Two Short Stories

I seem to be in the writing mood of late, so I figured I’d share two short stories. The first story is a humorous story.

One of the main reasons I was moved to Bellevue was to help with the water system that was constructed in the past few years. Whether or not I’ve actually accomplished anything with the water system is debatable, but I’ve tried. One of my attempts has been to establish regular water testing to make sure it is safe to drink. To this end, I have been working with the water quality person at the Ministry of Health in Port Antonio. Now that it is getting to be the last few months of my service and I really need to start “working myself out of a job,” I figured it would be a good time to set a meeting between the water quality person and some people from my community who help with the water testing. I want to see if my community members can do the testing on their own during my last few months.

The meeting was scheduled for a weekday morning when I wasn’t too busy with other work, so I figured that I’d ride my bike there and carry a change of clothes so I wouldn’t show up all sweaty and covered in mud. I woke up early and hoped on my bike before it got too hot. I reached down to Porti in plenty of time to clean up and change when I noticed my first problem of the morning; I forgot to pack a belt. My first thought was “No big deal;” after all, my jeans aren’t too loose… Well, turns out they are. I guess I really did loose those 15 pounds since being here. I noticed this when I walked halfway across town to grab a cup of coffee before the meeting and ended up having to hold my pants up by the belt loops while I was walking.

While I was sitting there drinking my coffee, I pondered two options: 1) buy a new belt 2) make my own belt. I had to reject the first option because I recently spent all my money on a community project and had a few weeks before my next stipend. Ok, so option 2 - how to make my own belt. As I was trying to concentrate, I looked down at my feet and realized that I could just use one of the shoes laces from my sneakers! Brilliant! Problem solved! After all, its not like I had to tuck my shirt in and someone would see that I had a shoelace holding up my jeans.

As I walked over to the office for the meeting, I was feeling proud of myself for finding such a quick and easy solution. When I got to the office, I few minutes early so I sat under a tree to wait. While I waited, looked down to my feet and realized something. My shoes were mud stained, had holes in them and one was hanging half way with no lace. Moving up, my jeans were trimmed off at the bottoms, there are stains a rip is starting to form in the thigh, and these are my “good” jeans. Moving up further, my shirt was starting to shred with holes starting to form and I saw a big stain on the sleeve I apparently missed over the weekend doing my wash. I’ve never claimed to be overly concerned about my appearance, but this is a bit much. Two years in Peace Corps has finally taken its toll.

Now for story two, a story of inspiration.

For anyone who has been to Jamaica and experienced the pleasures of public transportation, they can tell you all about the comforts of “smalling up,” the smooth rhythms of dancehall being played at maximum volume, and the sweet smell of people sweating all over you. Well, the taxis in my community are a daily adventure that includes doors falling off, cars overheating, dodging police, running out of gas, and so on. Each taxi has its own unique quirks that make it an adventure every time. One of my favorites is Jackie’s van. (A van in Jamaica is a pick-up.) Jackie’s van is a small Nisan truck with the bed being about six or seven feet long and about four feet wide. Jackie runs a moving business in Porti but he is usually the last person from Bellevue to leave Porti at night, and so he usually takes any stragglers who missed the other taxis. Now, according to PC policy, I always try take regular taxis unless there is an extreme circumstance...

I was running a bit late and Jackie told me he would be leaving around 6. At 5:55 I walked up to his van to see more people standing around then I could count on my fingers and toes (and yes, I still have all of them.) My previous record on a trip with Jackie was in the high teens set a few months ago. Would this be a record-breaking trip? When we finally loaded up, some of the older guys couldn’t fit and were left to find family or friends to stay with for the night. I settled into my seat, wedged among my community members, partly upset we couldn’t set a new record. However, shortly after leaving Porti, we stopped at a primary school a few miles up the valley to pick up some students who were still waiting. Record broken, and then some! To make room, and to anchor themselves in a little better, everyone sitting around the edge of the truck bed had to put someone on their lap.

At one point going up into the valley, a taxi pulled up behind us and was amazed by the site of a small van overflowing with people and what appeared to be a white person wedged in with them. They started blowing the horn and screamed out, “How unu do the white man so?” Before I had a chance to say anything, someone in the truck with me shouted back, “Him fi wi family!” There were a few murmurs of agreement and then the conversation went back to whatever it was before. After that, all I could do was smile (and wonder why the person on my lap seemed to be gaining weight every time we hit a bump). Even with all the failures and frustrations I’ve had, maybe I accomplished something after all.

Recent Happenings in Bellevue

Most of my posts up to now have been about things that have happened. I will continue with that for this post, since it has been a long time since I’ve written a post and plenty of things have happened in that time, but I want to start off with a few thoughts first. The reason for the change is the fact that many of the things that have happened in the past few months have given me cause to start thinking about different things.

