Two weeks ago, while at a conference in the capital of Praia, the Peace Corps medical officer pulled several volunteers aside and told us, “there’s be an outbreak of conjunctivitis here on Santiago, chances are it will probably be on the northern islands soon.” This harbinger of the sickness to come was accompanied by a [...]
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If you’re trying to explain the “experience” that is life, does it make the sense to use the broadest strokes possible or a composite of disparate images to final paint a comprehensive portrait. We all have our own solutions, but there are moments that protrude above the others which define the landscape itself. Here are [...]
Yesterday, after six months of strife, Ribeira Brava’s community pool opened. Thanks to the generosity of property owner Antonio, our local Camara municipal, high school administration and engineers, community children now have a place to take formal swimming instruction. This past year, Sao Nicolau has seen four drownings at local beaches. Our hope is that [...]
It’s decidedly summer in São Nic, what with all the unfamiliar faces of returned emigrants bobbing around the praca, presidential elections and, unfortunately, the inability to get anything done. Cape Verde may very well defy every defining characteristic of the space-time continuum, case in point being that while waiting line at the market you might [...]
The smell of kerosene kept me up all night because the window knocked a lantern over on my desk. All of my correspondence is now completely incendiary. So I paced around the room because the, between the smell and the five hours of jet lag, there was no hope of getting sleep before dawn. I’ve [...]
“The dust hurts my eyes,” Ennui said and he huddled in the bed of the truck as we passed beneath the mountains that border the abandoned village of Fontainhas. The wind was against us and the pickup strained to climb the road leading to Cachaco and Monte Gordo. “Are you going to the funeral in [...]
I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon dismembering a goat to be stewed at my friend’s festa. Somewhere between teasing back connective tissue from fur-bearing skin and hacking across the rib cage with a dull knife, I had what you might consider an out-of-body experience. Here I was, in the kintal of my friend’s [...]
If there is a universal symptom in the life of a foreigner, it is the occasional pangs of isolation that may distance you from your adopted home. Phenomena like “nostalgia” or “longing”, sehnsucht or, most appropriately, “saudade,” serve to remind you that, no matter how much you’ve grown accustomed to a place, a piece of [...]
So participation was at one point a series of peaks and troughs, but it now appears we’ve found our audience. English Club activities are well attended: night classes for youths consistently draw over 30 students and our films are developing a following. Also, thanks to the generous support of our donors abroad, we have more [...]
Our time has a serious dearth of pass-times; depending on which generation you belong to, time outside of work is most often dedicated to Orril or Facebook. To remedy that, the English Club is constantly introducing new activities. Joining our repertoire of kite-making, weekly movies, night classes and game nights comes our newest venture: chess. [...]
This weekend was a marathon of partying on Sao Nicolau. It started with the “Teachers’ Activities” weekend from Friday to Saturday. For this festa, we were sequestered in the primary school of a remote village, Praia Branca, and given a loose schedule of events including “dancing” a “grill-out and acoustic concert” as well as a [...]
Thanks to our partnership with the local radio station, Ribeira Brava FM, the English Club is now being publicized daily via their broadcast. Better yet, since they stream online, the word is getting out across the world. Check them out at Ribeira Brava FM Just click on the “Ouvir a Radio” tab on the right; [...]
While in our ascent, the captain came over the intercom: “Passengers, I hope you don’t mind but we have one passenger who has to catch their flight from Boavista back to Europe, so we will be briefly re-routing the plane to drop him off.” Which is just another indicator of how generous TACV can be [...]
“Who died?” I asked, bluntly, of a man standing at the edge of the praca this afternoon. “A woman from Campino, she was 101 years old.” In the span of that life, Sao Nicolau has changed much in some regards, but in others the stasis of our island is immediately evident. Roads were paved and [...]
When you travel in Cape Verde there are a few things you can do to immediately ingratiate yourself with the locals. One is being polite; another is to give as much or more than you receive, which can be difficult as Cape Verdeans tend to be very generous. So when I found myself on the [...]
On Saturday, I’d promised the local youth that we would build kites this week at the English Club; collecting the materials took a few days but by the time Monday evening rolled around, we were ready to start. A tentative head poked in the door around five o’clock and the kid, whom I’d never met [...]
And what brought this on? Probably the most mundane thing in the world: a median. I was leaving my friend Preta’s apartment, which is in one of a pair of four storey apartment buildings. Between them, there is what can only very generously be called a “esplanade”. It’s really just a wide, wedge-shaped street that [...]
