A couple days in

I've been here for a couple days now and things are going great.
My first night here my host family walked me through the village and introduced me to some of her friends. We sat on the porch of the house and ate fruit (star apple and sugar apple) while watching kids play football (soccer, right?) in the street.
Their "accents" here are quite strong, and I often have trouble understanding them. They call the way they talk "dialect" which is a type of broken English. Sometimes someone will ask me if I knew what they just said, after I pretended to understand, so I tell them I have no clue. Thankfully they are kind enough to repeat it for me much slower, and not be offended that I didn't understand.

Behind the village of Saddlers is the beautiful Mt. Liamuiga, which is usually covered by clouds toward the top, and in front of the village is the Atlantic ocean. It's a small village in a beautiful location.

Today I shadowed a community member in Saddlers. I normally would have shadowed someone in the school where I'll be working, but the schools aren't open yet, so I went to the local health center down the street. They didn't know I was coming so it was slightly awkward. They gave me a tour of the center then invited me to watch them for a bit. It was uncomfortable watching them because in the U.S. we like our privacy- especially about health- very much. After the first patents left (today was the montly childrens clinic) I asked if I could help them out in any way. There was nothing I could do, but I was told I could socialize with the people in the waiting room. They learned of my work in a behavior disorders school, so they introduced me to a boy with behavior issues. I stayed around for about an hour more, then headed back home.

Tomorrow we have another day of training. I'm beginning to feel comfortable with the busses here and feel that I could get around on my own quite easily. All of the busses are privately owned, and are more like 15 passenger vans than the busses we know. Each bus also has a name like "Mr. X" or "Traitors", and goes to a specific community. Because the main road around the island is just one big circle, it's easy to find out which busses go where. On Tuesday when I got on the bus, I was wearing business casual clothing and had a backpack on. When I got on the bus a man in front of me told me that I should have a briefcase instead of a backpack. I tried to talk to him about it, but my host mom told me that I shouldn't. We'll see if it happens again later on.

Tropical storm Erika passed over us last night. We had been kept updated by the PC offices, and my host family told me to shut all the windows last night. Surprisingly, it was cooler in the room with the windows closed than open. The storm didn't come until after 5 or 6am. It wasn't a big storm, but it did rain hard and the wind blew a lot. My first "hurricane" experience wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be.

And now for some pictures:

our plane to St. kitts
Waiting to board the plane.


The ocean near our training center in Basseterre

The new secondary school in Saddlers. It's in a beautiful location by the mountain: