Life is an Adventure: St. Vincent, snorkeling, and a purpose driven life.

Sorry to keep you waiting, but I had a nice little adventure planned for this past Friday and I wanted to include it in my next blog. But before we get to the stories I'll just give you a little update on how I am faring down here.

Life is wonderful in Grenada, per usual. We haven't really been affected by any of the hurricanes mainly because we are further south from where they usually pass through the Caribbean. However, the hurricane season is far from over (lasts until November-ish) and typically picks up in September. We do get plenty of rain, though, which is a nice compliment to incredibly hot days without AC. I am plenty healthy and I have a lot of food. We all had a small scare this past week because the bank had a mishap in depositing our monthly stipend into our account so everyone was broke. They said the money was supposed to be in by today so hopefully it is payday. Work is going very well, they have been keeping me busy. Currently, I am still working to finish a database for the National Welfare and Voluntary Services Committee. The database is a list of all the disabled, elderly, and vulnerable persons in Grenada, Carriacou and Petit Martinique including their names, location, closest shelter, medical history, contact info, and suggested counselor. It is a good bit of work and requires contacting a number of people to get the information, but it doesn't take me too long to input the information on my computer. Honestly, I could have it done in a couple of hours, but we don't meet again until Thursday so I am taking my time. My boss is going to Barbados tomorrow and when he gets back we are supposed to have a meeting to go over my project proposal and my work plan here. Hopefully, after that meeting I will have some better direction as to my main purpose here. As of right now, my purpose is compiling information for the Welfare Committee and last week I updated / became administrator of the NaDMA Facebook group, yay... That's something I can do anywhere in the world that has internet connection, I'm looking for something more than that. However, I had a nice epiphany a few weeks ago while I was at work. I had a little free time in the morning so I had decided to re-read the Peace Corps' Goals and see how I was doing. Here are the 4 Goals we have to guide our projects, some apply only to certain programs like Goals 2 &3.

Goal 1: Youth will gain more opportunities for success in their personal and professional lives and take a proactive role in addressing community issues.

Goal 2: NGOs, CBOs and local government departments will utilize effective planning, management and implementation practices to strengthen their capacity to serve disadvantaged communities.

Goal 3: Entrepreneurs will gain increased knowledge and skills in basic business and management practices to create or improve small businesses.

Goal 4: Young people and vulnerable groups will reduce their risk of HIV infection by practicing safer sexual behaviors.

I read through the rest of the project plan and objectives for the Peace Corps and stumbled upon some reassurance. One section stated "[...] In addition to these primary assignments all volunteers will be encouraged to engage in or support community HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in their communities as well as disaster preparedness" After reading that line a few times I felt really good about my past 7 months here. I was afraid I wasn't meeting our standards because I wasn't engaged in any life skills or HIV awareness programs. But I was doing disaster preparedness, and it makes more sense to me now. We are here to respond to "the expressed needs of the community". So often I put my Peace Corps or American blinders on and look for where I can give help first and see results quick whether it's teaching someone to read, volunteer, express their needs. All of that is important to teach, but we are here to listen to the needs of the community and the nation and let that guide our work. Illiteracy and poverty are high, we will work to fix that, or other volunteers will, but right now Grenada has an expressed need to be disaster prepared and that's my role.

Luckily, school starts up on September 6th and I will hopefully be helping out there two days a week this year. I'm really excited to get back to the school and see the kids again. I ran into a group of them outside the supermarket a couple weeks back and completely blanked on who they were. It was strange, I knew that I knew the group of kids, but I couldn't remember where from. At first I thought they were from Kenya which made me even more confused as to how they got to my community. Then, they ran up to me yelling "Mr.Tayla! Mr. Tayla!" I immediately remembered their smiling faces. I can't wait to get back to St. Joseph's RC School!