The whole “highs” and “lows” of the Peace Corps experience are mentioned so often that they’ve achieved a triteness only approached by the catchphrase “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” The truth is, if you were to ask your average PCV, “What was it like?” as people tend to do when they’re pretending to be [...]
After months of preparation and four days of non-stop revelry, Carnival in Ribeira Brava is finally over. The celebration required fabrics to be imported from Brazil, three storey floats built with re-appropriated rebar, flour and cement sacking from every construction site on our island. Power outages were frequent, what with all of the electricity re-routed [...]
History is filled with examples of man’s ambition and the lengths he will go to achieve it, no matter what the cost: the moai of Easter Island, the Great Wall of China, the Spruce Goose. In Sao Nicolau, we have our own foolhardy attempt at immortality-via-excess: Carnival. Sure, we might not compete with a million [...]
Ok, so I promise more interesting things to come, especially regarding carnival, but I wanted to get some serious stuff out of the way first. This weekend, for those of you in the Durham area, Duke University will be hosting its annual “Duke in Depth” event with this year’s theme being “A World Together” i.e. [...]
The month long party that is Carnival officially kicked off last night with the students’ parade. What was supposed to start at “3 pm, sharp” was soon delayed to five, then six and finally (and haltingly) started at a quarter to seven. Lining up on the street next to the polivalente, our students wore the [...]
Since we’re trying to drum up financial support for the English Club of Ribeira Brava, we’re offering some new, heartwarming incentives to donate. Taking a cue from NPR, we’ve got some gifts we’ll send your way at set donation amounts: $5 or more- Member Card (see below) $20 or more- Photo of the ECRB signed [...]
Beauty pageants are common in Cape Verde. You could attribute that prevalence to any number of social norms in our country: competitiveness, boredom, vanity, the “machismo” influence on girls’ self-perceptions. Not to critique them, they are merely a fact of life here. This past Saturday, Ribeira Brava held the first male beauty pageant, “Mister Ribeira [...]
Carnival is Ribeira Brava’s raison d’etre; there is a local saying that our community is so quiet because we spend 361 days a year preparing for our one, four-day party. With the first night a mere three weeks away, preparations are already well underway. If you walk the streets at night, you’re likely to see [...]
I probably won’t be posting anything for a few days while I catch up on some work from the last week, but I would suggest you poke around the other pages. When I have small amounts of free time, I’ve been making a habit of expanding the side offerings, most recently the “Travel”, “Culture in [...]
So due to Peace Corps’ stringent policies regarding volunteer health and safety, I’ve spent the last week in Dakar after being “medivaced” from Cape Verde. To refrain from editorializing too much, suffice it to say that I’m fine now and I hope to get back to work on Wednesday. In the meantime, I’ve been exploring [...]
My project proposal for the English Club of Ribeira Brava was recently approved and now the real work starts: raising money to supply the materials our members need to learn English. Whereas we sought in-kind donations earlier, I am now asking for you to donate money to our cause. Below, please find a link to [...]
“Oh yeah, one time I had two students….” that’s how most horror stories begin among volunteer teachers here in Cape Verde and, yesterday, I finally was able to contribute my own. Altercations have happened in class before, but they’re usually confined to simple teasing or the occasional slap on the back of the head. One [...]
By my count, Sao Nicolau has approximately 20 distinct “communities”, mostly clustered around the population centers of Ribeira Brava and Tarrafal. A few more are scattered on the main road between Ribeira Brava and Tarrafal. Beyond them, about four or five more, such as Juncalinho and Preguica, are substantial enough to have regular car traffic [...]
So Cape Verde’s elections are coming up next month, February 4th, and preparations are absorbing nearly everyone’s time and effort. To remain strictly non-partisan, I will only briefly mention the two parties, PAICV and MPD, which are most prominent. Instead, I think it’s worth noting just how healthy politics are in Cape Verde. While African [...]
This morning the National Volunteer Corps (that name is imprecise in translation, forgive me) collected a group of us to paint a dilapidated school in the town of Fajã. Even in the US it would be hard to motivate unpaid workers to get up at nine in the morning on a Sunday, but the local [...]
It more closely resembled a scene from a Vietnam movie than a “trash pickup day” at school this morning: fourteen year old boys swinging machetes, smoking billowing up over the upper classrooms from a raging bonfire in the main quad and ash raining down like we were in Pompeii. “Are you sure that’s safe?” I [...]
