Gone fishin'

For fun, and to take Oisin's mind of his wasp sting we took him fishing yesterday. We caught not a thing (no surprise there!) but Osh's curiosity was addressed (hold my rod Mim, it's really boring...). Osh put his rod down-time to good use by fishing old conch shells out of the water and lining them up in his conch shop. Yesterday was, in fact, a very exciting and achievy sort of day. I spent a couple of hours in the morning weeding the coconuts which were planted in trenches months ago and have been unattended by the goons currently running the nursery. With potentially thousands of dollars worth of tree not thriving we decided that action was needed: Nicky has laid out the irrigation for them and I tackled the weeds. In amongst them I found 3 tomato plants so we had fried green tomatoes (very tasty) for breakfast yesterday.

We've had the backhoe in most of the week digging holes for new digesters, moving the spoil piles from the new holes to new places and generally tidying up and creating new room for growing stuff. We might have 15 acres here but very little of it is immediately useful (being covered in bush) so we have to make the best of what space we do have. Osh's wasp sting (I was nearly stung!) was not too bad actually - I ushered him into the house and Daniel, unbeknownst to us went to find out what had bitten/stung him (bless that boy for his foresight and common sense). The sting didn't look tooooo bad but afterwards Daniel told me that had it been a small brown spider we would have had to whip him up the hospital (child, not the spider) for treatment because if you leave spider bites they necrose....lovely!

Daniel is back at school today and an air of gloom is settling on the house as Daniel tackles the misery of the government school (staffed by teachers motivated by their US dollar paychecks, populated with dim students, no light bulbs in the class rooms, not enough desks etc etc) and we all silently face Thursday. Osh is very excited about going home - not because he is home sick or doesn't like being here, just because he is looking forward to seeing his Dad and the cats and so on. The other day he told me not to be sad about leaving: don't be sad Mim, Nicky can come to our house for a chat every day and then go home on the plane....I don't think the distance thing has quite registered yet. He is certainly going to miss have such freedom outdoors and so many things to play with.

Today's favourite play thing is a broken down Hi-Lux jeep: Nicky acquired it from a friend and is keeping it for spares for his Hi-Lux. With the government now banning the import of any car over 7 years old the possibility of spares on-island are reducing and having a bank of spares to hand certainly saves money. So Osh is currently in the drivers seat making brooming noises (it has no engine) and being the boss of his own little world.

The jeep, it transpires, has another function. Nocius is a Haitian labourer who works for Nicky - he is incredibly hard working and diligent and is paid by the hour. No contract, no security - a very hand-to-mouth existence. As we came back from dinner with friends last night we found Nocius getting into the jeep....bedding down for a night's sleep. Turns out that because he lives so far away he finds it very difficult to get to work on time (very few jitneys running at 6am and little chance of hitching a lift) so he often sleeps here. That was a rather humbling thought as we sat in the house bemoaning the mosquitoes (a plague of them at the moment) and the heat. We've decided to build Nocius a small house on the property (a 1 room thing) so that he doesn't have to sleep in the car. Nicky also suspects that he sleeps in teh jeep to save money on (very high) rent.

Osh is certainly getting a glimpse of how the other half live and struggle!

trash heaps and me

Because I couldn't fit them in the previous posting, here is a photo of the dump, and a couple of me in me sunday best going out for fish and rice and peas down by the beach.

Bad mothering

On Maundy Thursday Osh came home from school armed with the goodies he had made - a lovely necklace for me (and Nicky to share, apparently, but Nicky let me wear it!), a basket with a cupcake in it decorated with a blue marshmallow chick (pictured, just before he devoured it) and 2 fridge magnets.

Easter was a marvellously old fashioned affair here. Most of the West Indies is, in fact, rather conservative (for a region that makes a pile of money from scantily dressed girls and is awash with alcohol) and wonderfully old fashioned. There was no alcohol for sale anywhere on Good Friday, no shops were open on Easter Sunday (in fact most places – except IGA! – are closed on Sundays) and everyone was decked out in there Sunday best for most of the weekend. Oh, and the Haitian preacher turns out to be in a church just behind the Liquor Store down the road….

