No Problem!! Part 1

It's been more than a month since I was in Jamaica. How sad! I guess it's past time for me to write about it!

We started our trip at Montego Bay. 14 teenagers and 6 "adults." The youth were in charge of everything. We were broken in teams of 4 with one group having 2 female leaders, the others only having 1. The kids were told that they had a certain amount of money to use for the day on transportation, and food, when they ran out, that was it, they would have to deal with it. The five teams had the potential to either get taxis on their own, or ride together in the bus you see. If my team got in a taxi that was going the wrong direction, I was told I couldn't say a thing about it until they realized something was wrong. Each leader was given some money for that type of emergency. They ended up saving money, time, and possible confusion of switching taxis 2 times by choosing the bus.

This is my house! I think I only have this angle of it because we only were allowed 2 cameras the whole week for all of us. Having 5 teams and only 2 cameras was a huge struggle for me who has been nicknamed "tourist" in the past. The sad thing about the 2 cameras is that toward the end of the week, one of the kids accidentally deleted all of the pics on one of the cameras. Boo! I nearly cried, as did everyone else. The saddest part is that the camera deleted was the one we had with our "family" an entire night. That's one dance party that will never be able to be used as blackmail.

The first day we were there, we started the foundation of a house. The size of the house is 17' x 12'. With out the porch, it's just a 12' x 12' for 5 people. Hand mixing cement is not very fun on an average day, let alone a day that is more than 100 degrees.

One day the Jamaican's graciously made us lunch. This may not sound like much, but when we had to stop work everyday to make lunch that could take close to two hours to prepare, we were grateful to use our extra time for rest. These ladies are actually washing our dirty plates in the luke warm (only because of the heat) water. Washing dishes in cold water isn't a great feeling. As one of the girls in my group and I washed dishes one day in water that we couldn't tell which was "wash" and which was "rinse," we prayed over absolutely everything so that it wouldn't make us ill. Occasionally we would have to shake an ant off of either our hand, or the thing we were washing.

The first day was definitely a hard day. The last time we took a group to Jamaica we had the guidance of Miss Linda and a base camp to stay at that had many comforts we would not again see until leaving the mountain. The day consisted of us flying in to Mo Bay in the morning, and by that night, we had ridden over 2 hours in the bus taxi to McAlpine Mountain, met our family, gone (or sent someone from our team) to the market, prepared two meals, began work on the foundation of the main house we were building, and successfully become the talk of the village due to us "whitey's" planning on staying an entire week on the mountain with them. I'm not sure how many times I had to tell someone that we weren't leaving, but instead, we were staying on the mountain. They all thought we would go down the mountain to the base camp as all the other whitey's always do.