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Today it is just shy of two weeks since we arrived on the island. It has been wet and grey for three days, and this morning I awoke with my face so bitten by flies that my features had collapsed alarmingly into a dumb, swollen mass, giving me the look of a stroke victim. We walked out on the waterfront then, to buy mosquito coils and repellants and when I heard the old men at the cafes laughing as we passed, I turned to Josh and pretended to translate. “They’re saying ‘See? Americans beat their wives, too.’”

Josh lowered his voice and answered in imitiation “I like them better already”.

It’s been a rough start. But the work is beginning, and I am finding comfort in that.