Roommates and slow days on Statia

I live with three other people. Andrew and Liv both work here at STENAPA and Mike is a volunteer for the month. All three are English, and I expect that by the time I get home to the States in August I’ll have a proper British accent again.

Andrew has been here since January and works in the National Park. He left a job back home to get more field experience and is completing a study on Red-billed Tropic birds. He’s our resident chef.

Liv has been here since the end of April. She’s a PADI Dive Instructor and worked at a dive shop in Mexico for the last couple years. She works in the Marine Park like me, but her responsibilities have more to do with keeping things in order out on the reef, lionfish eradication and keeping the snorkel club from drowning. She’s pretty lethal with a spear.

Mike just got here last Monday and is taking a bit of a summer holiday before heading back to work. He got bored at uni, took a job at a charity, and is now about to head off to Sandhurst for officer training. He’s been sharing my room since we don’t have a fourth intern right now and it’s a little toasty out in the tents.

Andrew and Mike and I have been on lizard patrol the last few days. As the island parks department we tend to get a lot of strays. Right now we have a Tropic bird and a kestrel chick that someone dropped off at the office. The Tropic bird gets 10 inch sardines for breakfast, and the kestrel gets what we kill for it, or what we cut off the sardines. Yum. S/he is growing pretty quickly and needs a lot of food. We make a sorry lot, though, driving around the island in our truck with a menagerie. The other day we had three people, two birds, 4 water jugs, a garbage can, our groceries, and a hitch-hiker hanging on to the back.

We do a lot of riding in the back. Either to hold down the tires because they’re bald, or because we’re on our way home from the bar and we have 12 people in the truck. We seem to pick up our friends and stray hitchhikers pretty easily. Island rules are pretty lax. There aren’t many laws that are enforced. Driving is kind of wild. The police are semi-non-existent. You leave your keys in the car, not just because no one will steal it, but also because someone else might have to move it down the road so they can get through. There’s a lot of off-roading, mainly because there are no roads.

Things are like that here. Everything is slow and done in its own time. When we went to drop off Amy (last Brit who left), we sat at the airport bar (which was half the airport) and had a beer at 9am because there wasn’t anything else to do and it’s the cheapest thing on the island at $2 a bottle. Security is almost non-existent, and the airport is relatively the same size as my house. There are three flights a day, morning, afternoon and evening. The plane is a 19-seater and the pilot leans out the front door to wipe down the window. Luggage goes on your lap.

We also have to come up with our own entertainment. Liv has convinced me of the benefits of hermit crab racing. You find a bucket of them (they’re about the size of your fist) and take your pick. Choosing a winner is a bit like going to the racetrack, it takes a certain eye. Then you put them in the middle of the circle and see which one crawls out the fastest. Gotta keep ourselves busy here!!!