My apartment is still intact, but I cannot get rid of the mold the grows here and there. Especially on my clothes, it is incredibly frustrating. A lot of the time you cannot see the mold on the clothes, but you can smell it when you put it on. I can't stand it. I'm guessing it is from the hot and humid air here, but I've cleaned all the places it seems to be growing, I've washed the mold-smelling clothes plenty of times but a week or so later they smell of it again. I don't know what to do, I don't know if there is anything I can do. Oh well.

Other things I've done since Carnival: We had a full-scale tsunami drill up in Victoria on Aug. 14-15. I was at the National Emergency Operations Center (our office) during the drill so it was pretty boring for me. Apparently, the drill went really well and they had people pretending to be dead or injured and fake debris in the streets, but I didn't get to witness that. I went to Fish Friday in Gouyave with some a couple of volunteers to eat some good food and two soca artists (Terror Kid and Mr. Killah) were performing. Ran some errands in town, most important of which was mailing a letter to Taylor Rigot to start our epic pen-pal journey. Played in a couple of football games, it's getting hard for me when I have to miss practice and then I'm expected to run around all game in the blazing heat. I had to ask to be taken out of the last game because I was getting heat exhaustion which is no good. If you haven't had that before its when you've been exposed to the heat/sun too much and you start to get so overheated that you feel cold and dizzy. If you ignore it then you end up with heat stroke which kills a number of athletes each summer, but I know better. I thumbed through the list of grad schools that have fellowships with the Peace Corps and I made a list of schools/programs I was interested in. I have no idea what I am going to do when I get back, I might not even go to grad school, but it was fun to make a list envision where my life could go for the first two years after I return. Grad schools of note were the University of Alaska, Fairbanks where I could intern with the US Fish and Wildlife Services (awesomer), a handful of universities out west, Kennesaw State which would put me back in Atlanta, and there is a program at USC which would put me near the majority of y'all but the program is on hold right now (lame). Again, I just wrote down the grad schools as ideas, I still have two years here and I also have to take the GRE so don't get your panties in a wad about me going off to Alaska, yet...

This past week was pretty entertaining, we had some of our volunteer friends from St. Vincent come to visit us. We also had our Safety and Security Officer from St. Lucia, who is super cool, in Grenada to do site visits to the EC83 homes to make sure we are all safe and stuff. The first night that the STV volunteers came we had a pot-luck dinner at Katie's place. The food was delicious and our SS officer came to hang out with us. The next day I had to work--most of the volunteers work at schools as their primary sites so they get a lot of downtime during the summer. I got to hang out with the STV volunteers the next night when we went into town for a few drinks and rounds of pool. It was really nice to see them and hear how they are doing, where they are working, how they've adjusted, and the differences/similarities between Grenada and St. Vincent. The STV volunteers took the boat back to their homes on Friday morning while some of us got ready to head into town for a little fun. Jon and Stephanie had planned a catamaran cruise for us to enjoy because they were expecting a friend to visit them during the week--Hurricane Irene ruined those plans--so we enjoyed the day out at sea. The cruise took us up the western side of the island for about 45 minutes to a snorkel site at Flamingo Bay which is a protected coral reef. After the guide took us around in the water for about an hour we played in the water near the boat, jumping off and goofing around on the water trampoline (not as fun as it sounds). Next, we sailed back down around the corner to another diver site called the Underwater Sculpture Park. It is exactly as it sounds and it's the only one in the world, I think our guide said they are building one at Cancun right now. There are about 40 or so different sculptures and statues scattered about the bottom of the sea in this little bay. Some of them are close enough to dive down to by just holding your breath--maybe 20-30 ft or so--and some you need scuba gear to get a better look at. The statues were really cool and I wish we had more time to explore them because we only got to see a handful of them. Some of the statues we did see were: mermaids, naked ladies, a guy with a typewriter at a desk, a guy on a bike, and my favorite the circle of people holding hands. Hopefully I can get scuba certified sometime in my two years here (it is really expensive) and visit that site again as well as the others that Grenada has to offer. After we sailed back into port we all went into town to grab dinner together. Then, because we are all broke, we went home...

Here are a few pictures of the past couple weeks: