The SUN finally came out today, that can only mean one thing – laundry day! We’ve had more than a week of southern California winter here lately – raining everyday, cold, roads flooding. It gets silly after awhile, running your laundry in and out, trying to keep it from getting rained on. Washing and drying my towels was a 3-day ordeal! The locals don’t bother with weather reports; they just watch the sky. I learned something while sailing recently. I was pointing to some black, ominous looking clouds offshore and Nicky said, “Oh that storm’s already passed, our weather comes from the East”. Great insight, now I can see the weather coming as well. Only problem is, directly east of my house is the hill that we’re sitting on, so I can’t see the weather until it’s almost directly upon us, but I do get a little bit of notice, enough to run out and grab the laundry off the line before it gets soaked.

One of the other volunteers had relatives visiting this week and they rented a car. I was invited to tag along for sightseeing, so I got to see some of the sights that you can’t reach by bus. There are lots of old ruins here of sugar mills and plantations, as well as British forts. It was a really nice day and the rain held off until nearly the end, so that was good. I was (am still) fighting off a cold and slept very poorly the night before, so the outing really wiped me out; I crashed when I got home and slept most of the next day!

We completed our interviews at the Culture division last week. They are an interesting group of people – they’re the steel pan instructors, players and builders, the music teachers, the crafts people and artists, the dance instructors, the culinary experts, anyone who has to do with maintaining the cultural heritage of the country. Most of them have never used a computer before, and many don’t know how to type. That will be a challenge, especially for the ones whose primary interest is learning word-processing and email. I can see that this will take up a large amount of our time as there are over 20 staff members there and most of them want individual rather than group instruction. I’m looking forward to it though, I think this will be a very interesting part of the job, especially meeting and talking with the people and learning more about what they do.

Had a fun day at the beach yesterday. George just purchased new snorkel gear, so he came down to Old Road to try it out. There’s an area just east of Curtain Bluff that looked interesting, where you can see a lot of rocks in shallow water from the road above, so we took the short walk down there from my house. As soon as we arrived a group of young girls showed up asking to try our “shades”. George figured out that they meant our masks and explained to them that we just got there and wanted to use them awhile first, but if they were still there later, they could try them then. Smart move. This has happened to me before with some boys down at my beach at Morris Bay; once they got hold of my mask and snorkel, I never got them back until I was ready to leave!

The rocks that I had seen from above formed some very nice reef structure. There wasn’t as much fish as at my beach, but the reef was more defined and there was more coral (Morris Bay is mostly sand, but there’s a jumble of rocks surrounding the jetty that they built to define the boundaries of the Curtain Bluff resort). We snorkeled for quite a while. The girls were patient.

As soon as they saw us make a move to get out of the water, they excitedly ran over, fighting over who was going to get to try the masks and snorkels first. There were 6 girls total, 3 appeared to be around 7 or 8. (George asked one her age and she told him 12. No way. She finally admitted that she didn’t really know how old she was.) 2 were younger, maybe 4, and the oldest was probably 10; she seemed to be in charge. Resize the masks for their heads, show them how to put them on, “Make sure you breathe through your mouth. Don’t breathe through your nose.” Sometimes they’d forget. After the initial demonstration, they fought it out amongst themselves, deciding whose turn it was next. The 2 youngest girls stayed mostly in the shallows, playing in the small surf. 3 of the older ones could swim fairly well and they used the masks most of the time. They were excited by the fish swimming around the reef and got the idea to try to use a bucket to catch some - hard to do from the surface when the fish can easily swim out of reach. They were determined, and I think really looking forward to going home and showing that they had caught dinner, but after a very earnest attempt, they eventually gave up.

One of the girls, “Shannell”, couldn’t swim so I was her life raft, carrying her around in the water, holding my arms under her so she could float, or she would climb around onto my back and we’d navigate around the reef. She spoke dialect, so it took a little work sometimes trying to figure out what she was saying. Dialect is a version of English, but it sounds like a foreign language if you’re not familiar with it. We had a few language lessons in training, but I’m only to the point where I can pick out a few words; I’m not nearly far enough along to follow a conversation. Adults understand that we don’t know dialect, so if they want to talk to us, they’ll switch to standard English. Young kids can't figure out why you don’t know what they’re saying, so if you tell them you don’t understand, they’ll just repeat the same words again. At one point George was holding Shannell and after she said it 3 times and pointed at me, he finally figured out that “me go she” meant that she wanted him to take her out to where I was. I did understand though when she asked me if I had pickney (kids); no, I told her.

At one point I looked around and one of the middle girls was missing. I asked Shannell where she went and she pointed to the beach, “dere”. It took several seconds for me to spot her as she was totally covered in sand and camouflaged against the cliffs! Photo opportunity calling! I grabbed George’s camera and started taking pictures. I’m finding it to be universal; those LCD’s on the back of the digital cameras are great, once the kids see themselves on the camera, they’ll pose all day for you, always creating new and different images for you to shoot. A little while later a calypso song was playing at the restaurant above and the sand girl started dancing on the beach. Shannell knew all the words so she was singing out to her, encouraging her on. Before they were done, 3 of them were lined up in a row, all dancing to the music.

Amazingly, they tired before we did. Actually, I think the oldest girl decided it was time to leave, so they all had to go. So George and I got our masks back and snorkeled around a little longer before leaving ourselves. As we climbed up to the road, we heard “Adios!” coming from the window of the house across the street, our new friends calling goodbye to us as we passed.