It occurred to me this weekend that they are one and the same. There are so many examples every where you look of Caribbean people holding their own people back, disrespecting and degrading others, taking advantage of one another, condemning others, and on and on... And they're all guilty of putting up with so very much crap.

I sat in the office today listening to one of the instructors complain about another one, about how she doesn't show up for class, about how her students are complaining, and how she has another business and spends her time on that when she should be taking care of things at the school, and how she doesn't want to do any work, but still collect her paycheck. And this instructor commented to me about how she doesn't understand how people can be like that. And I responded that I didn't understand how she gets away with it. Then she said, well, that's how it is here. That is so common it's endemic. People complain and complain, but no one ever does anything to correct the situation.

I have stood for hours in line to pay my utility bill (well, not any more since I discovered that nothing happens if you pay your bill late), while 5 or 6 clerks sat behind their counter (doing Lord knows what) ignoring the long line of people, and only 1 or 2 grudgingly consented to attend to the customers. You can bet everyone in line was complaining up a storm to the rest of us poor fools standing alongside of them, but not one said a word to the clerks or asked to speak with the manager.

This weekend while visiting St. Vincent I had the opportunity to ride their public bus system. It is very similar to Antigua's, with most of the buses being 14 passenger (plus the driver) vans - they consist of a back seat that sits 3 adults, 3 more rows with a fixed seat for 2 and a fold down seat in the aisle, and the passenger and console seats next to the driver. We had 20 people in one van on a winding mountain road above steep cliffs, at high speeds, for about a 45-minute ride. This is the type of ride that when you reach your destination, the old women on the bus exclaim, "Thank you Jesus!" I don't know if Antigua has a more powerful Transport Board, or if the drivers here just haven't figured out that they can get away with it, but we generally only put 3 adults in seats designed for 3 adults (kids are squishable and stackable and don't figure in the equation). When I approached the bus at the bus station, I looked in and saw that the back seat was full and so attempted to fold down the aisle seat in the row ahead of it, but the driver insisted that I go in the back. I looked again, shook my head and said, "Four? No." He said, "Yes." Someone else got in the back and then I had to squeeze along with 3 others in the next row. The hip width of 4 adults side-by-side is greater than the width of the van. I could not sit fully back against the seat and had to turn sideways to wedge in. It was truly uncomfortable. The friends we were visiting told us later that it's always 4 in every row. Why do they put up with this? People are literally sitting on top of one another. Why don't they just start refusing to squeeze into these degrading positions? Not to mention that the weight of all those people far exceeds the load-bearing capacity of the vehicle and tires, and on those roads…. It was a frightening experience.

Prior to the election last year, government workers were routinely being paid late… not a few days, we're talking months would go by with no paycheck. Children didn't have enough money for bus fare to get to school because their parents hadn't been paid in months. What was really amazing was that people kept going to work! Everyday they would get up and go into their jobs and come home at the end of the day, and everyday it was the same story, no money. Eventually the postal workers went on strike for a few days, but that was the only tangible dissent that I heard of. The government was notoriously corrupt and there was no money for the basic infrastructure of the country. (To their defense though, Antiguan's did eventually vote the ruling party out of office.) The roads are terrible, the sidewalks in town are broken and dangerous, trash is everywhere, and town (meaning St. John's - where the banks and businesses are and the cruise ships dock) reeks from sewer smell. But people have lived with it for so long that it's just status quo.

Gandhi wrote that you could never enslave the Indian people because they would die before they would be willing to do the work of slaves. People here don't even rise up against the injustices that they do to themselves.

Have just returned from a long weekend in St. Vincent, this time staying in the home of fellow PCVs Amber and Brian, a married couple who arrived at the same time that we did. George and I arrived Wednesday evening and very quickly discovered what we had suspected all along - that PCVs in Antigua are robbed of the village experience that Peace Corps so highly stresses. Antigua is basically an island of commuters - people get up in the morning and jump in their cars or hop on the bus and head off to work, then head back home at the end of the day. Except for a few snackettes, people don't work or even socialize in the same community that they live in. Many of the children travel to town where the best schools are rather than attend schools in the country, closer to home, and on weekends, many people even commute to church, bypassing several others on their way to attend the church that they've been going to for years. Although everyone knows their neighbors (someone once told me that he knew half the people on the island and the other half knew him), there really are no communities here that I know of where you can get the true "village" experience.

Not true on some of the more mountainous islands where the villages tend to be remote and secluded. Both Brian and Amber work in the village where they live and both work in the school system, so as Amber says, although she doesn't know all of the children, they all know her (I didn't specifically ask, but it's highly likely that there are no other blonde white women in their village). As we walked through the village after dinner on our way to a small bar there, they knew and spoke to just about everyone, and although it was dark and getting late, they had no problems with being out on foot at night. I was quite envious to see how well they had adapted to their life there and had been accepted into their community.

The following day George and I caught a bus into Kingstown, then hopped on a ferry to Bequia, the nearest of the Grenadine islands. There we checked into a modest guest house (kind of reminded me of a youth hostel), unpacked our bags and went in search of food and the local dive shop where we confirmed our reservations for diving the following morning. After that we took a walk down the coast to a nearby beach to relax and swim. Friday morning we loaded up our gear and walked the short distance to Dive Bequia's boat dock and headed out for a morning of scuba diving. Scuba diving in Bequia is strictly drift diving - the boat drops you off, you swim/float with the current under water, then the boat picks you up down current at the end of the dive. Although I have over 400 logged dives, I have never intentionally done a drift dive before, so this was somewhat of a treat for me. I had always felt a bit of trepidation about the whole idea, but it was really no big deal. Visibility for the first dive was only fair, but the water was warm (80°F) and there were lots of sponges and soft corals and other marine life to see. We moved to a new location with better visibility for the second dive and had the boat nearly to ourselves as we had dropped all but one of the other divers off at the dock between dives. After an enjoyable morning, we arrived onshore in time to shower, change, and catch the 2pm ferry back to St. Vincent.

