What a long strange trip ...

We are now back in the US and have officially completed our Peace Corps service. We are very proud of ourselves for making it through and getting our official Close of Service. But there are a few fun things left to talk about at the end of our Peace Corps journey.



At the Portmore Municipal Council they gave us a nice little sendoff party. It actually involved two parts. First, there was a lunch at Prendy's on Hellshire Beach with our closest coworkers in the building and planning departments. This is a restaurant we had been to a few times, and they have really good fish. The only issue is that it takes a long time to get the fish. So this time, we all pre-ordered so that the fish didn't take too long to get ready. The fish lunch was fun, and then the next day we had a little going away meeting in the conference room. I can't really call this a party, since it involved us sitting around the conference room table while speeches and testimonials were given about our service. Then we got some nice gifts: a wooden carving of the Portmore Causeway in a frame, two PMC tote bags, and a thank you card. It lasted about an hour, and then it was over. The main sentiment expressed was that they really appreciated the database we helped build, and they wish they could get more Peace Corps volunteers. Click here for more pictures.



The weekend after we stopped working, we went to a bush party. By that I mean a party in a rural part of St. Elizabeth hosted by our Jamaican friend Sania in honor of her work with our friend Caitlin. A few Volunteers attended, and a lot of Jamaicans. They had food made over a fire, using three stones to prop up the huge pots of mannish water (goat soup), fish tea, rice, curried goat, and oil for fried chicken. The fish tea was very tasty, and we tried a sip of the mannish water, which wasn't too bad. There was also big sound and a dance area. It started out with Jamaican oldies, and it didn't get busy until after midnight, when more people started showing up. Then a few people got crazy on the dance floor, grinding away, while most others watched or just danced a little bit. We left around 3:30 AM, when our taxi man returned to get us because he was too tired to stay up any later. A good experience to have before we left the island. More pictures can be found here.



We got home safe and sound on the 27th, only about 20 minutes behind our scheduled arrival. And only one bag was missing, but it should be delivered to us in a few days. We did only get 3 hours of sleep, because we had to get up at 3 AM in order to get ready and catch a taxi for our 6:40 AM flight. And we didn't finish packing until midnight. But we did get it done.

Our Peace Corps experience taught us a lot. We are glad that we stuck it out and know that it will have a profound affect on our lives in the US. Those things that we took for granted before, like washing machines and other luxuries, will be appreciated much more now. But more than that, the many friends we made amongst the Volunteers and the Jamaicans we got to know will stay with us. It was definitely a rich experience that we will think about for the rest of our lives.

-Shane and Kaelyn

New Group Arrives!

The new group arrived on island on July 3rd. Check out this article from the Gleaner and we have some pictures up on Flickr. Here's to a great two years on island!



At the same time, the international director of Peace Corps came down to visit Jamaica for a couple of days. He came to our office, along with the Regional Director for Inter-America and Pacific. We didn't have any electricity, so our office was hot and dark. But they got the generator hooked up and we were able to showcase our database and have a meeting with our counterparts at work.

-Shane

Load Shedding

So we were asking our supervisor why the electricity keeps going off at our office. It has happening a lot lately, often for 3 or 4 hours at a time, after which we usually go home if it hasn't come back on for that amount of time. The answer he gave was load shedding. Specifically, the fact that our office is in Portmore, which is right next to Kingston, the town where the majority of people who live in Portmore work during the day. In these hot summer months, all those Kingston workers are using a lot of air conditioning and other electrical devices. So in order to accommodate this peak load, they cut off the power to Portmore, assuming that not very many people are in Portmore during the day. The truth is, they're right about the small number of people working in Portmore. But for those of us that do, no electricity really cuts down on the amount of work you can do.

-Shane

Creative Thinking Contest Fun Day

On June 16th, the Creative Thinking Contest (CTC) Fun Day was held at the Peace Corps Office. The CTC is an event put on by the Gender and Development (GAD) Committee of the US Peace Corps in Jamaica, a group which tries to understand more about how gender and development intersect in Jamaica. The goal of this contest was to get Jamaican school children thinking about how gender is an important part of playing games, and see if they could think of a game that was interesting and fun for both boys and girls. Two of my fellow Volunteers, Brooke Dumain and Khaled Alquaddoomi, organized the event, and I helped them out.



