AN OPEN LETTER ON AN EXTRAORDINARY JOB - By Ed Teja

It’s a new year, and I’m sitting in my recliner on a private island in The Bahamas writing this letter. It’s a small island, called Lee Stocking, and it is where I live and work. Today there are seven people on the island, but shortly there will be 50.

The Bahamas calls itself: “Not an island nation, but a nation of islands.” There are over 700 islands and ours is six miles from Great Exuma, which is part of a group called of The Family islands. The primary economic engine here is tourism, but I have nothing to do with that.

Lee Stocking Island (LSI) is leased to a non-profit organization—the Perry Institute for Marine Science, based in Jupiter, Florida, which employs me. LSI is home to a major marine research facility, and top marine scientists from around the world come here to do research on fish, lobster, conch, coral, and the marine environment. Ongoing research efforts with NOAA monitor the nature of wind and wave in the region. We offer living (dormitory style) accommodations and kitchen and dining facilities for about 40 people, as well as laboratories, and dive operations. We have housing for on-island staff members, who, often aided by volunteer interns, provide research support, dive support, administration and the other services needed to let the researchers focus on their work.

My job is title facilities technician. I keep the infrastructure functioning so that people can live and work here. Along with a small staff of Bahamian workers who come to the island four days a week, the job is to maintain generators and electrical grid, operate the watermaker, and take care of the myriad chores that fall into the realms of janitorial, landscaping, refrigeration and air conditioning maintenance and repair, and even sanitation. Then there are the boats, the docks, the buildings, the road, the airstrip, and the vehicles.

Think of this job as a super handyman job, where resources are often limited, at least in the short run, but problems are always urgent. For instance, a salt-water circulation system feeds salt water to tanks, ponds and labs around the island. If the system goes down for any length of time, years of experimentation can be lost. If the watermaker or generator fails, then there is no way to live on the island. So it is a given that most of our systems are more than important—they are critical.

The nine years that my wife and I spent living on a powerboat in Grenada, Carriacou, and Venezuela turns out to be quite useful here, for a small island is not unlike a boat. It is a constant effort to stay on top of things--ensuring the utilities always work and still find the time to keep up on the painting as well. Paint is not just cosmetic in the tropics—it is essential to keeping things functional. Grease and oil are other vital substances. There is a West Indian saying that goes: “Grease and oil or ‘ting will spoil,” and it is just as true here as further south. The pace of deterioration of nearly everything is amazing. So an important part of my job is to see that things get greased liberally.

Because of our location, weather and mission, some aspects of the job are more challenging than simple maintenance. In fact, during the last hurricane season we had moments when we wondered if the research center would still be standing. These factors add difficulty as well as interest to the job. They make it an extraordinary job.

To give you some insight into the nature of a job like this, Kim has asked me write this letter on a regular basis. In addition to a variety of jobs in the US, I’ve lived and worked in Hong Kong, Venezuela, and St. Martin, and I can tell you that some things about this place, this job, are quite different. For some reasons that I’ll be getting into later, this is actually a rather ideal job for a writer, and in the year I’ve been here I’ve managed to do several rewrites of a Venezuelan adventure novel (at my agent’s request) and get well into the writing of my next book as well.

In future letters I’ll talk a bit about the rationale for working for someone else when going expat—as opposed to going it alone. I’ve done both now and while there is no perfect solution, you should understand some of the benefits and gotchas of both approaches, especially in an increasingly protective global economic environment.

If you have questions about this job, or the Perry Institute for Marine Science, or ideas for issues that you’d like to see addressed in this letter, send me an email at eteja@PerryInstitute.org.

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Ed Teja is a writer, musician and sailor who has kindly agreed to periodically send us an "open letter" about some aspect of his or someone else's "extraordinary job".  You may also like The Rum Shop, a short story of Ed's, and you can find his novel, The Legend of Ron Añejo, on amazon.com.  We'll keep you posted on the availability of his upcoming, Under Low Skies. Ed also writes a monthly column for the Caribbean Compass.