Thoughts on Statia

I have now been here on Statia for 3 weeks… one strange hurricane week but now 2 weeks of settling into a routine and getting to now the area — the plants and animals and the culture, and what I’m going to be doing here.

We’ll start with my routine: I am working at the botanical garden mornings from Monday through Friday. Monday is Maintenance Monday, so we do weeding and general beautifying on the parts of the garden which are already finished. Then during the week we are mostly working on creating other areas which are not yet finished. There is a Children’s Garden (basically a play ground and then they are going to have activities like plant potting and stuff for special occasions) where we have been working on moving all these little chips of old tire rubber to put underneath so the kids don’t get hurt if they fall. There’s also a fruit garden which is just getting started on. Well, actually it seems like it’s been being started for like a year and a half now, but that’s kinda how things seem to go around here. That’s another story altogether. So we have been up there pulling up invasive plant species and digging weeds and weedwhacking… but it all just comes back inbetween times we can get up there… so no progress seems to be made ever… and all the fruit trees and tiny and being overtaken by weeds… well anyways, hopefully it will be coming along soon once we stop spending so much time in the Children’s Garden. And on Friday mornings we have something called Family Friday where all the interns work on one project together. One week we were all in the Botanical Garden doing hurricane repaires. And then last week we were working on the entrance to one of the trails to the national park — basically pulling back weeds and digging rain channels along the sides of the trail to cut back on erosion. So that is morning work.

In the afternoons I have been working on various things. Sometimes there are kids programs to help with; we have a snorkle club for kids I think 8-10, and Jr. Rangers 1 for the little kids and Jr. Rangers 2 for kids 10-12 or so. So we help sometime just to keep them on task and working. The kids here are amazingly hard to keep sitting still and concentrating! As in, I thought my job in California was hard with 20 kids and 2 adults, but here I am working harder to keep 5 kids on task with 3 adults! Honestly. I’m not really sure why that is… besides somehow I had control over the kids in California where if I told them to do something, they may not want to and put up a bit of a struggle, but in the end I had the control and they had to do as I say. Here, for whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be this culture of grownups telling kids what to do… at least me and the other intern and the ranger in charge of Jr. Rangers pretty all seem to have virtually zero control when it comes right down to it. If the kid truly doesn’t want to do as we say, we just keep saying it until finally they get sent home and that’s that. Pretty stressful. Some of them are very cute though. I’m guessing maybe part of the problem is lack of consistancy. As in different interns seem to help out every week, and there’s lots of intern switch over anyways, so they never really form a relationship with any one of us and so we never get that control that comes from knowing the adult, like with the kids in Cali they knew me and mostly they loved me and thought of me as a mother, and they needed me and knew they needed me, so they would do anything for me. Here it’s not like that at all. These kids are so independent they need no one and know it and therefore don’t care a bit about what we say. So that’s some afternoons.

Other afternoons I get time to work on my independent personal project. Each of us here gets to pick a project to work on in our spare work time which we are responsible for setting up and completing before we leave. So since I’m here so long, I have decided to work on two projects. One of them is to renovate the vegegtable patch. There is a little veggie patch for volunteers and interns to play with near the house, but it’s mostly all overgrown with weeds and has bad dirt and no organization… so I’m gonna set it up with a plan and good composty dirt and no rocks in the soil and double dig all the beds etc etc and hopefully have time to plant some stuff and experiment with growing and seed saving and all that fun stuff! And then for my other project I’m gonna do something with the butterflies on the island, I’m not exactly sure what yet, maybe just a complete species inventory and then something with pollination ecology– which butterflies tend to pollinate which flowers at what time of day or something like that. So I get to work on that in some afternoons and on weekends.

I will write more about other stuff some other day — hopefully about locals and botany and all that good stuff!