Friday, December 17, 2010

Flowers in December

I realized the other day that I spend an inordinate amount of my time here focusing on the negative things about the DR. It is after all my job. I work for the remedy of certain problems. But I realized that so much time spent thinking about how to improve aspects of my community, while helpful workwise, was making me just a bit too pessimistic. Peace Corps Dominican Republic may be difficult and frustrating at times, but as I’m sure any volunteer from Tibet or Kazakhstan, especially when in the middle of winter, would say, “You’re in the Caribbean. How hard can it be you pansy?”And they would be right.

Here are some of the things that I love about the Dominican Republic. I was going to add more things but I ran out of time.

1: Brindar-ing: Dominicans love to share, especially when it comes to food. None of the farmers in our community let us buy tomatoes and peppers from them. When they are harvesting I just walk by the field and they fill up my backpack. If I show up at someone’s house around lunchtime I will promptly be pushed into a chair and they will shove a heaping plate of rice and beans at me.

2: Flowers in December: We had a really chilly week in November. The rain had us locked in the house shivering all day. I was rather worried that this was going to be the extant of the mountain winter. It sure didn’t seem like we were anywhere close to that famous Caribbean sun. But the sun is back. It’s less than two weeks till Christmas and we are eating fresh lettuce, peppers, basil, and kale from our garden. The unnamed red-flowering shrubbery around our house keeps bursting out in brand-new blooms. And our tomato plants are flowering. When I need a lime I just climb the tree outside my house. Our neighbors brindar us fresh oranges regularly. Occasionally we have a chilly day, especially when it’s rainy as it often is here, and the evenings always require a sweater or two. I know in Santo Domingo and the other coastal areas of the country most people probably pass the siesta hour sweating, but here it’s just perfect weather. If you have ever been in central Pennsylvania about mid-autumn, you know about perfect weather. Except here it’s even better because everything is still as green as June. The sun is warm, the eddying breezes always tug along cool air, and after lunch you just want to tilt back your chair against an inviting wall and doze.

3: Palma real: These palm trees are absolutely beautiful. They are definitely the most royal and stately-looking of all the DR’s many palm varieties. It may be that since in the States palm trees are presented as synonymous with cold mojitos, salted margaritas, and warm languid beaches that my subconscious taps into that image whenever I see these trees, giving me a feeling of deep satisfaction as if I were on a luxurious vacation even though I am over three hours from the beach and am forced to drink my mojitos warm. Also my house is constructed of palm boards. Whatever the reason, I find the palma real to be a stunning tree.

4:Public transportation: Since this is about the things I DO like, this one needs a few disclaimers. No I don’t like cobradores (fare-collectors) that are always trying to rip me off. I have yet to ride in a public transport vehicle (Santo Domingo’s metro excluded) in the DR that would pass inspection in even the most lenient state in the US. But all those unpleasantries aside, I love that you can literally get anywhere in this country on public transport. There are little rusted bumper-less green-roofed cars called carro públicos (public cars) that run fixed routes throughout the cities. But if you are in a hurry and they are empty they will usually convert into a private taxi if you pay them taxi prices. Once in Santiago we were the last people on a small bus. After getting off the bus I would have had to take two separate carro público routes, so after negotiating with the driver he agreed, for the same price as two carros públicos, to take us directly to our stop. I know I value the public transport here even more highly since I never lived anywhere in the US that had any decent form of public transport. But the fact that I can take various forms of public transport, without walking more than a few minutes, directly from my front door to the front door of most of the 190 volunteers in this country is a demonstration of how useful the DR’s public transport can be. Useful yes, but in the spirit of positivity I won’t elaborate on just how confusing and time-consuming a trip on Dominican public transport can be.

5: New Year’s Eve on the beach: Sure you can spend New Year’s Eve on a beach in Florida or some other warm state with a lovely coastline, but it’s not the Caribbean and it’s not the Dominican Republic. There is a difference. Enough said.

6: Geographic diversity: The DR is somewhere around the size of New Hampshire or some other tiny state of similar size. It’s much smaller than Pennsylvania. In all that smallness of space it goes from sea-level shoreline in the south to just over 10,000 feet high in the middle of the country and then back to sea-level in the north again. This helps to explain why it takes so many hours to get from the extreme southwest corner of the country to the northeast peninsula of Samaná. It takes so long to get around here that if I were to go by feeling I would say that the DR is at least as big as Texas. It’s always shocking to remind myself just how relatively tiny the DR is. People sometimes ask me if Nueva York (the US to them) is bigger than the Dr. It’s hard to get them to believe that we have 50 states and they are pretty much all (at least by average) bigger than this county. It’s a lot of fun to have beaches and mountains and still more beaches in such a small area. If there were a contest in the Western Hemisphere on who could have the most fun in the least amount of space the Dominicans would win, hands down.

7: Presidente Super Fria bien barata: You can buy, and rest assured that I do on those occasions that I make it to the city, a jumbo bottle of cold beer. This frosty jumbo, which is the equivalent of almost three regular state-side bottles, normally costs about $2.75. We spend-thrifty volunteers have discovered a place that sells them for about $2.30. What’s not to love about sharing a triple-sized economy-priced Presidente or two with friends while sitting on a concrete bench facing out across the restless waves of a Caribbean twilight while the madness that is the traffic of Santo Domingo seethes across the background?

8: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my kitty Schnickelfritz.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

La Gran Libertad

I met a young twenty-something boy in my community the other day who is fresh from spending several months in Milwaukee. I think he plans to go back again after coffee harvest. I, of course, asked him what he thought of life in Neuba Yol (the Dominican version of the Spanish word Nueva York for New York). Dominicans commonly use the term New York instead of the US. Apparently over fifty percent of Dominicans who live abroad live in New York. This has made New York synonymous with the US which is an endless source of merriment and also frustration for those of us who really aren’t from New York and would like to represent our own state. Anyway, back to my story.

In response to my question the boy in the yellow t-shirt smiled kind of funny and said, “ It’s great and all over there, but you just don’t have La Gran Libertad, which roughly translates as The Great Liberty. I was puzzled. Aren’t we after all the country that tries to promote freedom above all else? We seem to give freedom precedence over reason, safety and health. And what could be more free than that? Consumerist America generally doesn’t like rules against consuming anything, even when it comes to environmentally-degrading plastic bags, killer fast-food, or lumbering one-passenger SUVs that consume about as much gas as a small Cessna. For better or for worse, we have a lot of freedom.

