Tip Of The Sword

Last Call...

2007-07-09T15:36:00.000-05:00

Well, not officially. I leave the island in two days but I’m wrapping up things here in Bull Savannah. I decided to the ordination of Fr. Raymond be my official bookend to my time here. It seemed fitting. Raymond first came here for a year after he graduated college and he never really went back. Now, after a ten year journey, he’s a priest in this missionary society and as an outsider looking in I have to wonder why aren’t all paths that straight? Of course, I’m assuming it was. I have a feeling Raymond might say otherwise.

My last couple of weeks have centered on final exams, graduation and spending time with the fine folks I have met here. I cannot believe this is ending so quickly but to be honest, I am ready to go home. The final straws were the cockroach that was crawling up my back the other day and the fate of my sandals: Randy the German Shepherd used them as chew toys. I’m ready to go… for now. I have no doubt I will be itching to come back down here especially the moment the thermometer drops below 65 degrees!

There really isn’t much more to add to this story; not without divulging experiences that are extremely personal and might betray a certain unspoken confidentiality. As for insights, learning, observations and changes; I’ve basically said them all here and would be repeating myself. I feel I have to give the obligatory nod to the fact that I’m not the same man I was when I stepped off the plane in December and I have a clearer picture of what I want to do with the rest of my life – which was part of the aim of quitting my corporate job; an event which was the start of these pages two years ago. It seems like so much longer than two years, though.

I have a lot of things running through my head as I prepare to go; topics of where I’m going to live, what life will be like, and whether or not I’ll like being back in the U.S. I’ll have plenty of time to ponder that last one very soon as my family convenes in Hawaii for a get together in a few weeks. Yep. I’m swapping one tropical island for another. It’s good work if you can get it. Just watch out for cockroaches.

That’s probably the best advice I can give anyone right now.

This is my sign off for a while, friends. I’ll be involved in a frenzy of activity between my homecoming and my aforementioned vacation. (For all the wiseacres out there, no, this has not been one long vacation!) I probably won’t get back to this space until after I get back next month so until then, walk good.

Gravity...

2007-06-25T12:31:00.000-05:00

Not too much time for words here because we're starting final exams this week. In the meantime, check out the best way I can think to free myself of anything which might be weighing me down.

Huge props to my girl, Claire, for taking me to Negril, making this possible and for giving me the video. You rock, kiddo.

Full Circle...

2007-06-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

On the weekend of July 4th, 1998, I was in Platteville, Wisconsin for an improv show at a community festival. I was barely out of college and was slated to start two jobs in the week to follow so at that time I was simply having some fun with life. Litlle did I know that that weekend would eventually lead me here to Bull Savannah, Jamaica.

In the course of that weekend I went to Mass and instead of the priest’s homily, there was a presentation by Sr. Connie, a missionary in Jamaica who had brought with her two little girls as an example of the people who benefit from the generosity of people in the U.S. These two girls, who were just the cutest things on Earth, performed a local song called, “Jesus On the Telephone.” It was a cute song that I have heard once since coming here but when these two girls performed it for us, they integrated a hand clapping, sort of patty cake thing into it. It was most impressive and I took an envelope with me with the intention of donating to this foreign diocese once I had a steady income and could set aside money for such things. Two years later, once I was settled into a corporate job, I made good on that personal promise and began donating money to the Diocese of Mandeville. It was not a heap of money by any means, but it was what I could manage with my budget.

Fast forward six years to last summer when I was contemplating what I was going to do next in life. As I sat and gave that topic some thought, I spied my most recent thank you letter from the diocese and the donation envelope they sent with it. “Hmm,” I thought. “I have been curious about checking out something like that since I was 12 and we had that bishop from Montego Bay over at our house for dinner. I wonder if I could check that out now.”

Armed with that curiosity and an ability to utilize Google, I did some digging because for as much as the diocese told me how much they appreciated my donations, they did very little in giving me ways to contact someone to find out more about them. Eventually I came across a web page of a parish in Altoona-Johnston, Pennsylvania that has a long-running relationship with the Diocese of Mandeville. Listed on this page was the contact information of a nun who lived there for nine years but who was now back in the states. And with that, I contacted Sr. Patti Rossi and she and I conversed over the following weeks and months until I ultimately came down here in December.

I had never actually met Sr. Patti until yesterday. There is no way either of us would be able to pick the other out of a lineup so you can imagine my excitement when I she e-mailed me to say she was coming here for a visit with some folks from Pennsylvania. She, Monsignor Michael and I went to lunch and it was a great way for things to come full circle for me. Sr. Patti is this woman who acts younger than she really is. I believe she is in her 60’s but she has the enthusiasm and energy of someone in the prime of their life. What’s more she is a giving and generous soul who always ends her e-mails with, “Sleep warm.” In addition to having spent nine years here, she spent a lengthy time in the Amazon and most recently visited a missionary setup in Haiti. The woman ain’t slowin’ down!

And so it was that my experience came to a sense of completion; or so I thought until we visited Sr. Naomi, another nun who has been her in Jamaica for years but who was preparing to return to the U.S. As you can imagine, she and Sr. Patti are good friends and so it took about a nano-second for them to pick up where they last left off and it was in this part of the day where a true sense of “full circle” came about.

Towards the end of our visit with Sr. Naomi a young Jamaican girl, Meagan, stopped by with her six month old son whose name escapes me but whose bright eyes etched themselves in my memory. While Meagan was there to see Sr. Naomi, she was utterly surprised to see Sr. Patti and as you can imagine, had no idea who I was. Meagan is very sweet and quite lovely and she was more than happy to show off her baby boy who had a penchant for drooling on, well, me. As the conversation progressed Meagan asked about me and where I was living – all the usual questions I get from locals. And then Sr. Naomi asked, “Meagan, didn’t Sr. Connie take you to the states a few times when you were young?”

“Yes, she did.” Meagan replied.

“Did you ever visit Platteville, Wisocons?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you sing a song with another little girl called ‘Jesus On the Telephone?”

“All the time.”

This young girl, who was around 18 years old, was one of the two girls I saw nine years ago at Mass; an event which ultimately led to my being here. Now everything was full circle. In a sense, this adventure had come to a certain end and looking backward, I can completely connect every dot which has led me here and now, with this context, everything looks more familiar and I feel as if I have a deeper understanding of it all.

“The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and to know the place for the first time.” – T.S. Eliot

Home...

2007-06-20T15:57:00.000-05:00

My boss from my old corporate job recently responded to an e-mail of mine and asked, “So where is home for you these days?” I can only imagine she was prompted to ask since I’ve been out of Chicago since last year, my sisters and their respective husbands live in Southern California and because my parents have moved from Rhode Island to Seattle in the last month. And while my immediate internal response was, “Well all my ‘stuff’ is in Chicago so it must be Chicago,” I really began to ponder the question, ‘What is home?’ I mean, to be honest, I feel completely at home here in Bull Savannah after only seven months.

Since heading to the Midwest in 1993 I have always “gone home for Christmas,” meaning I have gone back to New England, the place where I spent the second half of my formative years. My mother is always happy to contend, quite emphatically, that wherever she and my father live, that is home. But for as much as I love Seattle it is not home and I would be much more comfortable calling New England home than the Pacific Northwest. But at the same time, people around here keep asking me if I’m going home and I always tell them, “Yes. I have an entire life waiting for me in Chicago.”

So which one is home?

I once heard the comedian George Carlin go into a rant around the word ‘homeless.’ His schtick was that homeless people are not really homeless, they are ‘houseless,’ and while anyone can have a house, it takes a certain intangible quality to make a home. I can only guess said intangible quality comprises people, memories, familiarity with surroundings and the like; that magical place where “everybody knows your name.” So what happens when you are fortunate enough to have more than one place fit that description? Can a person have multiple ‘homes?’ It’s kind of like the moniker of “Best Friend.” In my opinion there is a superlative quality to those distinctions and a person can really only have one.

I may have to get back to you on this. I head back to Chicago in little less than a month and I may have more clarity then.

Science Fair...

2007-06-15T20:16:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been working on the school’s very first science fair. It’s a project which landed in my lap about a month ago and as soon as it did, the half of my mind that has an ongoing love affair with spreadsheets kicked in and I began laying out names, presentations, schedules – you name it. Complete with color coding and the school logo, this was a thing of beauty. Maybe even one of my best ever. I’m still beaming over it.

The last three weeks have been full of trips to town to buy the materials the students would need for their presentations and grabbing articles and information off the internet for them to pull from. I felt a little guilty about that latter part – doing their work for them, so to speak – but internet access (let alone knowledge of how to use it for such purposes) is as equally scarce as the amount of time I have had to coordinate the fair thoroughly.

Thankfully, adding to our student’s experiments was a presentation by Jamaica’s Forestry Department, which was arranged by our main science teacher, Ms McIntosh. Further rounding out the day’s program was a nutritionist brought in to speak with some of our students about proper eating. That last addition was the product of one of the other teachers, Ms Elliott (previously referred to in these pages as Miss Anne but as it urns out, her first name is actually ‘Mizanne.’ My apologies.)

In short, we had a packed day that required a decent amount of coordination, but that was to be no problem for me because, as Ms McIntosh deduced, “[I] have a scientific mind so it will be easy.” Right. Coordinate an entire day of class schedules, 40 presentations, a lunch break, the Forestry Department, a nutritionist, 200 students taking all of this in and cap it all off with a school-wide Mass at the end of the day. It really wasn’t all that bad once I broke it down into smaller, more manageable chunks of time. As I wrote earlier, spreadsheets are a favorite weapon of mine; I am convinced that disasters like the federal budget and the NHL are all a result of someone not being able to manipulate Excel properly, but that is neither here nor there. The matter at hand was pulling together a science fair in back-a-bush Jamaica and all I had to draw from was a very faded memory of the science fairs in which I participated a long time ago.

The shopping trips in town were not much to write home about. My list comprised the usual suspects: baking soda, Epsom salt, vinegar, boric acid and vodka. Dividing up the presentations of the students as well as the remaining students who would be watching all of them was more difficult than finding lavender oil and marshmallows. But, as with most complex problems, the more I worked the variables and move pieces around the board, the more likely I was to be graced with a solution and eventually, I was.

Today was to start with all students not involved with the science fair partaking in their usual first period class. This gave the students who were participating a chance to tend to any last minute preparations. The end of that first period then signaled the first 90 minute viewing session where a collection of classrooms would float between four different viewing stations thereby making it possible for all of the presenters to display their brilliance. At the end of that 90 minute block was a small break followed by another 90 minute block for the remaining students who had yet to see the presentations. The Forestry Service was to do their thing once the second viewing block was over and then the school Mass to wrap it all up and signal the end of the regular school year. Very simple really.

There were two factors I did not count on; however. Two factors for which there is no button in Excel to add to one’s calculations. First, this is Jamaica, which means logic and planning are about as prevalent as moderation is in the U.S. Secondly, I forgot to factor in student apathy. It’s this second one tat really caught me off guard because I forgot exactly how much I didn’t care about science fairs when I was growing up. And the fact that I progressed to the statewide science fair one year had had more to do with me being competitive and wanting to do well than it did with really giving a damn about science. Times have changed, of course; that was almost two decades ago. Now I salivate at a chance to learn something scientific and I think that desire had somehow mutated in my mind into some fictionalized past wherein I was always excited about science!

There’s really not a whole lot I could do about student apathy. I couldn’t force students to be excited and engage their fellow classmates with questions any more than I could make a student stand up and give their presentation on hurricanes. I literally had a student who was about to present her piece stand up and walk out simply because she “[didn’t] feel like doing this anymore.”

As for Jamaica’s lack of planning, that was something for which I was a bit more prepared just because I have learned that that’s how things are here. As I mentioned earlier, Ms McIntosh arranged for the Forestry Service to come and give a presentation about deforestation, its effects and what Jamaica is doing to fight it. While this was a welcome addition to our day, it would have been nice if they had returned phone calls to firmly establish a time for them to show up rather than simply arriving at 10:30 in the morning and “wanting to go on as soon as possible because we’ve got a three hour drive back which we don’t want to start too late on,” thereby throwing a fairly decent sized monkey wrench into the day.

Remember that nutritionist I told you about? Turns out she was only available in the morning, a stipulation which ultimately led to me scrubbing her from the day’s events because it ultimately became too difficult to smoothly schedule her for the day. I asked Mizanne to thank her friend for offering to come but that it would be easier overall if we maybe saved it for another time. The nutritionist came anyway and subsequently occupied an entire block of students for the full 90 minutes in the school’s science lab which ultimately meant there was one group of students who never had a chance to present in the morning, that I had to juggle the rotation of the morning’s events (please see the previous paragraph concerning the Forestry Service) and finally a lot of confusion as to why some students learned about nutrition while most did not.

Further adding to the insult and injury of the day was an apparent lack of preparedness on the part of some of my fellow teachers. Despite my beautifully structured agenda for the day which very clearly stated which classrooms were to be at which location and at what time, it was not uncommon for either teachers or their classes (or both) to be completely absent from the event. Not only did this result in me feeling entirely unsupported, it fed the student’s apathy and underscored their belief that it was okay for them to blow this off.

But I’m painting an entirely gloomy picture here and that is not totally fair. There were students who did have opportunities to display the hard work they put into their presentations and there were students who enjoyed watching them. The combined efforts of Ms McIntosh and myself resulted in the school’s very first science fair with only a month to pull it off (please see the previously mentioned point about lack of planning here). What’s more it paved the way for subsequent science fairs, which, if someone were to start planning at the beginning of the school year as opposed to the end of it, have a shot at being done more thoroughly.

Am I entirely please with how things went? No. Ms McIntosh arrived at school today and came right up to me to inform me that she left her keys to the science lab at home; a wrinkle that would have been negligible if it were not for the fact that they are the only keys to the lab; there are no others. And as much as I laughed my way through that earliest of the day’s gaffe’s, it became damn near impossible to fake a grin by the end of the day. Thankfully the crown jewel of the science fair came when a fellow volunteer put his class’ project on display for the remainder of the school: Mentos candy dropped into 2-litre bottles of soda. Wanna know what happens? Try it for yourself and let me know how you make out. I will, of course, accept nothing without an official statement, hypothesis, analysis and conclusion.

Homesick...

2007-05-30T23:28:00.000-05:00

“Mark, you’ve got a piece of mail here,” I was told by one of my fellow volunteers. “It’s from Chicago.”

“What’s the name on the envelope?” I asked.

“Can’t make it out, the post office writing has it all mashed up. But it’s got a fancy gold seal on the back from DePaul University.”

Turns out a very good friend of mine, Mark, sent me an invitation to his upcoming graduation from a Master’s program; a degree he has been working towards for almost three years. I remember him asking for my Jamaican mailing address before I left but wasn’t quite sure why he wanted it. Now I know and receiving this invite has become the latest chuckle from the beast called Homesick.

