One Year on St Lucia!

This past Saturday marked my one year being here in St Lucia. It is unbelievable that a whole year has pasted already. I am just happy to say I am still here, there have been quite a few volunteers who have left early. We all felt that was something to celebrate. Our festivities started on Friday. We, me and my volunteer group who arrived with me, went to the airport to pick up the 34 new volunteers!! The 87^th group to come to the Eastern Caribbean. As veterans, we were so excited to greet them and nervous about saying something wrong or not being able to answer their questions. They looked a bit lost, tired and anxious, I am sure our group looked the same. We helped them with luggage and even got to ride on the buses with them to the abbey we stayed in for our first weekend. There were questions on weather, things to do, housing, the language, etc. There is also a bad drought right now so they are not seeing the best side of St Lucia. But I can feel the excitement and eagerness to get started for this group. I wish them luck with training! They will need it. They will see us later, we are all part of the training this summer, helping co-facilitate sessions. Most of mine are in August. I am helping teach best practices with literacy, participating in a volunteer panel about the work environment and facilitating a session a budgeting and how to best use your volunteer monthly allowance.

After picking up EC87, we stopped in Dennery and got some chicken and fries and relaxed as we talked about the past year. Our highs and lows, favorite moments, funny moments. We played our favorite game – not sure on the name but it’s like the telephone game but with pictures and sentences. Everyone has enough pieces of paper for each player and on the top paper, you start by writing a random sentence. It can be anything. Then, you pass your stack to the next person. They look at the sentence and then move what you wrote to the bottom and draw their depiction of the sentence you wrote. Then they pass the stack with their picture on top, and that person writes a sentence describing the picture you drew. You repeat the process until your original sentence gets back to you. It is hilarious seeing how your sentence evolves. After several thrilling rounds, we all packed up and made our way to Vieux Fort. There was a soca (local music – check it out if you have never heard it) concert where local singers were performing. It was free which was great. It was sponsored by Piton, the local beer, so it felt a lot like SummerFest in Wisconsin. Lots of drinking and good music. I had a fun time being the designated friend. We were out pretty late but it was nice to go out and celebrate our one year mark.

After trying to recover so much lost sleep, the next day I was given the challenge of decorating two cakes for a First Communion on Sunday. Fondant and everything. 6 hours later, I finished. I hand cut a dove on one cake and I made little fondant flowers on the other. I forgot how fun it is and decorating cakes is a big deal here. They take it very seriously. I was offered a job to be a private cake decorator, at least I have a back-up job…

  

I was looking out my front window yesterday and to my excitement, I saw that the tree in front of my house is a starfruit tree!! How awesome is that! There are so many growing, I hope people don’t pick them.  They call starfruit by another name here: five finger. It’s delicious and despite popular belief, are only dangerous to eat if you have kidney problems. Looks like I will be living on starfruit for a while. 🙂

Lastly, I wanted to include a finished picture of our school library. Over 500 books checked out since it opened 6 weeks ago. The students are showing a great improvement in their excitement to read. Students that I have never seen read before are coming to check out books. I could not be happier. Also here is a picture of me with my students, mostly first graders.