Following Goat Trails

I know, I know, I’m the worst blogger ever! Blogs are really hard to keep up on for me so I think I’m going to try something different. Starting later this month, I’m going to do a photo blog. One picture a week (maybe more and maybe less) of something that’s going on in my life here in Antigua. I would have done this sooner but my darn camera broke the very first week I was in St. Lucia and I haven’t had a good camera to take photos with for months. My replacement camera is coming with Jamie and Gene who will be visiting next week.

Speaking of friends visiting, I am SUPER excited for Jamie and Gene to come to Antigua. Plans are in the works for plenty beach time, a cruise around the island, snorkeling, consumption of many local foods, a beach lime with my host family (DJ and all), and lots and lots of other great stuff. We’re going to have a blast and it will be so nice to have a few vacation days.

Now for story time…

Work of late has been fantastically stressful. We have a ton of projects that we’re working on and at the beginning of January classes started which means we now have 60 new students wandering our halls. It’s hard to explain what the addition of 60 extra people in our VERY small office does to our work environment. It’s loud, it’s chaotic, questions fly in every direction, people are being pulled in and out of classrooms, offices, etc. Not a moment passes without a phone ringing, a student walking into the office, or one of us losing something in the mess that is our desks. It kind of reminds me of the images you see of the floor of the New York stock exchange. Crazy freakin’ busy! The tension at the center is palpable and at least in the short term there’s not a whole heck of a lot we can do about it. Our facilities aren’t going to magically expand. Nobody wants the classes to get smaller; in fact we’d love it if we had room for more students. It’s just going to be stressful for well, the next 8 months.

For the most part everyone has been staying pretty positive about the chaos but the entire office is a bit on edge. I find that as the day comes to a close my head feels heavy and I can think of nothing but crawling into bed and watching movies on my laptop… even reading feels like too much effort. So today, in an effort to arrive in my bed all the faster, I decided I would take a “shortcut” home.

My home is about 2.5 miles from my office and if I take the main road, it’s a relatively easy trek. While I’m walking through my village I feel comfortable enough but walking on the main road is kind of scary. People drive incredibly fast and they don’t really look for pedestrians because pedestrians aren’t ever on the road… so I’m always on high alert if I’m walking or riding my bike. If I could find a way to get off the road AND get home faster, well then that would be GREAT.

Last week while I was walking I noticed that there was a herd of goats which were cutting through some fields and it looked like the fields might lead to Seatons. So I figured if the goats could find their way to Seatons (I recognized some of the goats from my village or at least I thought I recognized them) I could easily find my way too… after all, I’m smarter than a goat right? So after going about halfway home on the main road, I turned off and went stomping through the bush.

The first trail I went down led me about a quarter of a mile away from the road but I eventually reached a dead end. DARN, I’d have to backtrack to the main road. On the second trail I noticed a woman who was carrying a bucket of tomatoes on her head, some seed trays in one hand and a bag of tomatoes in another hand. She looked very much like she knew where she was going so I thought I must be on the right trail. Yes, not only goats can find their way through the bush apparently we humans can too. After asking her if the trail led to Seatons, she smiled and looked me up and down and said, “yes, but you might not make it in those shoes.”

I looked down at my feet and saw my good ol’ Tevas. Ugly as sin but great for walking long distances and especially great for hiking a silly little goat trail. So I told her that I thought I’d be fine and if she wouldn’t mind showing me the way I’d help her carry her tomatoes. She looked at me again and I saw that she was eyeing me up and down and seemed to be focused on my work attire, a black skirt with a tank top and a purple sweater. She kind of gestured to her own clothes, she’d clearly been working on the farm all day, and then she specifically pointed to her boots and said “see my shoes will protect me from the bush”. Not to be deterred, I told her that I’m sure I can make it, grabbed her bag of tomatoes and started following her.

As we walked along the trail, I couldn’t help but smile. First of all, she was right of course. The trail had really tall grass, large bushes with thick thorns on them, and random holes that were accidents waiting to happen. But besides the tricky terrain, the view was gorgeous. Golden brown fields all around me, giant sugar mills on either side, the ocean in the distance, goats and cattle grazing on the grass; the whole scene was picturesque, I felt like I was walking through the scene of a movie. And all along the trail, I got to chat with my neighbor who I found out was named Grace and owns the fields across the road. She was telling me about how she loves farming, how she used to raise goats but can’t any longer because someone stole them (how anyone could steal anything from such a nice lady I have no idea!), and how she thinks she should learn to drive standard transmission so she wouldn’t have to walk to her fields every day.

I for one am thrilled that Grace walks to her fields every day because if she didn’t I might not have ever met her. When I left her and her tomatoes at the gate of her house, she told me that I should walk with her again someday. I really hope that I get to walk with her because I haven’t had such a pleasant walk in a long time. In some ways it was a perfect Peace Corps moment, to meet a neighbor and chat while walking home. In another way, it reminds me very much that I can have that moment anywhere in the world so long as I am open to the experience. These are things that I hope to remember when I head home. It’s important to get outside and walk in your neighborhood, meet the people who inhabit the same space as you, hear their stories and find out why they love what they’re doing. There’s just no reason for us to be so isolated when we share the world with so many other lovely people.