Before I came to The Island School, I didn’t know what it would be like to live without a phone or Internet; none of us did. Our generation has grown up with access to both. The Internet was always a part of our lives before coming to IS, never further than the smartphones in our hands. It was bittersweet to surrender our devices immediately after landing in Eleuthera to start our semester.
The first week was surely a change for us all. I constantly felt like I was missing a piece of me. I was always so accustomed to feeling the subtle weight and bulkiness of my phone in my pocket; it felt unorthodox to lose the sensation. As time progressed, we all became more and more acclimated to the lack of Internet. After being here for over a month, the loss of the web and my phone is the last thing on my mind. Instead, it has been refreshing to disconnect from those distractions and live our daily lives like all of our parents did when they grew up. Communicating with friends now means actually finding them and talking to them.
Doing papers means taking notes in class and talking to teachers; Wikipedia is no longer a last second option after a week of procrastination. Checking the weather app is no longer necessary, as our eyes are more accurate in sighting rain clouds off in the distance than any weather radar around. Life went on before the Internet existed, and it will certainly do the same for us here. It may be unrealistic to think we will all avoid the Internet and give up our phones when we return to our lives back home, but at the same time I hope this experience gives us all a new outlook on what really matters in our lives.
How do you start a blog post about where we are in the semester? Days can be tallied, sure. It’s been 37 if anyone’s been counting. Those days have been filled with 6:15am wakeups, morning workouts, 3-day kayak trips, scuba diving, and so many other activities that make each one of these days so jam packed and busy.
It’s often said that the days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days. I would be baffled to find a single student or faculty member that didn’t agree. Each week seems to come and go faster than the bacon does at Sunday brunch, which is astounding in itself. We have less than 2 academic weeks left until the heavily anticipated 8-day kayak and down island trips. Rumors surrounding the 48-hour solo on the kayak trip have been floating around since Day 1, and the buzz has only increased as we get closer and closer.
Lighthouse Beach
As we move forward through the term, we have all noticed each day getting hotter and the ocean water getting warmer. The Bahamian winter–which is surely nothing to complain about–is behind us and spring weather is emerged. Looking at the bigger picture, the 3-week kayak and trip rotation will take us to the middle of May. That will soon be followed by parents weekend, which we’ve all looked forward to since the moment our planes left the runway. After research symposiums are presented, the semester starts tapering off and June 12th marks the day of return to our families and friends.
Although dismal to think about leaving this special place we now call home, it makes us cherish each and every second we have left. We all eagerly look forward to what the next 63 days will hold.
After settlement day we all gathered at my settlement, Tarpum Bay, behind the elementary school before walking over to the festival. We walked along the beach until we arrived at the festival.
Photo by Abby Gordon
The second we arrived everybody had the same idea, food, Food, FOOD! The four stands had long lines within seconds while everyone bought drinks, conch fritters, cupcakes, pigs feet and much more.
Abby, Julia, Abbe and Robin at the Tarpum Bay Cultural Fair!
After most of us were satisfied we began to here the loud rum of Junkanoo music so we turned to see the brightly colored costumes. The elementary school had won a Junkanoo competition and was preforming for the festival.
Junkanoo Rush in Tarpum BayJunkanoo costume!
Boys and girls dressed in bright costume and danced and played instruments through the streets of Tarpum bay
All we could see was the radiant colors and lights moving around in a blur with the kids smiling and dancing their hearts out. After the amazing performance, other people went up and sang songs that we knew!
Everyone was laughing and dancing. One local girl, around the age of nine, decided all the girls needed to dance with a boy so she was setting up pairs left and right. After several of the boys learned how to spin and dip their partners, John S. called us all into a circle, we counted off, and left our second saturday night activity.
As defined in our first Literature reading assignment of the semester, The Rediscovery of North America by Barry Lopez, querencia “refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn – a place in which we know exactly who we are.” Its importance is such that “our search for querencia is both a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are. And the discovery of querencia hinges on the perfection of a sense of place.”
Photo by Mackenzie Howe
The Island School strongly emphasizes the importance of having a sense of place for a specific area and having time to reflect on our personal doings and think about the meaning within the beautiful place we are living for these three months. By this idea we are encouraged to find our own querencia or place where we feel most at home. Island School students got their first exposure to what querencia really means when we chose our personal spots this past Thursday. We were given three hours for our first querencia time to find our spot and reflect upon three writing prompts exemplifying our natural history, personal narrative and descriptive writing.
