“Layou is a good place to be. Good, good, good, good!” - Mrs. Florence Adams

There always seems to be a sign from the universe when I have landed myself in the right place. I sat in the Peace Corps office in Kingstown, St. Vincent, anxiously waiting for my host family to arrive. A woman stepped into the office, “Sarah!” she hollered. I jumped up, “It’s me!” I said and grabbed my stuff. As soon as I was within arm’s reach, Mrs. Florence Adams, my new host mother, gave me a hearty, sincere hug. Having come from a hugging family, it was just about the best welcome to St.Vincent that I could have hoped for! The universe was letting me know I had landed myself exactly where I needed to be for the next two years.
During training, I will be living with the Adams family. Florence, my host mother, is a dynamic, talkative Vincentian. She owns a lotto shop in Layou and has graciously allowed me to spend many hours hanging around the shop getting to know the lay of the land and starting the rumor that there is a new “whitey” in town. Richard, my host father, is gentle, kind and quiet. He works at Y De Lima, a variety store, in Kingstown. He has the greatest grin when I tell him that I might be knocking on his door after I move out because I will not be able to figure out how to cook breadfruit or make anything tasty out of green figs (green bananas). Justlyn, my host sister, stays with the Adams during the school year so she can attend secondary school in Kingstown. She is everything you would hope for in a 15 year old girl. She is so bright and has an opinion about everything. She loves fashion and wants to be a lawyer/psychologist, though as she explains it there is not much demand here for psychology because Vincentians have not caught on to its usefulness. Like my real sister Jenny, Justlyn is wise beyond her years.
My host family is most direct link I have to my new community. Living with a host family is an important part of the Peace Corps experience because they want us to integrate into our community so that we can work at a grassroots level, learning from the locals and working in harmony with them to create the change that they wish to see for their community. Miss Florence always introduces me as her “Peace Corps” and has shown me around to the morning bathers at the beach (retirees), shop keepers, Methodist church and pretty much every person we meet while walking down the road. They have also taught me how to wash all of my clothes by hand, iron properly and make awesome banana pie, where you use green bananas to create a casserole that can be best described as a cross between baked macaroni, squash and mashed potatoes! They have also helped me pick up on the dialect but I still feel like I am in a foreign land most of the time. It just goes to show how many different twists and turns a language can take.
Here are a few pictures to capture my first week in Layou:

1. Justlyn, Florence and I outside of the Methodist Church in Kingstown where we attended an Induction Service for the new minister in our circuit.

2. Sunday dinner! Amazing! Clockwise from the top: Chicken, Tomato, Cucumber, Carrot/ Cabbage Salad, Steam Vegetables, Kidney Beans, Steamed Sweet Potato (they are white inside but taste similar to the variety most common in the US) and Plantain, Pumpkin and in the middle Banana Pie!