Jamaica / Antigua / and...

So after the two weeks in Jamaica - which still leaves such a sweet feeling - I spent three in Antigua. And I mean Antigua - I didn't leave once except to go to a few pueblas in the surrounding area. I spent a lot of time in my sweet homestay room, with its open, grated window looking out onto orange trees and the volcano in the distance.........I read about 7 novels, each of them rather amazing (and found by my finger-walking method on the used-book shelves.) One about a hurricane in Jamaica that destroyed the family's home. One about two boys living in the "projects" in Chicago (which I once did in L.A. during my first marriage.) Each one always gives me something.........tiny stepping stones on my path.

I checked out my original project "destination" - the chance to volunteer that started me on this whole trip. And was told, "Thank you very much," they already had all the long-term volunteers they needed!

I was shocked, but did as was suggested and talked to the other volunteer coordinator about working in Guatemala City instead of Antigua. I was game for going to counsel some kids who were having problems, and give some ideas to staff, and for working in the brand, new BEAUTIFUL toddler center (tho the coordinator didn't seem to know why one would want to focus on children that young) until I went with the group on the chicken bus to G.C. to take the tour. An hour bus ride each way, each day.........even three days a week is just too much time out of the week for me, after nearly twenty years of one-hour commutes each way to work.

So I put that out of my mind.
Then, on a fluke, I looked up the website for CommonHope and decided to take their tour. Gorgeous new buildings in traditional style, just outside of Antigua; a parenting program, a counseling clinic, and a school for kids who aren't making it in public school, and a social worker who goes up into the pueblos nearby. I arranged to go with her on her rounds, 2 days.....into the corrugated aluminum shacks people around there have to call "Home," into some new concrete block or prefab concrete small buildings which the project has built for some families who have put in enough work hours. Communities on the sides of the volcanoes. BEAUTIFUL setting for some impoverished living, and sweet faces and sweet smiles, even from the kids behind the corrugated aluminum door to their concrete block shack in an alley. While the worker talked to the older boy in her excellent Spanish (the mom was at her 12-hr day job in a factory in town), I played tic-tac-toe in the dirt with the younger ones.
I was hooked. So I talked to them about long-term volunteering, and it looks as though we can work out a plan to contribute in all those areas: parenting, home visiting and classroom behavior.
Wonderful.

So I started looking for apartments. Amazing what you can find, tho everything very expensive (relatively) in Antigua, in part because of the numbers of Americans and Europeans who come there to adopt babies and pay a lot to stay comfortably for a few weeks. And because of gringos like me. I tried to keep the price down by going for the apts at $350......one sweet one in the back of a hotel, but not private enough for me; two were arranged as two separate rooms side by side on rather private balconies; one was a huge room in a colonial house with a fireplace and one lovely window out into the garden, but a kitchen shared with the grande dame of the place. That was $400. And then a small house in one of the nearby pueblos with 3 tiny upstairs rooms and a living room with a little fireplace and a sweet tiny kitchen downstairs, set with 3 other identical houses behind a tall wall (like all Antiguan homes) with a plaza next door where kids play "papi futbol" (a fast, cut-down version of soccer played on concrete) and a big church, whose bells ring out strong at noon on Sunday. I was on my way to put down my deposit for that house when my Spanish teacher (who walks around w/ me to make sure I say things right and understand what's being offered) called my attention to an ad on a door. We checked it out, saw the (incredibly beautiful) house, right next door to my favorite church with a big grassy area where I'd been to sit several times in the last few weeks, and by morning I had plunked down SIX hundred American dollars to secure the place.
And left the next day, AMAZED that I had set my plans in concrete without even intending to!
Originally I thought I'd put $350 down for the little house, come home, and think about Jamaica and Antigua, the different projects and the different possibilities, and if I chose something else, a lost $350 wouldn't kill me. But $600???
So........with a lot of regret, I have accepted that I am not going back to Jamaica.......now..........that I will start volunteering with Common Hope, and live in that beautiful house (fortunately not in a very touristy section of town, and close to the bus for C. H.) and see where things lead from there. I know I will never be satisfied just working inside a clinic, however important the work is. I have to get outside. If the in-home work and maybe parenting classes in the field develop for C. H., that would be pretty satisfying. If I find a little house to live in, safely, in one of the pueblos, that would be good. I think maybe they have other projects up in the hills, too. 

I still want to go see Livingston (especially after making a little connection with the Jovenes Garifuna group who came to a restaurant/bar in Antigua one weekend to play) and see if it's true that there are no projects for the street children there.
And in the meantime I have an extra room for friends and family to come visit me, and enough privacy to dance and play music and holler in my living room.
Bastante. (Enough.)

 

The photos above are from a parade I happened across near the Central Park, and a photo of my living room (not QUITE as grande as it looks. There's also lots of tile that I love and a tiny garden.)

Jamaica, Jamaica!

