Making Progress

I have finally gotten around to posting some pictures of my travels in Jamaica over the past four months. Most of them are mine, some of them I have taken from other PCVs, but I have been at least been present for all of them. I am not a great photographer, but I have posted a link for another Volunteer who is, and he also happens to live in one of the most beautiful places on the island, so he has some great pictures.

Things have been going well for me lately. Just this past week I was finally able to start branching out and getting other work outside of my primary assignment of JSIF. The first project I started working on is a USAID project in Portland Cottage. The place is a very depressed area of the island that has little industry and, therefore, high crime. It also happens to be one of the lowest lying areas on the island, making it highly vulnerable to hurricanes. During Hurricane Dean last summer, the storm surge flooded almost the entire area (similar to what happened in New Orleans), luckily all of the residents had evacuated. Along with the flooding, the winds damaged many of the roofs on the houses. In one neighborhood of 93 homes, 92 roofs were either damaged or totally destroyed. As a result, USAID is repairing or replacing the roofs. Due to budgetary constraints (Yeay politics) they have asked peace corps to help with the construction inspection. Not very glamorous, but at least it keeps me busy and gets me contacts with USAID.

Other than that, I was finally able to make contact with the high school that is across the street from where I live, Cumberland High School. There was a PCV for the past two years helping out in the IT department, and that is where they want me to help out as well. They have asked me to help them create a web site. I have no clue how to do this, but it looks like I will be learning! They also mentioned helping with teaching literacy at night for adults in the area. I really hope this actually comes to fruition! Again, not that I have any idea how to teach literacy, but PC has a lot of material to help me start.

In non-work related things, how about that election? I know that the people who read this blog have a variety of political opinions, so I will try not to offend anyone. But I will admit that I voted for Obama. I had pretty much made this decision before my service after doing as much research as possible on the two candidates, so it wasn't one of those voting for the party things for me. It was very interesting seeing the election process from the Jamaican view though. Pretty much the entire island was supporting Obama. There were some Jamaicans I spoke with that had done there homework and could explain the reasons that they supported him over Obama. But, at the same time, there were many who had not done any research and liked him simply because he was black. To all of these people that I met, I did my best to explain that there was so much to my choice then that. Some of the understood, some of them had no interest in understanding.

Either way, the way I see it in the end is that our system is made of checks and balances and that, no matter who is the President, these checks and balances will not let the country stray off the course of progress. Some leaders will slow this progress, some will accelerate it. We just have to trust that our elected leaders can come together and continue to move our country in the right direction.

Regardless of your political choice, everyone has to admit that it was amazing to see our country take another step towards this progress in voting our first black president into office. I know that I had a moment of reflection last Tuesday night where I thought just how amazing this moment was when just 50 some years ago, there were laws that segregated the people of our country. Now we have our first black President that has run his campaign on the promise of unity. Let us hope that this progress continues.

That is about it for now. I'll try to do better with the pictures from now on, but please enjoy what is there now.