Photo by Mackenzie Howe
Many of us were able to find our querencia spots rather quickly, but I on the other hand, had trouble finding the perfect place that I wanted to be connected to. I tried three spots before finally settling on a place on the white sand of No-Name Harbor where I was able to feel completely alone. I had never explored much of the island before, so when finding my spot, I tried to lose myself in the overgrown back-roads eventually leading me to the beach. After having ample time to decompress and reflect upon the past busy week, I started my journey back to campus which I found to be much more difficult than my bike ride there. I attempted taking a different route thinking that it would get me home quicker but got lost multiple times. Thankfully I eventually found myself at the entrance of campus again. After much thought, I realized the virtue of my spot being so remote; although I was lost in the woods, I could confide in the fact that my querencia spot was far away from anyone else where I could truly reflect by myself and work on my “perfection of a sense of place.”
Alejandro “Dro” Marti, an inaugural Island School teacher, recently visited our Cape Eleuthera campus. Dro was the first and only Spanish teacher in The Island School’s history! It was a great visit reminiscing the past and celebrating how far the school has grown since Dro’s last semester in Spring 2000.
Yesterday we all loaded up the four vans and headed over to Deep Creek Middle School to meet our buddies and learn about our community outreach projects. My buddy, Tallia, and I bonded over having the same birthday, July 18th.
Community Outreach Buddies!
We went around to three stations to play games and get to know our buddy a little more. The first station a character or thing was put on our back without us seeing and we had to figure it out.
Meeting our Buddies
At the second station we played drama games like the mirror game where we had to make slow movements so the other can follow.
Playing games!
The third station was where we all got a map of the others country and showed them where we live and talked about the different activities in our towns.
One thing I learned was that my buddy was a Miami Heat fan so we had a little spat because the Celtics are clearly the best!
After going to all of the stations our buddies got into their groups and explained the service projects they came up with and were passionate about. Some of them were about stray dogs, child abuse, lack of food and cutting down the invasive Casaurina tree. Each ninth graders plans a project and gets the help of an eighth grader and a seventh grader.
Learning about our community outreach projects
After bonding with our buddies they had to get to advisory so the Island School students stood in a circle and went around saying what was the most special part of our time with our buddies. As hard as it was to leave we were excited to go on a trip to the beach!
As Summer Term is drawing to a close, here is a recap of a few activities that have been going on this past week! We are excited to have Summer Term families join us for Parents Weekend starting tomorrow!
Shortly after we met Chris Maxey for the first time earlier this week, he took us out on his boat to chase a sunset. The 26 of us (because a third of the community was on their Down Island Trip) all giddily climbed aboard and quickly got situated. Although we have been living here for the past month, many of us have actually not had a chance to fully experience a true Bahamian sunset. It was absolutely wonderful. The deep blue ocean went on forever. When you looked up at the sky, there were no limits. The sun just hung there in all its glory. There is no better feeling in the entire world than sitting on a boat with 25 people who you have only known for a short amount of time, but they are all your best friends.
Captain Maxey and Summer Term students aboard “Kokomo”
As the sun went down, everything stopped. We all took in the moment differently, but I think we were all feeling same way. One girl started to cry and although no one else was, we all understood. She told me that because she lives in Houston, TX she never has the time to stop and look at her surroundings. But here, at The Island School, we have that time time and look at our surroundings and take it all in. Each day we see the ocean glistening in an endless manner, but it still always is able to captivate each and everyone of us.
The morning after our boat ride, during our preparation for the Monster Run Swim, a friend of mine and I were running the last section and we were about to turn into campus. We started talking about all the amazing experiences that we have had here. We started talking about the sunset and she turned to me and said “I now know what heaven is.”
After the amazing boat ride with almost all of the community, we all came together as the students and faculty on Down Island came back for the ultimate friendly competition yesterday: a World Cup soccer tournament! Things got intense…
Taylor’s Advisory getting ready for the big game
The soccer matches involved all of the members of the Island School community, including some interns from CEI. Advisories played other advisories and things got competitive and heated! All of the students (and faculty!) got really into the games, as they cheered on their teams from the sidelines and on the field. Feet were moving fast up and down the field at the Marina as the soccer ball flew by faces, hit heads, and soared into the goals.
The final game was Scotty advisory vs. Rachel’s advisory. In the end, after Scotty’s team threw a good fight, Rachel’s team came out victorious with a score of 2-0. Everyone enjoyed the final game with excitement and the teams enjoyed a great afternoon with the whole community!
To be intimate with the land, to have a sense of place, is to enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, to include it in the meaning of the word community. In Marine Ecology class, summer students do just that, but underwater! Through detailed observation and inquiry, students foster a deeper understanding of how tropical marine ecosystems are arranged into a self-organized and complex hierarchy of patterns and processes. What follows is an example of a student’s field note written underwater, demonstrating a balance between ecological truths and the beauty of natural history writing.