In the summer of 1993 I traded Connecticut for Milwaukee and spent the following five years at Marquette University. Upon arriving I didn’t have much time to be homesick as I was adjusting to an entirely different life and environment. But once I settled in and the season changed from summer to fall, the onslaught began. Phone calls home occurred regularly on Sundays to sooth my need for those voices which, until that time, had been in my life everyday for eighteen years. And on those rare occasions when I found myself in the library, I would stop by the reference section which contained large world atlases and would look at various maps of New England as I longed to be where the autumn colors were, and still are, the very best in the world.

Slowly (or quickly, depending on whom you ask) my condition lessened and Marquette became a home of sorts. I would leave at any given opportunity and head back to Connecticut or to exotic locations like Denver, Chicago or Germantown. But at the end of these short excursions was a return to the gritty streets of Brewtown. My phone calls home became increasingly spread out and my parents adopted the mantra, “If he doesn’t call, it must mean that everything is alright.” My social network was in place, my schedule packed with things, stuff, and the occasional class. I had survived moving away from home and with the exception of the summer between my first and second years of college, I never went back to New England to live. In fact, since arriving in the Central Time Zone 14 years ago, I have never left for more than three or four weeks.

As I was packing up to leave last year I felt sadness around my leaving; I even wrote about it in one of my first posts after my departure. It was obvious that Chicago had now become home after eight years of residence and that some of my anxiety around leaving had to do with how comfortable I had become there. And while I grasped all of that on a mental level and expected to miss Chicago, I didn't anticipate that similar feelings of homesickness as those described above would come home to roost, nor did I anticipate the city being the setting for so many dreams. I honestly have had three dreams in the last ten days which took place in Chicago.

In the early scenes of the movie “Fight Club,” before we are introduced to his character, Brad Pitt is digitally inserted a frame of the film. This happens two or three times before you start to wonder, “What the heck do I keep seeing?” It’s very strange how it happens but your mind processes an image of something it knows it has seen and just as quickly as it appears, it disappears and there is that split-second moment of “What the…?” Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about and some of you don’t. Regardless, what I have just described is an example of what I’ve been experiencing lately: small, instantaneous blips of an image which leaves me wondering, "What the....?"

Two days ago, after breakfast, I was washing the dishes before heading off to help with reading program started by the same volunteer who had alerted me to my piece of mail. In an almost automated fashion I dipped dirty dishes into a sink full of soap water, washed them with a sponge, dipped them into a sink of clean water and then put them in the drying board, all the while thinking about the daily schedule which lay before me. Strictly routine. And then in a fraction of a second, an image of an intersection in Chicago, Broadway and Lawrence to be exact, flashed before my mind’s eye. It completely caught me off guard and I closed my eyes and shook my head like someone who has just experienced a violent sneeze. This was probably the tenth time in as many days that an image of something Chicago-related has peppered my day and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. On a strictly factual and scientific level I equate it to the fact that we, as a species, only use ten percent of our brains and that in order for my brain to store the latest memory of Jamaica in one of its remote corners, it had to make room by expunging an existing memory and gave me one last glimpse before replacing the old with the new. So, for instance, before I could fully commit to memory the latest fight I had to break up at the school, the Belmont El stop randomly came to mind. Weird.

And maybe it's a biological knowing that things are amiss for me right now; a deeper awareness that I'm missing Spring in Chicago. Many of you have been writing and in your e-mails you mention how the weather has been getting warmer and I know how much of a welcome change that can be after a dormant winter. There is something special about this time of year, despite how well or poorly the Cubs are doing. It may not be the warmest of times during March, April or May but people walk around with a certain smirk on their faces; a smirk that knows street festivals, art fairs, movies in the park and beer gardens are just around the corner. People become braver as they head to work with a jacket considerably thinner than the parka they've been sporting since November. There is a slight swagger as people head to small patches of green space to eat their lunches and begin those important hours of a base tan.

The only thing that could further exacerbate my being homesick is the fact that my parents arrive tomorrow, but they are only staying for the weekend. They'll be gone just as soon as appear; just like the image of the Irving Park exit off of Lake Shore Drive came and went as I have been typing. The reason for such a short visit: they're preparing to pack up and move cross country for the third time in their marriage. In my lifetime, my mom and dad have moved from New England to Southern California and back and now, with a job change my dad took within his company, they are off to Seattle. My immediate family's 26 year presence on the Atlantic is coming to a close, and maybe that has a little to do with the whole stirring of the memory stew. I have yet to have flashes of the Family Bowl in Waterford or the drive on Rt. 2A to get to Mohegan Sun catch me off guard, but I think that has more to do with having been away from the Constitution State for almost half my life than a lack of love for it.

Of course, it could just be that the sun is finally getting to me here. The temperature topped out at 91 the other day and I've actually started using sunscreen; a sign of the apocalypse, to be sure. Whatever it the reasons, I have been constantly reminded of things back home and I miss it all sincerely. I love what I'm doing here and I don't want it to come to such a quick end and at the same time, I can't wait to get home and take my dogs to the dog park and watch them run like spazzes.

One and one is two, six and two is eight.

C'mon baby, don't ya make me late.

Hidey hey...

Baby don't you wanna go?

Back to that same old place...

Social Butterfly...

2007-05-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different: a social life. In the last week or so I have made it past the confines of St. Elizabeth; the Jamaican parish in which I have been spending the majority of my time since my arrival. It is not often that I get to travel to the distant capitol of Kingston so when an opportunity presented itself at 2:30 in the afternoon last week to attend a cocktail party at the house of one of the country's most prominent artists, I snatched it up.

The artist, Susan Alexander, is a friend of the priests of the Mission Society. Exactly how these distinctively different paths crossed I have no idea. The fathers tried to explain it to me and I followed the story right up to the part where "a miracle happened," and I lost it after that. Regardless, this party was planned by our hostess and after it was discovered that Fr. Sam was returning from a family vacation in Europe around the same time as one of the guests was planning to visit Jamaica, it was decided the party would be moved to coincide with everyone being in Kingston on the same night and just like that, everything fell into place.

It was a lovely night punctuated with live performances by some of the most preeminent musicians in the country, not to mention a few numbers by the priests of the Mission Society. We even had a vocal performance from the wife of a former Prime Minister. Bottom line: an enjoyable evening with some very lively and generous people. It was definitely a unique accent on my time here.

And on the following day, the social pendulum went the other way.

In the not-to-distant past I have come to know and spend a good amount of time with a Peace Corps volunteer named Claire who lends her time and talents as a civil engineer to the Diocese of Mandeville. Being plugged into the social outreach of the island she had let me know about a "fun day" sponsored by Food for the Poor wherein children from various orphanages around the island all descend on a beachfront complex for a day of, well, fun. Music, food, games, beach time, dance contests - you name it, they had it. And I was lucky enough to be one of a large group who volunteered to help with the nuts and bolts of the day. I can't remember everything we did but I distinctly remember being part of the crew that photographed each child as the buses arrived. Their photograph would be sent, along with a letter, to their sponsor and once all of that was out of the way, the kids were let loose at a place aptly named, "Fun Citi."

For eight hours 300 kids either played on the beach, took part in whatever organized activity was going on at the moment or attempted to make use of the run down roller rink on the premises. This rather dilapidated concrete rink had large trees growing in the middle of it (by design, of course) and tied to them were the "egg crate" mattress covers easily found at a store like Bed Bath & Beyond. The selection of Rollerblades was measly and in many cases, kids only had one skate on and were pushing with a bare foot and having the time of their lives as they tried not to completely wipe out. I was reminded once again of how kids can easily take whatever is right in front of them and have a blast with it despite any circumstances which might otherwise be deemed "less than" or "imperfect." I was also acutely aware that in a twelve hour span I had gone from socializing with some of the good and great of Jamaica to socializing with a group who hardly ever has more than the clothes on their back. Neither one is better than the other, more preferable or insert-whatever-label-you-want-here. They were just drastically different and a great reminder that at the end of the day we, as humans, have not been hard wired to be isolated or solitary. We are meant to interact with others, to be in community, and be involved in each others lives and that joy can be found in the exquisite playing of a violin as well as in the exhaustive jumping in an inflatable air castle.

Three days later, while still kicking these experiences around in my head, I found myself on the road to Kingston once more. I was headed there at the invitation of the daughter and boyfriend of one of the guests from the cocktail party. He, Jeffrey, plays in a band and seeing as how Wednesday of this week is Jamaica's Labor Day, and thereby a national holiday, (and since the remainder of the week is the school's mid-term break) I could not pass up their kind invitation to take in some live reggae and some of the island's social life.

For those of you familiar with it, the place reminded me of the rooftop setup at the Rock Bottom Brewery at State & Grand in Chicago. The biggest difference was that this place was more expansive with a bit of roofing to cover the actual bar. Aside from that, though, it was your typical watering hole jammed packed with young adults all looking fashionable with drinks in hand. It had been so long since I had been in such a setting that I almost didn't know what to do.

Then I saw the bottle of Jameson behind the bar and it all came back to me.

The two bands which played were great and sounded exactly how you would expect live reggae to sound. For some reason I carried the idea that it would get old quickly but it never really did and when the whole thing came to an end at 1:30am, I was disappointed that it was over but that disappointment was brought to a quick halt when I was able to satisfy a midnight craving for a burger and fries.

Incidental Plug: The band Jeffrey is a part of is Roots Underground. Check them out. They currently have one of the top singles on MTV Tempo and have a great future ahead of them. What's more, Jeffrey is just a really cool cat with an easy going attitude.

So let's recap: Cocktails and performances with some lovely and talented adults. A day of fun with 300 kids surviving via the generosity of many. A night out with people who, like me, are caught somewhere in the middle. It's very easy to fall into the trap of either wanting to have the luxury of the first or feeling sorry for the second. I have to wonder if it's just as much of a trap to believe that it's somehow the job of the third group to try and bridge the gap between the two extremes.

In The Meantime...

2007-05-10T21:37:00.000-05:00

It's not really for a lack of having anything to write about that my bouts of radio silence exist. I think it has more to do with really getting into a routine which ultimately exposes gaps of free time which are quickly claimed by various projects. The latest one to come my way is the coordinating of the school's very first science fair; an event which will be pulled together in just over a month. More on that in a bit.

And just as things can become routine around here, there are certain things which come along and make me cock my head to the side in a "Well I'll be damned," kind of way. The other night I was completely taken aback when we here at the compound were delivered a bottle of de-worming medicine. Apparently that is a hazard for those who walk around barefoot. And to think that just this morning as I got out of bed and stared at the tan lines on my feet I thought to myself, "Hmm. I wonder why I don't walk around barefoot more often." Now I have legit reason not to.

The actual taking of the medicine was nothing to write home about. It was like downing a tablespoon of cough syrup, only slightly bitterer and highly punctuated by the knowledge that this was being done solely to fight worms. Over the last few weeks we've been treating an injury to the paws of one of the dogs and the first thing we had to deal with was the worms which were initially forming in the wound. The dog, Pablito is fine, and now I somehow felt a little closer to him after this. And for those of you who are quick to rib me for being on the skinny side, take comfort that maybe what I've had all along is a tapeworm and that soon I will start to wear the effects of eating frozen pizza.

Yeah, I doubt it too.

Also standing out as a banner day around here was the recent appearance of a well published Jamaican poet named Lorna Goodison. Ms. Goodison has enjoyed a very successful career as a poet and is a professor of the subject at a college in Michigan. Our students study some of her poems in preparation for the CXC exams and when the opportunity to have her speak to our students appeared, Fr. Anthony acted quickly to make it happen. She was here visiting family and generously spent a day with us, educating us around poetry and answering questions from students and teachers alike.

Side note: I borrowed one of my previous post titles from one of Lorna's poems.

A very warm and perceptive woman, Lorna has an infectious smile that lets you know that she enjoys her life. She has seen a lot, done a lot and has been lucky enough to find and develop one of her greatest gifts: poetry. And from what I gathered, she did not set out to be a poet. It was something which found her quite by accident as she worked in the world of advertising. Her co-workers knew she wrote poetry and as fate would have it, the right people were in the right place at the right time and she began entering her work in small but public forums and it was not long before she became more widely known.

Between all manner of questions Lorna dropped quite a bit of knowledge about poetry, how one comes to express themselves through poetry and the importance of discovering natural gifts and developing them fully. "The corollary to having a gift," she said, "is the pride of knowing you used it as best you could." That, as well as a certain definition of poetry, (The insides of one person speaking to the inside of someone else) have stayed with me the most since that day.

Now for the science fair. Two days ago I was approached by our science teacher, Ms. McIntosh, a monumental event in and of itself because until that time, she had barely said more than three words to me and they were all the same word: "Fine." She usually said it in response to me asking, "How are you today?" To say that she is quiet and keeps to herself would be like saying Bill Gates has a few dollars to spend so you can imagine my surprise when she came up to me the other day with a terrorized look on her face and asked the questions, "Do you have a scientific mind?"

"Well, kind of." I began quizzically, "I have a degree in Electrical Engineering if that counts."

"Good." she said curtly. "You can help me organize the science fair."

I'm still not entirely sure why she picked me for this. I can't imagine there is a nasty rumor circulating that I have a ton of time on my hands. Regardless, it's a great project to take on because the school has never had a science fair and this is the kind of event the Fathers I trying to bring to the school as they improve the curriculum so I'm happy that it came my way. Logistics and long term planning are my bread and butter – you had better believe I have already started a spreadsheet to track all the details. And as I continue to work on this, I keep having flash backs to the science fairs I took part in and how daunting it felt to have to design a poster board and write a report explaining my project. I'm not sure if this latest affiliation with science fairs is some form of cosmic justice or God's twisted sense of humor. Maybe it’s a little of both.

Oh, Death...

2007-04-19T22:23:00.000-05:00

I know, I know. “Way to bring things down, Konold.” What happened to funny stories of things lost in translation, living in a rundown trailer or gorgeous terrain in all directions? Well, those are all still there I assure you. In fact in the last week I had to ask a man to repeat something seven times before I understood him, went to war with a colony of cockroaches in the ceiling of said trailer and woke up to crashing waves at a nice beach house in the area. And that’s all well and good; it all definitely adds to the experience, but life here ensures that there are opportunities to see the not-so-pretty side of things. The very first day I had arrived in December it was discovered that a very prominent elderly couple in the area had been kidnapped. It was not until I returned in January that the bodies were found. It turns out that they were the wrong people, to boot. They just happened to have the same last name as the intended targets and the kidnappers had made a mistake.

All that aside, I have death on the brain tonight because I learned this week that the grandfather of a very close friend of mine passed away recently, a man I had the privilege of meeting a handful of times while I was growing up in Connecticut. In the e-mails I have been able to exchange with my friend this week it has become painfully clear how much of a loss this is to him. He looked upon his grandfather not only as a hero but as someone who taught him much about life and how to be a good man. Mr. Drabik, you will be missed.