I don’t claim to be a very introspective person. When I have a problem or an issue, it doesn’t usually take more then a few minutes to think things through and figure out what it is I want to do. I’m not sure if this is the right way to do things, but it has gotten me through for the past 27 (soon 28) years. However, here it has taken a little more time to think through a few different things.

So here are the few thoughts I want to share before I tell you more about my past few months:

1 – My life here in Jamaica has been pretty stressful, mostly from pressure I put on myself. I think it comes from a feeling I have that it is always more important to please other people before I please myself. It doesn’t matter how busy I already am, I always feel that I can squeeze in a little more time to help someone. And being here where my job is to help people in my community, it just gives me the excuse to try to work that much harder. The problem is, in a community of about 600 people, once people start getting comfortable with me and feel secure in asking me for help, the pressure I put on myself quickly turns from a small stream of work to overwhelming torrent. Two things I’ve learned from this: 1) I’ve learned how to spot the people that are just using me because they have nothing better to do and the ones who really need help and 2) sometimes its more important for me to take time for myself. I’ve learned that if I’m not having fun, I’m not doing a good job. Having fun means that sometimes I can say no to helping someone if I already have something to do, it means that I’m allowed to take it easy on a Wednesday if I’m really feeling stressed from working all weekend, and it means that getting away from my site on occasion is necessary to keep sane.

2 – There are some people that are just not worth trying to help. This point took a bit of time for me to wrap my head around and might surprise a few people, especially when I get into my reasoning for it, but it is the truth and it has really helped me.

In the past few months, I’ve committed a lot of time and effort to helping at the primary school in my community. If you’ve never seen a rural Jamaican school, it is something entirely different then an American school. What I consider common respect for teachers is virtually non-existent in most students. Rules with walking in and out of class, talking in class and non-school people on the school premises are, well, not there.

I’ve spent a lot of time spinning my wheels trying to help Grades 4 through 6 with subjects like literacy and computers. At first, I thought it was because they either didn’t trust me, didn’t understand me, or where really trying but just needed a little extra help. What I found out was that there comes a point when I put out the effort and it was up to them to respond. I noticed that the disrespect not only continued, but escalated. I had to quit…on 10 and 12 year olds... It’s hard to come to grips with quitting on a 10 or 12 year old kid, but I’ve realized that 10 or 12 is old enough to understand consequences. Maybe not understand life long consequences, but at least understand the consequence that if you don’t show respect, you won’t get respect. To understand that if you don’t study, you will fail. To understand that if you fail, you won’t move on. At least there are a few that are willing to work, and I have just put my efforts into them.

3 – The underlying cause for some issues are not always apparent, and efforts to correct the issue won’t do much if they don’t address the cause. There are a number of issues that I’ve come across here that just mystify me as to how people don’t recognize them and take action to correct them. I had a big long thing typed out for this section that I decided to just delete and make as simple as possible. (Though if you want to have a few drinks and talk about it, there are things I can talk about for hours.) I have seen problems with people trusting their own family members, young men and women unwilling to work or even learn a skill when it is offered to them, kids responding to anything but physical punishment, kids dropping out of school, teenage pregnancy, etc. These are all problems that we have in abundance in America without a doubt, but I’ve never seen them so common and accepted as I have here.

In the end, what I’ve come to understand is a lot comes down to issues with families dynamics. Raising kids in families where there are not consistent parent figures is more damaging then any kind of physical injury. And the fact is, to find a traditional nuclear family in Jamaica, especially rural Jamaica, is the exception. I have come to appreciate the opportunity I had to grow up in a solid, cohesive family. Sure we had our issues (my siblings and I are still notorious for arguing and fighting with each other), but we were raised together and we’ll stay together.

4 – Give thanks and praise for what you have. This is something I learn a new appreciation for every day. When I see life here, I see all the advantages I have had that allowed me to achieve what I have. But at the same time, when I hear people here talk about how hard life is, I see that they don’t often appreciate advantages that they have. True, the road is horrible, but at least there is a road. True the electricity goes in and out a lot, but there is electricity. True the piped water is not always reliable, but there is piped water, and when there isn’t, there are clean springs within a 10-minute walk. True the farmers are struggling to make money, but their families are not struggling to find food to eat (at the moment there is more fruit on the trees then can possibly be eaten). Life is certainly not easy, but it is not that hard.

