Day 4 - Tuesday July 7

Tuesday morning I woke up pretty early, somewhere around 6:30 AM (I was probably just really excited for the day I had ahead). I stayed in bed until Robyn woke up too. We both got dressed and grabbed some lunch. Unika had prepared fritters for us with fried plantains and tea. I had never eaten fritters before and I am not sure what I could compare them with, but they are really good! After breakfast we continued getting ready and got picked up by Andre around 8:20. Allison was already in the taxi, since he had picked her up before he had come to us. We made our way to the Projects Abroad office and on our way we picked up Stacy in Mandeville town. We first had to pick up some shovels at the office before we would drive to the placement. We then made our way to the placement where we arrived at around 9 o'clock and where the boys were already there. We put our bags and spare shoes in a computer class room, which would be our room for the two weeks (only we were allowed to go in there). We started of the work with digging holes down the bathroom. In the months before, other volunteers and local people had already started on the holes, but they were not finished yet. The holes are being dug to become septic tanks. There is one smaller and less deeper one, which will lead out to the bigger and deeper hole. However, no one told us that "digging" meant that we had to dig in stone. It was not just earth that we had to get through, but it was mainly rocks that we had to dig in (since we were in the hills/mountains). We had to use axes and sledge hammers to smash the rocks and then used the shovels and the buckets to get the stones out of the hole. I'm still not sure how we managed to do it, but on the first day already we broke the sledge hammer and the axe. "Luckily", at that point the truck with cement bags came driving up the road, so we left the holes for what they were. Together with the local builders and the regular volunteers, we took the bags from the truck and we had to carry them into the storage room. This doesn't sound to difficult, but once you take in account that these bags weigh 42.5 kg each, you may think a little different about it. They were so heavy! The local people simply put the bags on their shoulders, which seemed pretty convenient, but I have no clue of how I would ever get those bags on my shoulder, since I was already struggling trying not to let them fall out of my arms. In about 20 minutes we had carried the tens of bags from the truck into the storage room (I carried about 5 of them in total, of which I am quite proud haha) and we then took a little break.

After a couple of minutes the second truck came. This one was loaded with steel wires from about 10 metres long and they were really, really hot from the sun. We understood that it was time to get back to work and we all carried the wires onto the playground of the school. Some people dragged two or three of them at a time, while others just dragged one at a time. Once we had carried them all to the playground, it was time for lunch. Unika had given us sandwiches for the day, but we didn't know that they would prepare food at the placement for us. The woman in the kitchen, Shelly, had prepared chicken with rice for us and we all got a cup of Milo.

We all ate our lunch together on the playground before we went back down into the holes. We (sort of) managed to fix the sledge hammer and still had one good axe so we could continue "digging". It was then that the other volunteers found out Dutch people don't speak English in the Netherlands but Dutch. They actually thought I was a native English speaker, since they considered my English to be really good. So when I told them that English was my second language and Dutch is my mother tongue, they were all truly amazed. This made me feel really good since this showed that following the TTO ( Bilingual education) and International Baccalaureate (IB) course is really good for your English and definitely not for nothing.

It soon got 2:30 which meant that we could get changed to drive back to the office. When we got at the office, we had a DIY-class in which we had do design something with a Jamaican interpretation. We came up with the ultimate Jamaican DIY-piece. We decided to make a summer dress from the Jamaican flag, and guess who would be our model... Of course, that would have had to be me. Besides our beautiful dress, we also made a headband and I got covered in glitters (which was not such a good idea hindsight). Unfortunately we did not win the cometition, but we did get the second place. It was really cool to see how everyone worked together and came up with totally different creations, but yet also similar in some ways.

After I got out of my dress, we were picked up by Andre again and were brought back to our house. The children were playing outside while Unika was cooking in the kitchen. When I walked into the kitchen, it smelled soooo good. She was cooking chicken soup, but not quite the same as we now it in the Netherlands. This was chicken foot soup, with the chicken feet still in it. Unika told us that she had volunteers before who did not like the idea of having chicken feet in their soup and would therefore not eat it. However, I felt like this was a once in a lifetime experience and if I really wanted to experience the Jamaican culture, I just had to try the chicken leg. So we all ate dinner together and Unika explained to us how they ate the chicken foot. They just put the foot into their mouth and suck of the skin (since it is really soft) and then they would chew on the bones to suck up the juice that was inside the bone and some of them even ate the bone (like Javier), but that went a little too far for me. I did as she said and ate the skin from the foot and toes and chew on the bone to get the juice out of it and even though it sounds kind of disgusting, it was actually really good. We talked some more about Jamaican food, recipes and Jamaican fruits and Robyn and I told her about food from England and the Netherlands.

After dinner, we walked to Mandeville town to buy a light bulb (which had been working for years but broke down when I first got at Unika's house. She therefore blames me for breaking it hahaha) and we bought internet credit, which we could use for a few weeks. I really liked the walks after dinner, because it was good for my digestion but it was also less warm in the evening and it allowed us to have some nice conversations. That evening for example we talked about the things we like to do in our free time, which let us to a conversation about music and karaoke and some of the things I had noticed about Jamaica in the first few days. When we got back home, Unika turned on the wifi so I quickly updated my Facebook page to let everyone know I was doing perfectly fine and I texted my parents to let them know how I was doing. Unfortunately, the Netherlands is seven hours ahead of Jamaica, so when I was texting them at 9 PM, they were still asleep which meant that they would read it when they woke up and would text me back when I was still asleep.

We then watched the X-Factor on the television and somewhere around 10 o'clock I decided to take a shower. I thought I had gotten a nice tan already on the first day of work, but when I stood under the shower, it turned out to be all dust and sand. I was still as white as a bottle of milk.... I got into bed with difficult, since I was experiencing some muscle pain from working with the axe and the sledge hammer. Luckily I fell asleep pretty soon, since I was really tired by then.

#Firstworkingday #DIYClass #Chickenlegsoup #Placement #Shelly #digging #Cementbags #Steelwires