Peace Corps Reality

Bryan and I live in ¼ of a house in May Pen, Clarendon where we have an apartment (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, extra room) to ourselves; it is nice to have our own space. For our first month after training, we were living with our Supervisor (I’ll get to her later). Needless to say, it was not an optimal arrangement! We share the water spickett outside where we do laundry—all by hand with cold water. Let me say that our hands hurt terribly all the time from laundry washing and ringing out!! It also takes a long time to do! The only problem we have with our place is that the kitchen completely floods whenever there’s heavy rain (about 2 times a week.) It usually rains about 4 times a week, but it’s not always hard enough to make our window and kitchen leak. So, we’re dealing with that right now.

We walk about 10 minutes to get to the main road where we catch a taxi and go to work in Lionel Town (about 20-25 minute drive). The taxis here are completely crazy, but we’re pretty much used to them now. I know my Mom would freak out! The area we live in and work in is considered “rural” and is the hot, dry (vegetation-wise), flat part of the island. There are some areas with Tropical Dry Forests here, but for the most part it’s just sugar cane fields. Goats, cows, and dogs roam the streets everywhere—kind of weird at first, but you get used to it.

The NGO we work for, The Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM,) is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Most days we just come to the office/cybercenter, which is just like a 3^rd world Kinko’s and help Jamaicans with their printing, photocopying, typing, and faxing needs. Woo hoo. Great fun. Other days we get to go out into the field and do Beach monitoring (surveying for erosion) and twice we got to do Reef Check and go SCUBA diving. Overall, work’s bad with some really great days once in a blue moon. I hate to sound so negative, but it’s the truth! Also, I think our supervisor (a strict, controlling woman) and other people we work with forget that everything is different and hard to adapt to for us here in Jamaica—the people, the nose, the smells, the food. I’m getting pretty sick of the constant verbal harassment from every guy on the street. I hate to go out alone.The smells here can be pretty awful as well . . . burning trash and dead goats and dogs everywhere combined with the heat and humidity—not to mention the terrible body odor of the Jamaican man squished next to me in the back of the taxi this morning (4 adults squish in the backseat of the car!) Okay . . . enough of that . . .

The good stuff: our NGO (C-CAM) is supposed to get funding in January and next September, so hopefully next year we’ll be able to get out more in the field and do real work. In our free time, most weekends we travel to other parts of the island, like Montego Bay and Ocho Rios where we spend time at the beach, snorkel, and if we’re lucky—dive. We meet up with some of our Peace Corps friends and do a little of the tourist thing (Dunn’s River Falls, Margaritaville, etc.) Also, we’re going to try and join some organizations on the island—Bird Life Jamaica, Jamaica Natural History Society, Jamaica Caving Club, and the University of the West Indies Sub-Aqua Club (SCUBA diving club) to help out in more ways. Through those organizations, we can take field trips and go places we couldn’t find on our own.

Peace Corps gives us next to nothing, so for the last week of each month we are practically starving—mainly because taxi fares went up 40% (HUGE increase) earlier this month and is really affecting our budget now. But, apparently Peace Corps can’t raise Jamaica’s volunteer’s allowance until they give out surveys at the end of the year, and if 80% get turned in, then they will consider a raise. There hasn’t been a raise in living allowance for years because it’s practically impossible to get 80% of the volunteers to turn in their surveys. Anyway, I guess this is all just a lesson of bureaucracy.