Gwada-loop

I’m back. From where exactly? After spending last year in Toulouse France as an English teaching assistant, I returned home for about ten days in June before turning right back around and heading for the French overseas department of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean where I worked alongside 5 others as a summer camp counselor for 25, very affluent, high school kids. Our camp, working under the umbrella organization of VISIONS, was not based on mainland Guadeloupe, but on a smaller, lovely and welcoming island called Terre-de-Bas which is one of the two tiny Saintes islands southwest of the mainland. Terre-de-Bas is about 4 square miles and has a population of around 900 inhabitants. Needless to say 30 Americans made quite a splash.

VISIONS has been coming to Guadeloupe/Terre-de-Bas for about 15 years and have very strong relationships the local families. For the past 8 years or so the Guadeloupe chapter has been run by a husband and wife directing team who made Terre-de-Bas their second home, staying each summer almost a month after the kids left. Ryan and Annie are infamous on T-d-B and the islanders honor them with the title “Santoises.” This year Ryan and Annie were starting up a VISIONS location in Ghana, Africa and we had a new director Andrew who had been to Guadeloupe once before with VISIONS in 2008. Other than Andrew, our entire staff was brand new. We spent the entire first week before the kids arrived explaining to community members that no, Ryan was not coming back and Andrew was the new director. They were equally happy and excited to have us there all the same, but we got the impression we had big shoes to fill.

The community was so graciously welcoming, and were always offering our kids fruits from their yards or bringing some over to the kichen. I was continuously greeted by name on the streets by the one police officer Laurent, our cab driver Ronald, the ferry captain Danny, and the storekeeper Michel. Picture a Carribbean spin on the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast.

Commerce in our neighborhood of Petite-Anse consisted of 2 convenience stores, and one local restaurant that made a different dish every night. There was one pay phone which I used calling cards to call home about once a week. We had a modest “port” from which several boats left daily for the mainland, and the other Saintes island, Terre-de-Haut, following an indiscernible schedule that seemed to fluctuate daily and accommodate the boats that inevitable and regularly fell “en panne.”

My specialized role as staff, in addition to being responsible for the happiness and wellbeing of all the little munchkins, was “food honcho”. After an insane Dinner Impossible-esque first week of being more or less solely responsible for 2 hot meals per day equipped with not much more than 2 bunsen burners, I had the incredible experience of working closely alongside our full-time Guadeloupean chef, Pierrette. Pierrette is somewhat of an international legend, and what some of the counselors described as who their image of what God might look like.  I was incredibly intimidated by her at first be we ended up working magnificiently together, and hers was one of the hardest goodbyes I made. We would get gorgeous produce shipments from a man named Jean Paul on the mainland and everyday we have had local bananas, melons, pineapple, mangos and passion fruits. I earned the (loving) nickname from the kids "The Kitchen Witch".

Our accommodations were very “rustic” to say the least. Our camp was once the old middle school on the island and we inhabited 4 fiberglass huts with tin and plywood roofs. There was one temperature of water, and due to exposed pipes in places it was usually warm – which was nice for showers but not so nice when it’s all you had to drink. The island was rampant with wild goats and chickens, iguanas, and tiny lizards and frogs that seemed to get into everything. Cockroaches and millipedes were also not as uncommon as I would’ve liked.

 I slept on a tiny twin bed frame on a plastic wrapped mattress under a frustratingly ineffective mosquito net. I learned how to shake out my sheets every night before bed, and quickly understood what “bucket flushing” a toilet meant.

My days started around 5:30 everyday and ended around 11pm. We would work with a group of 6 kids on one of our 5 work sites from 7 until noon. After lunch we would either hike, go to the beach, or participate in cultural exchanges with community members. On the weekends we had larger excursions that included hiking a volcano on the mainland, and scuba diving on Terre-de-Haut. I had roughly one day off every week. It was go-go-go 24/7 and just when I thought I’d given 100%, or I couldn’t process another person talking to me or telling me what they needed, I’d have to step up and bandage up a knee, or flush someone’s poop.

VISIONS summer: cool but crazy.