The planning for this event started over a year ago, when GAD started fundraising and deciding on the theme for the event. We thought that making a game would be a fun way for kids to think about gender issues, as opposed to writing an essay or other creative work. Then, students were contacted in parishes across the island, often with the help of volunteers who worked at the schools. Teams from the schools were judged and ten finalists were chosen from 5 schools to participate in the final round of judging.



The Fun Day and final round of judging went off very well. The heart of the day was all of the finalists demonstrating their game for all of the judges (who were high school students) and allowing all those in attendance to play the games. There was also a DJ bus from Digicel, a popcorn and snowcone machine, dancing, and lots of food and gifts for the participants. Shane ran the popcorn machine for much of the day, and Kaelyn was in charge of the prize drawings. The winner was Tivoli Gardens High School, from Kingston. You can read more about the Fun Day from the Gleaner here and see more of our pictures here.

-Shane

Labour Day

Jamaican Labour Day was last Wednesday, May 23rd. This is a national holiday in Jamaica. On this day, many Jamaicans, given a day off from work, elect to use their free time on a community project. These projects usually take the form of cleaning up, bushing, or refurbishing a building, park, school, or church. The Portmore Municipal Council's official Labour Day project was to build a small park with a monument showing the historical importance of Passage Fort, a district in Portmore. If you would drive around Jamaica on Labour Day, you would see small groups of people hunched over, painting, picking up trash, or weeding in their straw hats.



That it the type of sight we saw as we traveled to our destination, a school in St. Andrew where our friend Brooke works. When we got there, we saw that Brooke and her students had been hard at work collecting rocks and starting to dig a terrace into the small hill in front of their school. Their goal was to spell out the name of the school using the rocks. Shane helped out by grabbing the pickaxe and extending the terrace over about 10 feet, with the help of the students. At that time, it began to rain and didn't let up for about three hours. Since we couldn't work outside, we went inside and talked with the students and staff at the school. They were very nice and kept us amused while we waited out the rain.



By the time it stopped raining, all we had time to do was clean up the work site a little bit. The rest of the project would have to wait for another day. Afterwards, we took a little tour of the town and got to see where Brooke lives and the view she has from her apartment.

-Shane

Fun Citi Fun Day

This past Saturday, we spent the day with orphans from group homes around Jamaica to celebrate a fun day at Fun Citi, a private beach and club in Portmore. The Fun Day is sponsored by Food for the Poor, a US based charity that supports 12 group homes in Jamaica, among their other activities. The kids got to go to Fun Citi as a reward for their good behavior. Shane also attended the Fun Day last year, and this year was even better.

Fun Citi has a lot of different things for the kids to do, including a beach, beach soccer, volleyball, basketball, skating rink, and a basketball court. Besides these, there was also tug of war, a dance and singing competition, arts and crafts, refreshments, popcorn machines, and snow cones. Our job was to help watch out for the kids and make sure they all played safe, and to keep things organized. Kaelyn helped out a lot in the refreshment area, and Shane was assigned to the Mt. Olivet home for boys to be a general helper.

The day was packed with activities. Shane was a life guard for the beach area. He also made sure all of the boys from Mt. Olivet didn't miss any of the scheduled events. Kaelyn was also involved in handing out the gifts that all the kids got as they left the club. You can see more pictures of our exciting and rewarding day here.

-Shane and Kaelyn

Manual Labor

It's been a while since we have done any physical labor outside of our own house cleaning activities such as sweeping, doing dishes, and scrubbing laundry. So it was a breath of fresh air (not literally, of course, due to the stink) to be able to go out to Hellshire beach yesterday and pick up trash. The impetus for this trash removal exercise (T.R.E.) was the upcoming Cricket World Cup, which is motivating many people down here to spruce up their part of the island. The Cup runs from March 13-April 28, and the opening ceremonies and many matches will be in Jamaica.

