What I miss about our life on Saba… and what I don’t.

This was supposed to go up last week when I was writing about Saba.  Somehow my writer didn’t publish it, and I am just now realizing it.  So here is the last of my Saba posts and then I am moving on. 

I hope you have enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about me this week, and some of the adventures that my family has taken since it’s beginning almost 14 years ago.

I am going to wrap this week up by touching on a few of my favorite parts about living on Saba.  The things I miss with all my heart.  There are also a few things I don’t miss, and I thought I would share those too.

As I was going through these pictures, my heart was warmed.  It was fun to have the flood of memories come back.  I am thankful for cameras.  These pictures were taken with my very first digital camera which I thought was so amazing at the time.  Now that I have a big girl camera; I can look at these pictures and realize it wasn’t all that great.  Although, I am thankful to have pictures.  Especially of this time in our life, and I will take any pictures I can get.

First off I want to start by saying that I think Jonathan misses the ocean most.  He loved being able to catch fresh seafood and cook it up.  I miss the adventure of it all. This is a Saban lobster; which happens to be one way fishermen make money on Saba.

 

My favorite memory has to be having cookouts at Cove Bay.  Cove Bay was down by the ocean and just below the airport.  It was a great place to start a fire and cook tinfoil dinners.  We did this often on a weekend night.  We always did it with good friends which made it so special.

I don’t miss the water situation.  It was so hard and such a struggle to conserve water.  We adapted, but man am I grateful for water.  I know how important it is to be conservative with water.  I am just thankful I don’t have to work as hard as I did on Saba to do that.  Let’s just say I am thankful I get to flush the toilet after each use.

This is a photo of Jex in our make shift bathtub.  Saba didn’t have bath tubs because of how much water it takes to fill them.  It is so funny for me to think that for 2 years our kids bathed in a bucket.

I miss the simplicity of life.  I miss that there was no pressure to run around and do this or that.  There was no pressure to be involved with too much.  I really loved that there was no pressure to have MORE.  There wasn’t MORE to be had on Saba.  Everything came by boat and was expensive.  What you had, you were grateful for. 

One of my favorite parts about our simple life was that we had time several days out of the week to go and spend lunch with Jonathan.  I looked forward to seeing him during the middle of the day, and he loved seeing the kiddos.  I know it helped break up the monotony of classwork.  He was one of few students who had children so it was also fun for his classmates to be with our kids.  The kids loved to go for the fries. The school cafeteria had the best cook.  She made the best chicken dish on Fridays.  I looked forward to that each week.

It was so nice and convenient to island hop.  We were so close to many other islands.  It was fun to be able to explore other parts of the Caribbean.  A nice perk to living over there.  There were many Fridays we would stand and watch the cruise ship pass right by our island.  This is a picture of the littles on St. Maarten.

Our friends on Saba were the best.  They are life long friends that I will never ever forget.  They became our family.  We also share something that we don’t share with others.  We know the secret to island life.  We survived it, we survived medical school, and we have unique stories to tell because of it.

I miss being outdoors in such an amazing place.  The beauty there is  unreal.  I enjoyed our family hikes, and my morning runs.  I miss sitting on my porch watching the sun come up, and the sun go down.  I miss waking up early and going to bed early because of how the sun sets and rises.  I miss the smell.

I had a great support network on Saba.  It was a group of all the significant others of Saba students.  We got together often, and I learned so much from each of them.  I miss all of them, and grew to appreciate that each of us are different.  Although we were different we had such a strong bond because of Saba.

I miss sitting on my porch watching the rain fall over the ocean.

I miss the powerful church meetings we had on Saba.  God can certainly be found everywhere.  All of these men are members of our church and held great responsibilities in making our church services happen.  We did not have a church leader called to be over us.  These men stepped up and made it happen.

I missed our families greatly when we had to stay on the island for Holidays.  It was never easy to be away.  I will tell you that those are some of our most memorable holidays.

I miss the bananas.  Oh the bananas.  The majority of the bananas that grow on Saba are called fig bananas. They are shorter, fatter and sweeter.  We had a banana tree in our backyard so we ate a lot of banana’s.  Stella ate many a fresh banana mashed as baby food.  We also ate banana muffins, banana bread and froze a lot for smoothies.

I also miss all the delicious food on Saba.  I swear they have some of the best restaraunts.  This blows my mind because all of their food comes by boat, and they don’t have all the fancy cooking tools.  I wish I could just take you all to dinner right now.  You would have to give me about 7 days to take you to all my favorite places.

I miss Ting.  A delicious Caribbean grapefruit drink.

I don’t miss how hard it was to travel there, the poor internet connection, and how making a phone call home cost an arm and a leg.

I don’t miss the bugs.

I don’t miss paying $10 for a gallon of milk.

I am thankful to live in the Good Ole USA.  I am also thankful that I had the opportunity to live somewhere else for a while.  It gave me great perspective about life.  It also afforded me many opportunities I couldn’t have ever gotten had we not gone there.  Saba is where I discovered who I am, and what I am made of.  I will forever be grateful for that.

Saba will always have a piece of my heart, and will always feel like my second home.

Thanks for being here while I shared all these stories of my past.  If you missed anything that I shared this week about Saba.  You can find them here.