First Thoughts

My first thought is that the days move slowly here. Gone are the days of the hustle and bustle of everyday life, the constant rush against traffic, the ever-present daily grind. Welcome to the Caribbean, where days linger on – teaching you to enjoy every minute of your time here. Hours ebb and flow with the tides as days wash into evenings and evenings wash into nights.

Describing Dominica is no easy task because it is so vastly different from anything you’d see in the US. It’s a small island where everybody knows everybody else, so proper manners take precedence over a need to rush, rush, rush or a need for personal gain. The whole island is a rain forest – with palm trees, lush vegetation, and every shade of verdant green represented, shades seen only in a place with daily rainfall. Palm trees, forests of banana trees, cows lingering by the roadside, shacks in disrepair, roosters strutting along, waves crashing into the shore, jagged rocky cliffs covered with grasses and trees, rushing rivers and waterfalls – these are the things you see when you first get here.

The drive from the airport is not an easy one. The road- note that that is not plural, though paved (for the most part) is winding, with sharp hairpin curves and steep ascents and descents. The ocean waves rage against the east side of the island, with inky black sand beaches and beautiful giant rock formations that made me think all these islands are just huge stepping stones for a giant who skips across the island paradises that dot the Caribbean Sea. After winding around for what felt like weeks- but was really only about an hour- we reached the Portsmouth Beach Hotel and Ross University Housing, where we filled out some paperwork and were taken to our cottage. An interesting note about the driving here: all driving is done on the left hand side (like Britain), on a road that is barely large enough for one, yet people pass on the right occasionally, defying the laws of physics, and yet there’s a great deal of consideration with how they drive. Since there aren’t traffic rules, people yield to each other when it’s not wide enough to pass and pull over for someone else to go. Honks are words of greeting, notes of warning about curves and passing, and signify when it’s safe to travel. It’s a quite fascinating language when you really start to pay attention.

We live at Kootney Resorts, off Moo Cow Trail. There are over a dozen cottages here, painted in bright shades of coral pink and peachy orange. At the entrance to the trail, an unpaved, rocky dirt path, there are several cows, the namesakes for our trail. Up the hill you walk, parallel with the Picard River, a great place to cool off and enjoy a dip in the water. Some of our other neighbors are (besides other med students) a little pen filled with goats and a few random dogs and cats. Our landlady is lovely- super helpful and willing to do what she can to make us comfortable. She took us grocery shopping the first day so we could get our essentials. Fridays we get maid service, trash is daily, and every month we get pest control. She gave us the numbers for laundry pick up services and some restaurants she recommends. In our front and back yards, there are fruit trees, with everything from coconuts to oranges to bananas to starfruit. We picked a few things to start us off, but let’s just say I’m thrilled to have a huge banana tree weighed down by green bananas behind my house. Sadly, they really aren’t ripe yet – even by my standards.

We’re in #13, a cute 2-bedroom cottage with 1 bathroom, a huge closet and a small living room area. We have a patio, with a couple cute chairs on it, perfect for relaxing and communing with nature from the comfort of home. The bedrooms are simply decorated, with ceiling fans, desks, a queen size bed, 2 nightstands, and that’s it. All the essentials, none of the nonsense. Our living room has a TV with over 50 channels of Caribbean and American programming. Andy was quite relieved to see ESPN was in fact one of the channels. Thank goodness for football, I guess. The shower area is quite unique, made of stone and tile. It’s huge (though it has a weenie shower head) and is deep and big. There are loads of shelves for us to put all our toiletries on, and a small mirror and a sink. The closet is quite large, with several shelves and hanging bars (though we only have a few hangers). We’re still trying to figure out the best way to organize it, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Living here has truly made me realize how certain simple inventions are taken for granted in the US. I mean, seriously, taken for granted. For example, we do not have one of those toilet paper rolls on the wall – it just has to sit either next to or on top of the toilet and you have to unwind it yourself. I thought those things were pretty standard, but I guess when your shower is made out of stone, it’s tough to drill holes in it. Also, central air. We only have A/C units in our bedrooms, plus ceiling fans in them and in the living room. Meaning that our closet and our bathroom can get pretty steamy. We’re still trying to figure out the optimal way to cool our place while keeping electricity costs low. The other big weird thing is power. We have to really conserve electricity because you pay based on usage and apparently it can be quite costly, especially with transformers to transform the voltage. Anyway, we really only use power in our bedroom, and when I cook or use the microwave or anything of that nature, I have to turn the outlet on and then turn it off when I’m done. To turn the TV on, we have to turn the outlet to the transformer on and then turn the TV on. It’s quite the adjustment to go from A/C all the time to only when we’re home in one room. Also, grocery stores are not the mega stores we see back in the States. There’s no Wal Mart, Publix, Kroger, or Albertson’s here. There’s Tina’s Store and James Store and the Picard Grocery. They have most dry foods you’d need (pastas, rice, some imported instant mashed potatoes and stuffing) and all your basic needs. There really isn’t a produce department (we figure that most people pick that stuff up at the Saturday fresh market (though I have no idea where it is) and at the shacks. Most students appear to eat out quite often (most likely because they’re studying all the time and don’t have time to cook). My goal is to eat breakfast at home all the time and dinner at home as much as possible and then eat out for lunch and occasional dinners. Groceries are just too hard to pick up to cook every meal, 3 meals a day, at home. Some of the grocers deliver, which is great, but it’s not something I want to have to count on.

So far we’ve only tried two restaurants – Perky’s Pizza (quite good) and Bob’s Chinese Restaurant (quite adequate). Wait times kind of suck, but everyone here is on island time. We have groceries, which I hope will last a while given the difficulty of actually picking them up, with a few of our favorite things from home. The shacks don’t really look like they’re completely open yet since most of the students haven’t yet arrived, but I’m sure we’ll try those by next week.

The area around the school is relatively simple to navigate considering there is only one road, called Main Road (FYI- there are no stop signs or stop lights on Dominica or speed limits or street signs, or traffic rules of any kind it seems). Around the campus area there is Banana Trail, Lizard Trail, and Moo Cow Trail. We’re a little on the far side from campus (10-15 minutes) but since Andy will probably get a bike, it shouldn’t be a problem. After all, I need to lose a little weight, so all this walking up and down hills should help out.

Since we have no idea what his schedule will look like yet, we aren’t quite sure how the days will look and how (and where) I’ll be spending my time. It seems the most likely thing is that I’ll be here at home, working and writing, then meet Andy on campus for lunch and spend some time together, then come home. But since Andy got into this PAcE program, we don’t have any real idea what his schedule will be. My goals for the next 16 months are to write as much as possible, take as many pictures as possible, rest, workout, and experience things I never would not normally have had the opportunity to under other circumstances.

Well, those are the observations so far. We hope to take a few pictures today and tomorrow to show everyone what we’ll be seeing every day. It really is a different world down here and it will completely change the way we view our world!