This is the wish list post. Many of you- wonderful, kind, generous souls that you are- have expressed a desire to know what, if anything, I would like shipped down to the “rock”.
Many things are available here in Jamaica. However, items that I wouldn’t think twice about purchasing, say, mascara, or face scrub, aren’t easily available, and when they are, they are out of my budget.

So here it is, a shameless, self-serving list of things I would just LOVE to receive in the mail from you, my beloved readers.

1) Clinique water-proof mascara. It’s the best. Skin care products in general, actually.
2) Good chocolate. Green and Black is available here, but it costs the equivalent of $6US. Right. Any and all candy is appreciated.
3) BOOKS. Oh my god. BOOKS. Any thing. Not only I, but every other volunteer on this island is starving for reading material. Books get passed around more than pink eye in a pre-school on this island.
4) If you know anyone who has taken the GRE’s and wants to pass along their prep books, yours truly will take them.
5) Leave-in conditioner, deep conditioning treatments of any sort.
6) Lithium batteries for my ancient camera.
If I can think of anything more, I’ll throw it up here.

A word or two about shipping to Jamaica.
It’s not cheap. Really, though, it’s not cheap, and you can’t insure packages, apparently. So don’t send a huge box full of hard-cover, autographed first-editions. You can’t afford it.

When you send packages, they can reach me in a week or two, or over a month. Totally arbitrary. When they finally get passed on to the Embassy, and ultimately to the Peace Corps office, they then must wait until either I can come into Kingston, or someone who will be passing through my parish can drop it off.

Finally, when you address packages, them MUST be labeled the following, or I will have to go into Kingston, go into the customs dock, and pay an arm and a leg to get it. It won’t be fun. Do it this way instead!

Peace Corps Volunteer Taylor Severns
C/O Carla Ellis, Country Director
8 Worthington Avenue, Kingston 5
Jamaica
The Care Of is especially important, because the Embassy has a deal with customs, and anything sent to Leila dosn’t get slapped with a customs charge.

NEVER SEND A PACKAGE BY UPS/DHL/FEDEX, whatever. The plain old USPS
is the only way to go, or I will have to spend lots of time dealing with red tape.

Also important when at the Post Office is to fill out those little green customs declaration forms. This way, customs is less likely to open packages and damage or “lose” contents.

So thank you for thinking of me at all, actually, and HOLY COW, almost 50 of you checked in to see what was happening in my little corner of the world today. The love is most certainly reciprocated.