Home for the holidays!

Yes, that’s right! By the time most of you read this, I’ll either be en route to JFK or home already in snowy, wonderful New York! It’s been 9 months since I’ve been in the states, so to say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement. I have almost 3 weeks in the states, so plenty of time to get my fill of good old America. I’m excited for family, friends, food (lots of it!) and just being home in general. Jamaican Christmases are apparently a lot of fun, so I’ll be a little bummed to miss that. But the joy of a two year assignment is that I’ll still be here next year to experience it… and maybe I’ll even have some visitors to share it with (hint, hint!).

Nothing else too exciting to report from this end really. Happy holidays to everyone, and hopefully I’ll be seeing some of you soon!

Reggae (Half) Marathon

To continue with the trend of an exciting few weeks, I finished out this week with a half marathon on Saturday. It’s something that I had been thinking about doing since I got here and heard about it in March, something I decided on doing early in the summer, and something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull off. But despite a few ups and downs in my training, and with the help of a few good friends, I successfully ran 13.1 miles on Saturday!

The race itself was really cool – especially the start. Since it gets so hot in Jamaica (yes, even in December), the race started at 5:15 in the morning so that most people could be finished before it got too hot in the late morning. The sun doesn’t even come up until 6:15/6:30, so the first hour or so was spent running in the dark. The whole theme of the race was Reggae/ Rasta culture, and so there were drummers at the starting line, and the road was lined with torches for the first half mile or so. It gave the start of the run a really cool atmosphere, and it helped that it was almost a full moon, with bright stars and no clouds. It’s hard to describe exactly what it was like running with almost 1,000 people in the dark, and all I can really say is that it was really, really cool. And even after the sun came up, they had reggae playing at different points along the course to keep us all going. Luckily we finished before it got too hot out – there were some people still running at 11 and I have no idea how they managed. And they had fresh coconuts, bananas, Red Stripe and other goodies for us at the finish line that definitely helped ease the pain of the 13 miles. There were also a handful of PCVs who volunteered to hand out water, and they were pretty well spaced out along the course, which really helped. It’s amazing how much a friendly face (or, in this case 5) can to do boost your morale when you’re running for 2+ hours.

There was also a pasta party the night before and an after party the night of the race, so it was an eventful and exhausting weekend. Sadly, the headliner for the after party (reggae star Etana) double booked herself and didn’t actually end up performing, but there were a bunch of volunteers who went and we all still managed to have a good time anyway.

A few people have already been asking me if I’m going to run it again, or if I’m going to be upgrading to a full marathon anytime soon. My first reaction to that has so far been “Jesus, can’t I wait until my legs don’t feel like bricks before I think about running again?!” But next year is the 10^th anniversary of the Reggae Marathon, and so I think it would be cool to run it again. However, I don’t think I’ll be running the full marathon. I do understand why it’s appealing, but honestly, the idea of running for 4+ hours is just not something that interests me in the least.

Oh, my time? 2 hours, 25 minutes. My friend Jess and I ran together the whole time (sorry, Alicia!) and we were able to finish before any of the full marathoners did, and out of about 400 people who finished the half (men and women), we came in at about 215 and 216. Not too shabby, huh?

Jess and I approaching the finish line (I only look happy because of the endorphins...)

We did it! (Thanks to Emily for the pictures!)

A Peace Corps Thanksgiving

A few weeks ago I realized that in my 23 years, I have never spent a single Thanksgiving away from my family. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday (lots of cooking/baking + lots of eating + family – the pressure of gift giving = a very happy Melissa), and so the thought of spending it away from my family kind of had me down for a while. I knew that joining Peace Corps would mean giving up certain traditions and missing out on certain things, but this wasn’t one that I had wanted to sacrifice.

Luckily it wasn’t something that I had to sacrifice entirely. There is a married volunteer couple who live on the other side of Negril who graciously opened up their house to 30+ volunteers and community members for a Thanksgiving pot-luck this past weekend. Some people pulled out all the stops with what they brought – some highlights were a particularly memorable mac and cheese dish, a pumpkin pie made from scratch (a.k.a. no canned pumpkin), and onion pie – yup. A pie filled with onions. I was so full afterwards that it hurt to move for a few hours - no joke. Most of the volunteers were out here for the whole weekend, and it was really nice to see everyone again and catch up and hang out. You really do form a pretty unique bond with the other volunteers you serve with, but it’s pretty rare that we get to spend so much time together, and so it was a good chance to relax and catch up.