We woke to the sound of cheeping on Easter Sunday morning. A lovely bright sunny day (a huge improvement on the 3 days of torrential we’d had before) and there was a mummy hen and 5 wee chicks – one of them a Hallmark (inc) yellow. Which, when you think about it, is not the most evolutionary sensible colour to be in a bush made up of browns and greens. Osh was seriously excited about the chicks but that excitement was then superceded by joy at the discovering of a rash of chocolate eggs about the farm (see, if you feed hens chocolate they produce chocolate eggs!). I think Cadbury’s might put different stuff in to their crème eggs which stay remarkably solid in the heat….

Easter Monday was not such a happy morning. Out there in the bush behind the kitchen was the cheep cheep of chicks. They only make this noise when they are looking for Mum. Mum was nowhere to be seen and we think she is either sitting on more eggs (they lay 1 a day, each egg takes 28 days to incubate so the clutch will not all hatch at once) or got eaten by wild dogs Sunday night (there was an awful lot of barking going on outside). Whichever the answer, the 3 chicks (only 3 in evidence) have little chance of surviving – it has been chilly the past 2 nights and they are still pretty clueless about how to find food. Nicky kindly went into the bush and managed to rescue one chick which we put in the enclosure but by the end of the day all three chicks where back together wandering all over the farm still looking for Mum. Osh has accepted, with sanguine, the inevitably that they will die. But we still have 11 other chicks who are all alive and well!

Other excitement yesterday was a monstrous bonfire. There are vast amounts of garden trash here – big stuff, the sort of stuff that takes ages to rot (palm leaves, coconuts and so on) and although we have 15 acres of land much of it is still native bush and the trash is using up valuable space. So, we burned it – the fire started at 10 am and is still smoking this morning (Tuesday) but has made a huge difference. Thousands of cockroaches came scurrying out of the pile, along with some HUGE spiders and a couple of snakes (very, very small glistening black ones). Talking of snakes Osh came running down the hill last week all excited that Nicky had found a venomous victor….turns out what he meant was a boa constrictor (which of course is not venomous). It was very small and had been hiding in a pile of wood. We took a photo of it and then released it back into the bush. First time I’ve ever seen a live snake in the wild – Nicky has seen much, much larger boa constrictors here.


Last weekend we went to the dump and I remembered to take the camera with me. I met my first ever real life garbage picker there. Having lectured on poverty and garbage so often it was rather surreal to see one in the flesh, as it were. If there were a world prize for recycling the Republic of Haiti would win it hands down. This garbage picker was Haitian (and an adult, not a child, thank heavens) and went to each car as it arrived sifting through the garbage for useful stuff – broken computers, bottles, plastics, tyres and so on. There is no recycling at all on the islands although vast amounts of garbage do find their way back to Haiti where they are put to good use. After the dump we went to Malcolm Beach at Northwest Point - the most norwesterly point on the island and very remote. Utterly beautiful with cacti growing on the beach, and you'll see from the photo that Osh has gone quite blonde!

A plague of frogs on your house!

This is quite extraordinary. Oisin has been at Easter Camp for 4 days now and on every occasion I've been able to say goodbye and leave him quite happily; what a difference to his refusal to allow me to leave him when he was at school in Portsmouth! In fact he likes the whole experience so much that every morning he comes charging into the bedroom at 6.30 asking if it is time to go to school yet, and have I made his lunch yet and can we leave yet! He thinks Miss Myrna is lovely and she certainly is a great teacher. Yesterday they made cup cakes and today they are decorating them with marshmallows (apparently!). They've also been learning about Easter and Osh was asking me last night why they dug Jesus up from his grave after 3 days...me thinks the mechanics of the story have become a little muddled and it sure is a harder one to explain than Christmas!

Miss Myrna taught Daniel when he was about the same age and then she left to teach in Bermuda for 10 years where she developed a passion for gardening. There is not much vegetable gardening going on here (not the most hospitable climate for it, although it is possible with a bit of patience) but the good folk of Bermuda love their vegetable patches and Miss Myrna and I were swapping tips yesterday...like how come thyme refuses to thrive in this climate? You'd've thought that hot and dry was perfect for thyme but it obviously doesn't like this type of hot and dry.

