One Wild and Precious Life

 I've said before how I intend for this blog to be a place where I share the whole of my experience rather than just giving you the Instagram stories.  The reality of life--any life--is that it is not all (or even mostly) sunshine and rainbows.  And while I have had a lot of incredible, amazing, and joyful experiences since moving to St. Lucia, there are a lot of things that are not any of those.   This second term of school has been really hard for a variety of reasons.  While I'm committed to being open, honest, and transparent in this space, there are things that I just can't share here in any detail.  I can paint with broad strokes and say that the amount of secondary trauma I'm experiencing at school has increased significantly.  Initially, I think I was managing quite well.  As a college professor, I've dealt with secondary trauma for some time.  However, the key difference is that those students were adults--and it took me a long time to figure out how to man

 It's been longer than usual between posts--last week, we had a lot of rain and a lot of wind which meant that I didn't have any wi-fi (or water) at home.  I should clarify when I say "no water"--I didn't have water from the tap, but I do have a barrel of water to use when this happens.  It's not uncommon here for the water to be turned off when it is raining heavily because a lot of sediment enters the water system (the water looks like iced tea).  So homes will have a barrel or a pump-driven tank system to use when the water is turned off.  My home actually has both, but the pump is electric-powered, so unless the water is off for a pretty long time, the landlady doesn't come and turn it on. Actually I've been lucky and have never had to pay to use the pump because the longest I've had to use the barrel only is 4 days, which isn't bad at all.  Honestly, all of my backpacking experiences prepared me well for things like this!  Now that I'v