I screened a call from the PC the morning of July 31. It was 7am after all and I wanted to sleep more. There was a knock on the door a couple minutes after the phone stopped ringing so I popped out of bed and threw some clothes on expecting to see Eugene outside my place. No, it was just my kids, there to wake me up at 7am... I value my sleep greatly, so it took a lot of self control not to yell at them, I also didn't have the energy. I told them to come back later and I tried to go back to bed. Literally 10 minutes later there is movement outside my apartment. Are you kidding me... I stormed outside and kindly asked them to please come back in an hour or so because I need to eat breakfast and work on my own. In their defense, they were out there cleaning my veranda because the puppies pissed and shat all over it and there were flies everywhere. Zookie also informed me that there was a bad smell coming from the hole under our building and he thought one of the puppies died. Great way to start the day, no? After I ate breakfast and finished waking up, it was time to deal with the puppy situation. Sure enough, one of the puppies had died under our building in this opening where all 8 of them had been hiding out. The thing was decomposing already, good lord the smell was awful. We had to grab the 7 live ones out and toss them around the corner while I Macgyvered the dead one out. I almost ralphed all over the place, it was terrible. The only way to get rid of the sucker was to burn it like it was some viking hero. That sounds terrible, but it is necessary or else the smell of death spreads everywhere and maggots crawl all over the place and then other dogs try to eat it. So, I struggled to get a fire going in the mid day heat and after going back out in the afternoon I successfully had a blaze burning.
As if the puppy fiasco wasn't stressful and depressing enough, we all received a text in the afternoon informing us that we were in our "Standfast" phase of our Emergency Action Plan. There are 5 phases, Alert, Standfast, Consolidation, Evacuation, and All Clear. Standfast just means to remain at your site, continue work if possible, but have a bag ready to go in the event that we get a Consolidation alert and have to travel to our safe house. As we were expecting Hurricane Emily to move through the islands in the next 48 hours, I threw together things like my passports, flashlights, medicine, snacks, etc.. There wasn't any bad weather yet, so I went up to the fort for the last night of Soca music until Carnival starts. It might not have been raining, but it was freezing cold up there (relative to Caribbean heat). We get a lot of wind on the top of the hill here, but it was especially frigid that night.
In the morning, I woke up to start some laundry and I had a surprise greeting from Lorice. She is back in Grenada! I wasn't sure when to expect her because Liat is on strike and I didn't know if Hurricane Emily would complicate travel, but she is home. We decided we would catch up later since we were both in our "house" clothes. At noon, I was picked up by NaDMA to go work a booth at Rainbow City in Grenville. Rainbow City is a small festival (used to be big), in Grenville to celebrate Emancipation Day. At big events like these we set up a booth to hand out disaster preparedness information. Usually, we have a good time. However, about 30 minutes after we set up camp we received a call from our boss informing us that River Road had flooded due to rain and we needed to head back to town. We hastily packed up and threw the flashing light on top of the truck and sped off through the rain forest to head to town. River Road is the road that runs by the National Stadium to the sea and it floods quite often during storms, yet the people living there refuse to move. By the time we arrived on scene the flood had subsided into the sea, but the damage was still evident.
There isn't much that NaDMA can do in situations like these other than show our presence to the people. Unfortunately it is up to the Ministry of Works to rebuild and fix damaged communities. Stupes... I don't like sitting on the sidelines when there is help needed. Honestly, we could have stayed in Grenville at Rainbow City to work. We were supposed to be there until 9pm and now I was arriving at home at 4pm having accomplished not much for the day. To make me feel even more useless, when I went to hang my clothes to dry I discovered that the washer machine was broken with all my clothes sitting in a pool of water still. Side note--that was like 3 days ago and the clothes are still sitting in the pool of water, I haven't had time to take them out haha. On the plus side, Lorice had the internet back up and running so I could check emails and watch True Blood, yaayyy.
The next morning, Lorice greeted me at the door--which typically consists of her knocking and me running around the apartment looking for pants to put on--with an electric bill and a request for rent money. Ew, ew, ew, ew. Despite being out of the country for 6 days and Victoria for one week, my electric bill was $4 higher than June's. Rubbish!! First task for the day at NaDMA was to ride with Sean to Grenville to pick up the tables and chairs we left at Rainbow City, because that's my role at the office, right? I'm a PCV doing office work and manual labor, the dream. But, whatevs, I like going for rides around the island and those tables and chairs weren't going to find their own way back. A little background on Sean, our driver, he has been a driver for 10 years or so, and he may be related to Mario Andretti. The guy drives like a bat out of hell, but not in a bad way, he's a pro, but he's crazy. I'm used to it now, especially after having braved the roads in Kenya, but I'm sure you simpletons but poop your pants. To make our drive even more fun, we raced this other truck from NaWaSA (National Water and Sanitation), good fun. It was also on this ride that Sean introduced me to a new pick up line. We passed by a lady on the road and Sean said "Gyal dat thing sit down nice!" In reference to her humpty rumpty, of course. This reminded me of a line Mr. Jones mentioned the other day that I found hilarious. He said that sometimes when he was talking with a girl he will start walking in the opposite direction or into a wall and say "Gyal you confusing me wit yo beauty!" Bahahaha. Some background on Grenada, Men hand out lines like these about 100 times a day, it's part of the culture and they mean them as compliments. In fact, I've heard some men say it is rude to not say things like that to good looking women. Sometimes it seems like the women enjoy, other times the throw up the middle finger. It's sad really. New development in the story, Sean just walked into our office and was saying how he has to go with Mr. Peters to a funeral later today, he said that he wants to go get a suit first so he can look good for the ladies there. Oh lawd. What is this, Wedding Crashers?
To end on a philosophical note, I have some lines here that I stumbled upon this week and have helped me look at my work here in a better light. The first is a quote about failure and how important it is to own your failures and adapt.
"Of course it's a failure, but how good a failure is it?" Cornel West
The second is more of a credo that was originally used in a speech about Feminism, but I think it can apply to daily life and how to conduct yourself or be a better person.
"Embrace the paradox. Act in the face of overwhelm. Love people well." Courtney Martin
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