Watch the Walk

Flower necklaces!  How's your cringe face? You might need to warm it up a little. Cringe. Cringe a little harder. Okay, let's go! Picture this: you're a young-ish girl in a grand gathering of women, all dressed up, singing songs, reading from the respected book, dancing, giving you flower necklaces and other gifts. It's your day. Nope, not your birthday. But it's all for you, celebrating you. Why? ... you got your first period. Menstrual cycle. Aunt Flo visited. Monthly. Whatever you want to call it. They're all there to celebrate that you're now a woman.

With some of my "peaceful" neighbors BAM! BAM! BAM! BOOM! Baa! Baa! Rr-r-r-r-r! "HEY YOU! COME HERE! HURRY!" "YOU'RE WRONG! YOU'RE STUPID! WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN?!" In case you haven't gotten the idea yet, I don't live in a very quiet place. When you think of a tropical island, maybe you think of warm beaches, quiet breezes, and peace, but that's not exactly my reality. My neighbors have been doing construction, so often I'm waked up by 6 or 6:30 in the morning with the sound of a load of rocks being delivered, or workmen yelling at each other, or roofing metal being dropped from the second story into a pile on the street. And since it's warm and there's no AC, my windows are always open, so the sounds reverberate on my concrete walls and seem to only be louder inside than out. Yesterday there were a couple people working on building some walls and doors out of metal. All afternoon I suffered through the sounds of metal be...

It's clove season here! Time to dry the fresh cloves Sometimes life here on Clove Island is unpredictable. And sometimes the only prediction is that it will be unpredictable. An example of that would the the school system. Although I'm not teaching for a public school, I have many friends whose kids are in the public school or they themselves teach there. So I get in on the drama a little too. A little extra spice for your spices? See, it's September. September is the month when school should start. And it's quite possible that school will start this month, but when? The governor sometimes sets a day for returning to school, but maybe the teachers still haven't been paid for the end of the last school year. And they often refuse to submit grades for their students until they're paid. If the students don't have grades, they don't know if they passed to the next grade or not. And so school doesn't start. How long will that go on? We don't really kn...

Sometimes life gets to be too much, and we just have to get back to center. We have to rest. We need quiet. This hasn't been the easiest season on Clove Island. And by season I don't mean the weather-- it's been amazing. Cool nights, not too hot of days. But the season of friends and team has been rough. And I love my team dearly. If I didn't love my team dearly it might be easier. So I was feeling a little ragged. A little burnt out. A little frayed at the edges with not a lot of emotional margins for my neighbors and friends here. Life doesn't stop, but sometimes we have to. I was blessed to take some time to stop and recenter, taking a weekend away at the beach. I read the Word. I walked the beach. I talked with a friend. I gazed on the beauty of creation and listened to the voice of its Creator. And you know what? When I went back to my house in the city after a couple of days, I was happy to see people again. I was pleased to greet the old ladies o...

A happy groom Decked out for a wedding Sunset silhouettes Concert vibes Post-sunset glow Matching travel outfits My new buddy from the overnight flight

Jack the Cat doesn't haul water As many of you are already aware, water isn't something that's provided to my house 24/7. Some seasons we have water in the pipes most of the time. Other seasons, water comes for a couple of hours every two or three days. But on the third day, we start wondering, when's the water going to come? Recently, we had a greater water problem. Water had been coming every day for several hours at a time, so we weren't really worried about water usage. But then, two days before Annie's parents arrived, the water didn't come.  That's fine. We've got storage barrels. We'll be fine. But the water didn't come. Our larger neighborhood and the one next to it didn't have water due to a water main being broken. But people were fixing it. Day 6 we hauled water from a teammate's house. Surely they'll have it fixed soon! Day 7 the neighborhood got water again. But we didn't. Wait, what's going on? Day 8 we fou...

Before I get into this topic, please realize that I'm not writing to complain. I don't really blame most of the people involved for their part in the problem. They're just part of a complicated system, and right now the system isn't working in my favor. See, I have this class. They're all adults, no teens involved. All but one of them are gainfully employed, with several of them holding important jobs. They want to learn English, mostly for their job, or for travel. So a community organization asked for a teacher (me) and put together a class list. It started with 28 students, even though I normally limit a class to 25. Out of those 28, I've never had more than 23 show up on a given day. But we were making progress. I taught the class one day a week and an islander taught it on another day each week. We made it 3/4 of the way through the book, when... Ramadan happened. And since classes for adults normally occur around sunset-- the same time at which everyone is...