Watch the Walk

The talk of the town of late has been the many shortages and the rising price of food. Food prices here have risen 20-50% while salaries have remained the same, making it harder and harder for families to feed themselves.  In addition, shortages have made basic food items either difficult or impossible to obtain. A basic cheap meal here is typically a little fish, cooked with tomato sauce, served over rice, all prepared on a single-burner kerosene stove. There's no kerosene, so many are cooking over wood fires. The "50% broken" subsidized rice is hard to obtain, and the price has almost doubled. With fuel for motorboats hard to get, and the ocean being rough, fish is less available, and at 3 times the previous price.  Tomatoes are available, but the price has gone up, and the price of tomato paste has gone up too. So families are left struggling to figure out a new plan. What to cook? How to cook it? Will we feel full tonight? I remember when I first came to the islands h...

Transportation from one island to the next is sometimes an issue here. We have small commercial planes that go back and forth, a "high-speed" passenger boat that goes between Clove Island and the bigger island which hosts the international airport, and then some fishing boats or other small fiberglass boats which make the trek between islands. But sometimes the options start to disappear, or become less appealing. Fishing boats and little fiberglass boats never really seem like a good option, but when even the fishermen don't want to brave the seas, they seem rather unappealing. The passenger boat can be a pleasant enough experience, but when it's stuffed with 200+ passengers and the seas are rough, pretty much anything seems better than being trapped for 6 hours between puking passengers in a poorly air-conditioned interior as the sea rocks in and out of sight through the windows. And planes? Well, one airline had an accident and hasn't been allowed to resume wor...