“What do you mean by La Gran Libertad? I asked, clearly puzzled. It was really hard for him to articulate exactly why it is that los Americanos are missing out on La Gran Libertad. He seemed to think it was a lot the atmosphere of the place, that it was lacking in the spirit of the people. I tried to get him to be more specific. It turns out this boy missed having neighbors who greeted him by name every morning as he went by their houses on the way to work. Lunch wasn’t a one or two hour affair with neighbors and friends stopping by. He worked at the Milwaukee airport so lunch was probably a 30 minute ham-and-cheese event in a small cafeteria smelling of old food. Where’s the freedom if the rice and beans are missing? Also his job was work work from morning to evening, not being able to take a long break to chat with whichever friend happened to be walking by. In the evening he went back to his house and no one asked him how his day was. As he came riding down the street revving his bike engine (obviously he didn’t even have a moto which is where the lack of freedom starts) he didn’t have friends yelling ¡Wepa! ¿Cómo tu tá? or ¿Cómo te fue? while they pumped their raised fist in salute. He couldn’t just walk a few minutes down the street to the nearest colmado to meet his friends for a super fria. According to him people work all the time. No one knows each other. When you walk down the street everyone is a stranger and it’s not obvious that any one you meet really cares about you. People always seem to be rushing somewhere, anywhere but where they are.

He said he’s planning to go back to work in the airport again, but he’s not very excited about leaving his small community where everyone knows him and shares in his day.

It was a thought-provoking conversation for me. Dominicans in general place a high value on friends and spending time with them even though the Dominican culture as a whole definitely values consumerism as much as mainstream American culture does. Dominicans (at least the ones in my community), like most Americans, love acquiring material goods. I think the problem arises when a culture tends to do nothing but scurry about working to acquire things. La Gran Libertad, if I understood my friend correctly, is (among other things) knowing when to slow down and enjoy what you’ve got with those around you. Americans might have a lot of freedom, but take it from a Dominicano who knows, it’s not near as much fun as La Gran Libertad.

A Caribbean Winter

I uploaded a few more photos of our place and what we've been doing these days.

Winter has come to my part of the Caribbean. Peace Corps didn’t tell me (who knew then that I’d live in the mountains?) to bring a coat. I have a couple of sweaters that I put on all at one time, but it’s still kind of chilly. I don’t know what the temperature is, but my hands get numb when I’m sitting around reading or writing. The last two days it’s been raining so our only recourse has been to crawl under the covers. Earlier in the week, as you can see from the pictures, the weather was just gorgeous for hiking. The sun was slightly warm but the air stayed nippy. If I procrastinate bathing until after the sun goes down, as I usually do, it brings back memories of Pennsylvania winter-baths as a kid in our farmhouse’s unheated bathroom. Only there you had hot running water and you could run to the stove afterward.

Granted it’s not cold enough to see my breath, but I have one bucket of warm water to dump over myself while a breeze wafts through the latrine threatening to blow out the candle. It’s a chilly and uninviting bath. Sometimes I just skip the bath all together. It’s easier that way.

A week ago we took four kids from our communities to a national Brigada Verde conference. I think the conference was a big hit for all the jovenes (youth) that attended. Recall that Brigade Verde is a Dominican youth club focused on environmental issues. It felt strange towing four teenagers five hours across the country for a weekend conference. But I feel strange doing a lot of things here, meaning that if there’s one thing that Peace Corps (and living in a foreign culture does well, it’s stretching your comfort level. In college I was pretty uncomfortable just talking in front of a group, let alone talking in front of a group in a foreign language. Here that seems laughable. Last month when we participated in the tree planting project the local news station interviewed us about what we are doing in the area. I don’t have TV so I don’t know if it actually made the final cut for the air or not. But it was just another day in Peace Corps. Some days later Anna and I were laughing about the fact that if that had happened in the States we would probably have been like, “Woot, woot! We’re on TV!” But here so many new and strange (at least strange to us) things seem to happen almost every day that you just don’t really have time to process them all. Strange becomes normal. Which means that returning to life in the Stated in two years will seem rather mundane. Unless of course I’ll be used to this strangeness which will make American habits seem strange and so I’ll be in for another stimulating ride.

Some fun experiences:
Anna is sitting on a bus chatting with the cobrador (the fare-man) about where to get off and a man sitting directly behind her says to the cobrador, “Oh, so you speak English?” The cobrador says that no isn’t it obvious that they are speaking in Spanish and the passenger just looks confused, even though he could clearly overhear the entire conversation. Various volunteers have remarked on a tendency in some Dominicans to find it so incredulous that an Americano/a should be speaking Spanish that they literally don’t understand what you’re saying because they are so sure that what’s coming out of your mouth is English (or some other foreign language).

I know two Haitian Creole words. Bonswa is good afternoon and Bonjou is good morning. One day several weeks ago I am walking along the road and here comes a neighbor of mine on his motor bike with a Haitian worker on the back. He stops his bike and yells Leo! Leo! These guys speak the same language as you! I tried to explain that we actually don’t, but he was not to be discouraged and kept repeating, “Talk to him! Talk to him!” So I did. I said, “Bonswa," and shook the Haitian coffee picker’s hand. Of course the Haitian loved this because so few Dominicans (if any) bother to learn Creole. His face lit up in a big smile and he vigorously returned the handshake. My neighbor was ecstatic. He jumped up and down and shouted, “See, I told you!” Then he excitedly points to a group of Haitian workers coming down the road and tells me to talk to them as well. I shook hands all around with a hearty Bonswa for all as my Dominican neighbor cheered loudly. I never did correct him. Last week when I showed up at the school for an English class the professor said, “Ai Leo! I hear you’re speaking some Haitian Creole.” What could I do but shrug and smile?

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Tropical DepressionTomas in the time of Cholera

First a few photos of what we've been doing. I promise more photos later.

I’m writing this from a hotel in Santo Domingo. Peace Corps, fearing the current swirling tropical depression in the Caribbean will open up a can of hurricane on the DR, has ordered all the volunteers in the south of the country to congregate in hotels in various big cities. Basically they want us all in a few key spots in case they decide to evacuate is. I’m closest to the capitol, so I’m here. The staff is painfully slow at handing out our room keys; I’ve been waiting almost two hours. It’s just another Peace Corps moment, sitting on the floor in the lobby of a hotel that charges $10 a day just for internet access (my house rent in comparison is $15 a month). We will be stuck in the hotel here until the storm goes away. At this point it looks like we will be here until the coming weekend. Although I miss my site, I’m not complaining. I’m only a 20 minute walk away from the Peace Corps office where I can find free internet. The hotel has a fabulous restaurant where we get all the food we can eat three times a day. And no, they don’t even serve boiled green bananas. They do have made-to-order omelets, lots of fresh fruit, yummy chocolate-brownie ice cream, and fresh bread with real butter (the kind that actually requires refrigeration). I’m now sitting outside under a warm hurricane-gray sky beside palm trees and a huge, blue pool. Yes, I’m in Peace Corps.

