Plate o' Shrimp

Playing Chicken

I think I don’t have anything new or different to say to the folks back home and then I realize I do. Of course my immuno final is monday so this is yet again an advanced form pf procrastination. We never bothered to save our daylight here in warm and steamy Grenada so we didn’t change our time back this week. Still it is getting darker earlier here 12 degrees north of the equator and it has gotten cooler. I didn’t put my AC on for three whole days, and that is beginning to seem like a luxury. The other morning I decided to drive to school so I could do errands after class. (Riding the bus is generally cheaper, cooler and I get to listen to the local radio that often has a strange mix of hip hop, reggae and old US country music. This morning the DJ was playing and singing along with “Elvira” by the Oakridge boys. “Elvira, now that’s an unusual name! Come on everybody sing ELVIRA” ) Along the bumpy road to the main road, My neighbor Mr. Wilson who is a police man flagged me down and asked for a ride to the roundabout. He was heading into downtown Saint George and wanted to catch one of the local Reggae buses because there is never any place to park in town. He is the typical industrious Grenadian, a police officer who takes in tailoring and has informally adopted the SGU students along the road. He is also, he told me, the color guard for Parliament. There is a guy who likes to check students cars for change who seems kind of harmless, but Mr. Wilson chases him off with a few shots from his side arm any time he sees him. He told a group of us in our apartment to keep our lights on because “thieves love the dark” and he told us he wants to shoot the change taker guy in the foot so he can’t run away any more. Between Mr. Wilson’s 4 dogs, the mastiff I call cupcake who lives 2 doors down and the 5 other barkey dogs who live in the immediate area I feel quite safe.

After class I went on a little odyssey to find some frontline (a flea and tick treatment for shade). They were out of it at the veterinary teaching hospital so I drove down to Hubbards.. a kind of a catch all home store with pet supplies and stationary. Driving past I cut through Mon Tout.. a neighborhood considerably less upscale than mine on a narrow two lane road where folks just park in one lane and you have to play chicken with the chickens and oncoming cars to be on your merry way. Lance Aux Epines is definitely the high rent district for Grenadans.. and even though SGU students think of themselves as poor and although most of us are living off loans, we import our US standard of living with us which is a lot of money by Grenadan standards. Mr. Wilson asked me if I would come back to Grenada to practice medicine and I told him the simple answer which is no. The truth is that I would like the opportunity to do that type of do gooder stuff, but I will likely have to take a job that will first and foremost allow me to pay my loans fast. Then I can run off to Grenada, South Africa, Darfur or my old hood in Albuquerque and put my medical training to good use.

posted by Sa @ 3:39 PM