Alright, enough of my random thoughts, here is what has been going on in my life in the past few months. As I said previously, I have started spending a lot more time then I used to at the school. I have pretty much worked out a consistent schedule of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday at the school and occasional Fridays. Each day I have my scheduled time working with the basic school kids on Phonics and Grades 1 through 3 on literacy, math and computer skills (drawing in Paint and typing simple sentences). When I’m not with the kids, I’m either organizing the library or doing random things for the teachers like making posters, looking up information and typing up tests. Here is a picture of me and one of the basic school teachers working with the kids on Phonics:

I have a video of them trying to learn the letter “Y” sound that is pretty funny and I’ll see if I can load it later.

One other thing I’ve done at the school is help the principal with a mural on the school wall. For a while she had talked to me about the idea of painting a mural with “Welcome to Bellevue Primary School” with the school motto “Together We Light The Way Forward” and a symbol (hands cupping a flame). Finally, one Monday morning when I was busy on a poster or something, she came to me and told me that she bought the paint and talked to some guys in the community to come and help, they’d be here in a few minutes. Gee, glad I knew so that I could make sure everything was ready.

In the end, everything worked out pretty well. It took about 3 or 4 days to do the initial mural, with about 4 of the young guys in the community who don’t work and spend most of their days on the road walking up and down helping me paint. Here are a few pictures of the work in progress:

Work just starting

The guys starting to find their stride

Finishing up the work

What it looks like in the end

Things turned out pretty well and I even impressed myself with how it looked in the end. Not to mention the guys learned a bit about painting in terms of making your own stencils and how to transfer a small drawing on a paper to a larger drawing on the wall using a grid. The principal was so impressed she commissioned me to paint the national symbols on the wall as well. They turned out pretty well too. Their still a work in progress though.

My other main work success is starting a farmers group and building two produce storage sheds in the community. This is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I got here last summer. There was a concrete platform on the side of the road up near the school that used to be a small shed used by the farmers to box banana a few years ago before the banana export market was shut down. The shed was destroyed during a storm and never rebuilt since it was a community structure and no group existed to take care of it. After about 6 months of waiting for the Minister of Parliament to give money to build it, I got tired. I was running one morning when I got the idea to try to get money through a SPA grant.

SPA is the Small Projects Assistance grant that is given by USAID through Peace Corps Volunteers. The limit on the money that we have is US $3,000. When I started looking into the project around December, I found that with that money, I could afford to build two sheds that are about 10ft wide x 16 feet long, built with wood and a zinc roof. I applied for the money in February and finally got the money at the end of April. So, now $3,000 of your tax money, plus a bit me for a few extra unseen costs, is in Bellevue, being used as farm produce storage sheds. These sheds have shelves to get things up and off the ground, tubs to wash the produce in, locks to keep the kids out at night, and proper construction with bolts and hurricane straps to hopefully keep the thing standing for a few years. Here are a few pictures:

Yeah - the guy is standing on a concrete block on standing on its end using a circular saw...real safe, but got the job done

We added a message board to the front - why not use some empty space

An idea I got watching a red stripe commercial - turned out pretty good

Besides that, I’ve been busy with other things like computer training classes, helping high school and college kids with their homework, working on the water system, and a few other things not worth mentioning.

One very fun thing was that about 3 weeks ago my parents finally came for a visit. They came for about a week and it was great. I was in pretty desperate need of a break from work up in Bellevue and it was good to be able to show my parents around a bit. My parents were troopers getting on public transportation with no big complaints. We spent most of the time in Port Antonio, going to a few beaches and having some good dinners. We spent one night with my host family in Bellevue which was a lot of fun, playing interpreter because my parents were having trouble understanding my host family and my host family was having trouble understanding my parents. But the food was excellent and everyone really enjoyed meeting each other. The last day they were here we went to Kingston to see the Peace Corps office and for some shopping. All in all, it was a great time and not nearly as stressful as I’ve heard other volunteers say it is hosting family.

A view from our guest house looking over one of the bays in Port Antonio

My parents having a drink with my host family after dinner

Now things are winding down for me. I have my COS (Close of Service) conference in little over a week, school finishes in early July, and most of my work is finished here. I’m looking forward to really taking it easy in July and August before I leave, learning to enjoy the rural Jamaican experience without the pressure of trying to get things done. I’ll still be attending community meetings and helping where I can, but my goal is to work myself out of my job and have community members pick up the work. We’ll see how much that actually happens.

In recent news – I don’t know if anyone back home has heard much about what is going on down here with all this Dudus Extradition case going on. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say on the matter – all I will say is it is pretty sad that a man is hiding behind innocent men, women and children to prevent being extradited. Too many people have died already. I just hope that things finish soon and we can start moving around without trouble again.

Anyways, it’s on to the next step after I’m finished here in Jamaica, which I have already sorted out, and a few people know about, but not many. But that is a whole other post unto itself. Look for that one in the next week or two.