Last week we were also ordered to appear in the capitol for cholera training. Given the cholera epidemic in Haiti, it’s pretty much guaranteed that cholera will spread throughout the DR. The DR’s water supply system is almost identical to that of Haiti’s. The majority of rural people’s water supply comes from untreated (as in un-chlorinated) aqueducts or rivers. And all the country’s sewers (aside of properly built pit or composting latrines) run directly into the Atlantic, the Caribbean, or underground aquifers. We can only hope that it’s not a bad epidemic. Well hope, and then also train people how to minimize cholera transmission. It’s been decades since this country has seen cholera and the public doesn’t know what it is or how to deal with it. Many call it “the Haitian disease” and volunteers living near the border report seeing Dominicans refusing to get on buses with Haitians. So our current job is to teach our communities that it’s a bacteria that’s only spread when fecal-contaminated food, fingers, or water enter one’s mouth. Symptoms are explosive diarrhea and vomiting and can kill (from dehydration) a child in a few hours and an adult in a day. Treatment is as simple as taking lots of re-hydration solutions along with an antibiotic. With proper treatment less than one percent of infected people die, but if you don’t know what to do , you most likely die.

So we’ve been in our site over five months. I know I’ve posted about a lot of different things going on here but you may be wondering by now what it is that we actually work. For starters Peace Corps usually doesn’t expect that volunteers do that many projects in their first three months. This time is mostly devoted to getting to know the community, identifying their needs, and developing project plans. Our communities demonstrated a need for help with constructing latrines and improved cook stoves. The improved cook stoves use less wood than traditional stoves (which are essentially open fires) and just as importantly feature chimneys so that the women, who spend a big part of their day in the kitchen, are not constantly breathing in smoke. So we are currently waiting for grant money for both of those projects. I am also filling out another grant to help with the latrine project. This grant gets filled through private donors (like you) visiting the Peace Corps website and donating funds. Once Peace Corps gets the information online I’ll post the link here in case you are interested in monetarily supporting the project.

Between the two of us we also have three Brigade Verde (Green Brigade) youth groups. Basically we meet weekly with the groups and give environmentally themed presentations. The basic idea is to train these kids to be environmentally responsible. Two weeks ago a foundation Juventud Naturaleza (Nature Youth) brought a bunch of people out from Ocoa to participate in a tree-planting project in my community. They invited me and I invited my Brigada Verde group. My kids loved it. In the course of a Sunday morning everyone together planted about 3,000 pine trees. I hope to be able to use the foundation to organize similar projects that my Brigade Verde kids can participate in.

We have also had meetings about dealing with trash in our communities. There is no trash pickup so most people just throw their trash in the gutter or over a bank. Most of it soon winds up out of sight in the weeds giving the feeling it’s gone away. But when their great-grandchildren come along the trash will still be there. So working alongside a few more forward-thinking people in our communities we are trying to find a few strategic plots of land where we can dig a hole and place the trash. Basically it would be a micro-landfill. That’s the dream, but so far no one has been willing to put up the land. If we can find land, then we still have to convince the majority of the people that it’s worth their time putting their trash into sacks or cans and bringing it to the dump spot. It will be a patience-challenging project.

We are also currently trying to organize a reforestation project with the farmers. The DR government provides free hardwood and timber trees in various nurseries located around the country. Basically farmers request the amount of trees they want and we visit the nursery and make sure the trees are available and bug the mayor to provide the trucks to transport the trees. The last month the nurseries have been giving me the run-around. The local nursery told me that I have to go to Ocoa, the province capitol, where the director has her office. After a rather long and frustrating meeting with her she told me that I have to go back and talk to my local nursery. You would think that a government-funded nursery would be more than happy to find someone who wants to work in reforestation. While the nursery leaders say they want to work with me, it’s becoming increasingly clear that their lack of clarity and participation is going to make the project twice as hard as I had first imagined.

I also give English class once a week. It’s been progressing quite slowly because we really only have class half the time since it either rains a lot or I have to leave for the capitol to do things like attend cholera training or hole up in a posh hotel waiting out a hurricane. It doesn’t help that hardly any of the students actually study outside of class either. But it’s fun. It’s really mostly an excuse to have a good time.

So that’s a summary of our current projects. Well Peace Corps officials are here to give us hurricane updates. And then maybe I’ll spend the afternoon basking in the sun and swimming in the pool. Wish me luck.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

A Day In My Life

The other day my mom asked me just what it is that I do here in the mountains. I answered that for starters I play with my cat.

Seriously though, here’s a description of one of my days, and it’s a pretty good description of what my life here is like. At least in the sense that a day is usually measured not by how many things I get done, but if I actually accomplish the one thing I set out to do.

Last week one day we planned to go visit a farmer who lives in my community to talk to him about planting trees on his property. My community is an hour’s very fast walk from our house which is in Anna’s community. About half of my community’s houses are clustered together just on this side of a river. The other half of the community is stretched out along the river’s far side. From the river crossing it takes another 30 minutes of very fast walking downriver to reach to the last of the houses, which is where the farmer lives that we wanted to visit.

Well my day begins around 7 with lots of yawning and a purring kitten jumping around and attacking me. Without getting out of bed I can tell that it’s another overcast day. On sunny mornings the light beams in like weirdly flattened headlights through the cracks in the rotting palm boards, but this morning the cracks are only bored gray lines. During a breakfast of oatmeal pancakes and peanut butter we look out to the mountain across the river where clouds keep meeting and rushing away again in important little swirls. By 8, talking all the while and constantly getting up from breakfast to get a better look at the sky, we have pretty much decided to still go even though the entire sky is now gray. By 8:30 we’re not going because the clouds are even darker. By 9 I’ve spotted some blue patches and feeling very restless I decide I’m going to go anyway, by myself. By 9:30 I’ve convinced Anna that the sky is blue above the sooty clouds and we are off. We manage to catch a ride as far as the river. There is no bridge. The one narrow foot crossing consists of a 12 inch-wide log. Horses can cross farther downstream and occasionally, when it’s very dry, trucks can ford a low crossing.

We head downriver, whistling merrily as we splash though the mud (it had rained a lot the previous day). After about 15 minutes of walking a heavy downpour splashes out of the loaded clouds. It only then becomes clear that I no longer have my umbrella (I left it at a colmado, which is like a little Dominican general/convenience/grocery store). I run, with my backpack over my head, to the nearest house a few hundred yards ahead. The family members are all sprawled under a gallery of sorts in their plastic chairs watching the rain go by, but as soon as they see me they jump up. As I make the cover of the roof they politely push me into the chair and introduce themselves. I had never met them before but we pass a very pleasant 20 minutes waiting for the rain to dissipate. As soon as it does so Anna and I head on through the squishy mud, which is only deeper now.

