Minor First Aid

We had a bit of excitement on Saturday night while cooking dinner. Shane was peeling the pumpkin for our soup and sliced open his finger. He called to me in the other room requesting some "minor first aid". When I went into the kitchen blood was gushing from his finger into the kitchen sink and was also on the counter, his shirt, and even his glasses (it had squirted up when he cut it). Using a wash cloth we were able to contain the bleeding and then from our nifty Peace Corps issued First Aid Kit we bandaged it up. It wasn't a large cut but it was deep and in an difficult place going from the tip down to the side of his fingernail. When we put the gauze and waterproof tape on it looked like his finger was wearing a graduation hat. Since we had to tape it over the top but couldn't go too tight it was like a little white mortar board on top of his wrapped finger. Then we had to deal with the blood stained cloth and shirt. Using on of our handy tips from our Peace Corps Jamaica Cookbook we soaked them in cold salt water. Surprisingly enough this worked! Then everything went back to normal and the soup turned out mighty tasty. However, we did ponder why we hadn't received any sort of First Aid Training from the Peace Corps and why we hadn't been given more household solutions like the cold salt water trick. Those are definitely things we felt should have come with training but didn't. My last first aid course was in Fall 2003 and I feel pretty rusty now. I wish we would have brought some more books or other resources for these kind of situations.

-Kaelyn

Our Apartment and What We Eat

As requested we put some pictures of apartment on our Flickr site (see link on right-hand side of this page). We only put up pictures of the inside though and none of our veranda or balcony because we didn’t want our location to be recognizable. So if you want to enjoy our wonderful view you will just have to come to visit and see it for yourself.

Our apartment is an upstairs flat with an external staircase leading up to a nice big veranda. Hopefully sometime soon we will get clotheslines hung out here as there is much more room than on the back balcony. The part of the veranda leading into our apartment is enclosed by grills (bars; our landlady told us she would “burglar our windows” too) and we have some beach chairs and a plant there. When it is nice and breezy outside this is a good place to sit and read a book. Then, as you can see from the pictures, you enter the front door into the living room/kitchen area. Off of that is the bathroom and our bedroom. From our bedroom is a door leading onto our back balcony where there is a wash sink and clotheslines as well as another set of external stairs leading into our landlady’s house.

We have also posted some pictures of the yummy food we have been eating. Although we try to add new dishes into our repertoire we have gotten into a bit of a routine. Things mostly vary on the weekend when we have more time to shop and prepare. Our typical menu is as follows:

Breakfast: Caribbean Crunch Cereal (oats with dried coconut and bananas) with Wheat Germ, and Soy Milk; on the weekends we mix it up with Banana Pancakes, Fruit Salad, or Jamaican style Callaloo and Fried Plantains

Lunch: Peanut Butter and Guava Jelly Sandwiches, Plantain Chips, and Coconut Cookies; for non-work days we make a Pear (Avocado) Salad or Popcorn with Sea Salt and Brewer’s Yeast

Dinner: Pasta with Sautéed Vegetables, Beans and Rice (or Jamaican style Rice and Peas), or many varieties of Soups (Egg Drop, Lentil, Vegetables in Broth)

Treats: Soy Scream (Coconut and Pistachio are the best flavors) and Peanut M&Ms

Drinks: Coke Lite, Fruit Juice (sugar free), Red Stripe and Dragon Stout; we also drink a “whole heap” of water which amuses the people at work

Good Stuff!

-Kaelyn and Shane

New Things

There is something so exciting about getting something new. On Thursday we got a copy of Scrabble for our computer from a co-worker. This has been very fun and we are getting quite good - we even beat the computer on the advanced level. Then on Friday we received a package from my parents which contained pictures of my sisters for our fridge, two cds, a copy of Vegetarian Times, nutritional yeast for our popcorn, and a poster to hang on our very bare walls. And yesterday evening the living room furniture our landlady bought for our apartment was delivered. We now have a very cozy love seat and two big chairs for all of our book reading. Having all these new things to entertain us has been a bit overwhelming!
-Kaelyn

Happy Birthday!

2005_09_17 Hellshire Beach Cleanup 019
Originally uploaded by Shane and Kaelyn.

