Last Jamaican anecdotes

Hi all - just a short note to let you know we arrived safely home to our house that was safe. We're glad to be back - now to cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, catching up on emails, and the other first-day back after fieldwork type of activities!

2 brief anecdotes about our last days of fieldwork in Jamaica:

1. We had the great opportunity to stay with a fantastic family in MoBay - it was really a special treat to see the same people for consecutive days and share laughs, conversations, and yummy food. It's not often that we get to form any type of long-term (if you consider seeing them in 2 different towns over 5-6 days, long-term!) relationships in survey fieldwork and this was definitely one of the major highlights of our trip. Be praying for them as they continue to work at CCCD in Jamaica!

2. Our last survey goal was to get to the Jamaican Christian School for the Deaf (JCSD) in a little town of Lethe, outside of MoBay. We had gone into MoBay to enjoy a celebratory lunch of finishing fieldwork (a tradition we started in Peru) where we ate oxtail for the first time. It's exactly what it sounds like and tastes somewhere between ribs and roast. Not much meat - and after gnawing on the bone for a bit, it felt a bit disturbing to think about what we were eating! Not our favorite, but glad we tried this Jamaican traditional and awed dish. Afterwards we needed to catch a taxi to get to JCSD. We were walking toward the area we hoped would have one when I looked to the right and there was a JCSD van just about to drive out of a parking lot!

The interesting thing is that I wouldn't have even noticed it if we hadn't had to search online for the name of the town (sometimes it's hard to understand names over the phone when the person speaking has a strong accent) where the school was and seen a picture of it online! Good thing the person was hard to understand over the phone - saved us in the end!

Anyway, we went up to it and introduced ourselves and they were heading back to campus so they took us with! When we got there we wondered how we would have fared trying to find it - it was definitely out of the way! It was one of those "God-moments" when you just know that God has been leading you each step of the way. We are thankful for how God arranged things for us on this survey trip to Jamaica.