This is the first post in a couple of months and a lot has happened. For one I’m in my own place, which at first disgusted me with its duct taped ceilings that provide a home for bats that like to run around at night and spiders the size of a fist scurrying around the walls. But after several lonely days and nights my house has become my refuge, my place to relax and escape the stares from the other villagers. My house is a place where I can think about what it is I am doing here and what I want to accomplish. Since mid October I have working as a tutor at Sandy Bay Primary School, I have been working to teach kids how to read. Like anything teaching is a craft that has to be learned and I am still in the infant stages of that process. Thankfully every day I gain a little more confidence and maybe when these two years are up I may actually consider myself a good teacher. Most of the kids that I teach think that they can’t read although they know all the sounds of the alphabet but when it’s time to but those sounds together to make words they hit a brick wall. I can see that the most challenging aspect of my assignment is figuring out a way to break through that wall, so far I haven’t figured it out yet.
The village that live in is very beautiful , it has about 2,000 people and it sits on in the northern winward part of the island. If you imagine that your left hand is a map of the island and you hold it up with your palm facing you my village is located at the tip of your ring finger. The capital is located in the middle of your palm at the bottom. The people in my village are very nice and friendly most of them greet everyone they see and most of them stare at me when I walk around, I think it’s going to be a while before the stares stop. While the stares are annoying the first lesson that I have learned here is that people are the same everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re an American or a Vincentian, people are people and when you boil it down most of them want the same things out of life. They want to be happy and they want to be able to take care of themselves and their families. While Americans have more resources to accomplish the basics in life some Vincentians are forced to do things that they may not want. In my previous post I spoke about the situation with the banana farming and how this region was being forced out of the market. Because of this many farmers have turned to ganja cultivation. From my observations I think marijuana is St. Vincent’s largest export, marijuana is everywhere on this island. I recently went to a concert and everyone was smoking marijuana (except for me of course) there was so much smoke in the air that you could see it even though it was dark outside. So I guess when I comes to marijuana and St. Vincent it’s like the American military and gays, don’t ask and don’t tell.
