3 Weeks Down & 6.5 To Go

Well, we have officially gotten 3 weeks behind us and we only have 6 and a half more to go...until we come home again! We have our flights scheduled to come home on May 1st! Classes this last week went well...but it is still hard to get used to being in class all day everyday, especially when we have class until 8 o'clock at night 4 nights of the week!
Friday, we had a class trip planned for that afternoon and early evening. This means that we had to get up early to go grocery shopping before our class trip! Even though we had to get up early for this it worked out really good! We were able to get everything we needed at the store...which is not usually the case...the store was not a mad house as usual...and we got to have breakfast at a new coffee place that has opened at the mall. The new coffee place was good, we will definitely eat there again, their sign almost tricks you into thinking it is a Starbucks (Yum...how good that would be) it has similar font and is the same color green as Starbucks' sign. Although we hate to admit it...it looks like Friday mornings (yikes!) may be the best time to go grocery shopping.
Anyway, back the the class trip on Friday...One of our classes is about community health assessment. So, for the class we are doing a community health assessment of one of the areas on the island...this is not by our choice!! Basically, this includes spending several hours each week in the community doing observations, talking to the locals, taking surveys, doing interviews and focus groups. At first we were both very apprehensive about the whole thing...However, it went much better than we thought. The people were very nice but nosey...most people and even the taxi drivers would pull over and ask what you were doing in the their community. The people and the community are very poverty stricken! Most of the homes are little shacks, they look like a strong gust of wind would blow down most of the houses. Some of the homes don't have toilets or running water. While we were in the community we were taking a break in front of the convince store...I saw a man run into the store with a chicken head he had just cut off...he was doing this just to scare the girls working in the store, you know that would never go over well in the States. We also had one of our team members almost get hit by a car. Everyone here drives crazy, however this was my closest experience with the crazy driving...if our fellow team member would not have turned his back a fraction of a second later the bus would have taken off his backpack, it was a close call!! Anyway, this was a fun experience and it really makes us thankful for what we have, here in Grenada and at home in TN!! We hope to take our camera this week when we go so you can see the poverty we are talking about!
I will update again soon when I have more things to say!!