So, what do you do on your weekends? I love it here. Still. In case you were wondering.

I’m going to say right now that this post is going to be braggy. It’s hard to explain things without coming off like I’m bragging.

Weekends here are pretty killer. Last week our driver stopped at this bar on our way home on Friday. We went exploring around the back and found the wildest stuff. In one guy’s backyard, we found plants that provided coconut, breadfruit, sugarapple, five-fingers (starfruit), guava, a type of provision (think a potatoey-tasting banana), limes (which i picked many of), bay leaves, cocoa, papaya, and west-indian cherries. That’s all I can remember but I bet I saw (and ate) more. There was also just tons of flowers and plants growing. I unsuccessfully tried to climb a coconut tree. It’s just amazing that this stuff exists in the backyard of some guy’s house/bar.

After that, we made a quick stop for some tasty roadside chicken, part of which we fed to the hungry stray dogs. Passed a beach called Bathway which was destroyed by the hurricane. Saw the Rivers rum distillery after hours. Then there was a trip to Lake Antoine, the remains of a giant volcanic crater. Around the perimeter of the island as it got dark, we made a quick stop in Gouyave for fish friday (expect a whole post about fish friday later), finally making it home and going to bed.

Saturday was spent underneath the waterfalls at mt. caramel, with some new local friends. This waterfall is pretty amazing, it’s like 80 feet tall and really hits you hard, but it’ll certainly cure what ails you . Rest of the weekend? The beach.

Now, for the coupe-de-grace of the trip so far: We moved. The university was awesome, we all loved it there and it was a really great place to be. However, when you move to the university club, the place they house guest professors, speakers, etc., you can see why the nicer-than-psu dorms pale in comparison.

I have my own villa, which has a beautiful view of the caribbean sea. It’s got a big bed, wireless internet (low strength but who cares), a porch, a bathroom, and it’s all to myself! Each intern got one. They even gave us cell phones. The food here is just as crazy — there’s a 5-star chef that’s here. We’ve got to dress up for dinner, and it’s some seriously fancy food. I haven’t had a meal that good from a restaurant in a loooong time.

But yeah — works been okay this week. Students really weren’t warmed up to things, but that’s life I guess. The class was smaller, so maybe the concentration of people who don’t care was just higher. Meh. We leave for Carriacou on Sunday, so I’ll be out of touch for a week. Here’s some stuff I found online about Carriacou, from a local:

…If you’re looking for a tiny island surrounded by wide, white sand beaches with clear, clean and warm water seas filled with fish and healthy coral, with PERFECT weather year-round, then you have come to the right place. HERE the island is the attraction and we have not attempted to improve much upon nature with any fancy tourism infrastructure. We have diving. We have hiking and nature trails. Most people either walk or take island buses or ride bicycles. Hours will pass and you’ll not see a transport and lastly, when we see three tourists standing on a corner we consider that a tourist invasion. We have no high-rise hotels. I think our largest is 18-rooms – most are 3-4 rooms. We have no casinos. We have no movie theatres.

Carriacou is also an island where:

• Your neighbor can purchase a new stereo system and can play it 24/7 at full volume
  aimed right into your own house’s window and you can’t complain.
• A Local man can make a Farm on a vacant lot right in the center of Hillsborough, the main town on Carriacou, and raise goats, sheep and even slaughter cows, pigs and sheep/goats and sell the meat. Don’t bother to complain about his roving animals eating your flowers and plants
  as they roam freely throughout the town.
• Dogs run wild in packs of 5-10 in the town streets, knocking over trash bins, relieving themselves on the buildings, chasing everything that moves with teeth showing and barking to keep everyone from sleeping at night.
• Those few people owning vehicles drive without speed limit, tossing a finished beer can out the window, and park on the sidewalks so we must walk in the street

Pretty excited for that, teaching there will be new, that’s for sure. But hey, I’ve got a whole weekend ahead of me. I wonder what kind of adventures I’m going to have before then…

So, for the past two weeks, we’ve been doing a lot of teaching. Teaching is what really sparked my interest in this trip. Originally, I thought we were going to be teaching teachers. I figured this was really cool, but now that I’m here and have taught a few students, I couldn’t be happier about it.

I’ve always had the thought of being a college professor. They get to travel, do research, live in an academic environment, and, best of all, teach. Teaching is the ultimate way of giving back — in almost any scope you put it. You can improve communities, individual lives, or even the world, if you’re a good teacher. Colleges are even better because your students are (usually) motivated to listen to you, and you can actually still be a part of the community through multiple involvements with tons of enthusiastic people (at least, PSU is like that).

So yeah, I’ve sort of always held the goal of being a professor. I’ve taught in the past, a few times actually. During Governor’s School, I spent time teaching iMovie to middle schoolers enrolled in a small camp. A year later, for my senior project, I taught a class on how to use Linux. Both experiences were extremely rewarding, for their own reasons. And now I’m here, and my idea of being a teacher is even more solidified.

The past two weeks of teaching has been great. We usually get a group of kids with no programming experience. One or two of them are hardcore IT-kids, and go faster than everyone else. Sometimes, you get students who just don’t get the material, but they keep trying. Other kids just finish their work and toy around with the programs. But the thing that makes the experience so special for me is that they’re all enthusiastic and they all care about it.

Sometimes you’ll work with one student for a good bit of time, and leave them to finish their assignment, and they ask you for some more help, but they seem to do better. Later on, in another assignment, it all clicks into place and the student is happy — really happy to have gotten their program working. They marvel at it like they’d never be able to do it, and always want to show their friends and the interns. There was this guy who when he got something right, he’d call us over to check out what he did, he’d have us run his program, just beaming. There was another guy who’d clap his hands and laugh when he got things going.