We get to our farmer-friend’s house just in time to avoid getting drenched. This downpour lasts over 30 minutes. Meanwhile we talk trees, bees, and peppers and farmer-friend gives us a grenadillo (a fruit), some peppers, and a bottle of fresh honey to take home. We explain to him what types of trees the government’s nursery has and he orders about 500 trees to start. The Dominican government gives out free hardwood trees to whoever wants to plant them. The catch is you have to find your own transport (not many people have trucks) and you have to wade through sometimes complicated procedures and hard-to-understand nursery mangers to get the trees. We are basically trying to organize the whole shebang of helping local farmers to plant as many trees as possible.

So about as soon as the rain let up we decided we should head back up river. We had carried along cheese, tomatoes, bread, avocado, salt, and peanuts to have a small picnic lunch. We found a jutting rock right where a tumbling stream crashes down out of the mountains to join the river. I had just finished my first amazingly delectable sandwich when the threatening cloud-thunder made true on its threats and peso-sized raindrops pelted down. We quickly threw everything into our pack and Anne whipped out her umbrella. Just then a wild-looking barefoot mountain man came down the path. I really have no idea where he came from, or where he was going for that matter. I, still umbrella-less, was helping Anna (I had on sandals) step from rock to rock to cross the bubbling stream, thinking only about getting to the nearest house when this long-haired old man in banana-stained clothes came striding by. He had yellowish, tattered mid-calf-length pants on which hung his machete, and his shirt hung halfway open. His face was rather obscured by a wild bushy beard. He saluted and disappeared ghost-like into the rain while ear-deafening thunder cracked repeatedly overhead. (The thunder here really is loud enough to be legitimately scary). It was a rather surreal moment, to say the least.

The rain let up just as I reached the nearest house, which happened to be the same one where I took shelter before. So, damp to the bone, I continued walking. About 15 minutes later we took shelter from a shower at another house for a few minutes. By the time we reached the river water was already splashing across the crossing-log. This particular log is actually tied fast to a tree because high water washes it out of place so often. When the water goes down they put the log back in place. At this point it was no longer raining, but we were tired from walking so we sat around at a colmado waiting for a truck heading in the direction of our house. After over an hour of waiting it had begun raining again and it was now obvious that there would be no more trucks that afternoon. So we started out into the rain. Thankfully by now someone had loaned me an umbrella.

By the time we reach the first stream-crossing the rain has stopped for good, but the steam is swollen to a several times its normal size. I pull up my pant legs above my knees and start across. The water is so high and fast that I still get my pant legs wet and it almost knocks me over but I manage to stagger across. Then while Anna is debating on how to cross, several people on horseback appear from a small trail on my side of the stream. The lady says to me, “I’ll go help her across on my horse.” One of the men turns to her, scowling. “Don’t be an idiot, she doesn’t know how to get on a horse.” After a bit of convincing they believe me that Anna does indeed know how to mount a horse and one of the men on a mule gingerly crosses the roiling stream and gives her a lift across. When Anna jumps up on the mule, obviously an expert, the Thomas who had at first doubted her now cheers and shouts, “Oh look, she can mount a horse better than I can!”

We walk on, feet covered in mud. At the next stream I again dubiously cross it and survive. Anna is debating when along comes a motorbike and swishes her across. At the next stream she has to take of her shoes and wade it, but thankfully two cute little girls point us to the shallowest crossing. After several more steep hills we finally get back to our shack. By now it’s close to six and we still have to make supper and heat up water for a bath.

It took all day, but the farmer (on top of giving us free honey and peppers) signed up for our reforestation project . As days go here, this was a pretty successful one.

Somos Amigos

Last week Anna and I joined up with a medical mission to translate for a bunch of American doctors and other medical volunteers. The group is called Somos Amigos (which in Spanish is “We are friends”). Anna and I got to the hotel on Saturday afternoon around 2 and I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for two bananas and some crackers. We overslept in the morning so we rushed to the bus stop without breakfast only to end up waiting for two hours for the bus (which turned out to be only a pickup truck) to show up. I went to the hotel front desk and said Somos con somos amigos (We are with we are friends). The clerk smartly replied, “Oh, I didn’t know we were friends.” I just stared at her blankly and her laughter subsided. I looked at Anna, who repeated the joke, and slowly it dawned on me. But I was far too hungry to laugh so I just repeated my request for the room key.

I like to joke with people in my campo (the Dominican word for rural areas), but mostly I am the only one laughing. I am never quite sure if they don’t understand my Spanish or if the joke doesn’t translate culturally. Nevertheless I keep trying even though Anna has often suggested that I give up trying to make jokes to my neighbors. I think the receptionist’s joke was rather clever, but of course it figures that the one time a Dominican makes a joke I love (and can understand) I’m too sluggish to laugh.

Sunday we helped the doctors set up the clinic and then they saw patients from Monday through Thursday. Anna helped out in the pharmacy and in the dental clinic.. In a little rural village Somos Amigos has set up a real dental clinic where dentists can perform root canals and other rather painful (but extremely important) dental procedures. They also make a lot of dentures on site for people who have lost their teeth. It is an understatement to say that it was amazing to watch the dentists work and have them explain to us procedures such as root canals or denture making. Another PC volunteer actually got to assist on a root canal and helped out with multiple tooth extractions.

I was the personal translator and medical assistant for a pediatrician and had a fabulous time. Not only did I learn a lot of Spanish medical terms from translating, I learned a lot medically because the doctor was kind enough to explain a lot of her thought processes. It was an exhilarating job. A large number of Haitians also visited the clinic. At least half of them didn’t know Spanish. We only had one staff person who spoke both Haitian Creole and English and she did an amazing job trying to translate for everyone but there was no way she could keep up. So several times I found myself in a room with two Haitians. The one was the patient while the other translated from Creole to Spanish while I translated Spanish into English for the doctor.

It was an exciting week, quite the change from the slow pace of campo life. I don’t know the exact number of patients Somos Amigos was able to help but I’m sure it was in the hundreds, and they do this several time a year. In case you are interested, check out the Somos Amigos website. They are a non-profit organization supported entirely by individual donations of time, expertise, and money.