Sea Fan
Standing in proud and weathered sentry, a giant sea fan coral demands the attention of every eye that alights on Dive Site 3. In a scan of the primary producer residents of the rock, it would be an insult to the size and prominenceof the sea fan not to take note of it before any other coral. More than a foot in height, the sea fan flaunts a hand-like display of five this blue veins. From these veins, innumerable smaller veins branch and criss-cross like winding tributanes, creeping upwards and outwards the way frost slowly encrusts a window.
But upon a closer look, the net-like continuity of the sea fan’s face is broken by a conspicuous interloper: a flamingo tongue, hugging the sea fan’s fourth finger with a kind of suctioned urgency. Pearly and smooth with rows of small brown dots, the flamingo tongue appears at first to be a decorative bead to complement the sea fan’s splendor. However, a glimpse of the blackened, dead trail shaking behind the flamingo tongue alludes to a slightly more sinister purpose. An immediate question comes to mind concerning the nature of the relationship between the sea fan and its trespasser: Is the flamingo tongue’s presence one or parasitism, in which is eats away the polyps of its host for no beneficial exchange? Or does the sea fan glean some hidden benefit as thanks for sustaining its bead-like guest?
The search for additional relationships between coral and other organisms brought me to a second sea fan. This one, a wide-mesh sea fan, lounged off the side of the rock like a pine branch laden with thick needles. Here, too, a flamingo tongue took up residence, interrupting the fuzz of 8 fingered polyps that distinguished this sea fan as an ahermatypic coral.
Next, my attention was drawn to a large, stoic-looking coral, which thrust up from the rock like a cactus. Strong and brittle, this coral twined like an intricate sculpture shaped from driftwood bleached on a beach shore. An absence of polyps made me suspect it to be a hard coral, which usually retracts polyps until night has fallen. A search through a coral field book revealed that this piece of drift wood art may have been a staghorn coral, part of the branching and pillar group.
In visual dialogue with the elegance of the staghorn, several sea plums lent their careless delicacy to the rock face. Drooping like weeping willow trees, the sea plums did not deign to display their polyps even to an inch-close examination. This absence made me wonder if the sea plume is a hermatypic coral, with polyps retracted during the day, or whether the polyps are simply too small or too inconspicuous for viewing.
Other corals, however, were not as shy about displaying their polyps. One particular sea-whip coral, straight and gray-stemmed, hosted a blossoming of white polyps that perfectly resembled dandelion seeds. The polyps dotted the sea-whip so abundantly that it look as though one could pluck the coral, blow on it, and scatter the seeds to make a wish come true.
Brain Coral
A careful tour around the face of the rock revealed a continue plethora of biodiversity. Spiraling elegantly, a rose coral appeared a bizarre juxtaposition of the most delicate flower and the specimen of some neurology medical lab. The tenuous folds of a brain coral resembled a labyrinth maze. Plump spheres of great star coral beaded the rock’s surface, and elliptical coral carpeted many areas in a patch work of pink polyps. Clusters of cup corals rose like white popcorn, lush flowers in a landscape of green.
During the fifth day of each academic rotation for Human Ecology: Food Systems, students get the opportunity to participate in one of three CEI research projects: turtles, sharks, and bonefish. Here is an excerpt from our day on the field working with the turtle team on Friday!
Setting up the net in Half Sound.
It was a gloomy Friday morning in terms of weather, but The Island school kids were ready to go. Smiles, music, and gossip about turtle names drifts through the van on our way to Half Sound, an embayment 45 minutes north of school. Tagging turtles for research is not for the faint-hearted, and the Island School team showed up ready to get some catches. After a long ride to the creek we finally arrived, ready and waiting for the first turtle to cross our path. After a small talk about the movement of the tides and how it affects the destination of the turtles in the creek system, we quickly set up the net for the first capture. Turtle-ing requires patience and interaction with your peers. As we quietly form a line yards away, we face the net and walk back kicking and splashing as loud as we can. This may sound easy, but after a few hours and a mini lunch break in the water, we found ourselves worried that the turtles had outsmarted us. With our doubts we set up our net with a different technique. Instead of keeping the net in one location, making it easier for the turtle to escape, we moved the net around the people herding, hoping to get the turtle in the circle. After turtles made it out of the circle by jumping over the net and moving under the net, we made our first catch!
Juvenile green sea turtle.
After the catch, we quickly proceeded to take care of business. Turtles are able to live outside of water, but we always wanted to make sure the turtle is not stressed through the process. We went on to tagging where we insert a tag on each of the turtle’s front fins so that if he or she was to show up in a new location and somebody found them, they would know who to contact and get an idea of growth rate. We also recorded the species, width, weight, and length of the turtle. The process was not lengthy and the turtle swam off unharmed and quickly. Although this green sea turtle was our only catch of the day, The Island School crew and the help of a few researchers from CEI put in the effort, making this a successful quest for turtles!