Hellshire beach is one of the closest beaches to Kingston, and it has tons of fish restaurants. But it is also the home of an informal settlement, so there is not a lot of regularly scheduled cleanups. We picked up trash from the entrance area and the beach, while other people repainted the roundabout and the trees. We picked up lots of plastic bags, food containers, and hundreds of little plastic forks. The beach side was mainly abandoned clothes. The best part was seeing the trash truck come and actually pick up the waste, so we could be assured it didn't get left behind. Plus, the people organizing the cleanup gave us a free fish lunch for helping out.

Big up to the Half Moon Bay Fisherman's Co-Op. You should check out Hellshire Beach if you come to the Kingston area.

-Shane and Kaelyn

Disaster Training, Current Gone, and Pirates

Those three topics pretty much encompass our weekend.

First Shane worked really hard on the Disaster Shelter Managers Training that the Council hosted on Saturday. It was great to see people in the communities who were willing to sacrifice their time and comfort during a disaster in order to serve as shelter managers. Many of them also related interesting stories about past hurricanes in Jamaica. One such story was from a man who moved all of his belongings to the second story of his house because it was about to be inundated with water. Unfortunately, the roof blew off, so it all got wet anyway. The representatives from the national disaster agency and Red Cross were knowledgable and well spoken. Key points: 1) treat all people equally well , 2) don't bring your pets to a Jamaican shelter. It was a very fulfilling training as he not only helped prepare Portmore for a disaster, he also met a lot of persons who are movers and shakers within their communities in Portmore.

Speaking of meeting people, we have been doing that a lot more lately. I'm not sure if it has something to do with the fact that right now 20 of the Group 77 Trainees are living in our neighborhood and so everyone is being super friendly to all the white people they see. Or maybe after seeing us walk around for almost a year people have decided we aren't just passing through and they might as well get to know us. Whatever the reason, we just now found out about our neighborhood's citizen's association that meets monthly and we attended their meeting last Thursday. And on Saturday we hung out with some kids and young adults who live on our street. We learned the basics of cricket and played some card games with them.

Some of the friendliness extended by the persons on our street may have also been linked to the island-wide power outage that happened over the weekend. (In fact most of the weekend we were without water, current, or both - which did make us feel pretty sorry for all those new trainees in the neighborhood who aren't used to it yet.) Since it was of course very hot and getting dim, everyone was gathered outside thier houses to wait out the blackout. Once it got totally dark and we couldn't play cards any more we sat under the stars and talked until we felt we could take on the battle of the mosquitos and heat that would meet us when we went to bed.

Then on Sunday we went to see the new Pirates of the Carribbean movie. Note: we saw Pirates of the Carribbean in the Carribbean at a theatre called Carib 5 and located a few kilometeres away from Port Royal. How cool is that? We went with our co-worker Randy, which was awesome because he drove us and we didn't have to worry about the bus or chartering a taxi or anything. Plus we could go to the better theatre that is located in a worse part of Town. It had surround sound - which of course made the movie even better. We loved the movie and we loved the ac, popcorn, soda, candy, setting, everything. It was a great time!

- Kaelyn and Shane

A Jamaican Day at the Beach

On Saturday we went to the beach with our co-workers for the launching of the Portmore Municipal Council Social Welfare Club. We were scheduled to depart at 7:00am from the PMC office, however in typical Jamaican fashion we left at 8:37. While we were waiting the girls went on one of their many food runs of the day to Tastee Patties for some breakfast (liver and onions or saltfish with food). Since there is only a little bar and restaurant at the beach we were instructed to bring along snacks and even though the girls brought coolers and bags onto the bus there was still an insistence for many food stops. Finally, we were off picking up the one last person on our way out of town instead of waiting on her to reach. Since there were so many of us, around 20 persons, we were riding in style in an air conditioned coaster bus with plush seats - the kind you see tourists traveling around Jamaica in, it was pretty sweet! And the cost of the bus ride (J$500 each/ US$ 7.70)was actually less then we would have paid traveling by public transportation which would have been way more cramped and sweaty.

