In the last post, I was ending my training in Stony Hill. Now I get to tell you about Santa Cruz! Santa Cruz is in St. Elizabeth parish. The town is in a valley, and therefore rather HOT. yea. in all caps. I sweat when I walk from my room to my kitchen. The suns heat seeks you out. I live with a lovely older woman and we have a splendid time on the mornings I get up early enough ( 5:00am) to go walk with her around the neighborhood. She is one heckuva walker. The lady can move. I've been able to get a better idea of the residential areas with the hour walk. I walked with her when I came to Santa Cruz two weeks ago to get my feet wet. It was orientation of my site before the last week of training...which ended with me getting sworn in!
Now that I am a volunteer, this past weekend I did a little settling in. On Saturday I went to the market and supermarket for a few necessary things. I went with a fellow volunteer that lives 10 minutes away in another town, also in St. Bess. There are two different vendors, farmers and sellers. Clearly the better choice is to buy from the farmers, and after some looking around...I found farmers, and they were friendly and affordable. Two things I most certainly can deal with. I got some apples, oranges, cucumbers, and callaloo. Callaloo is like spinach, it's super healthy and delicious.
Then once we were satisfied with our purchase, we went to the supermarket to get other food and things for the house. As we were browsing the aisles in search of ramen (yep, i'm eating it daily), and other staples, a lady strolled up to us with a cart of toothpaste. She was wearing scrubs, and told us the benefits of sensitive toothpaste for sensitive teeth. I wanted to laugh. I've never seen anyone come to you with a product in the supermarket to sell you something...that you can buy in the supermarket. I don't know if she was being paid by the store, the toothpaste or both. And there was also another woman who was trying to sell white grape juice bottles, buy 3 get one free. So random!
After three hours of searching for household items and a weeks worth of groceries, I went home. Then on Sunday I went to church with my host mom. She goes to a Moravian Church. Moravian church is part of the Protestant view of Christianity. The service had hints of Catholic tradition, and so it wasn't too different from what I've been exposed to. However, like most church services it lasted over two hours. When we got back, I ate lunch and then passed out! I was asleep for most of the afternoon. And can I just tell you...it was awesome. That was the deepest relaxing, i-want-to-hibernate-until-fall, kind of sleep. I was just really tired.
Today, however, I woke up and did Insanity workout, ate a hearty breakfast and went to the SDC office. I work for the Social Development Commission, it is a government organization. There are offices in every parish and I will be working with the one in St. Bess. The day started a little slow. People were trickling into the office. As people came in, I got more things to do. By the end of the day, I'm responsible for planning two events... brainstorm some teamwork and communication games for an outreach day at a Boy's Home and to begin planning lessons for an Intro to Computer Skills class. Yay!
And that's it for now. :)
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