Saturday, Amber, George, and I got up early (Brian had a prior commitment as an extra in the filming of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel!) to hike the Soufriere volcano on the north end of the island. We met Gary, a friend of Brian and Amber's and our guide for the hike, and 5 young boy scouts who would be our companions for the trip, and then hopped in the back of a flat bed truck that Gary had arranged to take us all to the trail head at the northern end of the leeward road. We began the trail on the beach, first crossing barefoot through the stone-filled streams that flowed down from the mountains, then walking along one of the black sand beaches that surround the island. Near the end of the beach we headed inland and started the ascent that would take us approximately 2½ hours until we reached the top. We had cloud or tree cover most of the way so the heat wasn't bad, but the humidity was quite high and we were all drenched in sweat. Not long after we started the climb I wondered why it had not occurred to me to train for this hike. We had been planning to hike the volcano ever since Brian mentioned it as a possibility in an email over a month ago. Well, I would pay for that mistake. We started at sea level and the rim of the volcano is almost 4000 feet high. On that day and the two days following, I would learn just how out of shape I really am.

Nearing the top, we began to lose the shelter of the lush forest that had lined the trail most of the way, and simultaneously lost our windbreak. The wind at the top was fierce - so much so that it was difficult to walk upright - and cold and I was dressed for heat. As we reached the summit, we were awestruck by the enormity and beauty of the crater as we watched the fog rolling in over the windward edge. Gary thought it was best to wait a bit before attempting the descent into the crater, so we stopped for lunch at the top. I was so cold I was having trouble functioning. I huddled in a tight ball with my back pack drawn close into my chest to try to maintain a little bit of body heat, but I couldn't stay like that for long. The crater was a long, steep way down, but I needed to get off of the rim just to get out of the wind, so when Amber started towards the trail that would take us there, I quickly followed.

The path down into the crater was via a long, shallow crevice in the steep inner wall of the volcano. Running through the crevice were several ropes in varying states of decay, tied to rusted stakes of dubious holding power. These were to be our lifelines. The walls of the crevice were lined alternately with sharp, jagged lava rock and fragile, crumbly dirt so that stepping on the latter often resulted in a loss of footing and a painful encounter with the former. It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time, but I wasn't cold anymore! Finally down at the bottom, we made our way over to an area where there was still steam rising up from the rocks (St. Vincent's volcano last erupted in 1979), where we each found a spot to relax. When the boys decided to hike the perimeter of the crater, the rest of us decided it was a good idea to get a head start back up to the rim. As it turned out, as I stepped up over the edge, the first boy was on my heels and stepped up right behind me!

The path back down the mountain was quicker, but harder on the knees and feet. The sun came out to warm our way and as the temperature began to rise, I was quite glad that it had remained hidden for the climb up. The truck was waiting to pick us up right where it had dropped us off earlier that morning, then whisked us away to nearby Dark View Falls. Thinking it was inappropriate to strip down to our underwear with young boys around, Amber and I limited ourselves to getting only our legs and feet wet, but George and the boys jumped right in for a dip in the pond below the waterfall. Tired and refreshed, we headed back down the road to Brian and Amber's house on the beach and our last evening on beautiful St. Vincent.

God’s love and abundance are like the air that we breathe – an essential part of life. We breathe the air in, it fills us, traveling to all extremities of the body, sustaining us, giving us life, then is transformed, converted in chemical makeup and released, not as waste but as life-sustenance for others to take in and absorb, then transform and release back out again. The air, our breath begins the cycle of life. God’s love fills us and nurtures us, giving us the strength and passion to continue living. God’s abundance provides for us, bringing to us the people and opportunities necessary to move us forward through each step along our path of life. Through God we are supported, never lacking, never alone. These gifts are ours to appreciate, to utilize but not use up, but rather to grow and mature. They are transformed in us, developing new facets and intricacies uniquely through the contributions of our soul. Then they are released, absorbed in and then let go so that they can touch others and fill them with God’s love and abundance as exemplified by us, changed and forever altered by having known us, danced with us, played with us.

The semester is coming to a close with my 2 college classes having their final exams next week. After that, I'm teaching one more class at the college in Intermediate Word Processing which starts the first week of May and goes for 7 weeks. My Ministry of Education teachers' class will finish at about the same time in mid-June. Then I'm done. That's it. No more classes. No more students. No more Peace Corps. I get to go home.

Our Close-of-Service conference will be held late May in (drat!) Antigua (the 5 of us here won't get to travel). There we'll wrap up and talk about our final few months and about life after Peace Corps. The official COS date for our group is August 31, however you can get permission to leave earlier for reasons such as your job being finished. I'm targeting July 15. I had considered requesting July 1st, but there is a regatta to Barbuda (the other half of Antigua & Barbuda) that weekend and I'm hoping to get on a boat. Either way, it won't be long now. I can't even begin to say how much I'm looking forward to going home.