the bahamas welcomed my new life here pretty well.  the journey down was a good kind of eventful.  i fell asleep at push back from knoxville-charlotte and woke up at touchdown, from charlotte to ft. lauderdale i sat next to sunnie, a young pakistanie toronto cop.  he told me he was on his way to ft. lauderdale for a vacation, a vacation that he decided on no more than 24 hrs before this conversation.  he told me a story of the most traumatic day as a cop.  short version: day 2 on the job he and his mentor responded to a car crash.  they showed up and saw three men ejected from the car and smashed like a pancake, like how a wrecker does a car (he went on with lots more description).  then, he told me the traumatic part: the back seat passenger was ejected, but his foot got caught by the seat belt and...then there were two from the back seat.  sick.  then he told me about the remains, specifically the eyeballs that he kept trying to imitate.  imagine sunni bugging his eyes out and his tongue out the side of his mouth.  i tried to not laugh but...  as we landed in ft. lauderdale, i saw in sunnie's still bugged out eyes that he was regretting his impulse decision for a vacation spot when he 'whispered' to me, "cameron, i heard that ft. lauderdale is full of old people.  is this true?!?!"  i smiled and suggested he rent a car to miami if he was wanting something besides sitting on the beach.  just for your information since i had to find this out the hard way, us air only does plane-side carry on service for first class passengers.  if you find this out the hard way, you will have to claim your bag, switch terminals via the rental car shuttle, go back through security, get to your gate all in an hour.  just fyi.  as i told the flight attendant, that information would've been super helpful to have known before i stranded my bag plane-side.  (holls and j: i think moe's knows us air's style)

my flight got in about 30 min early and i was picked up by ladonna.  there is a family of four here and she is the mom, but..in her early 30s.  the family is great.  we share the cottage together.  i have plenty of space.  imagine a dorm room and and that's about what i live in.  the bathroom is there too, equipped with a toilet, sink, shower and a wrench.  a wrench?  yes, that is because we haven't put the knobs on the shower yet.

when i got here there were two small teams here already.  we spent the evening at the church down the road for dinner and music.  a lady with 9 children and 42 grandchildren came and played guitar.  we were curious how it would turn out but she was great..played the guitar like a slide guitar and wailed.  bahamian church music is going to be a challenge to describe because it is like no other.  joyful is how i'll describe it and really spontaneous.  they had methodist hymnal drills to pass time, that was funny.  similar to sword drills if you did those in sunday school, but with the hymnal.  they knew them too!  walking back to camp we saw a silhouette of a wild hog hanging around a few dogs.  we also saw one of eleuthera's treasures:  stars bunched into every square inch of the sky.  it's beautiful.

let's talk about palm trees.  they're everywhere of course.  but there is one that stands taller than the rest.  it's a cell phone tower.  last night we were driving back from our really long day around the island and saw a glow on the horizon.  kp told us that the glow was nassau, it's 60 miles away.  kp is a local bahamian and the construction guy.  he loves the 'charlie' youtube clip.  a big guy in his 40s, about 6'4" and quotes the clip all the time.  in his suedo-british/bahamian accent he says, "charlie, that really hurt.  charlie..."

today i feel like i can officially get started and settled.  the bigger of the two teams just left and today will be spent working through a to-do list of cleaning and organizing.  hopefully a trip to the grocery store is in there too.  i am excited to dig in and all has been good so far.

love you all. thanks for the emails and facebook messages.  peace.

oh, and how could i forget the 30-40 philippineo men. staying here at camp?  that's right, and they'll be here for awhile.  i'm glad they're here.  this group works here on the island on a 5 yr contract.  i'm not sure how good of a situation they're in but i'm glad they are living here.

tonight:  island cookout on the dock