As I have mentioned, I have been helping to teach the poetry section of the literature classes of the upper grades and one of the poems we covered is named, “Traveling Through the Dark.” Its overall theme is death and as the class delved further and further into it the students became confused at my interpretation of things as I concluded that, at least for me, the setting of the poem was a metaphor for a wake and/or funeral. Their confusion was rooted in the fact that the poem is entirely too somber to remotely resemble anything they experience when it comes to sending the departed on their way.

First let’s cover the wake. They don’t really have one in the sense that we do and what they do have is not called a “wake” but rather a “set up.” A set up, which occurs nine days after the person passes away, is a huge party wherein a very, very large speaker stack is erected at the home of a relative of the departed and in a pot luck type of fashion, food is made and brought, along with a health supply of drinks, and music is played at Earth shattering levels. This party, which begins somewhere in the vicinity of 7:00pm, lasts until at least 6:00am the following day. In the weeks before I took my trip home in March, a relative of one of the parishioners passed away and set up was at her place which is roughly a quarter mile away from the compound. I went to bed at 11:30pm that night, with ear plugs in, and when I woke up at 6:30am the next day, the music was still blaring and I could hear it perfectly. I was amazed, not to mention thankful for the ear plugs.

With respect to funerals here, not only does everyone accompany the body to the cemetery, no one leaves until the casket is in the ground and all of the dirt is placed on top of it. When I explained to them that in the States we accompany the casket to the cemetery, conduct a closing service there and then leave it above ground to be later lowered and covered, they were aghast. “Sir! Ya mean ya just leave da body der!? Ya not scared someone a come a take tings!?”

“Well, grave robbing isn’t too rampant where I come from.” From the way it has been explained to me, it is not entirely uncommon for material objects to be placed in the casket and, if left unattended, said material objects will rise and vacate the casket much sooner than the dearly departed.

“Sir, how could ya just leave da body? Respect da dead, sir. It not ovah ‘til ya can’t see it, sir!” And even after the burial, reminders of the dead are still be quite visible. Many Jamaicans do not have the money to have their loved ones buried in a cemetery and so it is not uncommon to see one or more headstones or semi-above ground tombs (much like what you would find in and around New Orleans) in the front or side yard of someone’s property which plays a large part in locals’ belief in ghosts, which they call “duppies.”

We went back and forth on this one for about ten minutes and then one of the students tried to explain to me that they tend to embrace the verse found in the Bible which talks about crying when a baby is born and laughing when a person dies. The former being a result of knowing the hardship the baby will come to face as a result of being on the Earth, the latter being a celebration that they have moved beyond this world to a promised paradise. And while I understood that on a cerebral level, it was a head-scratching thought for me simply because it defied that which I am used to. The convenient misunderstanding between me and the students had come to its logical conclusion.

And we here at the compound have had to contend with death recently in a unique way. Back on my birthday I wrote that one of the dogs, Petruscha, had gone into labor and was ready to deliver puppies for which we had been waiting for some time. In total she was carrying nine puppies and unfortunately five of them were stillborn and one of them died shortly after being born, leaving us with 3 puppies. Eventually two of the remaining three also passed and then Petrushca herself succumbed to unstoppable internal bleeding.

Two days later the one remaining puppy also died but in a most unusual way. He was napping and began to wake up and stretch and in the middle of it he let out a high pitched noise and then just stopped moving. Not to be cruel, but it seemed like he stretched himself to death. It was most bizarre and sad but in a sense, Petruscha and her 9 offspring are all in puppy heaven. The remains of all of them have been cremated for that is how things are done here.

And so it is that I remember that death is a part of life. It’s good to be reminded of the finality of it all. I think sometimes the sight of the horizon is lost for the sake of the ground directly in front of us. That immediate ground has its place, to be sure, but it is not healthy when the horizon line is constantly sacrificed for the here and now. And as uncomfortable as that end time may or may not be, I think it needs to be put on the front burner so that the steps taken when focusing on the ground right in front of us is done with intention.

Culture...

2007-04-16T09:53:00.000-05:00

Since coming here I have had “plenty chance” to experience things authentically Jamaican and have done what I can to relay those experiences in these pages. A lot of them usually spark from some comedic exchange wherein something was easily lost in translation or I just had not idea what to do with myself because I was that out of place. Fair enough. It’s to be expected.

And then there are other things that I have either seen or heard and have done my best to simply describe. So it is with this quick post. A few things that are authentically Jamaican that make me stop and think to myself, “Huh. Never really seen that before.”

Bashment: Similar to a backyard cookout, this huge party is centered on an extremely massive speaker stack which is cranked up to unbelievable heights and can be heard for miles around – that is not an exaggeration. We had the privilege of having one occur directly across the street from us and the aforementioned speaker stack was a good quarter mile from my room yet the music was so loud, it sounded as if there were speakers right outside my door. The music starts playing around 3:00pm and it usually kicks off with old R&B and cheesy 80’s love ballads. In one minute I was hearing Percy Sledge’s, “When A Man Loves a Woman,” followed immediately Lionel Richie’s, “Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For?” People eventually arrive and from what I could see, there isn’t much socializing in the way of talking which, no doubt, is directly related to the volume of the speakers. Seriously, I think there was an article in the news about astronauts in the International Space Station jamming to reggae. All interaction consists of people dancing with each other in ways that can most easily be described as “blatantly inappropriate.” And this goes on until 6:30am.

Bun and Cheese: As far as I can tell so far, this is mainly an Easter tradition and it consists of a long loaf of break, similar to the color rye bread, but its taste is spicier and sweeter; almost like it had been baked with cloves and all spice. It’s quite a thing to have bun and cheese on the table. If you find yourself with bun and cheese, you know it’s important. People here talking about making their “Easter bun” and even the packaging of bun bought in the grocery story wishes you a great Easter. Thanks to the generosity of parishioners, not to mention the fathers’ love of bun and cheese, we have had a constant supply of bun and cheese for two weeks now and while I never really thought pairing cheese with a fruity loaf of bread would be good, I have quickly become a fan of bun and cheese.

Let’s Burn Everything: While the island has some semblance of a garbage removal system, sometimes it is just easier to burn everything. This especially comes into play when it comes to handling garden trimmings and the like. It is not uncommon to look upon the sides of the local mountain ranges and seeing random columns of smoke decorate it. The bottom line is that sometimes it’s just easier to burn everything than it is to haul it somewhere or wait for someone to come and get it eventually. Burn bans and things of that nature do not exist here, at least they don’t in “back-a-bush” places like Bull Savannah. When Petruscha gave birth to her puppies, she decided to do it on a futon and while the metal frame was salvageable, the mattress was not so we simply put it in a previously-made fire area along with other items on the grounds, doused it in gasoline, dropped and match and let it burn for the day. By nightfall it was all ashes.

Billy: This is more of a local thing than a nationwide thing, but I’m sure there is an instance of Billy in every pocket of the island. Billy is the local bookie. He’s also the guy you want to see if you want to convert U.S. currency to Jamaican. Billy sits in the shade among some buildings in the next town over, Junction where he and his girlfriend run a liquor store. Billy spends his days sitting by his detailed, black, Honda Civic coupe along with five to ten other people hanging around him, a form of security I’m sure. As people approach him he simply greets them and does business with them. One of his unique talents is the speed of his mind with numbers. Every time I have walked up to him with some money to exchange, he does the math quickly in his head, takes out his pocket calculator to ensure he has done it right and to show me what he’s about to give me, places the U.S. money under the floor mat of his car, takes out a monstrous wad of Jamaican money and quickly flips out the amount promised. All of this takes place within 10 to 15 seconds and Billy gives a better rate than the banks. The kicker is, when the banks or currency exchange joints run out of money to use, they walk across the street and conduct business with Billy who is more than happy to help out.

That’s what I’ve got for right now. I know it’s a slight departure from my usual narratives but we have just started school again this week after a beautiful two week break, much of which was spent at a beach cottage belonging to a member of the diocese with whom the priests here have a wonderful relationship. So I could tell you of the numerous times where I either fell asleep or awoke to crashing waves and ocean breezes all while enjoying a comfortable queen size bed and a room the size of my old condo, but somehow I don’t think you want to hear that.

Birthday...

2007-04-03T23:51:00.000-05:00

I would have thought that milestone birthdays were the most memorable: 20, 25, 30, 40, etc. I never would have thought 32 would turn out to be one of the most memorable, but then again I never really thought I’d be spending it here. Let’s just start with the fact that

I haven’t had a birthday this warm since 1983 when my family and I were living in California. In September of that year we made our way to New England where I lived until I left for college in 1993 and, unless I am forgetting any globally-warmed off year, it never really reached the 60’s. Once I was in Milwaukee and Chicago in the years to come it was pretty much guaranteed that the warmest it would get on my special day was in the 50’s and that the lowest temperature was always up for grabs. Fair enough. So the chance to trek around the coastal area of St. Elizabeth parish in 80 degree weather was firmly grasped.

For a few days now we have been entertaining the mother and cousin of one of the other volunteers here at St. Vincent Strambi. Judy and Carrie, Aaron’s mother and cousin respectively, are two very dynamic, vibrant and all around good people who are great to spend time with and so having a chance to show them around certain parts of the island we volunteers, myself, Aaron and Jason, piled into one of the pickup trucks and rattled down the less-than-smooth roads of the island and made our way to Treasure Beach. Upon arriving we indulged in a lunch at the well known restaurant, Jack Sprat, a seaside establishment which serves incredible seafood and, of all things, pizza. Pair your fare with a cold Red Stripe beer and you have found yourself a small slice (no pun) of heaven. Treasure Beach is an interesting locale on the island because it is known well enough by people to be populated and semi-flourishing but it’s not as touristy as Negril, Montego Bay or Ocho Rios. It is kind of that destination for the slightly more daring traveler but not so far off the beaten path that locals would stare at you like you fell out of the sky. The people of Treasure Beach are very welcoming, open and eager for you to relax the way they do. With the Caribbean Sea right there and a front row seat for every sunset, it’s kind of hard to be any other way.

With lunch firmly polished off we hopped back in the truck and made our way down the road to the town of Black River, a town centered on a river which allowed goods to be brought from the coast to the inner parts of the island before the advent of paved roads and delivery trucks. It was the first town in Jamaica to have a telephone and if memory serves, electricity. There is a huge street market which buzzes daily and jams the roads with pedestrians. On extra busy days it can take ten minutes to travel the quarter mile strip of the town center whereas on holidays it looks like a certifiable ghost town. Our interest, however, was not the street market but the children’s home there which is affiliated with the Mission Society of Mandeville. A handful of the students at the school live there and two of the priests of the society, along with a group of nuns, keep the place running. It is home to more than 30 kids, boy and girls, who have been abandoned for one reason or another and who are now the recipients of the love and care of those who run it.

Those of you who know me very well know that I could not let this part of my birthday pass without some piece of introspection which mainly revolved around the fortune of my life and the times where I have been so wrapped up in said fortune that I have let it stop me from taking certain risks. And while I was musing around in all of that I was brought back to the lightness of the day when one of the boys placed a large laundry basket over his head, began roaring and then started chasing some of the other kids around like a deranged monster. I laughed so hard I almost fell over and lamented that the price of growing up is the precious commodity found in children: living purely in the here and now and not being aware of, or worried about, life in the larger context. Once the moment of the laundry monster had passed I went back to my previous train of thought and found myself tying the two moments together. These kids, who are more in the present moment than most people could ever hope to be, have very little in the way of personal possessions and those things they do own have probably been donated in a charity drive from a far off place and maybe this is one of the factors which produces what I judge to be a less inhibited lifestyle here in Jamaica. To quote Mr. Dylan, “When you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.”

Once our time with the kids was up we indulged in a truly tourist activity: a boat tour of Black River and its crocodile inhabitants. They are all over this thing and these tour boats bring you right up next to them to the point where the crew leans out the door and either drops fresh pieces of chicken in the water for them, pets them, or both. And while the captain’s offer to jump in and swim for a while was tempting on this hot day, there was something about these beasts and their open jaws that kept me in the boat.

We bid adieu to the crocodiles and the folks of Black River and made our way back to Treasure Beach by way of seldom-traveled roads. The condition of these thoroughfares was so bad that my back and butt begged me to revert to the tactic used in February when we descended from the Blue Mountains – stand in the bed of the truck, hold on the to the makeshift roll bar and duck whenever branches come along. This worked much better and provided a really great point of view for taking in the landscape. Extra thick rain clouds gathered over the mountaintops in the distance while directly above us and out towards the sea was the clearest sky around.

We arrived in Treasure Beach around 5:00pm which left us plenty of time to take in one more touristy thing which is been on my list of things to do since the moment I set foot on the island: Pelican Bar. The Pelican Bar is a fine establishment built on a sandbar 1 km out at sea. It is the most rickety structure I have ever seen; it is made of sticks and plywood and I would not be surprised if chewing gum were holding it together. I used to build forts more stable than this. For a moderate fee we hired Joseph Brown, captain of the One Love, to take us out there to drink overpriced beer. By way of comparison, a Red Strip at the bar up the road from where I live costs $90 Jamaican which is the equivalent of $1.50 in the States. However, at the Pelican Bar a Red Strip will cost you $200 Jamaican, which is the same as $4.00 US. I guess I wasn’t paying so much for the beer but more for the chance to sit at a bar in the open water with a completely unobstructed view of the sunset. We arrived at this watering hole an hour before the sun dipped below the horizon and watched in wonder as it peeked from behind scattered clouds and changed the color of its canvass from yellow to orange to a fiery pink. Check it out.

All that was left for the day was a boat trip back to shore, a breezy drive back to Bull Savannah and burgers and fries for dinner. My day’s companions surprised me with a birthday cake and we scarffed it all down with a vengeance. I love cake and more specifically, frosting! We may be limited to dial up access for the internet here but I can still get frosting so all is not lost.

For some reason 32 is hitting me with a certain weight; and I mean that figuratively of course. Those of you who know me intimately are aware of my inability to weight more than 160 pounds and yes, I hear you all groaning in disgust. I don’t feel physically older than I did yesterday, last month or last year but for some reason there is a sobering effect when I say the number “32.” Of course when it’s framed in the context my Uncle Jim used it doesn’t seem so bad. “I was at your christening party in Boston for chrissakes!” he wrote. “Stop it already!”

And it would appear I may not be the only one that will have a birthday around here. One of the dogs here, Petruscha, has gone into labor tonight. She’s been carrying puppies in her belly for a while and we have eagerly anticipated their delivery and there is still time for one to be born and share a birthday with me. The whole thing really makes me miss my own dogs, Mojo and Savannah, but it also reminds me of how many good things there are in my life and if you are reading this, you are counted among those many good things. Thank you.

Worship Is An Attitude...

