Visitors of every kind

So we have to travel first to Kingston, then to Portmore, then to Ocho Rios, then back to Portmore, then to Runaway Bay (St. Ann), then to Lionel Town (Clarendon) then to Denbigh (Clarendon also) all starting tommorrow and I couldn't bear the thought of leaving uno (aka yall), without a post in between. We'll be gone just a touch over a week. Anways. Since last we posted, we've had, not one, but TWO visitors to our part of the mountain. Which gave me TWO opportunity to bake tasty non-Jamaican desserts. This exciting development brings to a grand total FOUR people who have spent the night at our place. Nuff fun man.
The weekend before last, our peace corps friend from Manchester stopped by for a couple days. She got to meet the girls and go to our Supervisior's sister's party. It was pretty fun, since a little over half the people at the party were kids. Now, Caitlin and I are usually surrounded by pickney, but usually it's in a school or school-like setting, at the party we had the chance to just hang and play dominoes and deadly, high-speed games of catch (not since grammer school have I seen a tennis ball achieve such fatal velocities). I also got to make a first run at baking puff pastry on a Caribbean Island. Seemed to work out. The recipe is super easy as is the baking. The only area of difficultly with the first run was trying to get the pudding (I admit that under duress I made instant pudding) into the shells. I came up with a brilliant contraption that involved a straw, a rubber band and a plastic bag. See, I cut the straw to make it pointy. Anyway, after filling two shells, extraordinarily slowly, Caitlin declared my feat of engineering, "crap", so we had to scrap it and resort to the much less imaginative, but still rather fun 'stuffing the pudding in with a spoon through a small hole made with a ratchet [small knife]' method. I'd like to say it was a very Peace Corps solution, but I distinctly recall that this is how we got the pudding into the last eclairs we made while still in the States. Maybe minus the ratchet. Anyway, our friend from Manchester didn't seem to mind how the pudding got into the pastry, so I guess we did okay. Here she is with Caitlin. We had a great time and hope she comes to visit again. Three days later our good friends from St. Catherine, Shane and Kaelyn, came to visit and stayed for Easter. Although we did have a few things to do, like help out the St. Elizabeth Technical High School 4H Environmental Challengers prepare for Nationals, we did lots of fun stuff too. Shane and I got decidedly beaten in multiple rounds of Canasta. We went to YS Falls. We watched DVDs on their laptop (our TV, the singular item seperating us from "weird white people" into the "cool people we'd like to hang out with" categories, especially in the minds of the local kids, is now broken. It is beyond the scope of my repair skills. I even got out the multimeter. It's all up to Cliff now. He's the local 'fix electronics' man, also generally called a 'technician'. Apparently, he's willing to do things like repair electrical line for a shot of white rum. While I have great hopes for the repair of our TV, Caitlin has begun to consider our purchasing options). However, joy of joys, I got to attempt more desserts. Caitlin opened with a salvo of quite good biscottis (orange flavoured with pecans). As a casual return, I repeated my sinfully successful eclairs, this time with a less-than successful soy-milk based pudding. To add to the confusion we had to make banana muffins so the girls wouldn't instanteously devour all our newly baked goods. Finally, Caitlin pushed the envelope and made Cinnamon Rolls, not the Jamaican variety which are basically hardough bread with sugar and coconut (called a Sugar Bun, and quite tasty if your not craving a Cinnamon Roll), but geninune brown sugar and cinnamon with fat raisian cinnamon buns. In a final shock to our systems, I made a going away breakfast of a Dutch baby (aka puff pancake) with a banana's foster topping. We were very wicked peace corps. Naturally, since I was so busy eating all of Caitlin's desserts, I neglected to take any pictures of her incredible creations. You can see the unfoldings of the 'dessert melodrama' if you go back a few posts to the one where I got a package from my parents. An insidious little book, simply entitled 'Desserts', was the catalyst for our descent into sweethood. We did do more than eat candy though. The girls have now added three more peace corps names to their growing list of what they consider funny and unusual peace corps names (most amusing to Casenique was the fact that Caitlin and Kaelyn sound almost the same, which generated eighteen hour long episodes of sing-songing the two names together, seriously, when the kid left she was doing it, and when I saw her again the next day, she was still doing it). Myrna, the girls' mother and our good friend and neighbour, got to meet both Shane and Kaelyn and Maggie. She is always very excited when she can introduce us and our funny names to other people as "My friend Caitlin" or "My new friend Maggie" or "My good friend Shane". We really enjoyed having another couple out here though. While I think being single in the Peace Corps is alot harder in some ways then serving as a married couple, there are certainly different challenges. It's good to compare notes with another couple and realise your not entirely crazy. Due to our cool climate (and our stunning good looks) we do expect to see our friends from South St. Catherine visiting us again (It 'ot dung deso, me tell yah true) and they're always welcome, assuming we're here.

Naturally, we did have one other guest of note.

More when we get back.

-Khaled