So where do we stand? That’s a question I ask myself on a daily basis here and it seemed healthy at first, but, in being honest with yourself, you must consider the failures with the successes. What happens when you spend 50 minutes drilling a grammatical concept in class, only to discover that the confident [...]
Today, a small dream became a reality. Despite my disolussion with beaurocracy in general, and Cape Verdean in particular, sometimes you can get what you want by merely going through the motions. After a series of meetings at the camara municipal (our local government) and a formal proposal that my fellow teacher Simon helped me [...]
So anytime you’re confined to a small, tropical island literature dictates you must run into a colorful set of characters and Sao Nicolau doesn’t disappoint. Other than your typical collection of head cases, salacious teenage girls and the high-functioning alcoholics, we have a fascinating transient population of foreigners. In town as small as Ribeira Brava, [...]
So it’s been a while since the last post, what with holidays and all. Rather than recount what I did on my vacation, I think it would be more relevant to relate how my trip affected my opinion of Cape Verde in the last two weeks. If you follow international affairs, you’re probably aware of [...]
The trimester is wrapping up and these last four days will be incredibly hectic, so I won’t be posting for a while after this. There have been a few happenstances worth reporting, though. My students’ charm is beginning to emerge slowly. When discussing uncountable nouns, such as “water” “wood” “money” “mail” and “happiness”, and [...]
So last night was the first time I made an effort to experience the highly westernized Cape Verdean night-club scene. Tarrafal, the beach town on Sao Nicolau, sports “Molta” a two storey discothèque featuring a DJ with dubious taste and fairly cheap drinks. Though it’s difficult to remember every sordid detail of the evening, a [...]
Today, it rained for the first time in two months. Once the first drops had left their shadows on the pavement, the heavens opened up with impunity. At this rate, the green that had been receding from our island might stay for a few more weeks. With luck, tonight might also mark the first movie [...]
I’m sorry for the negligence in terms of updates; the last week has been hectic. This weekend marked Municipal Day in Ribeira Brava, a four-day celebration that climaxed when Cordas do Sol played in the town square last night. The six-piece band hails from Santo Antao and, while I might have once relegated them [...]
Time is a variable concept in Cape Verde. Albert Einstein, reportedly, once conveyed his theory of relativity with a simple anecdote: “Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. Sit on a red-hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour. That’s relativity”. Peace Corps Volunteers here have [...]
Thanksgiving dinner was an evening of American life transposed three thousand miles to our rooftop. The other volunteers on our island coordinated so that we each made a different dish (I made the unseasonal and unpopular lentil soup) and then prepared them in our apartment. Among them were: three locally raised chickens, green bean and [...]
A soccer tournament has descended upon our high school polivalente for the next week. Though we usually have our full dose of football here: 3 nights a week of games with professors, 2 with students, the rest of our weeks activities have been waylaid by the tournament. Teams from the island-wide Liga Federal play a [...]
Last night we went up to mountain village of Cachaco to help one of our fellow volunteers celebrate his birthday. In typical Cape Verdean fashion, we showed up fashionably late, only to find ourselves outdone by the party itself, which started 4 hrs late. Nevertheless, it was a great party by any standards: great company [...]
So last night, despite it every obstacle that was thrown in the way, we managed to show our weekly movie, Madagascar 2. As usual, the setup was a tenuous affair: our first laptop would not turn on, the projector showed up an hour-and-a-half after it was supposed to and my school director insists this is [...]
11/14/10 São Nicolau’s center of mass is certainly located in the west and, consequently, nearly all of the development has taken place here. The airport, capital (Ribeira Brava) and center of industry (Tarrafal) are all located on the western portion. There are, however, beautiful communities sequestered on the eastern peninsula. Yesterday, I made [...]
In the past twenty-four hours I’ve had my most enthralling and disheartening experiences of my service thus far. Last night, another volunteer organized a yoga class in our town’s old cinema. Normally, a women’s aerobics class practices there each night, so my friend had a group already willing and able to try this novel form [...]
Some very anecdotal evidence (read “unreliable”) suggests that it takes ten years to be fluent in a foreign language. Granted, there are a nearly uncountable number of variables at play when calculating that number: age, previous linguistic experience, immersion level, but I think the salient point is that it takes a very long time to [...]
What’s really lovely about living on an island that’s not on most maps is that it’s easy to convince yourself that every day will yield a new discovery. Obviously that’s far from the truth, but the beauty here is difficult to decipher and perhaps that is the source of its beauty itself. I’m tempted to [...]
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