Thursday, March 26, 2009

Hellshire

Welcome to Hellshire. I'm in a small town outside of Kingston right now. All 30 of us volunteers are staying here with host families. It's a tight community tucked in right on the ocean. Every morning I wake up and go for a run along the ocean and then my host mom makes me breakfast. After breakfast we usually go to classes all day. The classes include everything from Jamaican Patois, to technical training. It makes for a long day. At about 6 I go home and eat and then relax with friends or hang out with some of the neighborhood people.
The hardest thing about living here is understading the language. Patois is hard to understand and I'm terrible at speaking. The first day or so I couldn't understand it at all. Now I can understand it fairly well and know enough phrases to make people more comfortable.
Right now I'm at a local school using the internet so I don't know when I'll get a chance to post again. Next time I post I'll throw some pictures up. I'm having a great time.
PS I have a cell phone. Call me. I can't put up the number on this blog but you can probably get it somehow.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Finally in Jamaica


Made it to Jamaica finally. We went to the airport where the Peace Corp staff and some Volunteers met us at the Airport. (check out the picture, especially the billboard in the back)
We left the airport and immediately went to Peace Corps headquarters, where we got forms and information shoved in my face. Things didn't slow down until after dinner when we had a chance to sit down with a red stripe and relax.
Kingston is a fairly scary city. Everyone lives in a walled compound and you can't go out at night unless you're a bad man. The hotel we are staying in is nice though, and has a nice view of the Blue Mountains.
I'm excited to go meet my host family tomorrow that I'm going to live with for 2 weeks. It should be awkward, but it will be nice to unpack a little. The next 2 weeks will be more long days of training which is kind of boring, but at least we'll be living in a small town that we can explore.

PS: My roommate for the past couple days has been James Adams. We're both in the same program and everyone thinks we're brothers.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Welcome to Miami

Made it to Miami today where I met up with all the other volunteers going with me. Six hours after saying goodbye to Megan and my family I met 30 new people who I'll be working with for the next two years. We sat through a 5 hour seminar and then went out to grab some dinner and explore Miami. It turns out that Miami is not as glamorous as it's made out to be. The highlights of walking around were the K-Mart and dog racing track. As expected, everyone is nice and easy to get a long with.
Tomorrow we fly to Jamaica to start our pre-service training together.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Welcome

Welcome to my Peace Corps blog. Here I'll post stories and pictures from my time in Jamaica. Check back to see how I'm doing.