We made it all the way to Spanish Town before our next pit stop. This time it was for ice, bathrooms, and KFC. Spanish Town is approximately 10km from Portmore so at this rate I figured we would be getting to the beach around noon. Once we were off again we journeyed over the imfamous Flat Bridge - a single lane bridge that washes out almost everytime it rains. And we of course all lifted our feet to prevent the duppies (ghosts) from grabbing hold of us and pulling the bus into the Rio Cobre. Then it was through the Gorge and up over the wicked Mt. Rosser where you can get stuck for hours when the big trucks break down. Luckily no trucks! Our next stop was off the side of the road to buy some juicy pine (pineapple). It was already peeled (the hardest part) and cut up in the baggies so it was ready for eating. Very tasty and only J$100 (US$1.50)!

The bus ride was pretty eventful with lots of dancing in the aisles and screaming, laughing, and drinking. I was surprised to see the "dutty wine" (a current popular, quite risque dance) being busted out at 9:00 in the morning but I suppose anything goes. The girls not only had mixed CDs for the driver to play but had a boom box of thier own in the back as well. Shane almost lost an eye due to some fast hair whipping action in the aisle next to his seat. But some would consider him a lucky man being so close to such movements.

Then we pulled into Ocho Rios, a cruise ship town on the St. Ann coast, and of course stopped for lunch even though it was only 10:30am. We pulled up to the main street and luckily it wasn't a cruise ship day so there weren't massive amounts of white people mulling around which made things much calmer than normal. We headed for Juici Beef Patties for vegetable patties and then stopped into Baskin Robbins for a rare treat. Others hit up Island Grill, Burger King, and of course KFC. Then it was off to the beach which was down the road aways and over the border into St. Mary.

Reggae Beach was a really nice, clean, low-key white sand beach. Since it is outside of Ochi it doesn't get so much tourist traffic and caters more to Jamaicans. We heard some music videos have even been filmed there. It was J$200 (US$3.00) each to enter but worth it for the cleanliness, bathrooms, and lack of harrassment. There were lots of shade trees and picnic tables and even a volleyball net. We had a tree swing near our spot and further down there were hammocks. Of course the Jamaicans mostly hung out in the shade (sun hot!) , snacking and napping. We chose to soak up the sun and do some swimming. Some of our friends did get in the water and there were a few attempts at swimming lessons. Dominoes and bingo were played and of course there was lots of eating. At some point in the day another KFC run was made too. After the girls were successful in building a pyramid in the water it was time to head home.

Of course the return trip warranted pit stops too. First it was to buy a big whole pine - but not for the tourist price of J$500 (they didn't even weigh it, the nerve!) but for the more reasonable price of J$200 that we got 2 stops later. Then we stopped at Faith's Pen for some jerk - it is a large string of roadside stalls who all sell jerk meats and roast vegetables. We got some roast corn, yam and breadfruit plus some festivals (fried dough). It was really, really tasty! We finally rolled back into Portmore around 7:30pm, tired with our bellies full!

- Kaelyn

Fun Citi

I spent the past Saturday helping out at a Kid's Day celebration for about 300 kids living in youth homes around southern Jamaica. It was sponsored by Food for the Poor, one of the largest charitable organizations in the Caribbean. A number of Volunteers serve with Food for the Poor, and one of them was organizing this day of fun. Fun Citi, in good old Portmore off Port Henderson Road, was the venue for this event. It started at 10 AM and the kids left around 6 PM.

There were many activities for the kids. Sports like soccer, volleyball, and basketball. Swimming was the most popular, as the facility is located right on the beach. There is a skating rink. I helped kids put on their roller blades and tried to teach them to skate. A number of boys preferred just wearing one skate and racing around as if they were on scooters. There was also an old plastic electric motorized car (pink, with no batteries left) that kids would push each other on and then ram into the walls and trees around the skating rink. Hours of enjoyment.