2007-03-31T11:51:00.000-05:00

It’s not uncommon to look down on stereotypes; they put people or things in nice little mental containers which inform our judgments and don’t always leave room for assumptions to be properly dismissed. But let’s be honest, stereotypes exist for a reason and I am reminded of this fact every time my mom’s side of the family gets together. For those of you in the cheap seats who may not know, my mom’s family is Italian and I can already hear my cousin Lauren interjecting, “It’s the half that saves us!” And it’s the stereotype of the physically demonstrative Italian that probably causes people to say to me, “No wonder you’re so good at sign language. You’re used to talking with your hands.” So when I found myself at a Pentecostal function named “Glory In The House,” I was not surprised at all to see the experience live up to a barrage of stereotypes.

“Glory In The House” is an annual fundraiser for the church that my friend, Miss Anne, belongs to and it’s a night-long event wherein different choirs or individual singers get on stage and, with an accompanying band, perform a variety of religious songs. People literally came from all over the island for this and as more and more people arrived it was clear that this was going to last as long as necessary in order for the Lord to be properly praised. When I first arrived and walked in the door people just sort of fixed their gazes on me in a “Well I’ll be damned” kind of way and I could not tell if it was because of the color of my skin or because I was not wearing a suit but the more I reflect on it, I seriously think it was the latter reason. Seriously, whether the participants were local or came from the other side of Jamaica, they were dressed to the nines and those who were in choirs were in outfits, and I mean outfits, Jack! With hats to match, no less! It was very impressive.

Our emcee for the night was a member of the community who, though younger than me, carries the official title of “Elder.” I’m not sure of the semantics in all of it but as Miss Anne tried to explain to me, it’s a title which reflects not so much age as it does the person’s leadership within the community. This would also explain the youth of the pastor who has recently taken over in the wake of the death of their former one. These two men were highly energetic, very passionate and really able to work this crowd into a frenzy. The emcee was especially good at this in between acts.

As he explained at the beginning of the night, each group or person was limited to two pieces, a stipulation which I originally thought might keep the night rather short. However, once he made his way through the list of rules (one of which was to not hold ourselves back in the praising of the Lord) the performances started and I quickly learned why each group was limited to only two songs. These songs went on for what seemed like a lifetime. Versus were sung 3 or 4 times over and in one instance, I counted a refrain sung 27 times.

The energy was so high at times that I could not help but start dancing too. Those of you familiar with ska music know what it sounds like and are familiar with the style of dance which accompanies it. Since I am a huge fan of ska I felt obligated to start “skankin’” right there in the aisle. It was truly infectious, if not a little repetitive. (See the “sung 27 times” reference above.) And as I wrote earlier, in between each act the emcee would keep the energy up and here is where the stereotypes kicked in.

He would very often continue the recently completed (or so I thought) song, thereby taking our refrain count from 27 up into the 30’s, and would then steer the band into a familiar sounding gospel set. Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the movie “The Blues Brothers” but towards the beginning, Jake and Elwood are instructed to head to a church on the South side of Chicago and visit Reverend Cleophis (I think that’s the name), a character played by the late James Brown. In this gospel number the parishioners start dancing, singing and jumping around in a way which played right into the well known gospel stereotype. Then, in a most divine manner, a holy light comes shining through a stained-glass window and bathe Jake and Elwood in its glory causing them to start dancing up and down the aisle in this possessed way which makes them look like they are running in place. Jake (played by the late John Belushi) even starts doing back flips all over the joint. For those of you familiar with the scene, I’ll give you a minute to compose yourselves.

I now found myself in that very scene and came about an inch away from running in place a-la Jake and Elwood. But I refrained.

The meeting of stereotypes continued when the music ended and the elder began asking for a barrage of “Alleluias,” “Amens,” and “Praise the Lord!” This was especially comedic for me, not in a sense of ridicule, but more because in the course of the night we, as a group, were asked for an “Alleluia” about 300 times and I could not respond. For those of you wondering why, Catholics refrain from saying “Alleluia” during Lent which, among other reasons, helps underscore the joyous season of Easter for us. As soon as Easter rolls around, “Alleluia” is said like it’s going out of style but on this night I had to refrain. However, every time I was asked to shout something else, I responded most enthusiastically. I even drew a few strange looks and all I could do was shrug my shoulders as if to say, “Hey, he told us not to hold back.”

By about 11:00pm, I must confess, I had had my fill of glory and was ready to call it a night but because my car was blocked in by five others, I was in it for the long haul. A haul which became longer once the singing ended and someone took the microphone and encouraged anyone in the crowd who was in need of the Holy Spirit to come towards the stage for an intervention. It was past midnight at this point and now I was starting to get salty but fortunately the drivers of the cars which blocked me in were ready to call it a night too. Alleluia!

This was by far one of the most colorful experiences I have had since coming here. I have never been to anything like that back in the States and it was vastly different than anything I have seen in a Catholic Mass; which is both a good and bad thing in my judgment. But that is for another time.

Can I get an “Amen?”

Open Letter to 3rd Form W...

2007-03-30T22:49:00.000-05:00

Dear 3^rd Form W,

Today I presided over your end-of-term English and Music exams, an experience which was probably as much work for me as it was for you as I constantly scanned the room to discourage you from cheating at any given moment – and believe me, some of you were deliberately trying to cheat! The experience was truly an eternal one for as you probably felt the minutes fly by and dwindle down, they seemed to grow longer and longer as I just stood there staring at you.

For more than two hours I watched you toil over such simple tasks as remembering and comprehending a paragraph you had just read, or creating from your imagination a simple scenario given nothing but a location and time of day, and of course picking out simple pieces of grammar such as nouns and verbs. As for your Music exam, I am not saying that I could successfully explain the differences in musical developments of the 21^st century as opposed to the 16^th without having studied, but I like to think I could have made a decent show of it. On the other hand, I have not studied music since I was younger than you and I recognize a full rest from a quarter rest when I see it and to know that for many of you the difference between success and failure in this realm is simply the application of yourselves in an intentioned, focused and disciplined way is staggering to me.

Apparently, though, all was not lost this day because I stumbled across an important realization and an insightful piece of learning that I otherwise might not have had.

Standing there watching you fret over the Greek origin of the word “music,” I began to see you in a way that you probably cannot see yourselves. I saw glimpses of your capacity, that of which you are capable. I saw icebergs of potential whose very tops, which appear obvious on the surface, pale in comparison to the gargantuan collection underneath the water.

The ability to look at someone and see them in this way is one which comes with time, experience, and God willing, a bit of maturity and I know all of this because as it flashes through my consciousness it has a familiar ring to it. Not the familiarity that it is something I have said before but rather something I have heard. It is exactly what was told to me when I was your age and something I similarly refused to let permeate me. And one of the sad ironies of life is that such insight and observation is often passed on to those who need to hear it and it is completely lost on them.

It is what I have come to realize many adults were right in telling me for you see, I was once very much like you. I did what I was assigned but only did enough to get by and hardly anything more. Sometimes I did even less. And as I slowly paced in between the desks of the classroom today, periodically peering over your should to see if you could figure out how to spell “Pythagoras,” I saw in my mind’s eye moments in my childhood and adolescence where I sold myself short when it came to pushing myself to achieve the potential others saw in me. I was reminded of the rule my father put in place when I was 12; for every hour of television I wanted to watch, I had to read for an hour first. And I remembered how I abandoned both activities in favor of playing basketball or riding my bicycle. Today I was acutely reminded of the not-so-subtle urgings of my mother to study for the regional spelling bee of which I was going to take part when I was ten years old. And I remember being knocked out after my third word: various. Since that day I have never forgotten how to spell that word, nor have I forgotten the sting of disappointment which may have been staved off a little more that day had I simply picked up my study guide instead of a video game controller.

But I am not telling you anything you have not heard already, am I? You can accomplish anything you want to. You know this. You know it in your marrow. But you know equally as well that no one is going to do it for you and I think you are scared. You are scared to try and fail. You are scared of how you will look if that happens. Moreover, you are scared to succeed and of what that will look like. For if you succeed while the masses do not, you will be ostracized. You will be different. You will not fit and you will be ridiculed.

And that sucks.

You see, you are at that age when children are severely courted by the trappings of appearances, popularity, and belonging. And it is around this time when the talons of said beasts grab you and make those first and deepest of cuts, and the cost of letting them do so is mediocrity; to play beneath your intelligence so people will like you more – or at least pretend to. In the fourth and fifth formers I see this trade off of potential for acceptance many times over, and I see many of you poised to follow in their footsteps. I also see many of you simply standing at the edge of that path, reading its signs and giving consideration to traveling along it. But I also so you aware of the path which sits beside it, a path whose boundaries are hard work and sacrifice but whose destination is character. It is a path less chosen for obvious reasons.

Why do I tell you this? As I have already written, these are things you inherently know. Well, I am not writing this for you. I am writing it for me. For a time I thought that the window within which I could expand myself, live up to and possibly exceed my potential and achieve the most grand and glorious dreams for myself had past. I was lulled to sleep by the same aforementioned mediocrity. And standing here today, watching you struggle with something which is monumental today but in the future will be like a drop in the ocean of your life, I came to realize that I still have within me so much I can do with my life and it is all too often and easily that I forget that.

I am 31 years old. Next week, I’ll be 32. Some of you look at me and say, “Sir, ya old,” and in some respects, you are right. And then I am reminded of Jake, a man I met last summer in Chicago while taking my dogs to a dog park. Jake was there with his dog, a poodle which had taken a liking to my dogs, Mojo and Savannah. As is typically the custom at the dog park, he and I began talking and I quickly learned much about this man, now in his 70’s. He had many careers in his life and had just finished a book about Chicago firefighters; a project born out of an instinct to photograph a burning mattress. He gave me his card and promised to keep me informed about the release of the book and in a reply to my first e-mail to him he wrote,

“I remember when an old [guy] like me said I was a bright and talented young man, and of course, I didn’t believe him. Twenty years later I did. Don’t wait that long.”

Jake is at least 30 to 40 years my senior and given his time, experience and maturity, he is able to see in me a capacity that I sometimes cannot even fathom. But if I draw a parallel between the potential my elders see in me and the potential I see in you, I can’t help but believe it is one of those universally applicable truths to any phase of life. And armed with that knowledge, I can move forward confident that there is nothing I cannot do.

From a sarcastic and cynical lens, I might thank you for underachieving, not living up to your potential and for playing beneath your intelligence, but I won’t. However, I do thank you for being my teacher today. You have given me a tremendous gift and have reminded me of a most important lesson that I need to keep in mind and practice.

Sincerely,

Mr. Konold

Teaching...

2007-03-20T19:13:00.000-05:00

As I wrote just before I came back to the U.S., I spent a respectable window of time teaching English classes throughout the day and if it taught me anything, it taught me that I have no desire to be a teacher with a classroom, grade book, lesson plan, papers to grade, etc. To those of you out there who fit that mold, I say again: I do not know how you do it and can only assume it is out of an absolute love of the job.

Seeing as how I am not trained in any official capacity as an English teacher I often found myself at my desk at night reading up on what I was going to teach the next day. As many of you know I studied engineering in college, have always had a natural aptitude for math and science and that my interest in the written word has only come about in the last five to seven years. Had the fathers asked me to take over the math classes, I would not have been worried at all because I have seen the math they are teaching and its very easy for me: tangents to circles forming right angles with radii and all of the angles involved, polynomial expressions, matrices – God I love that stuff!

English, however, is a horse of a different color. Yes, I sit down and crank out these posts and for the most part they are coherent, structured, and make some sense but let’s be honest, if I were to be officially graded or edited within the confines of proper grammar, I tend to think my writing would be an abomination to whoever invented said rules. Let’s call a spade a spade here – I love commas too much, I don’t know when it is appropriate to use a semicolon or a comma, I’m jumping between past and present tense in the is post like it’s my job, and up until the other day, I had no idea that there are only four types of sentences.

Was that a run on sentence? Probably. Who cares?

I am sure Ms. Cote tried to drill all of the above into my head in 8^th grade but it, along with a lot of other information which might leave readers with the impression that I actually have a grasp on that which is my native language, has long since gone the way of the 8-track for me. Needless to say, this realization was a stark one and so I did my best to brush up on that which I was trusted to impart to the youth of Jamaica.

The lowest form I met with was third form, which is equivalent to high school freshman, and given the fact that there is a lack in educational consistency here, some of the students in this class are as young as 13 and some as old as 15 or 16 which makes things more interesting. This form focuses solely on basic tenants of English such as grammar and composition and it is not until fourth or fifth form that they start to hone their focus on prose, drama and poetry. The entire time I was with third form we focused on the art of writing persuasive arguments and the theory of having a topic sentence around which the entire piece will be built, an introduction, a body and a conclusion. Let me reiterate how much of what I was teaching them was almost like new information to me. It all made sense and with some reflection I could think of times where I had applied these principles myself, I just had not thought of them in these concrete terms and theories, I just did them. On the flip side of these proud moments however, were sobering realizations of just how mercilessly I can slaughter English and have practically zero grasp of the past perfect participle tense.

As we moved through the unit in the lesson book it was clear that absolutely nothing was holding their attention so I decided to try a different tactic and switched gears in the hopes that learning by doing might help. Given that there are two white boards in the room I decided that we would structure a persuasive argument on each board, arguments which were opposing view points. I split the class down the middle and the group on my left was assigned the task of arguing why homework should be abolished while the other side constructed an argument as to why it should not. I got only a little mileage out of this trick; as soon as we got past a topic sentence the wheels fell off and neither side could give reasons beyond “because it’s boring,” and “because it helps you learn,” respectively.

Muscling my way through the remainder of that class, as well as the rest of the times I met with the third form to ponder the mysteries of the universe, was not always easy and I found myself relying on what I have learned from my parents and former teachers when it came to restoring order to student behavior run amuck.

Fourth and Fifth form were beasts of a different nature because they were of the mind that since I was not Fr. Anthony the typical rules did not apply and they could therefore get away with murder. On one occasion while meeting with a smaller group of Fifth form students to study MacBeth, one student who is not particularly fond of me walked in, saw that Fr. Anthony was gone and then walked out and skipped class. This typically results in a student being suspended but I went a different route and he now owes me a 500 word essay on responsibility, making choices and the consequences that come about as a result.

What kills me about this kid is that he is by far one of the smartest in the school but given his small and scrawny stature and the fact that he has been transplanted from Canada, he knows he would be utterly ostracized and so he plays dumb enough to fit in but not so dumb that his grades will suffer too much. There are quite a few students of this ilk in the upper forms and it is painful to realize that some of them can wrap their minds around standard deviation but cannot spell the word “because.” Conversely, other students are able to point out dramatic irony in MacBeth but only complete one side of a two-sided math test – and she did not even start at the beginning. She completed the side numbered 26 to 43, not 1 to 25.

It’s an uphill battle, to be sure and there are days where it seems surrender would be easier. Of course none of this is really news to me having witnessed my mother’s life as a teacher but it takes on a new dimension now that I am the one turning off lights, standing in silence at the front of the room and keeping an entire class in silence in a room for an extended period of time at the end of the school day. Hell, this is probably God’s sadistic way of paying me back for just how much of a terror I probably was when my mother was my 3^rd grade teacher.

