The Planet Our Home
We will remember Gros Islet village always, for many reasons, but one of the main things that is etched in our being is the sounds… As I write now the steel band is practicing, in quite random fashion today.
It is as if each person is practicing their own bit oblivious of the others who are also practicing their own bit… the sound that emerges from this is rather more a noise!
After hours of this, sometimes four, we are suddenly rewarded with it all ‘coming together…’ Something beautiful emerges from the chaos…
We have a restaurant we really enjoy eating in, we get a lovely plate of local food, and local juice too, passion fruit, grapefruit and sometimes kumkwat…
Opposite is a bar that plays loud music… It is so loud that to enjoy our meal, and be able to hear one another speak, we have discovered a place to sit where the sound doesn’t reach to the same degree. It has to pass through the wall and a wooden beam first… There is no ‘tourist night life’ to cater for, this is a normal week day night in Gros Islet…
And outside the bar a local guy keeps his rather battered and worn drum kit, every so often climbs onto it and plays for a while… We are friends with him, he hugs us when he sees us and says ‘I love you guys’, and we say we love him back… We have never had a conversation other than that he says he likes to see us running and once he asked for a dollar, so we gave him five…
As we wander home we pass a house where people gather each night, the music is loud here too. It competes with the music of another house nearby, one plays country and western, the other playing reggae; cars pass and they vibrate with their sound systems.
Dogs and chickens run randomly amongst this scene and the locals sit around talking together, smoking, drinking… and it is always hot!
Anadi and I are part of the streets story now, we wander through it…
One guy calls out every night to Anadi… ‘The guy in the movies’ sometimes he races over and gives him the ‘greeting fist to fist’.
And in just over a week we will be gone.
Today we saw Malachi again and told him of the people in the UK who having read my blog sent him love… ‘The love never ends man’ he said ‘The love never ends’. As we left him he said to me ‘Goodbye Star’, which was name when I was a teenager and remained for many years, some of my friends still call me Star now…
The lady on the entrance gate to Pigeon island today, (we went up to the top again, we are much faster and more proficient at it now than we were seven weeks ago!) was on a bus coming into work on Thursday… She saw us at the point we were just about to turn for home, on our ten mile out and back run in the rain…
‘I saw you running, you were so far away…’ she exclaimed, ‘my friend is the bus driver, and he said to me, there are your friends running…’
And in just over a week we will be gone…
But the love, the friendship, the learning, the shifts within, the changes to us, all will remain…
Many people here have impacted on my life, my journey, my clearing and healing and opening….so that I can run free…
Roddy and Gabrielle healed me when I fell on the rocks; Rodja has had a huge influence in helping me stabilize and run with more confidence, Alan the chiropractor is treating me until I leave - opening my back and working on my neck… And then there are all the local people who have embraced us, 
welcomed us into their hearts and shown delight that we are living with them for a short while on their beautiful island in the sun.
Soon we are leaving for another beautiful island, and we will be reconnecting with our special friends there…
Today as we were having lunch, I said to Anadi…
'I love being a nomad and living as we do… I love being alive here, now, being me to experience our wonderful planet…
Our home…‘