I do realize that it’s been more than two months since my last update. I’m not sure if anyone besides my mom will be reading this (hi, Mom!), but for those who are, I guess I should give you a quick update on things. And I will do my very best to try and update more frequently in the future, I promise.

Work has been going really, really well, especially in the last few weeks. It was a little slow to get started, but for some reason about 2 weeks ago, everything just sort of came together. There’s a lot of little things I’ve been working on that have been keeping me busy, but there are a few major things that I’ll outline for you.

Green Key- Green Key is an international certification program for hotels who comply with a pretty strict set of environmental standards. It’s a sister program to something that NEPT (my agency) took on a few years ago – a similar certification for beaches called Blue Flag, and is run by the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE). I’ve been tasked with starting and running the program for the next year and a half, and it’s a little bit of an overwhelming process – there’s a steering committee that needs to be formed, international criteria that has to be specialized to Jamaica, hotels to recruit, an international agency that I have to liaise with and more. This is yet another example of how PC is nothing like I expected it to be. I was all ready to be living in a hut, teaching kids English on a black board in the middle of nowhere, but that’s not at all what my reality has turned out to be. This is not something that I’m at all qualified to do, but it’s something that has already taught me a whole lot, and the program is actually going really well. My goal is to have 5 – 7 hotels signed on for the program by the end of the month, and we already have 2 committed with 4 more in the works, so it looks like it won’t be a challenge for me to meet my goal at all. There’s still a lot of work to be done with the program, but I’m really proud of the progress that’s been made so far, and I’m excited to continue working towards getting these 6, and hopefully a few more, Green Key certified sometime in 2010.

Farmer education – the other main project I’m working on is something that’s totally different, but a lot more “Peace Corps-esque”. We’ve been working with farmers in a few communities in the Negril area to educate the farmers about environmentally friendly farming techniques, and although I know nothing about farming, I’ve sort of been tasked with running this project through February/March. This involves putting together a lot of workshops and organizing site visits to farmers in these areas and putting together a lot of logistics. This also involves working with a lot of different people from several different organizations in the area, and that can be a bit frustrating at times, but it always seems to work itself out in the end somehow. The farmers really seem to appreciate what we’re trying to do and are really receptive to us, and going out and spending the day in the fields or sitting and interacting with them in the workshops is always a highlight of my week.

Community Composting – as a tangent to that project, I’m in the early stages of planning a community compost pile with one of the farming communities we are working with. This would be a large scale compost pile, with about 15 – 20 farmers contributing their organic waste. The goal of the project is to cut costs for the farmers by providing them with an alternative to the chemical fertilizers that they use which are incredibly expensive. It will also give them a great place to dispose of their organic waste that tend to get tossed in with the rest of the trash, burned or just thrown in the bush. This project would require us building a simple structure to cover the pile, as well as several workshops and training sessions with the farmers to educate them about composting and how to do it. Again, I know nothing about composting, but I know how to facilitate something like this, which I’ve learned is almost more important. I know who to call for different aspects of the knowledge that I lack, and I’m quickly learning how to put all those pieces together, and hopefully that will be enough to make a successful project. It’ll definitely keep me busy for a little while though, and I’m really excited to keep up this relationship that I’ve built up with one of these communities that we’ve been working with.

So those are the three main things that are keeping me busy lately. I’m just about 7 months into my service, and I feel like I’m just starting to get some real traction with my projects here, and now I see why the two year commitment is so important. If I were planning on leaving in 5 months, I’m pretty certain that my projects would not be where I wanted them to be. To be honest, I’m also not sure I’d be where I’d want myself to be. Without getting too deep, I’ve been able to grow and mature a lot through the work I’ve been doing here. I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m not qualified to be doing a lot of the things I’m doing, but I’m still doing them, and I think I’m doing them pretty well for the most part. A lot the things I’ve been working on would have been really intimidating for me before this experience, but for once I’m not letting my fears and insecurities get in the way. I know that for this process to be successful, I need to really see these projects through successfully, and to tackle whatever comes after them. That’s something I’m fully committed to, but something that’s going to take me longer than 5 months. For that reason, I’m really thankful that I get the opportunity to be here for 2 years.

Well, I think that’s enough introspection for now. Again, sorry for the lack of posts in the past two months, and I promise it won’t be another two months until I post again!