You read that correctly, friends. Mrs. Konold was my 3^rd grade teacher and I have no doubt that Our Lady of Cosmic Justice is exacting her pound of flesh from me in this experience as a teacher.

Mail Bag...

2007-03-13T21:43:00.000-05:00

My mind is sort of taxed for ideas lately mainly because I have been put through the wringer in the last week. Fr. Anthony took off for the States to do some mission preaching and as a result, all of his English classes have become my responsibility and I have found myself jumping between grammar, prose, drama, and poetry not to mention students ranging from 13 years old to 20. Fortunately this writer is headed home to the U.S. for a brief stay. I have some business to take care of back home, ‘things and stuff’ you might say, not the least of which is to visit see how my mother is doing after her second cochlear implant surgery. Besides, I am kind of eager to set foot in my mother country.

And so I’m going to borrow an idea from a writer at ESPN.com, Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy). He has a legion of readers who e-mail him religiously and every now and then he composes an article which is nothing more than answers to their questions. So, while I am off on my side trip, I leave you with the answers to questions many of you have asked in your individual e-mails. Since many of you seem to be asking the same question, this will save me a little time. The number you find next to the question is the number of times it has come my way.

Enjoy…

-Are you sleeping any better than when you left? (7)

Yes, but it has more to do with being so tired at the end of the day that I have no choice but to sleep the night through. Recently my alarm has been going off at 5:00am, by the time I actually put my feet on the floor it’s 5:30 and then things just start coming at me. However, I don’t think my body has fully acclimated to things here. I sleep but it’s not a truly deep sleep. I toss and turn a lot and need to wear ear plugs because the guard dogs tend to bark at just about anything and everything at night.

-Are you getting really tan? (9)

It depends on whether or not I have had time to be in the sun. Most days find me inside a classroom so it’s not like I have a ton of time to work on it. Thank goodness for weekends and random breaks of the school year which provide ample opportunity to head to the beach. Since I wear my sandals every day, I have some cool tan lines on my feet.

-How’s the ganja there? (11)

Coming down here, I knew there would be one or two of you who would inquire about the chronic but I did not expect to receive this many inquiries. It’s pervasive here. In fact, the day I first arrived in December and was being driven along the coast, I kept picking up the scent of it in the air. Turns out the locals will collect tall grass, weeds, brush and the like, gather it all into a pile and light it so it creates a huge field of smoke which serves to fend off mosquitoes, a practice I fully condone. The thing is, all of it smells like marijuana that you would come across in the states which caught me off guard the first few times.

Now, the stuff which is grown and smoked by locals is much stronger and every once in a while I come across a local with a spliff the size of a Louisville Slugger hanging out of his mouth. Those are special moments.

-Do the kids call you Mark or Mr. Konold? (5)

The students try to call me Mr. Konold but they slaughter it. Many of the students in the upper grades call me Mr. O’Conner but that has more to do with the play, “The Glass Menagerie” than anything else. One of the characters in the play, Jim O’Conner, is one that I was once assigned in an acting class. Once they learned this and they equated “Konold” with “O’Conner” and when I explain the correction, it suddenly becomes Mr. O’Konold. Once this becomes too difficult to comprehend, they simply go the route many of the lower level grades have and call me Mr. Chicago.

-What’s it like living in a trailer? (15)

It’s definitely a learning experience when you consider that a year ago I was occupying a modest but well-outfitted condo. Everything I have taken with me for the journey fits in a suitcase and a duffle bag and fits in a 10’ x 10’ room. The bathroom I use is narrow and rectangular in shape and without fully extending my arms fully at my side, I can touch both of the walls which contribute to the narrow shape. At night as I’m falling asleep it’s not uncommon to hear something scurrying in the ceiling and I haven’t quite figured out if I’m hearing mice, cockroaches, lizards or all three. At night, with the window open, it gets very cool and comfortable but it can turn into an oven on a hot day. Thankfully the school schedule keeps me out of my room for the majority of the day so I don’t have to contend with it too often.

-What kind of food do they eat there? (3)

Chicken and pork are often the staple around which a meal is built and of course, there are a million things you can do with both. There isn’t much in the way of steak but they definitely fancy goat, especially curried goat. Rice and peas usually accompanies every meal here and sometimes instead of peas, the rice is decorated with peanuts and that’s always a nice treat.

Ackee is a natural fruit which is grown here but once it’s cooked it looks and feels a lot like scrambled eggs. It is not uncommon to pair it with breadfruit (a local product which grows on trees and can be the size of a small bowling ball) and salt fish.

Jerk shacks can be found just about everywhere. For those of you who don’t know, jerk is a type of spicy seasoned marinade. Done correctly, it’s absolutely heavenly. Done marginally, it’s still damn good. Done poorly? Just wash it all down with Red Stripe and ya cris, boss.

-When are you going to share some pictures? (12)

I’ve started posting some of them via Google’s photo sharing program, Picasa. Simply head to http://picasaweb.google.com/markckonold and you can see the galleries I have there. I don’t have a whole lot posted because the only access I have is dial up and to upload at that speed is painful.

Are they trying to get you to stay longer? (4)

I think they would like me to stay as long as I possibly can. They put me to good use in any way they can and since the situation here is always in flux, having extra bodies around is a good thing. My original plan was to stay here until the end of March but the Monsignor asked that I stay until the conclusion of the school year so as to not reinforce the message to the kids that adults run out on the things they start.

Is it common for people to just show up and volunteer or do they go through some sort of organized group? (2)

Going the route that I did, just showing up to help out, is uncommon. Usually when people are introduced to the work which goes on via the Diocese of Mandeville, it is through an organized outing wherein a church will send a troop of volunteers down here for a small window of time to build houses and help out in other capacities. If people are so moved, they might arrange to come down for a longer period of time. My decision to just pack up and head down here like this is on the unconventional side.

How are you doing against the mosquitoes? (6)

Much better these days. I don’t know if my skin has adapted at all but they don’t seem to bother me like they did when I first arrived. However, it is still a matter of awareness around things like wearing shoes in the first hours of the morning instead of sandals. The other night I was sitting down and felt my left elbow itching and I looked at it only to see seven mosquito bites on it. The little buggers are fast, I tell you.

Where There's Smoke...

2007-03-05T19:28:00.000-06:00

Aside from the laughs had around Saturday night’s adventure, yesterday was fairly quiet. I spent most of my day in my room going over my plans for the week; what material I was going to cover in class, other projects on which I was going to work, etc. After about three hours my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that it was time to pick up where I had left off at breakfast.

As I grabbed the last three slices of leftover pizza out of the fridge and reheated them in the microwave, the phone rang. I picked it up and on the other end was Dr. Carol, a missionary doctor who frequently comes down here to run a clinic and who has made a name for herself in this community. “There’s a fire down the road near Phelipe and Anthony’s house. I think it’s a parishioner’s house; you guys may want to get down there and take a look at it.” I relayed the message to one of the priests here and 30 seconds later we were in the car and on our way.

Like most spectacles of fire, a crowd had gathered; as we approached we passed pedestrians who were leisurely walking towards the commotion which had gathered the locals. A fire truck was there and the firemen had already extinguished 99 percent of the blaze while the throng of locals stood around talking. The family who had just lost everything was safe and no one was harmed but everything, and I mean everything, they owned had been incinerated. One of the family members was napping and the fire woke him. He dashed out of the house, realized that a baby of the family was still in there, raced back in, grabbed the child and once again exited the burning building.

They are a family of 8 and they were living in housing provided by Food For the Poor. These prefabricated wooden houses take practically no time to assemble and have a footprint of 12 feet by 12 feet. This family was fortunate in that they were living in a larger version of this housing which was nothing more than two of these units put together. Less than 600 square feet of wooden house sitting atop a foundation of cinder blocks was their home and it went up like a tinder box in record time. Anything which was not made of cement was reduced to a layer of charred ash and the only recognizable items were a microwave and a refrigerator. During the fire the four sides of the latter appliance had peeled away from each other like a banana and curled down towards the floor leaving it looking like a piece of apocalyptic art work.

Around me people walked and talked while members this family cried out in agony realizing that the only clothes they had now were the ones they were wearing, they had no money, no food, no personal possessions of any kind and an even bleaker horizon that the one to which they had woken up. Last week someone had given them a generous cash donation and since they do not have the means with which to open a bank account, they kept it in a locked room in this house and now, with everything else, it all went up in smoke. The poorest of the poor had just been kicked while already writhing on the floor. An elder woman in this family, probably around 65, simply sat in a doorway of a neighboring house smoking a cigarette and cried, “God give me the strength. God give me the strength.”

This former house sat behind two other houses, each of them made of concrete but with only a flimsy hollow core door protecting the innards of the homes, and given the proximity of the blaze, neighbors rushed in to empty them of all their personal belongings just in case. A fourth house sat off to the side of these three about 20 yards away. About 70 people gathered and moved about clamoring and talking, some of them trying to figure out how they were going to provide for the family in crisis. It was determined that among the neighbors, this family in crisis will have a place to stay and that today would begin the work of scraping together some petty cash, clothes and new housing either donated or paid for through various means.

I felt pretty useless standing there looking at the smoldering remains and watching this gathering of people. My eyes drifted from image to image; a bed frame that had been pulled from the blaze whose metal and wood frame was charred black and letting off white smoke, a dresser that had been somewhat salvaged and was now warped and contorted from the fire and water, the gray concrete foundation and its newly acquired black scars. As the wind came up the mountainside it carried the smoke of the fire over all of us and many people took to covering their noses and mouths with their shirts and then turned their backs to the smoke to shield their eyes and their lungs. I turned my head to the side to avoid the blast of smoke and my eyes met those of a girl who could not have been older than three. Having found as much privacy as she could carve out in this moment, she was squatting over some weeds with her shorts around her ankles and was peeing. She just stared at me as if it was a normal occurrence, pulled up her shorts and went back to playing.

The entire episode seemed surreal and the smoke which blanketed the area ever now and then gave it the look and feel of a somewhat cryptic dream. “Maybe I am dreaming,” I thought. “Or maybe I was hit by an oncoming car while trying to my broken one last night and now I’m in some sort of purgatorial limbo thing.” The fact that I haven’t gotten more than five hours of sleep on any given night in the past week might have had a little something to do with it too.

Having done all he could do to help in this moment, Fr. Sam collected me and we drove back to the compound. “So now what,” I asked him.

“Well, we’ll have an emergency meeting with some people tomorrow and see if we can ease their suffering. We’ll try and get some money together for them, see if we can get some clothes donated and beg for some housing from someone.”

“And that’s just how it goes here,” I asked.

“Yes,” he said plainly. “We do what we can.”

Driver's Ed...

2007-03-04T15:18:00.000-06:00

I knew it was only a matter of time before I got behind the wheel here and given what I’ve written in the past about the motor vehicle culture of Jamaica, I simply assumed it would be a memorable experience. But as I have said before, the Almighty has a sense of humor and I had no idea what awaited me.

A couple of weeks ago the monsignor came up to me and said, “Since we have the mid-term break coming up, if you and the other volunteers want to take one of the cars and head off to YS Falls or something, that’s fine.” This offer, having been made in the not-too-distant past might still have been on the table and so I approached him and asked, “Monsignor, I kind of feel like I’m 16 again but, can I use the car tonight?”

“And where would you be going, young man?”

“Little Ochie.”

“And with whom?”

“Miss Anne.”

(pause)

“You can take the blue car; just make sure you’re home by midnight and not a minute later!”

You see, during the week one of the teachers of the school and I decided that this weekend we would head out for a few drinks at a local establishment called “Little Ochie”. It’s a bar/restaurant which literally sits on the beach. They have creatively converted row boats into booths by suspending them four feet off the sand, installing small sets of stairs which lead up to said boat, and placed a table in the middle of it for your dining pleasure. These elevated booths, along with picnic tables scattered here and there, are sheltered with thatched canopies and provide great views of the Caribbean Sea. It is really quite an ingenious and cute idea and every spot is within reach of not only the main bar but the waves as well.

Just after sunset, with a few slices of pizza to simmer down my appetite, I was on the open roads of Jamaica. It was my first time driving on the left hand side of the road and on the right hand side of a car. It took about five minutes to acclimate to it all but I really didn’t have too much time to think about it because oncoming traffic “soon come” and I had to learn very quickly how to negotiate a very small road in a very small car.

One of the biggest adjustments came whenever I had to execute a turn, especially when said turn involved a stop sign. My instinct is, of course, that my flow of traffic comes from the left and that when I turn I will find myself on the right side of the road. Having to completely reverse my thinking, I began to wonder just how many aspects of driving have become automatic (no pun intended) and that maybe a refresher of a driver’s manual is in order when I get back to Chicago later this year. My license is up for renewal anyway so I can tackle it then. Back to our present story.

I wove my way around corners, dodged potholes and did my best to make room for other cars and to not hit pedestrians but the way things were going, I could have sworn that the good people of Jamaica had conspired earlier in the day to make sure I encountered all of those obstacles at the same time repeatedly. Yes, I was thrown right into the deep end, folks, and I was determined not to drown.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that I only a vague idea of where I was going. Signage on this island can best be described as pathetic and magically every destination is “just around the corner.” Combine that with the fact that the last time I had made this trek I was but a passenger in the car, I was sure that my odds of getting utterly lost were very high. But fortune smiled on the daring, as they say, and I was soon united with my friend and we were off to Little Ochie.

The drive there was an eventful one, to be sure, as we navigated the local happenings of the area. Saturday night was in full swing and I often had to dodge parked cars and congregations of people. The practice of setting buildings away from a roadside or making room for parking is practically non existent and so a road, which is barely wide enough for two cars, becomes even more treacherous as one third of it is taken up by parked vehicles. On our way we passed three or four exotic dancing establishments and every one of them had a group of guys outside huddled around a grill, drinking and swapping stories.

Now, I’m not here to condone or admonish exotic dancing, however, I would be remiss if I did not mention my bewilderment. That someone would take in enough exotic dancing as a spectator and manage to fit in a meal is, well, odd to me. I do not usually equate the two activities but apparently that is how it’s done here in Jamaica. Fair enough. Eyes on the road. Let’s move on.

As I described above, Little Ochie is perfectly situated on the beach. To boot, it has an almost dive-like quality to it and to someone from Chicago, the prospect of drinking at a beachfront bar in March is heavenly. The crashing waves added a nice touch to the atmosphere and the weekend’s full moon meant there was no need for exterior illumination. All that was missing was a cheesy, four chord pop song playing in the background. Instead there was a 20 foot high speaker stack and a DJ pumping reggae tunes with the bass blasting at levels high enough to disintegrate kidney stones. I had to take the good with the bad, I guess.

After a few hours at our magical locale we decided to call it a night and our return trip was not too dissimilar from our original drive. The end of the night looked to be fairly uneventful. Then the accelerator broke.

