This is the next spring that runs better during the dry season. We are going to try to make a small dam and run about 400 m of pipe to connect to the existing system. Hopefully this will happen some time in the next year. 
This is the dam used for our community water system. It works well, except that during the summer when it doesn’t rain often, the spring runs low and doesn’t flow enough to fill the middle chamber where the outlet pipe is. 
This is my 5 year old host brother, Omar. It is almost impossible to get a picture of him standing still because he is always running around getting himself into trouble somewhere.
This is the view from the side of my house (a window for my room is in the back left of the pictures). You can see the Valley between the John Crow and Blue Mountains where the communities of Ginger House, Comfort Castle and Millbank are. You can see all the weather coming this way when the clouds spill over the top of the John Crow Mountains and head our way. 
This is the front of my host family’s house. As with most houses, it’s a construction in progress. They are currently taking down the old board house and putting up block and steel, one room at a time. 
This is the view from the front of my host family’s house. You can see the coffee trees in the foreground and a few banana trees that my host father has and again you can see the Rio Grande and the Caribbean Sea in the distance. I get to see this every day, which is pretty sweet (also the reason Bellevue has it’s name).
View from “Look Out” about ½ the way between Bellevue and the dam for the water system. My house is the one in the middle of the picture, the school I teach at is the big roof to the left of it. The river is the Rio Grande and in the distance you can see part of the Port Antonio Harbor and the Caribbean Sea.So far, life in Bellevue is going well. When I first got here, school was still in session, so I was teaching a few days a week and spent the other days helping out with maintenance of the water system. Since the end of June, I’ve kept busy most days with the water system and also trying to coordinate with some Ministry of Health persons in Port Antonio to get a few various projects running up here in Bellevue. Due to the really bad road conditions, the MOH does not have a strong presence in the community. The closest operational health clinic is only about 10 miles away in Fellowship, which is the first community in the Valley up from Port Antonio. Unfortunately this 10 miles takes over 45 minutes to drive due to the condition of the road, and this is only once you catch a taxi, which can take 2 or 3 hours.
Since the beginning of July, I have started a computer training class for interested community members on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It’s run out of the school library, where we have two working computers that I am able to teach 4 students at a time. We don’t have a blackboard in the library so, with advice from another volunteer, I was able to jerry-rig a white board with some cardboard, white paper, paperclips and plastic report covers that I duct tape to the wall during class. It works great! Hopefully I’ll get a picture of it for next time. My students are mostly female and range in age from teenagers to probably mid thirties. I look forward to continuing this through the rest of the summer and then holding it another 1 or 2 times in the next year before I leave.
Part of my time recently has also been spent working on the community water system. The system took about 6 years to build with the help of a few former volunteers and has been actually running since about November or December last year. Unfortunately, after all the work that went into building the system, there was no strong, organized group running it in a transparent manor. So far, we have organized a new Water Committee, brought new persons into the system, started holding regular meetings and started to set rules and regulations. It’s a long process and will take more then the remaining year that I have, but I am hopeful that things will work out. Just today we had a Community Work Day where 8 males and 5 females went up to the water lines to clear the bush that has overgrown the pipes. I wish I had some pictures of the work we did, cutting incredibly thick vegetation on steep slopes where there are 200 feet drops to the valley below. All total, we cleared about a mile of bush, which is pretty good. I think I showed some of the guys that I can manage a machete and walking along some rough areas. My hands and arms are all scratched up and I think I lost about 10 pounds from sweating, but I enjoyed the day.
Besides all the day-to-day activities, the summer time is a great place here. The best part is that everything is coming ripe now. Mangoes are all over the place, bread fruit and ackee are starting to come in, avocado will soon be in season. There are occasional jack fruits still on the trees. My host father hasn’t been able to sell all of his banana in the market so we are getting a lot of ripe banana. The vegetable garden I started with my host family is doing well and soon we will have all the carrots, callaloo, pumpkin and corn that we can eat. We also have okra, scotch bonnet pepper, sweet pepper, lettuce and tomato that are starting to do well. Unfortunately the bugs are attacking the tomato so I have to sort something out with that. The past two Saturdays I’ve had the chance to go to Port Antonio to hang out with some volunteers at some of the beaches around Port Antonio, which is a welcome break from the summer heat.
That is about it for now. I’m planning a trip home towards the end of October till mid November (I probably won’t be home for Thanksgiving). Hope to see some people then.
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