My favorite thing, and the scariest thing, was the hand-operated ferris wheels, of which there were three. I operated the largest one, with six carts and standing about 15 feet high, for quite a while. It sat on railroad wheels, and so used to be towed around on rail. But it was sunk into the ground with poles at each corner of the platform. To operate, you pulled the wheel on either side (sometimes easier with two people) and loaded the kids into the carts, which had a safety bar the kids were supposed to hold onto. Then you would keep pulling down on the wheel to spin it, the kids shouting "faster!" until one of them wanted to come off. The scary part was when kids would try to climb on before it had stopped moving, or climb down from one of the top carts. At one point one of the carts flipped all the way around, but the girl inside was able to hang on. Towards the end of the day, a safety pole came off of the cart. That's when we realized it was time to stop, and we made everyone get off. I had to play the role of the boring adult, always worrying about safety, but it wasn't too bad.

The kids got their chicken and rice lunch, which took about four hours to feed them all. Before that, there was hot dogs, snow cones (I got one), Chubby brand soda, and popcorn for snacks. The talent show at the end was fun, just like Rising Stars, with dancing, singing, and poetry. At the end, I got a free red stripe, chocolate bar, and Bob Marley shirt. The kids had fun. I had fun. A day well spent.

-Shane

Hotel Party

Last night, we went to Portmore Municipal Council's staff holiday party, held at the fancy Terra Nova Hotel near New Kingston. We decided to spend the night at the hotel so that we would not have to try and get a ride home after the party at 2 AM. Plus we don't mind the hot water, cable TV, and internet available in the hotel room.

We got into the room about 2:30 PM. It had hot water, and cable, and internet. Hey, that was just what we were looking for. That worked out well for us. Plus the big bonus was that the room was carpeted. The last time we saw carpeting was at the hotel in Miami. It was almost too much for our barefoot feet to handle. It was so great not to have to wear flip-flops (Jamaicans call them slippers) while inside plus it felt so soft and clean. We spent the afternoon watching TV, showering, and using the internet. All at the same time. Well almost. At one point Shane was checking his email, watching the KC Chiefs game, while switching back and forth between "Sean of the Dead", which is a funny movie by the way. Kaelyn took two hot showers, to make up for all the cold ones in our apartment.

We went down to the party/banquet around 8 PM. The food was ok. We think it might have been a little funny because it had been sitting on the buffet line for a while. (We started at 8:30 rather than 7:00, typical Jamaican event) We both got a vegetable plate, and it was really good, with about 12 kinds of vegetables (corn, potato, cabbage, tomato, mushrooms etc. ). After the food, members of staff wowed us with their musical talents. The City Engineer sang some smooth R & B. The accounting staff did a skit and a dance routine. Our boss, the planning director, is a bit of a comedian and did a little standup. We were so proud.

After the performances, the DJ's went through some 70's funk and pop (e.g. Jackson 5), then into oldies reggae and dance hall. We danced a bit, but bowed out when it got a little too hot and heavy for us. Jamaican dancing can sometimes make grinding from back home seem quite tame. It was a fun night, and then we had the next morning to chat online and take more hot showers. Afterwards we went to a Christmas craft fair at Devon House and went out to eat at the Thai restaurant.

All in all, a very nice holiday weekend.

-Shane and Kae

Tennis Clothes Line

For those who don't know, I (Shane) do tennis lessons with students at the local high school on Fridays after school. I hope to expand this to two days a week next semester. The school has the lines drawn onto an asphalt court, and they have 10 tennis racquets, all with strings. There are also some enthusiastic kids and two teachers who are supportive of tennis at the school, one of whom does tennis lessons on a different afternoon. What they don't have is a net.

While teaching them how to play tennis, I was continuously reminding them that, if this had been a real tennis match, their shots would have to go over the net. Then I would point to a spot in the air (approximately 36 inches off the ground) and say, "See that shot, that was a little bit too low, so that would not have gone over the net in a real game." I think they got the point of the whole net thing, but it's kind of hard to practice while trying to visualize the net.

So, last Friday, I finally unveiled my big plan for showing them -- kind of -- what a net would be like. I took two volleyball poles that the school had and tied a length of clothesline between them. I measured the height at the middle so it would be 36" and a little bit higher at each end, as a real tennis net would be. Even though it was the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, I still got 5 kids to come out and practice. Success: the net thing worked, in my opinion. I said, "See, you have to hit it over the net", as I introduced a new concept into my tennis pedagogy. For the most part, they remembered to hit it over the clothesline instead of under.