While taking my friend home to her town of Southfield we passed through Top Hill, so named because it sits at the top of a hill; a very long and steep one at that. It was on said hill that the throttle cable attached to the accelerator snapped rendering the car useless. In one moment we were cruising along nicely and the next, I suddenly found the pedal was to the floor and the engine was slowing down to an idle. These two things, for obvious reasons, did not go together and in the time it took for my brain to make sense of it all we had ceased moving forward and were starting to roll backwards. Realizing that our reverse momentum was more of a priority than figuring out just what the hell was going on, I moved the car out of harm’s way. Without a flashlight, tools or any knowledge of this car, it quickly became clear that my ability to MacGyver my way out of this was practically non-existent. Our only hope was to make some phone calls and get Raymond out here to save the day.

A word about Raymond: He is a brother in the Mission Society of Mandeville and will be ordained a priest in July. Originally from Manitoba, he came here ten years ago as a volunteer, realized his calling to religious life and has walked that path ever since. As I have mentioned in the past, each member of the society seems to fill a particular role and Raymond is the Swiss Army Knife of the group; a role I have become accustom to playing in certain circles so he and I get along nicely. He can fix just about anything and if he can’t fix it at first, give him twenty minutes to figure it out and he will. When something mechanical breaks he is the first person we call. The phrase, “Get Raymond” is used as often as the word “Amen” and this was, once again, a time to “Get Raymond.”

After some abrupt midnight phone calls wherein I woke up half the house, Raymond was soon on his way and arrived at our troublesome scene in ten minutes. It was quickly decided that I would use his truck to finish taking Miss Anne home while he attempted to fix the problem. If he was still working on it upon my return, we would leave the car until the next day and if he was not there, it meant he was successful and I would simply meet him at home.

Fortunately this car had experienced the same problem in December and since he was the one to fix it then, he quickly re-fixed it now. As I approached the place where I had left him, he was gone so I continued home and met up with him there. After a few laughs about the whole thing it was time to retire. Sunday morning prayers and Mass were “just around the corner.”

Little 'Ol Me...

2007-02-19T22:26:00.000-06:00

In July of 2004 my sister got married and in true Italian style, the whole family was invited which meant cousins and their respective spouses and/or significant others. One of said couples was my cousin Andrea and her husband Conrad. Conrad is a hard core Bostonian. In fact, that last sentence did not do him justice; it should have read, “Hahd cohr Bostonian. Yankees suck!”

Much of the initial conversation that day revolved around catching each other up on our various endeavors since he and my cousin had made a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit me the year before and at some point I began telling him of the work I was beginning to do with the Theatre Arts Program of Thresholds, Illinois’ largest psychosocial rehab center. I told him how they use story theatre as a means of artistic expression for those living with mental illness but also as a tool to help inform people about what mental illness is and what it is not.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty amazing. You know, a lot of times in the summer I eat my lunch in a park near where I work and I see people who seem out of it, or talk to themselves – who are probably mentally ill – and they come up and ask me for some change or something, so I give it to them because I want to help out a little. And it gets me down because I think, ‘There is such a huge problem in the world, what can I do to change it? I’m just Little ‘Ol Me.’”

That was in 2004. Fast forward to yesterday.

I was making my way toward the high school building and crossed paths with one of my favorite students here. “Sir,” she started, “Are you a teacher back in America?”

“Nope.”

“Then why you come here to help the faddah’s teach?”

“Because it seemed like a good thing to do right now.”

“Do you have a job in America?”

“Sort of. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Did you leave a job to come here?”

“Not exactly, but I left a lot of other things.”

“Why did you throw everything away to come to Jamaica?”

“I didn’t really throw it all away. Much of it is waiting for my return.”

“Okay. Sir, I’m glad you’re here. I’m learning a lot from you.”

With that, she walked off.

This girl is one of my favorites here because her story is a complete inspiration. She is one of the smartest kids in this whole school and I know I mentioned her in one of my posts from my first trip down her. When I grade papers for her class, I always save hers for last because it will be the most well written, most intelligent one in the bunch and I can then end my experience on a high note. She has so much potential and such a future in front of her I’m almost afraid to bring it to light for fear of jinxing it.

The amazing part of her story is that she doesn’t have all of her school books simply because they are too expensive. She is here on a scholarship, which has been donated by a benefactor oversees, and during the day she is known to borrow from her classmates the books she does not have and she studies during her breaks and off periods. She accomplishes all of her homework, studies as much as she can and then returns the books to their owners by the end of the day and she nearly aces every test she takes. She does so well, in fact, that when I came back in January she told me, “I’m thinking of dropping English because it’s tough and if I don’t do well I won’t make the honor roll.”

“That’s a possibility,” I said. “But if you drop it you will make the honor roll the easy way. Where’s the fun in that? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to know you walked the harder path?”

“Yes,” she responded, almost knowing where I was headed next.

“Besides, I have a feeling you’ll rock the class anyway. You’re very smart.”

“Sir, what does that mean?’

“What?”

“‘Rock the class.’”

Right.

In an entry detailing my arrival in December, I wrote about being met at the airport by a priest and his traveling companion; an 11 year old boy who lived at the orphanage at which we stopped while I was brought to Bull Savanna. This boy, along with seven others, is brought up here from the orphanage every day, goes to his classes and is then transported back when the day is done. One of the advantages these boys have over other students is that they are always around adults who speak more than just Patois so their development at this stage is slightly ahead of other students, not to mention their reading skills. But the cost to educate them is high, as is the cost to clothe and feed them.

Some of you may be wondering what my conversation with Conrad has to do with the kids at this school. The answer is best summed up with the words of Mother Teresa. “Not everyone can do great things but everyone can do little things with great love.”

While I was home over Christmas I often told the story of the aforementioned girl and people asked how they can sponsor the cost of her books. Others expressed wanting to sponsor the tuition of some of the boys. What’s more, I have been contacted by a Kindergarten teacher I know in California (read: my sister) and her class has chosen to hold numerous mini-fund raisers to help cover the cost of a child’s books or tuition. None of these is anything on the scale of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or that of Mr. Warren Buffet but they can still be done (and will be done) with great love and I am currently working with the principlal of the high school, Fr. Sam Alloggia, to ensure that they are. Like all of the other priests I have mentioned in this space, Fr. Sam is one of the Mission Society of Mandeville and he recently told me how the mission society is registered in the U.S. as a non-profit which makes financial contributions easier to implement here.

Last week one of my old co-workers paid me a pretty high tribute in a comment to one of my posts and mentioned feeling badly that he wasn’t doing more in his life and as I mentioned at the beginning, Conrad wondered what “Little ‘Ol Me” could do. Not everyone has to quit their job and move 10,000 miles away to help out a stranger, although I might appreciate the company. A lot of you have asked if you can help and you can simply by e-mailing me and letting me know if you want to make a donation to the mission society. I’ll make sure your act of great love is successfully brought to life here..

We often hear that the greatest gift anyone can give is to lay down one’s life for another. But it doesn’t always mean you have to throw yourself in front of a bus to do it.

Blue Mountain Pt. III

2007-02-11T19:26:00.000-06:00

The top of the mountain was wide with many spots to take in the views from the four directions. To the North was the coast and in the distance, somewhere in the haze, was Cuba. Directly behind me was the South coast and Morant Bay. To the East were the John Crow Mountains and the once again to the ocean; to the West lay the remainder of the Blue Mountains and in the distance we could see the plateau where Mandeville resides. The whole island was in view and the land around us sat in the shadow of the mountain we had just conquered. To help underscore the moment I put my earphones in and played the soundtrack to Braveheart because well, why not?

The sun continued to rise casting different shades and shadows all over the place; I was taking pictures like it was going out of style and continued to marvel in the fact that in four hours we hiked up a mountain and reached the top while much of the island below us was still asleep. Of course the way I felt, you could have told me it was really 2:30pm and I probably would have believed you.

At the top of the mountain is a rundown concrete hut which people can use for shelter if necessary. It is in bad shape, parts of it crumbling, covered in graffiti and against one main wall are the remnants of fires lit for extra warmth. Many of us changed in to dry clothes that we had brought and hung our drenched items on bushes to dry in the sun. Not too long after some snacking and more pictures it was nap time. Yep, I came all the way up here to take a nap! I was out for 40 minutes and it felt great. My knee was still not happy with me but it was a small price to pay at the moment. For that window of time, I was king of the island and nothing was going to diminish that.

Nothing except for a prolonged and painful descent.

After three and a half hours of enjoying our success we decided to get out of dodge and make our way back down for lunch. Obviously the walk down was easier than the walk up, gravity was on our side and the temperature was climbing quickly. Our path down, which was slippery just a few hours before, had dried out in most places and we were able to snap even more pictures of the trail that we could not see on the way up. I managed to snap a black and white which, to me, looked like a tree offering the orb of the sun to the sky. You can find it in the “Black and White” photo album I have placed online.

By this time my knee was really starting to hurt. Every time my foot came down to support my weight a dull pain surrounded my knee and shot up my leg. It made for a long trek down and for a while, I tried taking steps by swinging my right leg out and around so as to avoid bending my knee. Awkward though it was, it certainly alleviated the pain.

Ninety minutes later we were back at Portland Gap and looking back towards the tops of the mountain, we noticed that a fog had enveloped them all and was coming steadily towards us. After twenty minutes we continued down the mountain amazed at just how steep some of the drop offs were and exactly how close we had come to a perilous fall. We rounded corners which constantly gave way to expansive views of valleys below. Soon we were back at the top of Jacob’s Ladder and walked down the switchbacks towards the bunk house and arrived back at our original starting point in a mere three hours. Lunch was waiting for us (it was the same meal as the night before) and we devoured in record time. They served coffee with it and even though I had 2 cups of it, there was zero chance of me staying awake for anything in the near future.

Back at our cabin I rinsed off the journey with a semi-cold shower. Hot water is something of a rare bird up here, as is water pressure, and I had to make due with what I had. The remainder of the day was spent recounting the journey and playing cards. There was not a whole lot of movement going on. We ventured up to the bunk house for dinner and quickly returned to our cabin for an early bedtime. My knee still didn’t like me.

We woke today for a breakfast we were told would be ready by 9:00am. Upon arriving at the bunk house we discovered that it wouldn’t be ready for another 90 minutes. This is not uncommon in Jamaica and it is one of the hardest things for me, as an American, to get used to. Eager to start our trek back to the other side of the island, we Americans decided to get breakfast on the road, piled into the monster truck and began our trip out of the Blue Mountains. I rode in the back with Emmett and it was considerably easier to take in the terrain and the effects on the truck by standing up and holding on to the roll bar for support. People in houses and towns looked at us quizzically, shouted things in Patois and waved. We waved back only to quickly return our hands to the bar for support. And of course the views continued to impress. Seeing these mountainsides in daylight, not to mention the peak we had conquered helped reinforce just how beautiful Jamaica is. John Crows, which look like a cross between a vulture and a hawk, glided in the air above the valleys letting thermals and winds direct them all over the place with practically no effort from them. I kind of wanted to stay.

About an hour later we arrived in Mavis Bank, gathered the truck we had left two days before and continued down the mountain roads to Guava Ridge, Gordon Town and finally Kingston. A short while later we were on the highway out of town and back to the half of the island we call home. My knee was still not happy with me.

The rest of today was spent crossing the island back to where we began. We have recently arrived home here in Bull Savanna, it’s late in the day, dinner “soon come” and as soon as dinner is “soon gone” it will be time to sleep.

I think I may have left something back at the mountain top. Oh well, I’ll get it when I go back.

Blue Mountain Pt. II

2007-02-10T18:34:00.000-06:00

2:00am came very quickly this morning but what came even more quickly was 1:30am. I am happy to report that it was not my anxiety which woke me up 30 minutes before my scheduled alarm but rather the need to do something about all the water I drank before going to bed. Having answered the call of nature, I returned to my bed and tried to fall back asleep but wondered what the point would be. Would an extra 30 minutes really make a difference? I didn’t want to get up and start milling about and then wake up my companions so I simply lay there with my eyes open letting my mind work at a mile a minute.

Am I physically able to do this? I’ve never tried anything like this before. How hard could it be to hike a trail?

I have heard stories of how easy it is to get lost in these mountains. What the hell would I do if that happened? Could I really survive in the mountains if I had to?

If I collected a whole bunch of coffee beans, roasted them and saved them, I could probably save myself a whole bunch of money. It might not taste as good as other coffee but it’s the principle of the matter, right?

Someone had explained the reason the coffee is so good from Blue Mountain and how the whole system here works. The coffee beans grow on plants all over the mountainside and various estates exist at various altitudes. The higher the altitude, the more prominent and wealthy the estate and as a result, one particular estate (obviously located high up and with a vast swath of land) is the preeminent coffee here. You cannot buy it in stores, only at the estate and when any high falutin’ head of state comes to Jamaica, this is the coffee served. However, the way the mountain hike was structured, we would be going nowhere near anything like this. No, we were destined for backwoods and trails no wider than me, which isn’t very wide.

At 2:00am we all woke up and spent 20 minutes gathering our things before heading up to the bunk house. Before going to bed we had arranged for Vinny, an old Jamaican with a gray beard and few teeth, to have some coffee ready for us; a sort of jolt to send us on our way. Upon arrival at the bunk house we encountered a group who had just driven in from Montego Bay with plans to camp in the mountains for the weekend. Our conversation with them stirred Vinny out of his sleep and when he came down; he offered to make it saying it would, “soon come.”

“Vinny,” we said, “everybody in Jamaica says, ‘soon come.’ We need the coffee in five minutes.”

“No, mon. It take longa dan five minutes.”

“Forget it. We want to start walking.”

Our plan was to start the trail as soon as possible and summit by 5:30am; 6:00am at the latest. We were looking at a vertical gain of roughly 3000 feet and needed to do it in four hours. The actual distance to the summit was just less than six miles and seemed easily doable and so we started, us and the newly arrived group we had just met.

Fortunately for us this group had done the hike before so they knew the way to get started. Armed with flashlights and decked in rather light clothes (it was around 70 degrees when we started) we started up a series of switchbacks they call “Jacob’s Ladder.” There are 11 in total and they are fiercely steep, not to mention gravely and riddled with deep puddles. Had it not been for the flashlights and some quick maneuvering it would have been ugly early.

It took us about 30 to 40 minutes to get through the switch backs, longer if you include the 10 minute rest we took half way through them. Early on we noticed that the trek was going to be difficult for one of our crew so we carried their pack and did what we could to make sure they weren’t left behind. I was the first to carry the extra backpack and it turned out to be a blessing because it helped balance out my own backpack which, thanks to the added gravity, was having a field day with my shoulders. This extra weight helped keep me more upright.