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Hagley Gap, Jamaica, to learn that I would be in charge of a squirrelly group of 3-5 years olds for a 4-hr-day/5-day week "Fun Camp" for my 2 weeks volunteering there. I had 2 young Jamaican helpers for my group, both of whom (when they showed up) exercised the usual local discipline methods of yank, yell, scold, shame and hit. Grant you, the kids are so wild - having learned no SELF discipine - that I COULD NOT keep them paying attention, staying in the group and learning WITHOUT these young helpers, whatever their methods, but the biggest challenge, beside trying to understand the VERY thick local patois, was getting other ideas of discipline across to my helpers and to the few parents who also come to help (mostly do their children's work for them.) But at the end of the two weeks, the helpers were doing more encouraging, my group actually managed to behave well one session WITHOUT the helpers' presence, and the kids learned the greeting song I learned at Head Start "...stand up tall and we'll clap for you," (an apparent anomaly as usually individual attention means ridicule or punishment.) I also learned some wonderful songs w/ motion from them, and have a fantasy of turning one into a children's book, complete w/ photos of the area and the kids, called "She looks like a sugar in a plum." The kids are so eager to learn and avidly look at every book I hand out. Also so eager for attention and cuddles - MOST kids up to 7 or 8 suck their thumbs routinely. What they DO have here is a whole mountain community which is close-knit and completely safe, and the beautiful river, where everyone has swum, washed clothes, bathed and gotten their drinking water since a hurricane wiped out the water system 2 years ago. Also one of the most beautiful environments (if you ignore the trash here and there) I have ever seen - with bananas, plantains, guavas, pineapples, coconuts, mangos and peaches growing wild - a real boon in this area of 75% unemployment. The people who DO work (visibly) work incredibly hard - farming on hillsides, mixing concrete by hand, and of course everywhere broken-down vehicles being worked on. The project (Bluemountainproject.org) is wonderful. Minor glitches, as with any all-volunteer programs, but the manager (a 30 y o. American woman w/ a BA in Community Development, who has visited here 12 years and lived here 3) has produced this yearly summer camp, a year-round clinic w/ a reg. nurse, and visiting dentists to come, will be getting Engineers without Borders to replace the bridge on the main road to town, and is getting a helicopter donated to bring in supplies when the road is washed out (and it's terrible in the best conditions) and so someone could be taken to the hospital in Kingston if needed.
There's Dance Hall music and lots of dancing in the square in front of a few raggedy stores at the top of the hill on Fri & St nites, which includes many of the older kids, and one afternoon we had a great impromptu drumming session w/ several of the young men on the tables, pots and pans of the community center - which included one of my 5 yo boys, who will be a great drummer, and of course this very happy person. But in general I never walked (climbed hills) so much or worked so hard in my life. No bad bugs or snakes, and I'm not bothered by the mosquitoes at all, tho some are - and the crickets or cicadas sing and buzz at nite, and there are tiny fire flies! The temp is about 80 during the days w/ probaby 70% humidity - and cooler at nite, tho I understand it gets colder in Jan/Feb. Perfect for me...shorts and tanks all day. I think of living here for awhile - there's so much work to be done with parenting and discipline in the schools, and I could have some goats and chickens, but there'd be so little communication w/ my family except by cellphone and not really a place to visit, especially for my gay son, as Jamaica is known as the homophobic capital of the world (also the murder capital) and two gay rights workers were just brutally murdered recently. But I am strongly drawn and there is possibly a job opening as "Ed. Director."
LOTS of frustration due to cultural issues, mostly time-concept, things happening when they were supposed to (or at all), and the incessant discipline issues. But I've lost another 5# due to the physicality and am brown as a berry (which is a meaningful concept due to the coffee-growing here.)
On my last day I was told I could give a parenting talk at the local 7th Day Adv. church and went at 1:45 to be told to come back at 3:30-4....so I used the time to walk upupupup (another 1500' elev)(the lower community at about 4500') to a whole community area I was previously unaware of.......a little more primative or ghetto-like....a little scarey to just set out walking without knowing anyone.......but I managed to get up to the first of the four preschools (called "basic school" here and funded by the govt) to see what things looked like there. If I returned to Hagley Gap, THAT is where I'd be working. (My fear of heights coming vitally into play here.) Then walked back down to wait more than an hour more for the "afternoon service" and then to give my parenting talk to what turned out mostly to be grandparents and young people....so I switched the talk to "care for the children in our midst." The response was really wonderful, the two pastors were very enlightened men who really care about their "flock" - wanted to know what to do about the single mothers, fatherless children, etc etc. I was very moved and I guess they were too. Really a wonderful experience; unforgettable. I will miss the children, especially.
And then in the morning I started off a 8 am on what turned out to be a 12 hour journey by car and cancelled fights, and 1/2 hr. between 2 flights in the dreadful Miami airport and eventually again by jitney to my homestay in Guatemala, in the midst of a cold rainstorm and to bed by 8:30.
And now the adjustment (very difficult) to Spanish, and this lovely town, and whatever it holds.