Lights On, Lights Off

Lighting up can mean different things, depending on where you are and who you ask. Here is St Vincent and the Grenadines around this time of the year it means something special. Now is the time of the year during the pre-Christmas festivities of 9 mornings when the villages decorate an area of their village with holiday lights, make-shift decorations, and other bright and shiny objects.

Note--unlike back home where many people decorate the outside of individual homes, the vast majority of the people here decorate the central village area rather than individual homes.

In the early morning hours, people celebrate the part that is 9 mornings, but in the evenings the villages are light up with their holiday spirit. The people have more song and dance and some even stay up all night until after the next morning's festivities (typically between 4-7am). Things slow down a near complete stop here during the holidays, so I suppose that is how so people can afford the time to party as they do. Although I should say that many people still get up for jobs too....it isn't all fun and games.

The big stuff for 9 mornings happens in Kingstown and I haven't been a part of any of that yet. This is in part because I have my own difficulties getting up that early after taking part in the evening activities of my village. I have been quite active in helping with my community lighting up. We decorated last week a section of my village along a stretch of road next to a couple shops, an abandoned house, and an old police/agricultural station. We have a theme--expanding the joys of Christmas--but I don't think we represented it very well. Seems kinda hard to make that theme become a visual reality, but perhaps that my lack of artistic insight talking. The theme, along with other factors, was to compromise the basis for a village-to-village competition for the lighting up. The lighting up and judging will continue all the way to Christmas--so I don't know any of the competition result yet.

Our village has been sponsoring some evening sports, 5-ah-side football (soccer) and netball. After the games, there has been nightly on the street singing by village musicians and crowd-goers. A couple of the nights, I got to play "Santa". No I didn't dress the part, but I did have a bag of toys purchased by a local group to give kids after they went up to sing.

Some of the people in my village have been asking if the steel pan drums some of the kids and I have been cleaning will be ready to play for our evening activities. Well I got the drums finished and carried them up to our decorated area; I even collected some bamboo and made little stands for the drums to hang on. However, not only are the drums not yet in proper tune but we also haven't perfected making the sticks for the steel pan. We have been using sticks and rubber from a car tire tube. The kids were ecstatic and went next to crazy trying to play the steel pan. 7 drums among many kids doesn't go too far and some crowd control was needed. ^_^ It didnt last too long though, since 1) it wasn't really music but more like a cacophony and 2) one of the old village pan players took the sticks away and turned the drums over. He said they shouldn't play the until we make proper sticks, that they would only mash up the drums playing as they were. I'm sure the kids didn't like hearing, but just adds to the list of things to do.

Had an interesting experience with our lighting up...
Was trying to figure out Saturday night why we didn't have the lights on well after it got dark. Found out that although we were using electric current from the old police/agro station, we never got official permission to use it. The higher authorities found out and said that we were not allowed to use it. Somebody had negotiated permission to use it at the last minute to keep power until our juding (this past Friday). Seems this little fact slipped by all of us on the lighting up committee from one individual's dropping the ball. Lots of people were disappointed that there were no lighting up activities on a Saturday night. Therefore, after banana farming/shipment Sunday morning, I joined a couple guys to do some rewiring and redirected all of the decorations to pull current from a nearby shop...lights on to off to on again. ^_^

This little incident didn't impact our village too much and the festivities are continuing. However due to who it was that dropped the ball and how they handled it the situation, there is a growing conflict between myself and my attached organization. This is just fuel on that fire.

Either way, I'm glad everything is all bright again. ^_^
Here's some pics of putting together the lights. I wanted to have more pics from our activities, but I didn't have my camera on me at the time.






I know it's out of focus...most people here have not used a digital camera before..







I was collecting the bamboo to cut for the steel pan support



These didn't come out as clear as I had hoped, but you get the idea. ^_^
We still have lots of work to do on these drums.

stay happy and well,
ciao tutti
~your local wannabe jedi
~Shawn