Jazz Festival, Youth & Sports, World Environment Day

So every year St. Lucia hosts a big jazz music festival featuring world renown artists that attracts tourists from all over the world. Ironically enough, besides the Kenny J music that I hear for the processional at almost every wedding I've been to here, practically NO ONE from St. Lucia listens to or likes jazz music at all. It's obviously done exclusively with tourists in mind. In Soufriere, however, most of the artists this year were local Creole artists. I enjoyed hearing the local music, but got quite a kick out of the fact that none of the music in the Soufriere "jazz" festival was actually jazz.

I'm excited to report that, after lots of planning and coordinating, we've finally managed to organize a youth and sports club in Fond St. Jacques! Apparently awhile back there used to be a group focused mostly around football and cricket, but after some complications and drama the group split, causing organized activity for youth to largely come to a halt. So, the past couple of months I've been working with a few people in the community to try and unify the youth of Fond St. Jacques and form a new club. We focused on targeting a wide cross section of youth in the community by advertising that the club wants to undertake a variety of different types of activities (sports for both guys and girls, culture, education, debate, etc.), instead of just football and cricket. The night of the election we were a bit nervous because we weren't sure if people would turn out or not. We had registered a large number of people, but then again that doesn't always mean too much. Thankfully, nearly fifty people came and we were able to elect an executive board to move youth and sports forward in the community. I pray that God will continue to bless the group and that it'll start off on the right foot.

In collaboration with a fellow PCV and a Tour Guide Association, we organized World Environment Day activities. We had a screening of a film about climate change/global warming and how St. Lucia is affected as well as a hike. Things came together and we had a good turnout for the film and the hike as well. I think it had something to do with the fact that a free t-shirt was involved, but nevertheless it was good that people came. Considering that littering is a BIG problem here (kids, adults, everyone), it was good to have an event that reminded people of the importance of taking care of the environment.

In my last post I spoke about mangoes and how spectacular they are. I thoroughly enjoyed mango season, but it's unfortunately coming close to its end. I have a funny story involving mangoes though. An older gentlemen (early 70's) was nice enough to take me to his mango tree one day to pick some for me. When we reached the tree I scoured the ground picking up all the mangoes that had fallen but were still somewhat edible and started eating them immediately. Mr. Morris, my friend, told me not to bother with those because most of them were too soft or rotten. I told him that one man's trash is another man's treasure and that quite a few of them looked alright to me (at least worth a good bite or two). So, while I was busy shoving mangoes down my gob, Mr. Morris was approaching the tree and looking for the best way to climb it. Now I don't mean to gloat, but I consider myself to be a pretty good tree climber. Looking at this tree, however, I was stumped as to how anyone (especially a 70 some year old) would even begin to think of how to climb it. Granted my mind was bit preoccupied with shoveling in the mangoes, and I wasn't closely inspecting it, I had no idea how he was planning on climbing it. Next thing I knew, he had his entire body wrapped around the large trunk and was shimmying his way up it. There I was, a reasonably fit, 23 year old, watching a man 3X plus my age doing something physical that I most likely would have failed miserably at. Yay pride check. Meanwhile, I'm still devouring mangoes like a little kid given free reign in a candy store. To add to it, most of the mangoes were, by St. Lucian standards, most likely "untouchable." After successfully climbing the tree with much ease, Mr. Morris took one look at me shoveling in mango after mango, chuckled, and told me if I don't stop eating mangoes I'll probably crap myself. I laughed loudly and responded, "it'll have been well worth it." So, in the end, I took an enormous bag of mangoes home, and soon discovered that breakfast, lunch, and dinner could largely be simplified. :) Oh, and yes, Mr. Morris wasn't kidding. I seriously pooped around 3 times a day for a solid couple of weeks (just in case you were curious).