Even yesterday, the West Indies Cricket team won the World Twenty/20 Championships! Here's a picture from today's Gleaner ( http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20121008/sports/sports1.html the article for anyone who likes cricket.)
I was in Kingston yesterday and while I was walking down one of the roads, I hear loud male voices coming from a house on the opposite side of the street. Then I see about 50 yards ahead of me, on that other side two people screaming and jumping up and down running toward the male voices. The men who I heard came out and were yelling Windies Won!! We're Champions! Windies WON!!! AHHH!!! ( perhaps not exactly like that, but give or take yes.) By the looks of the photo, Windies were pretty stoked. I'd like to be part of that celebration. whoop whoop!
The end of September I participated in the PCJ Early Service Conference (ESC). This is held at the six month point of our service. It's a week long conference in which the PCV brings their counterpart/ project partner (interchangeable terms) and we engage in sessions for the betterment of our respective communities. Another part of ESC is to discuss our experiences at site with our sectors (mine being the Youth Sector) and having the support from staff and our fellow PCV's on what to look foward to.
The first three days was a project management workshop. Here is where we did organizational sessions and goals sessions, lots and lots of sessions. Then the project partners leave and the last two days are about us. In YAPII we talked about our challenges, successes, stabilizers...everything. Not seeing everyone together in months was a delight and then talking out our individual situations was therapeutic for me. Another aspect of ESC was our CASI ( Community and Sector Inventory). This is what we worked on for the beginning of our site integration. It's a paper and presentation given at ESC about the needs of the community, the current resources any and anything relevant to our stay here in Jamaica. I talked and showed pictures of my Santa Cruz life, while other PCV's had some amazing presentations. This too gave people a way to take in how similar and different our sites are. It was cool.
ESC was in Ocho Rios, and our sweet little hotel was at the beach front. The water is amazing!! I swam in it every morning before the day started. The water was cool and warm. I was told that something to do with the limestone, there's fresh water that mixes with the ocean water, especially near the coast. So the very top layer, as I would put my arm in for a stroke, I would get an ice cold chill before the warmth of the ocean.
The weekend after ESC I stayed with a PCV with some friends. It was a good way to ween me off of seeing everyone before heading solo back to my site. I learned to play Settlers of Catan! At first I was confused, but I enjoyed it. Here (above) are two other PCV's and I playing ( Photo by PCV Marie)
More to come, hopefully sooner, and in closer intervals... haha. :-)
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