A trip to Barbados that's for grad school?! No way!

For one of my classes in grad school, I've been lucky enough to go to Barbados and Trinidad. We'll be spending time talking about leadership, coalition building, bullying and violence in schools, health issues, and disaster preparedness...along with many other issues that may come up once we get there. 

This past Sunday, we arrived in warm and sunny Barbados. Once we passed through customs, our professor took us to Chefette, a local fast food chain, where I had an Indian roti burrito thing filled with potatoes and beef. Although it was a fast food place, I think we were all just so happy to be eating food since most of us had only had breakfast and by 2:30pm, we were starving! 

Later that night, we went to a friend of my professor's house for dinner, where she cooked us all appetizers, dinner & dessert! It was delicious!! Some other friends of his also came to welcome us to Barbados. One woman was the deputy director of Oceanography I think for the Ministry of Environment and others were school teachers or working in other parts of the government. I learned from one woman that the elections in Barbados are coming up within the next few weeks since the previous prime minister's term ends soon. Normally a prime minister's term is about 4 years, with the last elections being held in 2008, but the previous prime minister, David Thompson, died of pancreatic cancer during his term and so another prime minister had to be elected. Currently, Freundel Stuart is the prime minister. It'll definitely be interesting to see what goes on during election time here!

So far, we've slowly been getting into the culture and life in Barbados. On Monday, we went to a Jazz festival on the island, which was pretty neat. I'm not much of a jazz person but man, some of those musicians can sing! I'll post some pictures when I get back to the States too that you can see. 

Then today we met with a few people who held positions in education and gang related organizations. I'm starting to get sleepy but once I have some more time tomorrow, I'll post about that. 

And of course no day is complete without a little beach time, so we finished our day there before heading to dinner. It was all just so surreal, sitting on white sandy beaches and listening to the crystal blue waves crash. I couldn't have imagined a better place to be.