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DAY 8 – 5.11.11 LIGHTS OUT! As I was sending several emails, everything went dark. Mind you, the sun rises at 5:30am but it does not illuminate the room. It was around 6:30am. Knowing the connection of the electricity to the water, I quickly took a shower. Still warm and at full force, I washed efficiently. Sadly, there are no gas stoves which meant no oatmeal. Corn flakes and cereal were a part of my hefty breakfast for the day. As more students woke up and recognized our dilemma, the thought of living in paradise became reality. Life on an island means just enough natural resources. When you run out of resources, you are left with what you saved. Luckily, most of the students took showers the night before. When we reached town, we realized we were not alone. Slowly but surely, the rest of the island was losing power. Even the commercial shops in the tourist areas were without power. Many stores and businesses were affected by the outage. I went into a shop thirsting after a smoothie and realized smoothies are made by blenders which need electricity. There was no person reacting hysterical and the tourists off the boat did not notice the outage while entering generator active shops. The little things we overlook and underappreciate are large omissions to our lives when gone. What if the Black Out that happened years ago happened every other day? Welcome to the Caribbean!

VISIT VIRGIN ISLANDS HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICE, SERVICE DAY AT OFFICE So today we went to the USVI Historic Preservation Office. The day began with a talk by Mr. Sean Krigger, an architectural and cultural historian. He talked to us about the origin of the office, and its mission to preserve the territory’s archaeological and architectural heritage. He explained how they accomplish this by increasing awareness and appreciation of history through encouragement, education, support, and sponsorships.

Mr. Krigger showed us the actual pamphlets that they have available to educate the people in the public who are building on the land. For example, the pamphlet I got discussed the paint colors and materials appropriate to be used within the historic district. There are guidelines for all of these things set by committees which reside on each island. Anyone building can only use materials and make plans that are approved by the committee of 11 people within the USVI.

He also talked about his job and his day to day work of answering people’s questions and educating the public to preserve the historic areas of the island. After we asked lots of questions and he finished talking we did community service for the office – by organizing a book case.

Now it may seem like organizing a bookcase is a mundane task, but trust me, it was not easy. This case was full of unorganized books which belonged in three different categories. It was so unorganized even a few of the employees were noticing books we found that they had never seen before. So we had to delegate the work between 15 people to reorganize the books according to the lists we were given, and add the new books not on the list in their proper spot. At first organizing the bookcase was a little hetic, while some leaders in the group tried to start different systems, but after a few minutes a good system was operating, with three groups (one for each category) and a few people unpacking the bookshelf. Each subgroup then made their own organizational system to sort the books, check them off on their list, find any extra books in their piles, and then decide where the extras should go. This process took a few hours at least. And it was a good challenge for us all to work together in different teams while still working towards one common goal. At debreifing tonight someone even pointed out that the activity was our first real thing we had to do as an entire group, and it kind of reminded us of some group activities at retreat.