Jacques Cousteau Eat Your Heart Out

November 18, 2006

The week has just flown by. Things are really happening at GRENCODA and my plate seems to become more filled with projects and tasks as the weeks seem to slip by faster and faster.

This week saw me heading out into the fields and back country of the parish of St. John’s (the parish that we are located in). These farm visitations are revealing to me a new Grenada, one that highlights the effects of hurricane Ivan as felt by the farmers. Grenada, I am told, looked quite different before hurricane Ivan made its mark on the island. Before Ivan, the most recent hurricane to visit Grenada was Janet in 1955. This translates into an almost sixty year time period where the vegetation on this tropical island was allowed to reach a maturity rarely seen on other Caribbean islands located closer to the hurricane belt. On many parts of the island, palms grew over 100ft tall, an almost unheard of feat in a hurricane region. Stands of cocoa, nutmeg, mango and other trees were large and imposing with canopies that provided cool shade for less heat tolerant plants and animals. This extensive canopy also contributed significantly to weed control by limiting the heat units that reach the ground.

Today, Grenada lacks the protection of that canopy and the weeds have over run the island in many places. Vines have grown and covered many acres of previously farmed land, suffocating the surviving trees while robbing them of precious nutrients and moisture. The major job of many farmers today is to reclaim this land, uncover the surviving trees and start the job of planting new trees. Having visited some nine farms and seeing the extensive growth of these vines firsthand, I can give testament to the enormous task that lies before many of these farmers. The Cocoa Revitalization Initiative, which is organized and dispersed by GRENCODA, supports these farmers by allowing them the opportunity to hire day labourers to help clear the land. After only a few days I have seen some of the progress that this project has supported and I am encouraged by the changes in the appearance of these farms. There are a lot of farms yet to visit and I hope that the progress goes as smoothly for rest of them. (Though I know there will be stalls and set backs along the way.) Don’t worry, those of you that love the visual reporting aspect of the blog will get to see some of the pictures I have taken of these farms when I post them in the future.

Even with all of these farm visits and progress monitoring responsibilities I guess I just can’t help heaping more work onto my plate. I spoke up at the weekly staff meeting on Monday, offering to help one of the staff with some problems she had been having with a PowerPoint presentation. Now I find myself having agreed to facilitate three workshops on various aspects of multimedia training in the upcoming weeks. Just a sucker for punishment I guess.

Kristy has also been saddled with a lot of work but I believe that she prepared her own post, describing and detailing the tasks before her. So I will only say that she has found a bundle of work that will keep her busy well past Christmas.

Enough about work, you’re probably tired of hearing the details of our workweek. You probably want to know what we did on Saturday. Yes, we did go for our first SCUBA diving lesson. For those of you that have already taken a lesson or gotten your certification, then you already know that diving is a bizarre and amazing experience. Within half an hour of Kristy and I signing our liability release forms, we were in a hotel pool, learning the basics of our equipment and taking our first breaths underwater. We were quite lucky as we were the only ones scheduled for Saturday and as such we didn’t have to wait for other people to grasp the techniques and processes before we could progress onto the next step. And what a step the next one is! It all seemed to happen very quickly; one hour after we arrived at the dive shop we were sitting on a boat and heading out for our first reef dive. After getting into the water and descending slowly to a depth of 35 feet, we swam over to a small reef. I know it is terribly cliché but words can’t really describe our experience. The abundance of life living in and around the reef was astonishing. Everywhere you looked, things were moving and vibrant. I was amazed at how close we could get to many of the fish before they darted away. Our instructor showed us many interesting things on the reef from small anemones that quickly retracted their tentacles when she touched them to some sort of water eel that glowed an iridescent blue when she fanned water over it. We are still trying to process our first reef dive experience but those 48 minutes were filled with many, many firsts. We felt like a couple kids wanting to say, “What’s that? What’s that?” all the time. I think that we are hooked and we plan to head back to the dive shop soon to finish up our certification. If anybody is curious about the dive shop that we are using, their website is: www.ecodiveandtrek.com.

I guess that’s about it for now. We are currently wondering where we can get water on a Sunday when all the stores are closed as the town water supply has been off for about 24 hours. I am not too worried about it though, as the situation doesn’t seem to bother the local residents. Now I have to go brush up on Microsoft’s Access software so that I am one step ahead of the students I will be teaching next week.

Later,

Jason