Today was the first time that I have spent Thanksgiving away from my family. Usually we I go to my parents or my grandparents house with the rest of my family and we eat, drink, argue and do the typical family thing for a few days. This year both my twin sister Kelly and I were unable to make it home (Kelly living in Chicago and starting to settle in out there). It was nice today when I was able to call home and talk to everyone in my family and hear that they were all enjoying their Thanksgivings.
The weirdest thing to me is how normal today feels to me. I’m not sure if it is because I am still a little shell shocked by things even after four months or the fact that the weather still feels like the middle of summer or maybe not being around Americans who are talking about Thanksgiving. What ever it is, it doesn’t even really feel like I’m missing out on Thanksgiving this year because it doesn’t feel like it is Thanksgiving to me.
When I woke up this morning for my run (to the sounds Browny, one of the dogs in my yard, barking continuously from 4:30 to 5 AM), one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was that it was Thanksgiving and I needed to call home. After I finished my run, ate breakfast, did laundry and cleaned up around my apartment, I had to remind myself again that it was Thanksgiving and that I needed to call home. I then saw the stick of sugar cane leaning against my fridge that Ms. White, my host mother, gave me this past weekend that I have been meaning to cut. While I was out on my veranda cutting the skin off and chopping the cane into pieces, I started to look around:
This is a picture from my rooftop looking north towards the mountains.
This is the view from my veranda looking west with the Cumberland High School in the distanceI know you can’t tell by the pictures, but they were taken at about 9 in the morning and it already in the upper 80’s and shaping up to be another hot day in Portmore. What is sad is that this is winter when it is as cool as it gets, and I’m still sweating…oh well, things could be worse.
After finishing with the cane, I had a chance to call my parents. They were doing well, at home preparing food and getting a small construction project around the house ready for the family members that were about to show up. This year, the project was to replace the door from the kitchen out to the deck. This is pretty minor to the Thanksgiving back when I was in college where they decided to replace the linoleum floor in the kitchen with tile during Thanksgiving. That was a fun time, getting a hammer rather than a handshake when I showed up the night before Thanksgiving and watching my mom trying to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with a kitchen floor that was torn up.
I was finally picked up by a co-worker at JSIF around 11 and we went up to a school in a town called Christiana, a place way up in the mountains in Manchester Parish where the views are amazing and the air is cool. We had a short meeting with the principal, some teachers and some parents about the reconstruction of the school and a nearby roadway and then it was back on the road to go home. What a hard day of work…
After getting home, it was time to warm up a left over bowl of red pea soup that I had cooked last weekend and a few phone calls to my family back home to see how things were going. It was really nice hearing from everyone, but like I said earlier, it really just didn’t feel like thanksgiving to me. I think it is a good thing because I wasn’t getting really home sick like a few of the other volunteers I know, which is good for the “mental stability” that can be an issue down here.
I guess what I am trying to say in the end is that I do miss my family and wish I was there to spend the holidays with them, but I think I have reached to point where do not need to do so. I am ready to accept situations as they end up without getting upset if they don’t live up to unrealistic expectations. Maybe that is a lot of what my experience here has been a lot about. As much as I tried not to set expectations before coming down, it is impossible not to. When I heard PC, visions of mud huts half-way around with a village of people excited to see me and work with me came to mind. Instead I got a nice house on a tropical island a few hours from the coast of America where there are a lot of very nice people but also a lot of people who are skeptical of my motives for wanting to do PC.
In conclusion, I am thankful for a lot of things and will certainly miss many of them in my short list: The health, support and love of my family, my friends (both in the States and here on the island), being an American who has this opportunity and last, but not least, chicken, rice and peas!
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