Here's a suggestion computer. I assume you read binary so why don't you 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1.

Today, a small victory. We were walking between the Village and the school and a neighbor going the other direction stopped us to make sure that the children were home so he could bring them mangoes. Woohoo! He knows we work there! This may seem silly, especially since we see and chat with this man at least once a week and we are usually orbited by plaid-clad electrons clamoring loudly for our attention, but it still makes us happy to have hard evidence that our place within the community is known and accepted.

Another sign we’ve been here awhile is my acceptance of things I once thought odd. When someone told be that taxi divers drove around honking and pointing in the direction they were traveling, I giggled. The scene in my head was probably more fantastic than reality, but still, isn’t that an amusing picture to those of you who have yet to experience it? A bunch of people honking and hanging out the window, pointing their route? In fact, it is wonderfully efficient. I don’t think it’s strange at all. I even point back to confirm the direction I am going. Honk, point.

But then I get ringworm on my eyelid—AGAIN—and I feel like we are stuck in a never-ending loop of hot weather and skin fungi. Gross. Also, while things are falling in place for us, it is still exceedingly, irrationally, difficult to get things accomplished. I just continue to underestimate the factors that contribute to the completion of a task. It’s like a treadmill with hurdles. I wake up thinking okay, today I have to get this done, so I sit down to it and realize halfway through that I have to do 5 other things first to make this task do-able and it always involves favors and information from other people and I get all excited and then my boss can’t understand me. Ultimately these things get done, but never without some amount of panic on my part.

So that’s where we are. And, the kids have learned my name. I know people think this is dumb, especially when the kids can call me ‘miss’ most of the time, but I was tired of being called ‘Patrick and uh, uh, uh…’ So now everyone knows my name, or at least a varied pronunciation of my name, and they shout it gleefully when they see me approaching the Village. Just to reiterate, there are over 100 children and Erin is not a common name here. So I feel good about this, and if you think it is paltry, then you are a poo-head.

Oh my God, Darryl. You look like Barack Obama. Everybody I'm dating Barack Obama.

Lately Patrick and I have been embarking on mini-adventures of the nature that cause me to proclaim, “this will be the end of our marriage.” So for your enjoyment, we have listed the top ten things that are likely to end in the dissolution of our alliance.

1. PowerPoint presentations
2. Home haircuts
3. Death Match Uno
4. KU/MU
5. Snowboarding
6. Wayne Brady
7. Rationing of baked goods
8. Chorus of the Jamaican national anthem
9. Naming children after steroid-filled Polish men (Mariusz Pudzianowski Mazi?)
10. Top ten lists

Don’t worry, we have our mutual love of ceramic animals with festive costumes to see us through the tough times. Oh Shebadda.

Occasionally I'll hit somebody with my car. So sue me-- no, don't sue me. That is opposite the point I'm trying to make.

Busy is a relative term. For the most part Erin and I have had our heads down plugging away at our various work projects. We spend most nights at home doing nothing, save pining for our very own game of Carcassonne, but our days have been pretty full. For those of you still reading our blog, I thought I would give a schedule of upcoming happenings for the summer…

At our orphanage:
- A couple weeks of summer school
- A couple weeks of arts &crafts, fine arts, and music
- A few beach days, an airport tour, a Rose Hall Great House Tour, and an off-site trip to St. Ann? (the trip is definite but location still up in the air)
- A week-long JAMM camp
- A week-long football (soccer for you American folks) camp
- The week-long HIV/AIDS peer educator training that Erin got a grant to fund- this project will actually continue on until World AIDS Day in December, but the main part is happening this summer
- A summer-long reading contest, complete with prizes for readership
- Computer classes will be held for the mothers, aunties, and the children though I might wait until school resumes to incorporate the kids

At the marine park:
- Revamping the outreach and education program
----- Educating and getting the local fishermen onboard to facilitate a protected area for fish to breed and grow
----- Educating the public, both domestic and foreign, about the issues the local marine habitats are facing and how they can help
- Hopefully finding funding to initiate a mooring buoy system to act as boundaries for the protected zones as well as providing environmentally low-impact anchor site

As for us:
- Last week we met the new PC Trainees. They all seemed very excited and full of energy. I believe they are all capable of making a difference in the lives of those they will soon be living among.
- Erin’s folks are coming for a 5-day Jamaica extravaganza! Woohoo!

And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.-- Sir Paul McCartney

Patrick

Cool! Bouncy house!

