The Land of Milk and Honey

Life at site is super busy right now, as we’re right in the middle of summer Culture Camp. We’ll tell you more about that later, but as for now, we thought we’d share a little about our trip home last month. Here was our rough itinerary:

June 1- Matt flies to Buffalo, NY to spend time with his family. (Matt had an extra 3 weeks, as Julie took 3 weeks for Africa in April.)
June 17- Matt hits the road with his mom to do a little East coast road trip.
June 20-Julie flies in to Portland, Maine to meet up with Matt and Judy.
June 21/22- We spend roughly 24 hours checking out Unity, ME, where we hope to ‘settle down’ post-PC.
June 23- We’re all back in Buffalo to spend a couple days chilling out there.
June 25- We fly to Chicago to spend a week with Julie’s family.

It’s hard to know what to share, what all of you might be interested in. I’m sure if we really tried hard we could come up with some insightful parallels, or ironic symbolism. We could probably talk about the paved, flat roads; how for our whole trip, we didn’t get begged once, or harassed, or stared at; that everybody seems to follow the rules and that there seems to be a system for everything; how people were so nice; how we ate like kings (and got fat too! The first thing Julie heard stepping out of the airport, from one of our close Jamaican friends was, “Julie, you put on a whole heap a weight!”) ; how life is so easy, and comfortable and convenient –you want anything in the world, you just hop in your car and go get it; to have intellectual conversations; how we didn’t have to think about Jamaica, or site, or the poor, and the cumbersome and difficult task daily to give them opportunity for a better life. But, to be honest, our brains are fried, especially with Culture Camp, so consider yourselves lucky to be getting even a blogpost. So let’s just summarize with this:

As far as vacations go, our trip back home was AMAZING. It was hard to leave….so thanks to all our friends and family who gave us the break we needed.

Cockpit Country

Maybe some of you are waiting for us to blog about our recent trip back to the States… and that will come in time. (We’re currently swamped with our summer Culture Camp which takes place during the next two weeks.) However, we wanted to do a quick, but important blogpost for our friend Bart.

Bart, a former PCV, is still in Jamaica trying to continue on the work he was doing as a PCV, but on his own funds. He’s currently undertaken a video documentary project that highlights Cockpit Country, which is a beautiful and unique part of Jamaica that includes our community, Accompong. I could tell you all about it, but Bart does a much better job on his website, which also includes a video explaining what he’s trying to do.

Why are we telling you about this?
#1: Cockpit Country is currently where we call home, and the preservation of the land and the people who live here is so important.
#2: Because Bart is staying on his own funds, he’s asking for financial support from others to help him stay in Jamaica and finish this project.

So we’re asking all of you, to please, at the very least, click on this link and spend 1 minute checking out this website.

Should I Stay or Should I Go

This past month we lost 2 more Volunteers from the original 38 who arrived March of last year. This brings the total number of Volunteers in Group 81 down to 27. That leaves about 70% of us left, with about 40% of our service left to go. I recently read that on average 1/3 of PCVs will not finish their service.

Every PCV has said it over and over, “Peace Corps is hard.” This can be seen in the 2/3 of applicants who will not be placed/accepted, by the 1/3 of PCVs who don’t finish their service, and in recognizing the caliber of people who apply to PC in the first place.

We prepared for this. We went through months and months (sometimes years and years) of the application process. We packed up our things. Left good jobs. Left our homes. Said good bye to friends, families, loved ones. We set aside our American lives for 27 months to embark on this PC journey…

I don’t know anybody who joined PC, and thought, “Well, I’ll see how this goes.” Or “I guess I’ll try this for a little while.” They came to finish, and I’m reminded of this energy as Jamaica just received another set of 30 PCTs last week.

It’s always hard to lose other Volunteers. And although we have yet to be in a position where we needed to seriously assess whether we should stay or go, I surely do not envy those who have had to make the difficult choice to go.