In honor of my father's birthday I am dedicating this post to him. I have constructed a list of the Top 7 Things he would like about Jamaica. It is a Top 7 list rather than a Top 10 because that is the way they do it every morning on Irie FM.

Top 7 Things My Dad Would Like About Jamaica

7. Devon Stout Ice Cream

6. The Peace Corps Office in the former location of Island Records

5. Chicken Foot Soup and Mannish Water

4. Bob Marley Museum

3. Irie FM Radio Station

2. Dragon Stout and Red Stripe at its ultimate freshness

1. Hellshire Beach and its ample offerings of fresh fish


Hope you have an Irie Birthday!

-Kaelyn

Dinner: Pumpkin and Lentil Stew

This dinner was really good. I have to use pumpkin a lot this time of year because it and Calaloo are the cheapest vegetables. Pumpkin is only J$65/kilo at the supermarket, compared to tomatoes at J$250. The ingredients were garlic, ginger, green pepper, onion, carrots, pumkin, curry powder, Jamaican all-purpose spice, black pepper, lentils, and vegetables soup stock. I cooked it all for about 1 1/2 hours. Very tasty and served with some wheat crackers. It would have been great with biscuits, but that would have been a lot more work and I don't have a pan. Now we have dinner for tonight already prepared in the old Kelvinator.
-Shane

Movie Review: The Forty Year Old Virgin

We go to the movies on Tuesday night because it is buy one get one free ticket night. We had a rough day last Tuesday, so we went to Burger King before the movie and each got the Veggie Burger Combo with Diet Coke. Damn it was good. Then we had to see this movie because both of our moms recommended it. I don't know how often this happens, but probably not that much.

Kaelyn: **** (out of 5). This movie was laugh-out-loud, almost pee in your pants a little bit funny.

Shane: ***** (out of 5). The great thing about this movie was the balance of gross sexual humor and nerdy humor, with the struggle for humans to love each other and share their lives (including their sexuality) with each other.

You should definitely go out and see it.

Laundry Adventures

Usually we don't use our blog to "air our dirty laundry" but I think this story of our adventures in doing laundry needs to be shared. It all started Monday night when following our usually laundry pattern we sorted and separated our clothes, picking out the brights because it was their turn in the rotation. We then put the laundry bucket in the shower, added the powder soap and "showered our laundry" since the water only comes out the shower head for some reason. Then we left our clothes to soak in the soapy water overnight. We awoke Tuesday morning and followed the usual routine of scubbing and ringing, soaking in rinse water and ringing, and finally rinsing in the wash sink and giving it a final ringing out. Then we hung them to dry on our back balcony. We went to work as usual on Tuesday morning and by afternoon it had started raining. It rained most of Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and was even starting to rain again when we reached home Wednesday evening. All this time our laundry had been hanging on our back balcony just hoping for the sun to come out and dry it. After checking the week's forecast and realizing thunderstorms were predicted for the whole island for the next 7 days we realized we were going to have to take a different course of action. We consulted with a few of our co-workers on what they do and set to work Wednesday evening. We snatched the clothes of the line as soon as we got home and returned them to the laundry bucket in the shower. Then we soaked them in water with fabric softener added so that we could rid them of the "raw" smell caused by the rain. (Fabric softener is our wonderful new discovery that we are going to start using every time we do laundry because even without the rain our clothes still smell a bit funny.) We gave them a good ringing out in the bathtub and then we tried ironing them dry. Theoretically this would work but we soon realized after spending 2 hours on 5 pairs of shorts that it would also take forever. So on to Plan 2. We strung up two laundry lines inside our house. If we had a hammer and some nails this would have been much easier but we just had to make do with what we had (door frames and curtain rods). We hung all the laundry back up on the indoor lines, opened all the windows and put a fan on them. When we awoke this morning everything was pretty dry except for the socks. So we went back to the ironing technique to try and get the socks closer to dry. We decided just to be cautious we would leave everything up on the lines inside with the windows open while we went to work today too. Hopefully, by the time we get home tonight they will be ready to put away. Then we can start the next load because this adventure has created quite a backlog. Hopefully this time it won't take 3 whole days!
-Kaelyn