Once the switchbacks ended the path began to narrow and soon we found ourselves following a trail which was sometimes exposed to the night sky and sometimes covered with a canopy of branches, leaves and vines. The moments when we could see the open sky were amazing; it was as like a million diamonds on a blanket of velvet. Whenever we stopped to rest we tried to do so in an open area so we could see the heavens. As the trail went on we sometimes saw different constellations and from them were able to ascertain which side of the mountain we were on and in which direction we were facing. We came to the half way point of the walk around 4:30am, a place called Portland Gap which was a good sized clearing that we could make out in the bright light of the moon.

The moon turned out to be a tremendous asset during the hike. In the open parts of the trail we were able to turn our flashlights off and see all we needed to see and it was odd to think of myself being able to clearly follow a path in the middle of the night with nothing but the moon to light my way. Though one of our group continued to experience difficulty, is was obvious no one was getting left behind; but I began to suspect that at our current pace, reaching the summit before sunrise might not be in the cards for us. We pressed on now that we were properly watered and snacked, and the opening of Portland Gap quickly gave way to a covered, slippery, dark, rocky and somewhat spooky trail. At times we could tell that a wrong step to the right or left would have us succumb to gravity in a way that would, well let’s just say it would put a damper on things.

Shortly into the second half of the hike half of our team forged on more quickly, still holding on to the possibility of making it to the top in time for the sunrise while two of us stayed further to the back. As things went forward the vertical gain began to increase and certain points became instantly steep which slowed us down greatly. As the trail pressed forward the canopy of trees and growth thickened which increased the slickness of the trail and its rocks. As 5:00am approached I concluded that getting to see the sunrise from the top of the mountain was definitely out. I began to become angry.

It was something I had wanted, something I had set my sights on and knew was in my grasp and now the sudden disappearance of it left me feeling betrayed. I stewed in this anger for about 3 minutes and then came to the realization of two things:

It’s not like this is the only sunrise I will ever see, God willing. There will be others.
I hold in high regard the chance to support people as they attempt to accomplish their goals and often the accomplishment of a group far outweighs an individual one. To quote my favorite line from the movie Little Miss Sunshine, “No one gets left behind!” (If you haven’t seen the movie, do yourself a favor and get on the good foot.)

Sunrise continued on as we continued up. I could see on the horizon clouds going through phases of orange and red; mountain ridges gaining more and more definition and stars fading away with every passing minute. The trail became better lit and eventually flashlights were put away. The peak of the mountain loomed above our heads, it was clear to see where our final destination lay and by this time I had managed to pull something in my right knee so every step was a painful one. Putting weight on it to push off and continue upward had me wincing every few seconds and we were only 500 feet from the top.

We pressed on and came around a corner which put us on an exposed side of the mountain and whoosh! A gust of wind came out of nowhere pressing my sweat-drenched clothes against my skin causing me to call out to the Almighty to ensure she was awake. 50 steps later I found myself at a clearing; the summit of Blue Mountain with the sun only a few degrees off the horizon.

6:34am. Success!

Blue Mountain Pt. I

2007-02-09T20:19:00.000-06:00

Today a group of us set off to hike to the highest elevation in all of Jamaica, Blue Mountain. Known more for its great coffee than for being Jamaica’s tallest peak, it is a climb which most people begin in the dead of night so as to summit before the sun peeks above the ocean’s horizon in the East. The mountain range sits on the Eastern side of the island which means before even considering an ascent, my group and I had to travel from our Western locale through the narrow roads of the island and into Kingston, Jamaica’s crime-infested capital.

After a quick drive to Mandeville, our nearest ‘big’ city, we were joined by the final members of our group and departed. In total there are six of us: Emmett, Larry, Margaret, Jason, Aaron and myself. Like me, Jason and Aaron are volunteers at St. Vincent Strambi, Margaret works with Catholic Relief Services, Emmett is a volunteer serving in a civil engineering role for the diocese and Larry works for a local Aluminum mining company. Exactly how our six paths converged to this moment is not important right now. What is important is that we have decided to take this physical challenge.

We left Mandeville around 12:30pm and headed East through towns such as Porus, Spanish Town and finally arrived in Kingston around 3:30pm. It was an easy drive punctuated only by a quick traffic stop where a police officer was checking papers and identities for reasons unclear to us. Having nothing to hide and having gone through a couple of these so far, our two drivers, Emmett and Larry, breezed through the checkpoints and we entered the outskirts of Kingston.

Entering Kingston is similar to riding into Chicago via Irving Park Blvd. It is two lanes of traffic on either side and it’s not uncommon to find vendors and random people roaming the crawling lanes of traffic. As we moved bit by bit closer to the downtown area we passed many a shack-ridden area. Rusted corrugated tin made up the walls and roofs of these houses and it was hard to tell where the rust stains caused by rain stopped and the stain of the red clay began on these houses. Add in some overgrown wild grass, junked cars, tattered laundry hanging on sagging clothes lines and I am left with another seared image of poverty on this island. And just like any other large city it has its more affluent areas to offset the poverty.

As we wove through the streets of Kingston I detected a slight gain in elevation which stood in contrast to the lower flatlands of Spanish Town through which we had recently passed. We turned a corner and from around a consulate building the Blue Mountains suddenly appeared. Looming tall and majestic over Kingston, I could not believe that I was able to see houses and buildings as high up as I did. Having learned that the quality (and sometimes existence) of roads in this country is horrible, I wondered how in the hell life in the places I was about to reach went on. I was about to find out.

We cleared the bustling avenues of Kingston and on the other side quickly found ourselves at the last town before really ascending the mountain, Gordon Town. Comprising no more than 12 or 15 buildings which house some restaurants, clothing shops and a hardware store (plus some various businesses which now escape me) it is a town exited as quickly as it is entered and here is where things started to get interesting.

As we exited the aforementioned Gordon Town the roads quickly narrowed and began zig zagging along the mountainsides. It was not uncommon for a tight turn to come out of nowhere and for us to find ourselves negotiating with another truck or van as we moved around the bend. It reminded me of times when I have moved a large couch through a doorway and had to negotiate with my fellow movers on how and when to turn so as to successfully move on. “Okay, now you drive forward a bit and turn your wheels left, I’ll move towards the spot you just came from and you head towards where I was and we’ll avoid rolling a thousand feet down a steep incline to our deaths. Sound good?”

We seemed to be driving at a constant ten degree angle for close to 40 minutes when we finally came around and bend and began descending the back side of the mountain we had just climbed. Towns such as Paraiso and Guava Ridge seemed to pop up out of nowhere and every once in a while, when we checked with locals to ensure we were headed in the right direction, a few of them would ask for a lift to the next town in exchange. Having plenty of room in the back of our trucks we obliged and pressed on towards a small town named Mavis Bank.

Please take note of the fact that I just said the word “trucks,” as in plural. The first truck is an older Nissan which rides fairly close to the ground; the other is a newer Toyota which has the clearance of most modern SUV’s. The Nissan, driven by Emmett, was the lead truck and the Toyota, driven by Larry, followed. Knowing that the roads we would take to get where we are now are treacherous, we planned to park the Nissan at a Police Station in Mavis Bank, transfer all gear and occupants into the Toyota and continue the journey. After roughly an hour of being out of Kingston we arrived at Mavis Bank, consolidated everything into the behemoth Toyota (4 in the cab and 2 in the back with all the gear) and pressed on.

We finished a descent of sorts into a valley at the base of the innards of the Blue Mountains and crossed the Yallahs River. Dusk had a firm grip on the landscape and everything was dimly lit as we crossed a concrete slab of a bridge over the narrow river. It was very easy to see that a heavy rain could easily wash out this road and bridge and leave the higher mountain locales stranded for days at a time and suddenly I found myself regretting that I had not checked the weather before leaving.

Once we had crossed to the other side of the river we began a 40 minute ascent which had me laughing in disbelief for nearly the entire ride. The incline of this road was similar to that of a roller coaster while it climbs; seriously, gravity was forcing me into the back of my seat from this point forward. To boot, some of these roads were nothing more than dirt with huge gaps and trenches carved out from rain water. Larry shifted our trusty truck in to 4 Wheel Low Drive after a while and negotiated not only the terrain but hairpin turns with oncoming traffic.

You read that correctly: oncoming traffic. I really have no idea how a late model Honda Civic hatchback or Toyota Minibus gets up and down these mountains without needing a new transmission every month but they do and we came across a few of them. We also came across many a vehicle that found its final resting place along the side of this path as well as a few natives leading donkeys in the night to which Aaron quipped, “Hey Mark, watch your ass.”

With night in full swing and no street lights of any kind, we finally arrived at our destination, Whitfield Hall. It’s a large bunk house which can house up to 40 people. Its main lounge is gloomy, if not all out creepy, with a large fireplace and a smoke-stained ceiling. We have arranged for the use of a separate private cabin located just down the road and like the main bunk house it has no electricity and no hot water. Kerosene lanterns and bottled water are in full swing as I write this. We have just finished a great baked chicken dinner up at the main bunk house complete with rice and peas (a staple at most Jamaican meals) and some juice. Now it is time to force myself to sleep for we will wake up and begin our trek at 2:00am which is a mere five hours from now.

Nature, It's All Around Me...

2007-02-05T17:03:00.000-06:00

That title is the opening to a song by The Samples. If you don’t know it, do yourself a favor and find a copy. You’ll thank me.

In one of my posts from my first trip I mentioned how the priests here have a set of prayers they do in the morning followed by Mass. It’s really quite beautiful and serene sitting in a church just before the sun comes up right over a point where the Santa Cruz Mountains meet the Caribbean Sea. Palm trees rustle outside the church as breezes find their way through the windows and brush away stress and fatigue only to replace them with a deep calm.

And I get to start every day like that!

On the weekend, things get pushed back an hour in favor of a little more sleep and I saw this as a great opportunity to fully catch and photograph a sunrise before prayers and Mass on Saturday morning. Those of you who know me well know that I can wake up early when I have to. 5:30am was not foreign territory in my days at LandAmerica but left to my own devices, 8:00am would be rise and shine time for everyone. My alarm kicked in and I grumbled out of bed wondering, “Is a sunrise really worth it? There will be another one tomorrow, right? Besides, I’m here for a few months. I’ll catch it later.”

During the night one of the German Shepherds that guard this compound had conveniently placed himself outside my window and at the moment I was getting ready to fall back into bed, he saw a bird roaming the grounds and launched into a barking fit and chased after it like a Greyhound at the track. This startled me out of my grogginess so I proceed to slap on a pair of pants and my sandals, gathered my camera and set off for a field I have recently discovered which gives me an incredible view of the sea and the mountains. The road leading to said field is partly paved, partly gravel and partly dirt but worst of all, it is very hilly; something I (and my leg muscles) have grown unaccustomed to in Chicago. My destination finally reached, I started snapping.

Aside from some of the views, I took note of how quickly the temperature changed during this outing. When I walked out of my trailer (yes, you read that correctly: trailer) it could not have been more than 68 degrees. By the time the sun was peeking through some clouds and shining over the top of the mountain, things had easily gone up ten degrees and by the time I started to head back to the compound, it was near 80 – and it wasn’t even 8:00am yet. Ultimately it reached 93 degrees that day; kind of odd for this time of year.

On the complete opposite side of the coin is the beauty of a night sky in these parts. Lights are confined to those in houses and street lights are rare so gazing up at a plethora of constellations usually results in me laughing in disbelief that something this beautiful exists. Over the weekend I had an opportunity to travel to Mandeville, the nearest big city, to watch the Super Bowl. Hell, if troops can watch the game at 2:00am in Baghdad I should be able to catch the game here, right? Thank goodness for CBS Caribbean.

As soon as the Colts had secured victory (my condolences to Chicago fans) we decided to start the trek back. The overall distance is a mere 25 miles but to travel it takes 45 minutes if not a little more. The roads are not wide, they’re in terrible condition and a good portion of the trip consists of switchbacks on the western side of the mountains. In short, it’s not really a quick drive. But this time was probably the most exciting it has ever been because I had the opportunity to experience it while riding in the back of a pick up truck. Typically something like this is sort of commonplace. Who among us hasn’t ridden in the back of a truck even if just down the street? What made this trip so memorable was being able to take in the night sky I just described for 45 minutes. To boot, the full moon was only a day old so it was up there shining like a spotlight and bathing the Jamaican mountains and countryside in a cool shade of blue.

For all the poverty and somewhat harsh conditions in the undeveloped areas of the island, Jamaica really is a beautiful place and it makes sense why their pledge and national song talk about the island’s beauty and their promise to increase it. Locals refer to remote areas of the island as “de bush” and even more remote areas like Bull Savannah are called “backabush.” I have been fortunate to see areas like Montego Bay, Negril, Ocho Rios and Kingston as well as “backabush” and the latter is leagues more beautiful than the former because it remains untouched. A lack of modern facilities, especially hospitals, makes it nearly impossible for a resort to open down here and it’s sort of a catch 22 for locals. They want modern resources for themselves but realize the moment those resources arrive, it’s open season on their untouched countryside which would bring on a downward spiral of crime, poverty and spoiled environment similar to that found in the fore mentioned cities. But without those resources, it remains difficult to break the cycles of what plagues them: poverty and a wide spread lack of good education.

Mother Nature also popped up this weekend in a way I never would have expected. We had an earthquake. Its epicenter was about 75 miles to the Northwest of the island and had registered 6.2 on the Richter scale. It shook us pretty good; one of my fellow volunteers was napping and when the rumbling woke him up he was at first convinced somebody was under the bed shaking it and having a laugh at his expense. A few items fell from shelves and other items were moved from their usual resting spots. No major damage took place which is a blessing. More than 90 percent of the buildings in Jamaica are made of concrete, mainly because it is what stands up best to hurricanes. I have no idea how they hold up in an earthquake or what kind of havoc would come about if they came crumbling down and I’d rather find the answer via Google than firsthand.

And that’s your nature report for this week, folks. No massive insights, no learning, no new perspectives. Just sheer enjoyment of backabush Jamaica. Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some thick rain clouds coming over the mountains which will envelope our clear blue sky in roughly 20 minutes and I know a place where I can watch the whole thing unfold.

For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)...

2007-01-29T22:23:00.000-06:00

When I hear the word “teacher” I automatically think of my mother. Some of you know that she was my third grade teacher and have heard me tell stories of what that was like, even the time she came within an inch of giving me a detention. I tend to think the punishment would have been lost on me since I was already forced to stay after school and do my homework every day while I waited for her to wrap up her day, but that is neither here nor there.

I’ve watched my mother throughout her career as best I could. I saw the work that the rest of the world saw; the moments where she was pouring her energy into the education of children, the school assemblies and the conferences with parents. I also saw what the rest of the world does not see; lesson planning, cute bulletin board creations, the grading of papers and the completion of report cards, not to mention efforts to remain “certified” and the like. I learned quickly that being a teacher is one of the hardest jobs in the world and that while I have the capacity to instruct people, I do not think I have what it takes to be a teacher of children on a daily basis.