Then I took the clothesline home so that I could still use it to hang clothes in my apartment. Beautiful. My hopes are that we can have a net donated by Jamaica Tennis Assocation or another source sometime in the spring school semester. Then, in the next school year, we could play competitions against other high schools.

One other thing we need is tennis balls. Right now I only have two that I bought in Kingston. It was a can of three, but we lost one in the tall grass. Now the two we have left are turning brown from dirt and have quite a few burrs (macka is the Jamaican word I learned for burrs) stuck in them. So if anyone out there has any old (or new) tennis balls they would like to send down, feel free to ship them down in with another package or as a separate box.

The address is:

Shane McCall
United States Peace Corps
c/o Suchet Loois, Peace Corps Country Director
8 Worthington Avenue
Kingston 5, Jamaica, West Indies

Thanks for your help.

-Shane

New Job

We have just completed our second day on the job at the Portmore Municipal Council. To celebrate, we are going to the Portmore Palace movie theatre, which has two for one night on Tuesdays. There is only one screen there, but it is showing Wedding Crashers at 6, which both of us wanted to see. We want to get there early so that we can see the national anthem, which plays before each movie. There is also an intermission in the middle of each movie, a practice that American theatres should take up.

We are now official volunteers! We were sworn in on Friday, August 26th at Campion College in Kingston. The governor-general was there. He is the ceremonial head of state for the Jamaican government, a throwback to the days when Jamaica was under the British crown. He was a very powerful speker, even at 90 years of age. There were many other speakers, including Peace Corps and US Embassy staff, so the evening stretched on for a bit. We all got certificates and shook the hands of the PC Country Director (Suchet) and the US Charges D'Affair (not sure on the spelling). Then we went to a local club called Village Cafe and partied for a couple of hours. They were even filming a music video there. We think it was Bounty Killer. Look for him in the states - maybe.

The next morning, we got up at 6:30 AM to pack. Our ride from the Portmore Municipal Council was supposed to come at 9, but came at 10. So we got in to Portmore and our apartment around 11:30. The apartment is a second story flat with a separate entrance. It has a fridge and stove, but we are waiting on the carpenter to put in the kitchen sink and cabinets. There is a bedroom, and then a larger room, half of which is the living room and the other half has the kitchenette and dining area. The neighborhood is nice with lots of teachers, police officers, and goverment workers and families who have lived there for a long time. Our landlord and her daughter live below, and they both work in Kingston for a hotel.

Our first day of work, Monday August 29th, was pretty boring since we did not have much work to do. We left early, since there was nothing else to do, in order to visit the a school close to where we live. The week before, an administrator had asked if either of us had experience with lawn tennis. When we went in to talk to the same woman, she asked if Shane could do a tennis lesson for beginning middle school students. So he will be doing that on Friday afternoons. Tuesday we had more stuff to do at work. Shane was shadowing one of the urban planners and Kaelyn was entering and correcting an excel spreadsheet listing all of the property permit applications for the last two years in Portmore. Then we went through the original paper records and are checking each application to see if it was entered correctly. Not the most glamorous work, but at least it gives us something to do.

So, things are going better at work. We like our apartment and our landlord is responsive in improving it. She is really caring and even called us last night to see how our first day of work went.

Love,

Shane and Kaelyn

Site Assignment

We found out where we will be serving for the next two years. We will be working with the Portmore Municipal Council, located in Portmore, St. Catherine, just West of Kingston. The Municipal Council is the first of its kind in Jamaica, because no other city has had its own authority or directly elected mayor and city council. The city has about 230,000 people and serves as a bedroom community for people who work in Kingston. We will be working with project proposals and community outreach while we are here. We will know more over time as we figure out our role. Right now our top priority is finding housing in the area.You can go to a local website (http://www.portmore.org/) for more information about the town.We will have more details for you after we return to our training site from our week in Portmore.
Love,
Shane and Kaelyn