This has also been a very very wet week. Monday was dull and cool (by WI standards), Tuesday started out much the same (it had rained a little overnight) but by 11am the rain started and boy did it rain. Torrents of the stuff came down for a good 2 hours and then it rained steadily for the rest of the day. Nicky and I had been to a meeting about the Blue Loos and decided to pop in and see a developer interested in some landscaping when the rain began. When we left that meeting the main road up the middle of the island was awash with rain with huge, deep puddles everwhere. Nicky was a little nervous about whether we'd get home or not - apparently diesel 4X4 are better in that amount of water (we were in the gas truck) on account of the electrics or something. Ignorance, I believe, is bliss because I'd driven in driving rain in the truck before and had been happy as Larry! Anyway, we did make it home but only because Nicky knows enough short-cuts that enabled us to avoid the inevitable snarl ups as saloon cars ground to a halt in the 2' deep puddles. Everyone is gnashing their teeth that the government spent a small fortune tarmacing the road (which previously when I was here was full of pot holes with treachorous drop offs on either side) but Johnston Int. who built it didn't take drainage into account. Compound this with the rapidly shrinking amount of natural drainage (disappearing under an ever widening carpet of tarmac and concrete) and real problems emerge.

I finally managed to get a batch of laundry dry yesterday when it was sunny long enough in the afternoon to dry it out and the house has an air of dampness about it and a permanent trail of muddy footprints from the dogs but the grass has suddenly sprung back to life (Nov-March is very dry, April and May see the 'May Rains' then the hurricane season begins!) and the frogs are out in force.

Tuesday night we were treated to the most awesome chorus of frogs. Most nights we hear them from the irrigation tanks, but Tuesday they were all around the house - hundreds of them croaking away. Couldn't see them (it being dark and all) but they were in full voice. Last night I went into the TV room to find a (tree) frog on the sofa, one on the floor and a huge one on the wall. Really pretty things (dull green, mottled yellow rather than a bright green) but all looking rather startled. Given their look of surprise I convinced myself that a plague of frogs was not upon us (I think plague frogs would look more menacing) and just got on with watching the TV.

With my translations out of the way I've been able to find time to read books and have recently finished 'A Proper Marriage' by Doris Lessing which I thoroughly enjoyed (although the next one in the series bored me very quickly - endless discussions about Communist party meetings didn't enthrall me) and right now I'm reading The Time Traveller's Wife which is excellent. I can see that my ambition to finally read Pride and Prejudice is coming to naught....still only on about Chapter 20 of that. Last week Osh plucked Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator off the shelf and asked that I read it. I thought he'd bore of it very quickly, having few pictures in it but he was enraptured by it and we finished it last night. I'm sure I must have read it as a child, bits of it seem familiar, but it was fun reading it again and he is very proud that he has read a 'big boy's' book! Well, listened to it at least. He is intrigued by the concept of Minusland and what a minus number is. I might have to shelf that next to resurrection and explain it to him when he is older.

Buoyed up by my success with the cookies, I'm going to try and make a banana cake today. We have a pile of old bananas which need using up, so I'm going to have a go. I don't know why cooking with a foreign cooker, armed with foreign ingredients makes me nervous - after all, I'd cook such a cake in England without batting and eyelid - but there you go! Just got to work out what shortening is....I know Mama's little baby likes it, but that is not much help!

We still have 11 chicks - which is good news (the rain and the ensuing cold tend to kill them off) but no eggs yet.

Easter Camp

Well, this is wierd. For the first time in over a month I am free of Oisin....! The Primary School where Daniel went as a boy was full up and unable to take Osh, but they are running an Easter Camp and that is where the oshlet is at the moment. It is only in the mornings and just this week and next week but I thought he'd enjoy some little people to play with. Osh was not entirely convinced by this, but I managed to sneak off about an hour after dropping him and no call from the school yet! Miss Myrna (all the teachers here are Miss and then their christian names) is in charge of the class - there are 7 in there for camp. Miss Myrna taught Daniel when he was small and I met her last summer when Nicky and I were invited to her TYA (ten year anniversary). Turks Islanders celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary with a big party to which everyone wears white. Problem is that no-one told me that and I turned up to the party on the beach wearing dark brown trousers and a black shirt....when I twigged that EVERYONE else was in white I felt a bit like the Ancient Mariner turning up at the wedding with the albatross around his neck (or am I mixing up two bits of classic literature there?!?).

