners.

Thanksgiving
Even though it was very strange to experience Thanksgiving in a tropical climate, and it felt nothing at all like it, it was quite an enjoyable time. All the PCVs got together for a spectacular Thanksgiving feast, which included three turkeys, creamed corn, mashed potatoes, pie, cobbler, and all those other wonderful foods. I anticipate Christmas feeling even stranger. I have spent Thanksgiving away from family for a few years now, but Christmas has always been spent in relative cold Kansas with family.