Ordinary World - Part 1 (by Beenie Girl)

“And as I try to make my way, in this ordinary world,
I will learn to survive…” (Ordinary World – Duran Duran)

Sometimes I feel like I can totally relate to the things I see and experience here in Cuba and yet other times I feel like I am in a completely different world. Some days I laugh and wonder if I am in Cuba or back home. For instance, next to the Embassy, there is a house where a swimming pool is being constructed in the back yard. Since I came here a few weeks ago, every now and then as a little break from work, I look outside to see how the pool is going. Now understandably, because of the blockade, construction material is difficult to access and often delays building projects, so yunno, yuh have to make allowances for these things, but as far as I could see they had lots of material and stuff lying around the yard. The workmen would come to work shovel some gravel from one side to the next, put down a few tiles, then I would be like “where the workmen gone?” By the time the sun get hot, workmen no where to be seen. Some days they would work quite hard eh but other times to be honest I just wanted to order some jumpsuits from Trinidad for these guys, cause they had some real “CEPEP-like” working hours. I could relate to them workmen.
But there are some things that may seem completely ordinary to the average Cuban which is like so foreign to me. Some of the peculiar things I have seen or have found out so far I wonder if it is even possible to make those things work in Trinidad and Tobago:

Red light Green Light 1,2,3 …
When you get to the traffic lights there is this counter telling you how many more seconds are left on your green light or red light as the case may be, so that you know, ok the green light has only 3 seconds left, then I should probably slow down. Fabulous idea. But I thought about those lights and I said to myself that stuff only working in Cuba, where there is a policeman on nearly every corner. Can you imagine them traffic lights back home in T&T? Somebody would always be sayin: “A whole 3 seconds left on that green light? I COULD MAKE DAT!” Zoooooom! Bolt through the traffic light and hope no one coming.

Saturday School?
Ok we all know what Sunday School is, whether you talking about the one where you read bible stories or the one that takes place in Buccoo. But school on Saturday is not something we are really used to. Extra lessons maybe, if you in Standard Five or something. I was driving past a school yard and I saw a whole bunch of children in the school yard, so I was thinking maybe they have a school fair or some kind of thing. Only to ask and find out that children go to school on Saturday to do projects such as helping to do repairs or cleaning at the school, and other school community projects. I was like, look how they happily working on their projects, what a good way to encourage students to have a sense of community and a sense of responsibility for their school surroundings!
But think about it, you could imagine trying to get our Trini children to leave Cartoon Network and Hannah Montana to go to school on Saturday? Not unless it involved some kind of test results or something and even then some of them not comin a place! I have some little cousins you can’t even get them to do regular chores home without the promise of MONETARY GAIN, as if I could have asked my mother or my sister for money to wash any dishes home … trust me all now I would still be eating through a feeding tube, but I digress, Believe me, this is another thing I am sure would work fine here in Cuba, but in Trinidad and Tobago, I feel them teachers woulda have to bribe or threaten those kids somehow!

Like I said some things seem so foreign to me here and yet others seem so ordinary, I still have so much to learn and to get used to, like not having access to everything I want right at my finger tips most if not all of the time. Today I saw a bottle of sweet almond oil at the pharmacy in the hospital and I wanted to buy it then I was told I could not buy anything in that pharmacy without a prescription. Ummm for a bottle of sweet almond oil? I wonder what that prescription would be for, split ends? What about the lip balm next to it, did I need a prescription for that too? So I decided I didn’t need sweet almond oil that much and I could wait till my castor oil came in my shipped stuff. Am I being forced to live a life full of restrictions and controls? Or am I slowly being taught to develop more discipline? I guess it depends on how you look at it. The more I think about it and the more I open my mind, the more I realize I could actually like it here, or at least I can learn to.

“Every world, is my world... I will learn to survive
Any world, is my world ... I will learn to survive” (Ordinary World – Duran Duran)