My New Family and Job

I am beginning to grasp the meaning behind the slogan "The toughest job you'll ever love". Take all your creature comforts and every little tiny thing you take for granted back home, and flip it upside down. Good news is I'm alive and well, even after a few rough days. I have heard a few nightmare stories from other volunteers, so I feel lucky with my situation. I returned to Kingston on Saturday for a week of debriefing and more training.

My first two weeks with my new host family were bizarre, uncomfortable, amazing, inspiring, scary, but all in all a lot of fun! I arrived on a Friday evening after a 4 hour drive across the island to find my host mother waiting on the side of the road for me. After a big hug and a brief hello, I was taken to my new home where upon first sight almost had a panic attack. This place is TINY! There's five of us crammed in like sardines, but they are fabulous people. I live about 3 miles from Falmouth up in the hills, and along a dirt road neighborhood. Saturday it rained all day, so I played cards with my younger brother(16) and sister(11). We have two dogs, whom I named Foxy and Puppers, as guardians of the house. They bark at everything that moves after the sun goes down. After a month in country, I can now sleep through the rooster calls and dogs barking all night long. We have piped water most of the time, so bucket baths are fairly common. To my surprise we have a rudimentary mini washing machine that sort of works. The yard is filled with all sorts of fruit trees. We have breadfruit, sweet sop, mango, guinep, passion fruit, naisberry, and coconut. I gotta tell you, the mango here is fit for a king.

To my surprise, I am a regular working guy down here in Jamaica. I work 9 to 5 Monday through Friday at the local Health Department/Hostpital as a water quality and water sanitation advisor. The clinic is packed with people during the day, and I get a lot of strange looks from the Jamaican people. My co-workers are a great group of people, and they let me tag along on all their health inspections to the little shops, and even fancy resorts. I get to travel the entire parish every Monday taking water samples from communities, resort pools, and restaurants. One day my boss told me to go take a pool sample over yonder, so I walk over to the pool only to find out that I'm at a nudist resort. It's not nearly as cool as you might think if you know what I mean! My first project assigned to me is to build a home-made Chlorine drip tank for all 6 satellite parish health centers because they use untreated water at the moment. I'm excited to get to work!

Some of the highlights of my first two weeks at my site include a few beach days. I'm currently working on getting bronzed up! Life is tough here in Jamaica. Also, my co-workers invited me along to Kool Runnings Water Park in Negril last Thursday. There's a sweet closed tube ride that dumps you into a big "toilet bowl" and then you fall into a pool. I must have gotten flushed 30 times that day. Afterwards we went to the world famous Rick's Cafe for sunset and beers, and to watch people dive off the cliffs. Another day I had the unique opportunity to take a tour of a chicken farm. This farm had 13,000 chickens at half capacity. The owner tells me they are producing 900 dozen eggs/day. During the holidays he tells me at full capacity they are producing 2000 dozen eggs/day! So he is interested in getting more Jamaicans to eat eggs. I told him I would be willing to put on an egg demo at some of the local schools, teach the children about the health benefits of eggs, and all the different ways to prepare eggs. This is all very egg-citing stuff! The best night so far though was the night I was invited to to be a judge at the 2008 Miss Salt Marsh Pagent. I had to take this serious, as there were at least a few hundred Jamaicans hooting and hollering behind me! The girl I picked to win didn't win overall, but at least I didn't get mobbed afterwards for the wrong girl winning. I walked home that night in the dark, and got yelled at by Mom. I thought for a minute I was going to get grounded, or at least be forced to wash the dishes all week.

I will try and get some photos up as soon as I can. Miss you all. Peace and love!