Grade structure here in Jamaica mirrors that which is used by the British; first form, second form, etc. First form is our equivalent of seventh grade and they measure it up until their fifth form. Should a student continue their education beyond fifth form, they enroll in a two year preparatory program which readies them for a test hosted by the CXC, the Caribbean Examinations Council. This is our equivalent of the SAT or ACT, however instead of one test, they take numerous tests on different topics (math, science, poetry, science, etc.) Once the exams are sufficiently passed they (hopefully) move on to university studies.

When I was here last month I helped with the grading of some English mid-term exams and they were studying the poem from which the title of this post is borrowed and I have chosen it because today I had a mere introduction to the life of a teacher and I am left with a simple question whirling around my head: How do they do it?

Some of it was easy, yes. Some of it was downright adorable as I timed and tested ten and eleven year olds on the pronunciation of letters such as a, e, f, g, c, and on simple words such as “an,” “too,” “two,” and “to.” They read stories composed with sentences such as, “I like to jump,” and they smiled proudly when they passed each level with less than three mistakes. Their reward for their hard work is a sticker and a “sweetie” (a piece of candy) for each test passed.

“Sir, how me do?”

“You only made two mistakes. You know what that means?”

“Me get a sweetie!”

“You passed two of the tests so you get two stickers and two sweeties! Good job!”

Then we bang fists like you see athletes do. It’s pretty damn cute, if I do say so myself.

Reading time being over, I switched gears up to fifth form English. This group meets three or four times per week and each time they meet their focus is different. Poetry is the focus on Mondays, Prose on Tuesdays and Drama on Thursdays. Today being a Monday the class was divided into three groups; each charged with the task of analyzing an individual poem. As I joined the class I began to feel my nerves kick in mainly because I had never been much of an English fanatic while in school so the potential that I might have to remark openly on poems I was reading for the first time was slightly intimidating. Let’s face it, I don’t speak the Queen’s English, Shakespeare I am not and I bastardize commas and semi-colons on these pages like it’s going out of style. Analyzing “Colonial Girls School” and noticing the caustic tone it directs towards colonials forcing their education on natives while utterly disregarding Jamaican history and heritage left me with more than just a raised eyebrow and a “Hmm,” - a response for which I am well known. I probably learned as much in that class period as any of the students.

The afternoon found me involved in what the priests call their “Personal Development” classes or “PD for short. It is in these classes they attempt to teach, explain and decipher the aspects of life which unfold at each age level. I decided to drop some knowledge with respect to accountability and consequences but it was much different bringing those topics to 12 year olds who understand it in the context of the classroom, at home, and with their friends, than it was to bring it to 14 year olds as we discussed them through the lens of teenage pregnancy.

I suddenly found myself wishing I was back in the poetry class.

Actually it wasn’t that bad. The concepts of accountability, consequences and the like are universal so finding their relevance wasn’t the challenge. The challenge sat in gearing the presentation towards varying audiences every forty minutes. It was a little jarring to make a jump from relating the topics in terms of not doing one’s homework to then discussing them in terms of perpetuating the cycle of poverty, but I think my discomfort had more to do with feeling like I was shooting from the hip with a group that seemed to be less than thrilled with what I was sharing with them.

Truth be told, these were some of the more exhilarating parts of the day and at the end of it all I was pretty sacked and in need of one of my famous power naps. As I lay on the grass looking up at the sky the day played back in my head and I realized that I had experienced a mere fraction of a teacher’s experience. This, in turn, led to me wondering how my mother has been doing this for so long. How on Earth has she been able to get up and do something like this day after day, year after year for more than twenty years? On top of all of this she helped raise me and my sisters, carved out a successful marriage with my father, and earned a master’s degree. Combine all of that with steadily deteriorating hearing and I’m left shaking my head and saying, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Maybe the secret is just to laugh as much as she does. Seriously, I don’t know anyone who makes my mother laugh as much as she does. It is not uncommon for her to be in hysterics way before the end of a sentence.

If it’s true that I am a 50/50 blend of my parents then I can hope to inherit half of my mother’s strength and if I do, well, I should thank that will be more than enough.

Oh yeah, and for all of you teachers who spend your time educating children in the classroom, Big Up Yourself, as they say here. Much love and respect.

J.K. Lee...

2007-01-25T18:03:00.000-06:00

A very small number of you will recognize that name and if you are struggling to remember, it’s the name of the 9^th degree Tae Kwan Do instructor who had founded and ran the school at which I studied during my final year at Marquette. I really enjoyed those classes not because I had the chance to bust stuff up with my hands and feet but because I learned a lot about leverage, joints and how the human body works. I’ll get to the relevance of all that in a minute.

Today being my first day back I took a good deal of time reacquainting myself with the students of St. Vincent Strambi High School. Many of them remembered me and I was very happy to see them as well. Many of them had hugs for me while others gave me a mouthful for being gone so long, but it was lost on me since it was all in Patois; I hardly understood a word.

My morning was filled with roaming the school, sitting in on a class or two, figuring out what my daily schedule will be and adjusting to a school schedule. It has been so long since my day was composed of a succession of 40 minute blocks; it’s hard to keep in mind that 11:35am or 2:25pm might be significant. It is also jarring to be moving through the realm of high school and the priorities that go along with it; looking cool, the latest gossip in the halls and whether or not one can do something utterly stupid in any given moment. The good news is, these kids are right on track as normal teenagers, eh?

And with the usual order of gossip and high school popularity comes the requisite he said/she said business which typically climaxes in a crescendo of hormones, tears, and maybe even a tussle like the one we had today.

I don’t know the particulars; they seem to change with each person’s telling of the story. All I know is that I saw two kids get into a verbal exchange before a class and after having broken it up I sent them on their way and continued talking with students with whom I was reacquainting. One of the two former ruffians found his way to the classroom of the other and all hell broke loose. At the start of the incident my back was to the action and I had no idea it was happening and had it not caught the attention of the person with whom I was talking, I probably never would have known it was going down. By the time I raced to the classroom one teacher was restraining the instigator which made him an open target for the other one who appeared to be in some unbreakable trance of rage. Here’s where my opening reference comes in.

I raced in to grab the unrestrained one and his gangly arms were flying around as if he were some seriously malfunctioning robot. Something in my memory kicked in and I began to put a hold on him that I had learned in my classes. It’s a very simple move and it isolates the arm at the shoulder and gives one a great amount of leverage and control over someone else. As I tangled my arm with his and went for his shoulder my mind fired off the following thoughts in a nanosecond:

-In the States, doing something like this is not only illegal; it usually results in a lawsuit.
-I really have no idea what the laws are in this country.
-I don't want to get arrested for manhandling a student.
-Maybe something a little less aggressive will suffice.

I settled for a half nelson and it worked fine. All of those hours spent with friends practicing what we saw on TV wrestling came in handy.

I led our young fighter out of the school, across the driveway and past an open field where the other contender had been taken to cool off. The former tried to make a charge for the latter and I soon found myself hoisting this kid in the air by his waist with his legs churning; much like you see in a cartoon before a character goes speeding off. It was quite comical and I wanted to laugh but was afraid my laughter would piss this guy off even more.

I wish I could say the rest of my first day back in Bull Savannah was equally stimulating but I cannot. I barely stayed awake for it. That is less a reflection of the school and more a result of having been awake since 2:30am. It didn’t feel like another onset of anxiety, but for the life of me I could not get back to sleep. My mind was just churning a mile a minute and I have no idea why. Maybe I am just adjusting to the change of scenery. I was planning on getting up at 4:30am anyway (we had to drive here from Kingston and it’s not a short drive) but I sincerely believe that having those two hours of sleep under my belt would have done much to improve my stamina throughout the day and by extension, my observations and reflections of it. All I have right now is that I’m back in Bull Sav and even though the sun has not even fully set, I can’t wait to turn off this computer and get to bed.

Round II...

2007-01-24T13:42:00.000-06:00

After an incredible visit home complete with a fun, old-fashioned family Christmas; as well as Patriots playoff games, college basketball, and lots of great family dinners, I am back in the land whose motto is, “Out of many, one people.” I took a hiatus from writing while I was home, save the entry about La Familia, but that had more to do with wanting to rest and not do much of anything. A few of you wanted more and I thank you for your enthusiasm and interest.

I did not think my day of travel back to the island could be longer than my trek down last month. Yesterday out did that one by a good couple of hours due to American Airlines and Jamaican customs. My day started early and I felt I was already behind the curve due to a brief and shallow sleep between the hours of 1 am and 5 am. Those precious four hours of sleep were not sound ones because my anxiety has been ratcheted up these last few days for various reasons. I have not been sleeping well and this was just one more night in a string of nights that are best described as mediocre. It all came to some sort of a climax when I woke up and I spent the first 30 minutes of my day just crying. I’m not entirely sure what I was crying about and in retrospect, it honestly doesn’t matter. There was simply a conglomeration of pressure building up inside and had this release not happened, I surely would have had an episode on the plane similar to Ben Stiller’s in “Meet the Parents.”

(Whether you find that admission admirable or insane is immaterial. Those of you familiar with my dance with anxiety know that after moments like that, I can tackle a day like a rock star. I don’t fully understand it and I don’t intend to. I just go with it. On with the show.)

I finally got around to putting my feet on the floor and scurried around the house grabbing a final load of laundry from the dryer, packing up that which was not yet in my luggage, and trying to eat some kind of breakfast. My appetite suffers greatly when anxiety comes home to roost, which, if you are familiar with the amount of food I am capable of putting away, is a touch ironic.

For all of my expedience and efficiency I was awarded with one of the slowest trips to the airport in recent memory. A little snow fell in Rhode Island during the night and apparently its presence had adversely affected people’s ability to drive. For those of you unfamiliar with modern rules of international travel, there is a 45 minute deadline by which you must check your luggage or else you are not permitted to board the plane. I had made my deadline by a mere five minutes.

So let’s recap: I slept little and poorly, cried a ton when I first woke up, and had come within an inch of not making my flights. The worst had to be behind me, right?

The first leg of my trip, a flight from Providence to Charlotte, NC, was really just a huge fog which lingered in the aftermath of the fore mentioned whirlwind morning which played in my mind like a montage from The Benny Hill Show complete with the zany horn music. (Some of you will understand that reference. Others will not. It’s okay.) I had three hours to kill in North Carolina and I successfully did so by finding some breakfast to quell my surging appetite which had magically come back to me on the plane; tying up some loose ends with some help from the free internet access in the airport, and then talking with my youngest sister before the next leg of my trip; a flight from Charlotte to Miami. As the plane took off my fatigue began to catch up with me and I spent the first half hour of the flight with my head pressed up against the wall of the plane only to wake up with a stiff neck and an imprint of the wall texture on my forehead – a canvass which is larger than usual thanks to the most recent shaving of my head. The remainder of the flight was uneventful and uncomfortable. US Airways has yet to catch up with the other carriers who have taken multiple rows out of their planes in favor of a bit more leg room.

Upon arriving in Miami I was met with the longest walk of my life from one end of the airport to the other. It’s shaped like a gigantic horseshoe and all of the terminals (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H) shoot out from the rounded portion of the structure. I arrived in terminal H and had to walk all the way to A. The most fun, and somewhat perilous, part of my trek was darting and weaving among an intense crowd of people who all looked like rejected tabloid fodder. A warehouse of Barbie dolls doesn’t have that much silicon and unless you have had your eyes tested with those drops that keep them from dilating properly, I really don’t see a need to wear sunglasses the size of window panes while you are indoors. That’s just me.

I probably would not be so bitter towards such an embrace of popular fashion had my experience getting out of Miami had not been so dreadful. A layover of just under 90 minutes was extended an hour only to be increased when the co-pilot, during his inspection, noticed one of the nose gear wheels was torn. This, of course, was not good and needed repair. The nose of the plane was elevated and the wheel changed; all while we boarded the plane and in so doing, the crew had inadvertently disengaged the pilot’s ability to steer the nose gear; a situation which was not discovered until we had already been pushed back from the gate. For obvious reasons, that needed to be rectified and by the time the wheels went up, it was 7:00pm and I was originally slated to land in Jamaica over an hour ago.

Fatigue found me again and I took in yet another power nap for which I am so famous. This time I assumed the position I normally take when napping on the El in Chicago – arms crossed at my stomach and my head hanging straight down. It tends to do a number on the neck muscles if you’re not used to it. My arrival in Kingston was uneventful right up until I got to customs. Apparently you need a copy of your itinerary when entering the country (a detail which was obviously skipped during my last entry) and when I didn’t have one, I went through a torturous scenario of obtaining one with the customs official. This easily tacked another 45 minutes on to my overall journey but according to the customs official, “Me would have been sitting ‘ere all night doing nuttin’ anyway, sir. You’ve made it more interesting. I’m just glad you was at the end of the line, not in da middle.”

Yeah, me too.

There was much rejoicing when I finally met up with my ride. There was even more rejoicing when I noticed he had a New England Patriots bumper sticker from their most recent Super Bowl victory. It immediately turned to much grumbling and griping over their loss to the Colts and exit from the playoffs. Turns out he’s from Warren, MA so we had plenty to talk about. I would like to say we took a quick trip through the mean streets of Kinston but to call them “mean” might be a bit of an understatement. Of course, any major city in an area has its bad parts, we just happened to be passing through all of them on the way to our destination and I vaguely recall seeing CNN footage from a war zone in the Middle East that didn’t look too different from this.

I was soon as my destination for the night; a former hotel called The Constant Spring which had been purchased by nuns half way through the 20^th century. It serves as their convent and sits on a gigantic compound which houses among other things, a school and a retreat center. So far, what I have seen of the former hotel is gorgeous. Complete with a swimming pool and a lush central courtyard, the look and feel is similar to that of a large Italian villa and much of the furniture which adorns the place is left over from its original purchase. The lobby (which I am lounging in as I write this) is a large, square room with tall French doors at opposite ends which let in a plethora of light. The 20 foot ceiling is supported by tall, square columns whose bases are decorated with low, stylized chairs and small side tables between them. Breezes pass through the room at any given moment and considering that I woke up yesterday to 27 degree weather, the change is most welcome.

Yes, folks, I’m back. I continue to meet fascinating people whose stories are as varied as the places from which the come. Since arriving I have met a Chinese woman who is also a native Jamaican and the one in charge around here. Sr. Goretti is her name and even though she is not even five feet tall, her presence looms very, very large. I have also had the pleasure of meeting a Canadian named Greg who is here helping in all things computers and he and I spoke “geek” for much of the day as he explained his plan of implementing Linux servers and desktops around here. (If that means absolutely nothing to you, don’t sweat it.)

Later today I will take in the taping of a radio program at the University of the West Indies and hopefully some more of this beautiful hotel. Tomorrow I make my way back to Bull Savannah and the great people I met last month. It will be a two hour drive just to cover a little less than 60 miles and we are planning to leave at 5:30am. At least the sunrise coming up over the Caribbean Sea will be fun to watch.