Not only did I greatly enjoy translating, working with patients, soaking up medical knowledge, and hanging out with everyone, I was immensely inspired by the doctors and other professionals who took time off from their busy lives and paid their own way to the DR to donate a week of hard work in a clinic. Cheers to you all!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

High Technology

This Dominican mixture of extremely rural living mixed with what the Mennonites would call High Technology just gets weirder. Yesterday I wanted to make a kitty hole in our house wall for Schnickelfritz. I finished the hole (using only a flat screwdriver and a hammer) in under 10 minutes. And it's cute and perfect for when kitty gets the wanderlust. That piece of rotted wall seems so incongruous with the lovely solar panel perched above it.

Now today I am sitting at the local school, a 15 minute walk from my shack/house, connected to high-speed internet when we don't even have electric lines. Apparently the ministry of education gave all school directors a laptop and a wireless internet card (it runs off the cell phone network and is faster than some internet centers here). What the government didn't do is teach the teachers how to use this High Technology. So in exchange for computer and internet lessons the director here lets me use his wireless card. So hopefully I will have internet access at least once a week and hopefully sometimes oftener.

In other good news the mayor finally came through and today the township began grading our road for the first time since we've been here. Everyone is so excited that most men in the community are just out following the grader around and watching. There is a sort of jubilant ecstasy in the air that the grader has finally arrived. They can get more crops out faster. And they don't have to steer their motorcycles around foot-deep ruts. My question is what the community will talk about now. The road was so rutted and eroded that it was (and rightly so) a constant topic of conversation these past months.

We just (some weeks ago) discovered that a local family makes something akin to ricotta cheese. It's called boruga and the Dominicans eat it with lots of brown sugar. They let fresh cow milk turn into buttermilk and then dump off the buttermilk water into another container. Then they slowly add more milk to this buttermilk water and the boruga forms on top. I've never bought food with live cultures so cheaply before. I tried it the Dominican way with sugar and it's utterly repelling. We eat it salted with Anna's fabulous flat-bread and fresh peppers. I can't really describe how wonderful it is to have a fresh milk-product to eat regularly after so many months of cheese deprivation.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Esa vaina amarilla

The following is written September 12.

I went to help my neighbor pick his first crop of peppers this past Saturday morning. As we were picking the other workers informed me that the ones that were already red couldn’t be sold since these peppers are for export. Of course I immediately said that I wanted them. No, no, they replied, the red ones are spicy. Well of course then I really wanted them as it’s always so difficult to find enough seasonings for our food here. Dominicans, at least the farmers, really prefer the blandness of plain white rice and boiled green bananas. And so it was that I had a bag full of spicy peppers to skip home with at lunch time.

Anna also succeeded in pickling some cucumbers, onions, and garlic. We of course just devoured them. But in a noble attempt to honor Peace Corps’ second goal we also sacrificially offered some to two schoolboys. They barely managed to swallow their bite of the pickle and we had to bribe them with some fresh banana bread (thanks Suzie Q. for the fabulous recipe) to get them to smile again.

This past week I gave the first English class for adults. Almost 20 people, the majority with no experience in English beyond random movie lines, showed up. How do you successfully teach any English to adults with no textbooks—we have no textbooks partly because I know practically no one will bother to study outside of class—for only one hour each week? Well they might not learn much by the end of two years, but they should at least be able to have more patience with my occasionally mangled Spanish. And I get to laugh at them instead of them always laughing at me. I also started helping out once a week in the 6th and 7th grade English class at school.

The educational system in this country is sometimes dismaying. The English teacher teaches from three pages of notes he took when he was in college. That notebook and a cheap 50-page English-conversation booklet form his English-teaching arsenal. He writes things on the board and the students copy it down. He also teaches French. I haven’t seen his books, but I’m hoping the fact that French is also a Romance languages helps at least a tiny bit. I’m not belittling the teacher for the textbooks or language knowledge he doesn’t have; I’m questioning the sanity of a ministry of education who prescribes two foreign language courses (without educating the teachers) to middle school students who are only in school four hours each day. What’s more important by the age of 16, being able to (barely) introduce yourself in French and English even though you can barely read in your native language not to mention doing the multiplication table, or being able to read and recite the multiplication table as if it were second nature although you don’t know a word of English or French. (Although if you are a true Dominican tiguere you will have learned “I love you baby!” without the help of any formal English classes.) Yes it looks good on nationwide curriculum requirements, but in the real world of the classroom (at least in my rural community) it just makes me sad.

Novels must be very lonely here. I can count on three fingers the number of Dominicans I have seen reading for what appeared to be pleasure. And one of those was a teenager reading a middle-school reading booklet. When the people in my community see me reading they say, “Oh you’re studying again.” And sometimes they’ll add, “My, but you work a lot.” I have given up trying to explain that I’m reading for fun. No, it’s not hard work to read. It’s relaxing. At least they think they have one hard-working volunteer. I’m assuming this dearth-of-reading, this death-of-the-novel type lifestyle is not so common in bigger towns and cities. For the sake of the Dominican cultural I can only hope so.

Schnickelfritz, our spoiled little kitty for which Anna sometimes makes a tiny salami-and-egg omelet, is growing like a fat yellow vegetable in a Dominican garden. For any of you that know Dominican slang, you will laugh to know that when our 7-year-old neighbor boy comes looking to pet Fritz he always asks, “Y dónde está esa vaina amarilla?”

Until next time.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Noah comes to life

The following is written Tuesday August 24.

First, here are some photos.

Yes it’s been a long time since I updated. The reasons are many: lack of internet time, lack of personal computer, lack of electricity, lack of a kitty . . . oh wait, that’s not a reason. Well you get the picture. The news is all good. So many wonderful things have happened that it’s hard to know where to start.
We finally moved into our own house on August 1st. And life is suddenly so much better. Well to be fair to our previous host family a great part of the better-ness comes from it not raining every day anymore. But the food has also improved greatly. Yes we have sun and lots of it. From May 14 to the end of July we had about 17 days saturated with rain plus another 15 days of long showers. And that’s not counting the days where it just spritzed. So we sat in our little room and read and read and read and wished for a home of our own where we could at least be cooking and not be cooped up in one little room with not much privacy.

