Heya readers!
A bit of a rant to kick this off.....so the Ocean Conservancy has been sponsoring the international beach clean-up and St Vincent was supposed to have a nation wide effort all over the island 2 weekends ago. Due to rain storms, many of the St Vincent locations got rescheduled for this past weekend. Nobody officially canceled our site clean-up, so I spent some time by myself picking up the trash. So the local environmental group chose (and very supportively) to relaunch our clean-up efforts for this past Sunday 9am. There was supposed to be a decent sized group, a beach cook, music, and generally good time. What happened? I sat on the beach for an hour by myself wondering what happened to the enthusiasm and commitment I had heard only 3-4 days prior. Just today I found out that the person responsible for the food wasn't able to fulfill that portion for whatever reason. That single factor got the others to decide they didn't want to do it without the food. It was only expected to be a couple hours of work!
--There is a Vincy dialect saying, "All skin teeth, nar lauf". Some of you might understand it's meaning--just because you smile doesn't mean that you are also happy. That's what I did when I was told why nobody showed. Now I was pre-warned by one of our training instructors that most Vincy's are motivated by their stomachs; be sure to have food at anything we do. I now see just how right he was. This is just one aspect of culture. I'm not looking to change it or fight it......just something to live and learn by while I'm here. Better to realize it sooner with an outside project than one that I put lots of time into.
Today I went on a Heritage Tour with a select group of students and hosted by the Ministry of Youth--as part of the greater effort to kick off Youth Month here. We went to several places including the Vermont Nature Tour info area, the Wallabou plant propagation center where a large varieties of pre-sprouted plants can be bought by farmers at subsidized gov't prices, the Layou Petroglyph site (yeah, rock carvings have been found here and are still being studied), and a place called Dark View Falls. This last place is my new favorite site. It is on the far Northern side not too far from a place called Richmond. Here, there is a a waterfall called Dark View Falls due to the canopys that shade the place and darken the lighting. All around the falls and river is feeds are protected bamboo groves. This place is so quite and tranquil. The bamboo groves reminded me of my time in Japan and I really enjoyed the Kyoto bamboo forest as well. This place is a bit far for the tourist thing, but I highly recommend it.
Saturday, I went to a place called Richmond Beach. That beach isn't super special on my list of places (although a nearby rock outcropping is), but I took a pic that I'm really happy with of the incoming waves on the sand. It is currently my desktop image. If you like it too, feel free to copy it from the site below. I hope that the size and quality were preserved for you.
Here's a link for a few general pics--trying out Google's picasa web. For a free 1GB of space, why not.
http://picasaweb.google.com/friendsofshawn/MyAdventures#
Stay well and happy,
ciao tutti,
~your wannabe jedi
~Shawn
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