Today was our first day volunteering at our secondary project, the Montego Bay Marine Park. The marine park was the first national park in Jamaica and has a ton of various projects that need revamping. The cool thing is our supervisor is really excited to let us run wild and pick the projects that best utilize our skills/interests. I am excited as the work is a bit more along the lines of development work and more what I expected to be doing when I joined PC. I love what I do at my orphanage, but the energy investment is in the 105 children and not really in expanding capacity of the organization, as one would expect in development organizations. This way we get the best of both worlds.

To Do List:
1) Mold 105 positive world citizens that can hopefully read better than they could ante-Patricio
2) Save the aquatic environment in the Montego Bay area or at least get a good start
3) Become guitar virtuoso—Eddie VanHalen, Clapton, Kenny Wayne Shepherd watch yourselves!
4) Cook dinner for Erin—Tonight may be leftover stir fry but tomorrow’s tacos with my revamped tortilla recipe will dominate
So my list may be a bit over the top, but after getting roughed up last week I have found a bit of peace and renewed energy and am ready to conquer the world again. Things are looking up. Hell, even the Royals have won 8 out of their last 10 games.

I am very excited about the new volunteers coming to Jamaica soon. I am excited to feed off of their energy, their desire to make Jamaica and the world a better place.

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity. --The Buddha

I’m doing my best Chubby.
Patrick

We're all homos. Homo sapiens.

I was in a bookstore in downtown MoBay and encountered a peculiar site. On one of the main shelves, prominently displayed, was the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Despite this Pulitzer Prize winning book getting rave reviews from Erin (though I have struggled through parts), I was very, very surprised to find it shelved so conspicuously. For those of you that have procrastinated reading this book STOP HERE!, the following is a SPOILER… The protagonist is Calliope, who after having a lesbian-ish experience finds out she is in fact a he that has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. So a couple of un-descended testes later, some incest, and transvestitism (though unknown to Cal), this book really hits home the complexities of gender identity. Let me pause to express just how taboo homosexuality is here. It is biblical stoning taboo—literally. Jamaican homosexuals were almost (but not) granted U.N. refugee status. So for this book to have such a blatant placement I have to assume the store itself or the shelf stocker is extremely progressive. I hesitate to fully assume the liberal leanings of the store as Middlesex was surrounded with books whose covers were adorned with Fabio’s oiled chest and whose titles included The Pirate’s Booty (that title doesn’t necessarily imply smut novel, but its cover confirmed my suspicions). So maybe there was a mix-up in the book orders, maybe someone was excited by the idea of a Pulitzer Prize winning romance novel, but I want to think the owners/staff of this bookstore were deliberate in their shelving. I am happy with the idea that they are trying to encourage their fellow countrymen to open their minds.

I was in the bookstore to solicit some presentation supplies and was just browsing to kill time waiting for them to draw up my invoice. For the past couple of days Erin and I have been running around trying to complete a grant application. We are planning an HIV/AIDS peer educator training for the children at our orphanage. This training, for 20-40 kids (depending on summer work schedules), will provide instruction on HIV and other STIs, work to improve ability to make positive life decisions, and how to impart their knowledge to their peers. We are also having the kids create HIV/AIDS awareness paintings (on nice canvas with quality paint) to be displayed at their respective schools. The idea is for our kids to then use their new skills to create projects/presentations for World AIDS Day and present them at their schools. All in all we hope to indirectly raise awareness among 3000 or so area school children. Big up to Erin as she dominated the grant application. (This is Erin, I am reading over the blog and I wish to point out that I did not dominate it. I have the ability to dominate it, but I do not feel that I utilized that ability to its fullest.) We are really excited and are hoping our grant is accepted. Keep your fingers crossed.

I would rather take your punch, than not give you a shot.
Patricio

I'm optimistic, because everyday I get a little more desperate. And desperate situations yield the quickest results.

So last night there was a cockroach in my bed. I had turned out the light and was watching my bedtime Office episode, Patrick was mostly asleep and I felt something on my foot. Immediately I began kicking and twitching epileptically, rousing the half-comatose Patricio. I leaped out of bed and turned on the light… and saw nothing. So we settled back in and five minutes later, what do I see by the warm glow of The Office? A cockroach. Moseying its nasty way down my arm. I am quite upset by this and begin bellowing—with a curious mixture of disgust and triumph—that the cockroach is not imaginary, and it is currently on my person. Patrick grudgingly rolls out of bed and turns on the light to find me alone in the bed. He sighs and pointedly begins searching through the sheets, when he spots it. Running from the bed towards the closet. Man, I felt so freaking vindicated at that point. He gallantly smashed it into a gooey pulp with my shoe. And then he went back to sleep and I stared wide-eyed around me for hours. Really the funniest part is that I am pretty sure Patrick does not believe the roach was in the bed. But I saw it. I did. It was on me. He was extremely annoyed that I kept waking him with my anti-roach flailing. Lest you underestimate me, I’m not too bothered by creepy-crawlies. Even roaches. There used to be a nest of them in the shower drain at our previous abode and it didn’t faze me. But in my bed, that is a different story. Also I was having a “difficult” evening and this just capped it off. Gross. Stay out of my bed roaches.