Yesterday was very hot and we went out to Northwest Point (photos to follow) for the morning and then tidied up the farm in the afternoon. The high point of the day yesterday was me finally getting around to baking cookies for Osh (when you are that hot it seems pointless to moan about turning the oven on) and lighting a big bonfire. We had a stack of material that needed getting rid of and a Cow Bush (lucaena leucocephala) which is a giant weed and almost impossible to kill. Although given the intensity of the fire I think we managed it. Osh was transfixed by the fire, running around finding twigs to be thrown on it - by 8pm he and Nicky where installed in easy chairs on the patio (Nicky with a rum, Osh with his bottle)admiring their work of fire.

I've been asked various questions since I've been here and thought (being osh free) now was the time to answer them. One of them was whether it really was perfect living on a tax-free tropical paradise. Well, first off this place is anything but tax free. There is no income tax (hence a large number of millionaires) but the government rakes in money from every other possible source. There is no manufacturing on the islands so all goods are imported and all food (bar some fish and the odd vegetable) is imported. Whilst fresh food comes in tax-free, everything else incurs a duty of 33% (which would explain a loaf of bread costing $2.39) which, if you shop in the wrong supermarket (ie the IGA, a big international supermarket) you can spend a small fortune very quickly. Personally, I prefer Island Pride around the corner which is like a huge warehouse - short on frills, precious little customer service but nice and cheap. Other than that, I'm really struggling to find any downsides of living in paradise....the climate wrecks my hair (very windy and lots of dust and sand around), I'll be wrinkly early on, no chance to wear my huge collection of wooly jumpers, but nothing to complain about really!

Got to go and get the Osh now, will report on how he got on later. Meantime, you could check out www.provoprimary.com to see where he is.

Rats, Bats and Iguanas

The wildlife outdoors continues to come a-visiting (which, given that the front door, such as it is, is never shut and there is no back door is hardly surprising) the other night a bat flew into the house, flitted around and flew out again. Nicky remembers the days when there were lots of bats around feasting on Erebus moths (not dissimilar in size or colour) but there are a lot less now – on account of huge chucks of their habitat being cut down by developers. My worse fears were realised on Friday when I was happily cooking in the kitchen. I’d just wiped my hands on the tea-towel hanging on the oven door, sat down at the table when I heard a cry of “Wow, look at that” from Nicky.

There, on the VERY tea-towel I’d just used was the biggest spider I have ever seen. How I’ve managed to get through so many trips to Africa and Asia without encountering a spider to set my skin crawling I don’t know. Nicky, Daniel and Skippings (Daniel’s friend) were photographing the beast and examining it whilst I sat quivering in a corner wondering where ON EARTH the beast had been seconds before when I’d used the very towel it was now sitting on……Thankfully they caught it and chucked it back into the bush (of course the only thing worse than a big spider is not knowing where big spider has just disappeared to!).

The increasingly load scrabbling and rattling in the kitchen has now been tracked down to the rat which I spied scurrying off into the rafters last night (part of the kitchen ceiling came down in the rains a while ago, providing easy access to the rafters). Not the biggest rat in the world, but still a rodent. So we treated it and the various mice that we’ve seen out the corner of our eye to a tasty snack of bacon fat. This morning we discovered that one mouse had taken the bait but the rat is still at large. Mind you, rats over spiders any day of the week.

At the weekend Osh and I once again went to West Caicos with Nicky who was working on Saturday. We fixed the RO machine which is taking on an increasingly Heath Robinson aspect as Nicky valiantly and successfully patches it back together every time it shakes itself apart. When we left it was making 8 gallons a minute which is about half what it should be doing, but making water nonetheless. Nicky’s company makes the ONLY fresh water on the island so if the machine packs up he has a bevy of irate builders hunting him down!