We’ve been eating a lot of fresh oranges and avocados. So lots of guacamole with Dominican corn chips that Anna makes from mixing water and corn flour and pan-frying it. The chips are much better than the ingredients suggest. Our communities grow lots of tomatoes and peppers, so we’ve also been making fabulous salsa from fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and basil or cilantro. It beats the boiled viveres every time. We eat a lot of potatoes as well as the traditional Dominican rice and beans. But even our rice and beans are better. First we use brown rice; it’s not even very much more expensive but so much tastier and more nutritious. And then our brilliant chef-in-residence, Anna, makes bean-and-rice burgers. We boil the beans and rice together and then add salsa and egg and fry them into a burger-shaped mound of comida rica. Just don’t forget to add some guacamole. Admittedly the burgers don’t always stick together that well, but it sure beats the daily Dominican grind of heaping a mountain of white rice on your lunch plate, forming a deep crater with your spoon, and then filling the crater to overflowing with soupy beans. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the passion fruit juice. We have all we can drink and then some. The juice is so sour you have to add quite a bit of sugar to make it perfect, and perfect it is with Dominican rum and popcorn. But with all the sugar I just can’t drink a lot of it every day. When our neighbor found out that we were buying some she tried to sell us a 100 fruits. We finally agreed on 30 and then she brought us 30 more the following week. Now every time she walks by she yells, “Leo, no quieres mas chinola?” “Do you want more passion fruit?” I assure her that I’ll let her know once we’ve gobbled up all the ones that we have, but all the same she incessantly keeps asking.

In the beginning of August I finally got my new computer, a tiny cherry-red netbook that is almost as cute as it is useful. This finally allows me to write while I’m at my site so that when I get to the internet I can use that preciously small amount of time to do the online work that’s always waiting and still get emails sent. So I should be able to update more frequently in the future. Since we have the computer we’ve been working a lot on grant writing this month. In September we each plan to send two grants soliciting funds to build latrines and we each also plan to apply for funding to do stove projects. I still have a bit more work to do on my price lists, but the grants should all be ready to send off by mid-September.

As of today, our own latrine is finally finished. It was quite the long process, but I guess one month is about right to build a seven-square-foot latrine. The deal was that I pay for the materials and pay the mason to do the cement work instead of paying rent, and then he would finish the job. But my landlord is semi-retired and rather lethargic, so it took some pushing and finally some hard manual labor on my part, but we eventually finished. I helped one day put to up the boards. They use palm boards which are so hard that you have to drill a hole before nailing because a nail just splits them. These boards reputedly easily last a hundred years on the outside of a building as long as they aren’t constantly getting wet. Our drill was a hand-held, manually operated (by me) contraption called a bar-b-king. I have no idea where that name comes from, but it makes me smile every time I say it because I feel like I’m ordering fast-food. And this thing makes you feel about as bad as fast-food does. For a drill bit we used a sharpened nail. So basically what made the hole was not the nail, masquerading as a drill bit, but me pushing against the bar-b-king with my chest. My chest bruises lasted several days. And then I spent another day helping Mr. Lethargy, who actually worked really hard the two days I helped, hang the door. The door frame was bigger than the door so he found a four-inch-thick post to close the gap. Smashing, except that our biggest nails were, you guessed it, four inches long. So we spent a pleasant 45 minutes under the shade of a lemon tree while he used a hammer and somewhat dull chisel to carve out five square holes about an inch deep in the side of the post so that we could get the nails in deep enough to bite into the existing door frame. Oh and the lovely door is about five-and-a-half feet tall. If you lift it off the floor about three inches that puts the upper door frame at just about my eye level. It’s a perfect pain when I’m leaving the bathroom in a hurry.

We dug a small garden at the end of July. Yes, we did it the hard way like real PCV’s trained by Tim Kiefer. We dug the double-dig. Our house sits on a small hill and the surrounding soil is very sandy. Not Caribbean beach sand, but grainy sand that when dry turns into cement-like rock. Needless to say, this made digging the latrine hole great fun. Any topsoil that existed close to the house was pushed down the hill when a level spot was cleared for building. So we dug our garden partway down the hill where we still found a decent amount of good topsoil. Yesterday we planted sweet corn, string beans, and zucchini in the garden. We also have tomatoes, cilantro, chives, and broccoli germinating in pots in the house. Some weeks ago we transplanted some basil clippings from a neighbor’s garden and the basil is thriving.

You may recall that our community has no electricity. About 15 – 30% of people have small solar panels to power light bulbs and charge cell phones. So we bought Noah, a two-foot-square, 12 volt, 50 watt solar panel. We now have plenty of power to charge our phones and, more importantly, our computer. In case you’re unfamiliar with solar power, I’ll give a quick explanation of how it works. Noah converts the sun’s energy-filled photons into DC electricity and sends the electricity through a charge controller which then charges our 150 amp hour battery. The charge controller makes sure the battery doesn’t overcharge or get too empty. We have an inverter that converts the DC electricity in AC so that we can charge our electronics. When the sun goes down I clip the wires from my 12-volt light bulb directly to the battery and, voila, there is light. Also the schools in our communities recently got solar power as well. The German embassy supplied the funds while a Dominican group supplied the labor. Each photovoltaic system produces around 2-3 kilowatt. They also provide the school with an inverter and a computer and a printer. These groups supplied eight schools in the DR with solar power this year. The big inauguration was in my community. In typical Dominican fashion, a culture that loves the glitz and the fanfare of the openings and beginnings of things, they had hung balloons everywhere and had dragged in one of those boom-box trucks with the bed filled with ear-splitting speakers. After we waited over an hour the German ambassador himself rolled in with his entourage. Then we sweated through various speeches and thank you letters, but it was all rather exciting. I am a big fan of solar power, anywhere in the world. I helped install a small photovoltaic system at my college that was mainly being used as an educational tool but that would power approximately one entire computer room. That experience was amazing. Here I lived for only three months without electricity and then wired up a solar panel which allowed me to charge my phone and computer and to use a light bulb at night. This one small panel is such an enormous help to my work here (not to mention my recreation) that I’m still in awe in each day when the sun’s first photons slip over the morning mountain and my charge controller kicks into carga profunda. Imagine if you were an 80-year-old man who never thought he would see a light bulb in his community and then, boom, the community group solicits aid and in a year some people show up and without even bothering to build electric lines they just put some funny boxes on the school roof and your school and community center have light for meetings. As wonderful as solar power is as an alternative energy source in developed countries, it becomes much more ideal and incredible and delightful when it’s installed where there is absolutely no other electrical source. It just means so much more.

