Last Call...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.