VENEZUELA and T&T 2009

We're sorry about the gap in blog posts! We have now been back in Trinidad for a week, recovering from a bout of dysentry (?!?!?!?) and chilling out with friends and family. We have also started our volunteer work at Our Lady of the Wayside Halfway House for babies and children, run by Living Water Community. The Halfway House looks after a small number of young children and very young babies who have either been abandoned or are unable to be with their parent, and the aim of the centre is to give them the love that might otherwise be missing from their lives. Although our work there can be tiring, it is also really enjoyable - particularly as much of it involves feeding, bathing and generally cuddling tiny babies! We are also helping them to organise ther library, putting our combined passion for organisation to good use...

When we aren't at Living Water, we also help out in my aunty Mary's office, which means lots of great roti lunches! We've definitely been having a lot of great meals here, including a delicious sushi dinner followed by cocktails with lots of my cousins. Today at work, the delightful Mr Beharry came in to talk to me about his memories of wartime Trinidad, in relation to my study of V.S. Naipaul. He was an incredibly lovely and entertaining Indo-Trinidadian gentleman, and it was so interesting to hear his memories of colonial Trinidad, where his parents' generation spoke only Hindi, had no electricity, and there was only one newspaper for the whole of Trinidad.

Last weekend we also had a great day at my godparents' house, where we had (of course) a yummy lunch before going out onto their organic farming estate. The estate is a beautiful piece of forest where you could basically survive on the huge variety of fruits and vegetables harvested there - we ate huge mangoes straight from the tree, and enjoyed the strage, white flesh of cocoa pods. Everything from coffee to cassava is grown there, and we were enticed to go back later this month for some 'WOOFing' (working on organic farms)...

So we have been having a great time in Trinidad so far, and we have much more lined up for this weekend, so we will try not to leave it so late before the next blog!

Love Hannah and Alice