It’s seeing stuff like that, seeing these kids learning something entirely new, something that they can take further, and being really happy because of it, that’s why I want to teach classes. Seeing a student who got help from one of us on a certain topic taking that knowledge and helping the kids around them, it’s great. Sometimes we’d have to do very little work, and the programs they wrote, they’d all be different, in ways that our lessons never explained, and they’d work and they’d be unique to the proud programmer.

I dunno, I feel like I’m getting repetitive, so I’ll end it here. All I can say is that I’ve never felt so rewarded about anything I’ve ever done. It’s a good feeling — knowing that you’re making a difference in someone’s life like that.

PS I get the overwhelming feeling that this post seems pretentious and that I’m stratifying myself with other people, putting myself on a higher plane than them because I’m a teacher. I don’t really know how to properly address this other than saying that I feel lucky to have been given the chance to share a lot with these kids, and that it’s more than just teaching java. I’m learning plenty, too, and I think (hopefully) the students and we interns get together alright.

Okay, so I know I was a little slow in getting this thing going, but things have been awful crazy since I got home from PSU. I’m going to fly through the basic gist of things, just to let you know what I’ve done so far. I think later on, I’ll go into details about life here, but for now, here’s what’s been going on:

I flew, for the first time ever, out of Pittsburgh on June 3rd. After all the stuff that surrounds leaving goes on for a few weeks, you’re pretty ready to leave. The fear surrounding the flight didn’t though. All in all, I’d say it was pretty cool, and I liked flying (I had 2 window seats, one of which was us flying over the islands in the Caribbean), minus turbulence. Turbulence is probably the scariest thing I think I’ve ever experienced. I thought maybe it would just be a little bumpy, but nobody told me the plane freaking drops like it’s going to just drop out of the sky. So yeah, a little unnerving. I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

After we got there, we met our supervisor, Mr. Leo Cato. Mr. Cato’s a pretty great guy, and he arranged a tour for us around a few attractions of the island. We visited the Anandale falls, Lake Etang, and a few points of interest around St. George’s. After our first lunch of real Grenadian food (I got a Crabback and a soup made of the Calaloo leaf.), we visited the Ministry headquarters, and went home. One nice part of this trip was that we had three technology people who were our age accompanying us, so we got to find out a little bit about the culture of the people while we saw the sights.

Tuesday was more meetings with people from the Ministry. We found out more about what we’re going to be doing while here, and decided on a plan of action. In case you didn’t know, we’re going to be teaching students here how to program in Java, and how to do some system maintenance (both hardware and software types of things). We’re doing two weeks in three parts of the island and one part on a small island to the north called Carracou. We have some other plans too, involving wire less networking around the capital city, and when we can help with other stuff, we will.

Wednesday was spent setting up computers in the Gouyave location. They needed the software for coding Java, so we got that set up for teaching there. At night we went to a local nightclub, including a big dance hall and a bar on the beach.

Thursday was a national holiday, Corpus Christi. It marks the beginning of the wet season, and all the locals we talked to were telling us to expect lots of rain. It turns out that this happens just about every year on this day, it rains a lot. I was told that they hadn’t had rain like that since January. Traditionally, some people in Grenada spend Corpus Christi planting crops, even if it’s only in their own gardens, because the oncoming rain will be a welcome change an an excellent start for yielding a good crop.

Friday was spent as a free day for us, to do what we like. It was nice, we basically spent the day on the beach. Saturday wasn’t much different. Sunday was, though. We spent it making a textbook for our class. It started off to be around 30 pages (it’s nearing 50 now).

Since then, we’ve just been going to St. Mary’s school in Gouyave. Teaching is awesome, it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to do it — I did for Senior Project, and if you count some of the IST groupwork I’ve done, that might count too. I love it, and it just reinforces my will to go get a Ph.D. and become a professor of something.

Very quickly (I’ll touch up on this later) — I’ll say a few things in rapid succession, just to give you an idea of some of the crazier things here. Driving is insane, people are hospitable, there’s plenty of really good, healthy food to eat, and the little differences between Grenada and the US is immense.

I have a lot to say, about a lot of crap. I hope this will be the last “this is what I’ve been up to” post — I’d like the rest of them to contain that stuff, but have some more thoughtful posts about just how amazing this place is. People dream of places like this, they see them on television and it seems so far away, and they don’t even get the whole picture. I love it here so far, and I doubt that will change. So cheers, here’s to a summer that makes a difference.

My god….

Horse the band is releasing a new album. I’ve been pumped about it for awhile, but I just got a taste of the new material. They have a new song, “Murder”, up on their myspace. Do you even need to bother asking if the quality of anything produced by HORSE is anything less than “confronting the boundaries of the immortal just to giggle and dance in the buff”? Didn’t think so. I think my collection will have a new king later.

Everybody always gives me crap that Horse isn’t some ridiculous band. Yes, they have two or three songs dealing with nintendo. Yes, they made a whole EP about how good pizza is. But you can’t question whether or not they put their hearts into the music, and you can’t question whether or not they have meaning in their lyrics and sounds. Need proof?

“‘A Natural Death’ is about the futility and arrogance of creation and destruction, the overwhelming scale of space and time, and the brutal majesty of nature, the horror of birth and the beauty of death. Everyone who will ever live will die a natural death, and will soon after be forgotten for eternity. Hopefully this album will serve as a warning to the human race to stop taking itself so seriously, as we have seen the dire consequences of its actions in the future. You are nothing.”

Go ahead and listen to any song by them, possibly excluding the Pizza EP, and you’ll find those kinds of themes.

Maybe I should just have a Horse the Band category

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By the way, I leave for Grenada early Sunday. I’m pumped.