Toby has been cruisin' for a bruisin' for twelve years. And I am now his cruise director. And my name is Captain Bruisin'.

If Erin and I did not use quotes from ‘The Office’ to title each blog, I would have entitled this blog:
I, Lead Paint and Technicolor Boogers, I

For those you with a keen eye and quick wit, you probably noticed that this title is in fact a palindrome. And despite Matt’s insistence that palindromes are kryptonite to gypsies, they, in fact are completely harmless when they are also onomatopoeias. And since all palindromes, like my title, are also onomatopoeias (I can provide citation for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalindromesareinfactOnomatopoeias), I am completely safe. Assuming Matt is not reading this blog… the only real literary danger to a gypsy is the dreaded Semordnilap. Damn you !Stressed Desserts! OUCH! Oi!

Anyway… Erin and I left to go up to the orphanage today around 8 o’clock. We got about 100 yards from our house before “Pssssst. Psssssssssssssssssst! PSSSSSSSSSSSSSST!” Ah, the sounds of a Jamaican flirting with Erin. My first instinct in this situation is to get mildly offended that 1) this dude would blatantly come on to Erin as I walk next to her and 2) that Erin would choose dirty, toothless bum-guy over yours truly (the “psssssst” is very common amongst cat-calling Jamaican males and I am not implying that all those who pssssst are dirty, toothless bums). However my second instinct is to walk over to the guy and explain to him how incredibly idiotic he sounds making that noise. I am pretty sure that making the deflating tire sound at a passing woman, American or otherwise, has never gotten anybody laid. Also calling Caucasian females “Whitey” (pronounced Whyyyy-teeee) hasn’t either. (I can provide citation for this too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/actinglikeObtuseRacistAssholedoesn’tgetyoudates) This has to be frustrating for our special likkle fem-Nazi and I don’t blame her.

The rest of the day was spent at our village laboring for Labor Day, which I am assuming is really is a day off of school to repaint and landscape said school. I immediately claimed painting the monkey bars and “swing song” for the two of us. I dunno why they call swing sets “swing songs” but I like it. I chose this chore because clearing bush (our other option) sounded like the set-up to a dirty joke. Also it sounded hard. Mainly, I never get to paint. My family thinks I am a terrible painter and so instead of teaching me to paint to their standards, they just never allow me around a brush. Not that I can blame them, my lack of patience comes from somewhere. This is Erin now, P.S. I was pretty pleased with myself until I realized we’d have about 20 “helpers,” and our work included scraping old paint off what had to be 2 miles of metal pipe twisted into some sort of playground rubix cube with small putty knives. The scraping alone may have been daunting, but really it was the band of eager 8-yr-olds clamoring for a chance with the putty knife that made this chore more challenging than I originally supposed. There were chips of paint (probably containing lead) flying and sticking to our arms and faces, getting snorted up our noses (thus Patrick’s rainbow snot) and meandering down our windpipes. We decided to only let the children that helped scrape wield paintbrushes. Even with all the commotion, it was easy to tell who had scraped as they looked like they had some sort of rare disease that produces multi-colored sores all over the hands and face. Most of the children only wanted to paint until they actually got a chance, and then realized it was work and lost interest, luckily. However, we never had a shortage of workers. Sometimes I get the eerie feeling that there are no adults in the village. You’ll see scores of children running about maniacally, but no one over the age of 12. It’s spooky. Today was kind of like that. I did see plenty of people over 5 ft, but they all seemed glad to have escaped the assistance the children were so eagerly offering us. So Patrick and I trudged through the day, lone supervisors over a herd of children armed with paintbrushes. Now that I think about it, it went pretty well. Despite the bottle of spilled kerosene oil and the ice fight at the end, there was only the usual whining and bickering. It did take us about 7 hrs to do something that should have taken 3 (and we still have to put the second coat on!) but no one tried to paint anyone else. Oh, they were covered in paint anyway, as they tried to reach through freshly coated monkey bars and sit on paint cans, but it was the result of an honest desire to work and not the remnants of a paint fight. I have some lovely pictures and video to commemorate our toils, but our camera broke! I’m pretty sure it got infected with some sort of high-tech virus (for more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/brokenGypsyCameraforSale).

This has been Erin and Patrick with your Channel 1 News investigation.