In other exciting news a neighbor gifted us with a lovely little tabby kitten which we named Schnickelfritz. For those of you not on the fast track with Pennsylvania German, a schnickelfritz is a very mischievous person who generally is so cute that she is often able to get away with her mischievous capers. Since he is so travieso we named him Schnickelfritz, or Fritz for short since the Dominicans can’t even begin to pronounce the full name. Even their pronunciation of Fritz sounds like “Freece” to rhyme with fleece, but with the ”r” slightly rolled. It doesn’t sound remotely like Fritz, giving us much amusement and allowing us to laugh back at all those who laugh at our Spanish. In typical Dominican fashion Fritz has another nick-name, Kitty. Since we often say kitty kitty when we call him, various people now also call him Kitty. Fritz is a great lover of eating until his tummy swells alarmingly, climbing up into a lap (ideally in the sun), and then stretching out and purring so loudly that it sounds like a small motorbike. Pilo, the seven-year-old neighbor boy who visits a lot and likes Fritz so much that he tends to hug him so tightly that Fritz gets scared, says that “Fritz has started his motor” whenever he hears the loud rumbling purr. In his other pastimes Fritz climbs ladders, chews on grass and shoes, and climbs our mosquito net. We awoke one morning to find him, meowing loudly, on top of our mosquito net. When he saw we were awake he started purring loudly and fumbled about up there for a full half-hour like an out-of-control trapeze singer. He kept trying to get closer to us while we lay below and mocked his staggering lunges. So far Fritz is mostly meowing in Spanish. When he’s really hungry he will sometimes switch to English to get us to understand, so it seems he’s capable of that language too. What seem to give him the most difficulty are those guttural German growls. But we expect him to live up to his name and learn eventually.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Water in my paint

I have never experienced this much rain in all my life. Since we got to site in mid-May, we´ve spent almost 3 weeks lounging around reading, pretending to be working, and reading some more while the rain proceeded to turn our road into an impassible hill of sludge. The locals claim it usually doesn´t rain this much in the summer. I feel they may just be lying so that we don´t pack our bags and head to the beach until the rains are over.

I came in to Ocoa today to buy more paint. Last week we got a bed, a stove and a gas tank, and some paint. My host family is convinced that a gallon of acrylic paint needs at least a liter of water added to it. At least 5 people came up to me and asked why I had not added water to the paint. I said that it was runny enough. They replied that no, that´s what water-based paint means, it means you add water so that it covers more. I tried to explain that watery paint just needs more coats, but they didn´t agree so we stubbornly painted on. Now they think I´m wasteful as well as ignorant. Ignorant in that I´m always asking what things are called. Once I asked what a screwdriver is called. My host dad told me, and then went and fetched a screw and turning it with the screwdriver demonstrated what the screwdriver was for. Well, I hadn´t known that before. Now I know how I can get those screws to hold my new deadbolts in place.

Last week we dug the hole for our latrine. They did their best to hide their shock when they saw I knew how to handle a pick and shovel as well as any of them. Well I guess there are lot more surprises in store for all of us.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Our day in Photos.

courtesy of Anne, here are some photos of a typical day in the mountains.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

100 bananas later

I've been in the capital for the past 3 days running errands. I changed my phone to a company with better service. I went to china town to buy batteries and to print out some pics from a one-year old's birthday party. And I've been desperately trying to get my laptop fixed, but I think it may finally have died. The computer shop will let me know on Monday what is wrong. Oh the horrors.

I've also spent hours on the internet researching information for possible projects like latrines, efficient cooking stoves, improved coffee-farming practices, and solar electric systems. I've thoroughly enjoyed the noise and culture of the city. Coming back here for a few days has made me realize that I don't miss the blasting heat of the coast, but I do miss - at least a little bit - the cheap beer, colmados (very convenient convenience stores) on every corner, loud music, accessible electricity, and a big variety of fresh fruit.

We always get more bananas than we can eat, and when someone from our community visits Bani (several hours away) we occasionally get a mango or two. Eventually, when in season, we will have lots of passion fruit, oranges, and avacados. And when we cook for ourselves, we can buy more fruit in the nearest town. But for now we eat bananas, raw, boiled, or fried.

One of our first days in sight our host mom gave me a huge clump of bananas. She said, "Here, here, have some bananas." I said, "You know I really can't eat that many bananas." She smiled knowingly and said, "But these are for when you get hungry."

A few days later when I couldn't stand the rotting banana smell anymore I made sure no one was watching and then opened my window and hurled handfuls of black bananas to the eager chickens waiting in the coffee field.

The next day my host mom asked, "Are your bananas all yet?" Truthfully, reluctantly, I said, "Yes."

That night I had a new bunch of bananas, this time sealed in a 5 gallon bucket to ensure that I would be blissfully unaware of their slow, slimy decay. Since I'm offered plenty of bananas throughout the day, I pretty much forgot about my banana bucket for almost a week, but then one day I thought maybe I should try to eat at least some before they all rotted. I opened the bucket inside the room. That was my first mistake. The only yellow that still existed in the bucket was the supermarket bag that contained the bananas. It took several hours to properly air out the room. My second mistake was using my hand to empty the bag, one banana at a time. It was more like one handful of slimy organic compost at a time.

I no longer accept bananas in my room; I accept only what I can eat immediately. And I no longer look furtively about before throwing away a banana. I just cluck a little bit, and the happy chickens come running.


We live up in the mountains, along a winding dirt road. It's stunning. It's gorgeous. And its rural. It takes us about 4 hours (approx. 100 miles)on a good day to get there from Santo Domingo. It takes a good half hour to cover the last 8 miles of the winding, hilly, often muddy, and (in places) treacherous roadway. We will be working primarily with 2 communities, about 4 hilly miles apart. We live in Anna's community and I will walk or hitchhike to mine when I'm working there. For now we are just walking around visiting everyone, studying Spanish, gossiping with the locals, and trying to outline possible projects. I printed out some papers while I'm here in the capitol and I hope to start teaching English soon.

Tomorrow I catch an early bus. Despite the fabulous few days with flushing toilets and plenty of electricity, I'm glad to head back. I miss the crickets, the locusts (that frequently sing so loudy that your eardrims hurt from ringing), the kids that are always hanging around, the bulky cumulus clouds hugging the mountain tops, and the Milky Way's white swirl of light overhead when I walk to the bathroom at two in the morning.

Friday, May 21, 2010

WEEK ONE

Well we are one week in as actual PCV´s. It seems more like we lived an entire month than just one week. I don´t mean that in the sense that time dragged on, but that it feels like we did a month´s worth of activities. The internet lady just said she must close up shop for 2 hours for lunch so she is chasing me out. Here are a few photos for your enjoyment. I think the lady is hungry, I better run.

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I´m back from lunch. I actually spent the last half hour updating lots of wonderful stuff and then my internet crashed and I lost it all. Since I´m too bitter right now I´ll try to rewrite some of it someday, but for now you´ll just have to guess at its fabulousness.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Our site

We're back in the capitol after a week at our new site. Here are a few photos. Our host family is incredibly friendly and the vistas are stunning. Unfortunately because we are so far up in the mountains it will be rather difficult to acquire our regular supply of pineapple and mango. There are an endless supply of bananas however, and when in season, there are so many passion fruit and avocado that they (at least the avocados) become pig food as the locals can't eat them all. This week we had plenty of coffee (hand-roasted and ground)and hot chocolate (from chunks of dark chocolate) from local cacao plants. Near our house lives a man who makes fresh whole cane sugar and he also sells hand-ground corn flour. All of this loveliness will make the lack of a wide variety of fruit a little easier to bear.

