What is kickball?

The other day I taught my students at the CARE school how to play kickball. Apparently St. Lucians do not know what it is. What I had thought would be a rather easy thing to do, turned out to be exactly the opposite. Turns out, if you don't know baseball, then you won't understand the concepts behind kickball. So I spent the first half of our sports session explaining the basics of baseball and the second half attempting to play. It turned out rather decent, and the kids got into it by the end of it. Sharing American culture is just another fun part of the job that we are here to do.

I met an emperor.

Walking in town I ran into another PCV, Jeff. After a few minutes of catching up, we had the pleasure of a stranger walking up to interrupt our conversation. Oh, but this wasn't just any stranger, no. This was an emperor.

He started by asking us a bucket full of questions about ourselves. Apparently to him we were "special looking". We did not look like Lucians, but then again, we did look like we lived here. I had to laugh when he thought that Jeff was the "manager" of the Peace Corps, and that I, was "just a volunteer". Ha ha. Naturally, my response was, "why didn't you think I was the 'manager'"?

After a few minutes of talking about ourselves we had decided to ask him a few questions in return. We asked for his name, where he is from, all of the basic questions that you ask of new people you meet. Everything seemed normal, yes. He carried a conversation well.

Then came the BIG question of the day,..." so "W", what is it that you do?" He responded with, "I am an emperor, of course." I looked at Jeff all rosy cheeked and all, and realized I had to bite my lips rather hard in order to keep myself from laughing. After all, what if this really was an emperor???? I would hate for the guy to get a bad impression of PCVs, after all.

I asked, "so what are you an emperor of?" And he simply responded with, "Social hierarchies". Well, after a couple minutes of this banter, I couldn't carry it any further. I relied on Jeff to make an exit to the conversation after this "emperor" asked far too many questions about my living location and my contact information. After the emperor went back on his merry way to his mighty throne, I turned to Jeff and let out a big smile. "I've never met an emperor before, how about you?" was the first thing that came out of Jeff's mouth.

It was a rather entertaining day, all in all, and this added the final icing to my already baked cake.