On Sunday we all went to Little Water Cay. The Turks Islands are host to the world’s largest population of Rock Iguanas – funny looking creatures, about the size of a small rabbit (only more iguana like than bunny rabbit, if you see what I mean!). They are highly endangered and the country is making a huge effort to protect the few that are left. To get there we hired sea kayaks. The only previous time I’d been kayaking was in Canada so I was pretty good at controlling the thing; mind, Osh was under very strict instructions not to wriggle too much lest the whole thing when in the water. Needless to say, Osh was sitting in his own seat when we were underway and not in my lap as in the photograph! The lovely man in the shop gave him half a paddle which Osh used very effectively as a brake for most of the time (which kinda didn’t help progress what with the tide and the wind and every thing). We also got a discount for being the first family from Kew Town to hire from him! Kew Town (the bit of Provo we are in) is not where you would normally expect a white man to be living. There is a (not unfounded) assumption that all the whites here are very wealthy or certainly far more wealthy than many of the Turks Islanders and so discovering one of them is living in a ghetto tends to raise eyebrows. Personally, I’d take Kew Town over the wealthy white-dominated parts of the island any day. In fact Nicky was the first person living here and was quickly joined by Turks Islanders from North Caicos (Kew, in fact, hence Kew Town) and the most recent residents are from Haiti – giving the place the distinct air of a West African village. Actually, it probably looks like Haiti on account of the Haitian residents but the similarity with West Africa is striking given the 200 odd-year gap between Haitian culture and that of their forebears. But I digress.

Nicky and Daniel took the other kayak and off we set armed with a picnic. It was excellent fun but very tiring. Nicky worked out that all together we did over 3 miles – at least half of that into the wind (which was pretty stiff). And because I tired quickly they gave us a tow. We got to the island and went to see the Iguanas which really do wander down onto the beach, some of them are tagged with beads. Their biggest enemy is cats which hunt them down, although local dogs have also been known to cross the channel between them and the mainland.





Before we went to see the Iguanas Osh finally proved that he can swim! He and I were both wearing life jackets and he quickly discovered that he made him very buoyant and so he just started swimming. It was great to see – although I did have to work hard to dissuade him from jumping off the kayak for a swim for the rest of the day.

After Little Water Cay we went to Mangrove Cay, passing a curious turtle on the way (first time I’ve ever seen one in the wild) and had lunch (being very careful not to drop any crumbs and so endanger the Iguanas further) and then we paddled round to Donna Cay and went exploring in the mangroves. They are just beautiful. Very peaceful and green and still and full of tiny fishes. Osh is now well versed in the specific ecology of mangroves and why they are so important.

The clocks when forward on Saturday night and we are now treated to lovely light evenings (getting dark about 7.30 ish) but dark mornings. Nicky now has to get up in the dark at 5.30 to catch the boat to West Caicos whereas before it was light by then. This morning, just after Nicky had left it started raining and before I knew it it was coming down hard – and at just the right angle to come crashing through the mosquito screens. So, much to Oisin’s delight, I had to run outside to close the shutters on the house – by the time I came in (all of 30 seconds) I was soaked to the skin. The shower didn’t last long but it emptied a LOT of rain out of the sky and has just started again at about 5pm.

Our other adventure was Sunday afternoon. We got back from kayaking to discover that 2 portaloos should have been delivered out to NorthWest Point. But hadn’t been. The Chief Minister (Michael Missick) is getting married in 2 weeks time to a famous Hollywood actress and one of Nicky’s long-term business contacts is helping organise the do. Portable toilets are needed for the staff (Hollywood bottoms don’t normally use portable toilets…not even executive ones). So, we needed to get 2 toilets out and quick – it was about 3pm at this point and they should have been there long ago. So, all hands to the deck we got 2 of these things onto the back of the poop truck (large lorry equipped with powerful pump for sucking out the toilets and septic tanks) and then drove out to Northwest Point.

I’ve always said that these islands are not particularly beautiful – not in a classic tropical island sense. They are dry and scrubby and dusty. But Northwest Point made me change my mind. It took us the best part of 45 minutes to get there and most of that was through a national park – mile upon mile of rolling green hills covered with bush. There were mature trees (not many of them around – it being so dry they take a long time to grow and often get chopped down for development (palms are so much more tropical than black olives, for example) or for charcoal (many of the Haitians are using charcoal stoves). There were huge cacti and lots of Thatch palms and then we got to the coast – which is wild and rocky and undeveloped (with the exception of one ghastly hotel where the wedding is happening). We plan to go back out there again for a picnic sometime soon. Very pretty indeed.