Statia!

For those of you who don’t know, I arrived two days ago on St. Eustatius, a tiny island in the Netharlands Antilles in the Carribbean. Just east of Puerto Rico and the US Virgen Islands. I am an intern here with the National Park system, working mostly in the botanical garden.

Yesterday I spent most of the day getting tours and having my brain COMPLETELY overwhelmed with information regarding the national park system and funding and local wildlife and my role and my responsibilities etc etc etc….. and getting to know my housemates and our cooking and cleaning duties and all that. So basically I was really excited today to get to work in the garden this morning. So far the weather here has not been the stereotyical carribbean sun, it’s been raining a lot, which is great for plants but unfortunately great also for the weeds. There is this vine with lovely pink flowers growing all over the lowlands of the island… I am ashamed to say I don’t know the scientific name but they call it here coralita. So I get the feeling at least half of my job with digging the stuff out of the ground…. at least I like weeding… Anyhow, that and weedwhipping is what I spent my morning on.

It seems that most mornings will be spent in the garden and afternoons either working in the office or working on an individual project I will devise in the next few weeks. Probably not as much physical labor as I was expecting but to some extent I can control that, eh? There should be lots of opportunities to get whatever i want out of this whole thing. I will know more and write more about all that kind of thing later.

The people here are a huge hodgepodge of nationalilites, but unfortuanetly I don’t feel most of the time that far from home culturally. All the interns and volunteers right now are from the US or England. The park rangers are mostly locals… very carribbean seeming. Everyone speaks engligh although most I think also speak dutch or spansish or some local something… more about that later.

There is a tropical storm coming tomorrow and Thursday. Should be exciting. But the people who were here in hurricane season don’t seem concerned so I’m not either.

Anyhow, I should have relatively consistant but short-session internet access, so I will keep frequent short updates. Hopefully.