This coming week we finally swear in as volunteers and then we'll happily escape the oppressive heat of Santo Domingo and journey four hours back to the highlands.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Cordillera Central, here we come

The long awaited day has finally come. We received our site placements today. We are heading to the southern foothills of the Cordillera Central which is the biggest mountain range in the D.R. Our site is relatively near to San Jose de Ocoa. It doesn't look that far from the capital on a map, but apparently the mountain roads are pretty bad so it's actually approximately a 4 hour trip to Santo Domingo. We have been requested to potentially work on various projects such as reforestation, building latrines, making organic compost, and constructing more efficient wood stoves. We also finally received cell phones today as well so coordination will be quite a bit easier.

Tomorrow we meet our project partners, throw our stuffed packs on our backs and head off to our site where we'll be for the next 2 years. Needless to say we're quite excited. We'll spend one week there after which we return to the capital for a few days of final Peace Corps training jabberwocky. Then we swear in and we're off to live life as actual Peace Corps Volunteers!

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Piropos, platanos, and a Presidente

Some thoughts on things Dominican. First, ”piropos.” We were given a handout explaining that “piropo” is translated as “compliment” in English. When a pretty woman is walking down the street past a macho dominicano, he pauses the domino game and, lifting his plastic Dixie cup, takes a long sip of cold Presidente (the preferred cerveza here). He proceeds to look the lady over, and after carefully choosing from his vast arsenal, selects and fires the appropriate piropo. If he’s feeling clever, he’ll invent something like the following “¡Cuántas curvas y yo sin frenas! (All those curves and I don’t have any brakes). Or, “¡Como avanza la tecnología que hasta las flores caminan!” (What technological advances, even flowers walk). But if our hero is just having a normal boring day in the barrio he’s more likely to just shout out obvious things like “!Hola linda!” (Hey pretty). Or in the wondrous case that the charming lady is a foreigner, you’ll hear “!Ojos azules!” (Blue eyes). Or, “!Hola rubia!” (Hey blonde). Or, “!Americana, Americana!”

These piropos are ubiquitous. It doesn’t matter if you are walking the street, riding public transportation, or relaxing in the park. If you are a good-looking female, especially una americana, you will receive piropos machine-gun style from an endless stream of admirers. From the phone-card vendors sweating in their bright orange suits, from motorcycle taxi drives leaning intently over their handlebars, from the over-enthusiastic man who charges fare on the bus, and even from a bright-eyed boy in his blue school uniform. Dominican men see piropos as part of expressing (and I think trying to prove) their manhood. Dominican woman seem to mostly ignore them, or just haughtily accept them as their rightful due from a lesser gender. So are piropos really compliments or are they actually just a form of harassment in the guise of clever language? Take your pick. But (ladies) don’t hit the Dominican streets unless you’re ready for some piropos.

And on food.

The DR has an overabundance of viveres. Most of these are starchy tubers that must surely be in the potato family: cassava, yucca, batata (kind of a sweet potato), yams, etc. The vivere family also includes plantains and green bananas. All of this is not a problem. But serving a host of viveres with every meal is. All of these viveres are most commonly boiled in water and then served with either pasta and rice or meat. Honestly, when boiled, they don’t taste that great (not to mention that when eaten in great enough quantities they make visits to the bathroom practically unnecessary). But thanks to my lovely doña, I have discovered a way to eat, and enjoy, viveres. Fry them! Fried plantains or batatas are so unlike their pasty, boiled, hard-to-swallow cousins that you’d swear it’s a different food altogether. Never mind all the fatty oils, I say yes! to viveres that suddenly got sweeter and a whole lot tastier, and suddenly I can smile my way through that entire heaping plate of viveres (even if a bathroom visit afterwards is still out of the question).

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And here is an April 2 update from Anna on what we’ve been doing the last two weeks:
There were a lot of blackouts (as is so very common in the DR) in Santo Domingo and the internet cafes were closed the last week before we left. Now we’re in the countryside for our technical training. It’s so much better- we’re in the mountains with fresh air and cool nights and wonderful food and friendly people. We left Santo Domingo on the 26th and had a 5 hour drive to a Brigada Verde conference at Montecristi. Here are some photos of the conference. Just find the "Monte Cristi" album.

Brigada Verde is a Peace Corps initiative, started by volunteers some years ago. Basically it’s a club for teaching youth about environmental issues. Every volunteer is encouraged to start on at their site, with the idea that in teaching the youth the awareness of taking care of the environment will affect future generations. As part of the club, youth are expected to participate in the weekly meetings and activities. For example, when I was on my volunteer visit, I went to a meeting where they learned about the importance of clean water. Trash is a big problem around here; it’s probably the first thing you notice in the country. There’s not really an organized trash pick up system; communities have to get together and figure out a plan if they want to get rid of their trash. So unfortunately there’s a lot of trash by the sides of the roads and some communities use the rivers as their waste disposal, contaminating the water. So one of the activities of Brigada Verde can be a trash pickup, where all the youth get together and clean part of a beach or roadside. They also learned about pesticide runoff, and how deforestation and erosion affects the water supply.

I was pretty impressed by how well they paid attention and answered questions. Anyway, so the conference at Montecristi was a marine conference, organized by volunteers to give the youth information about coastal environmental problems. The volunteers each brought 2 youth from their clubs, for a total of about 40 youth attendees. Montecristi is beautiful; it’s the first time I’ve been at the beach in this country. It’s way up on the northwest side; close to the Haitian border. The water is aquamarine and very calm and shallow and warm. Friday evening was the official start of the conference; we had our first experience organizing activities and entertaining the youth for an hour and a half. My Spanish group has 5 people in it; between the 5 of us we came up with various things to do and play. Of course the biggest challenge is being able to explain the game with our limited Spanish; imagine trying to lead 18 youth in activites when you can only half understand their chattering. But they were really gracious with us, and although I felt pretty frustrated by the end, I got a good score and reviews on leading the group, so I guess it went okay.

The next morning we took a boat over to a beautiful island, where the volunteers gave talks on different marine ecosystems. There was a coral reef where the kids could go snorkeling, seagrasses, mangroves (which are these cool trees that grow in the water), and a presentation on erosion. I thought it was all really well done, and when it was over we got to lounge around and swim for a while. The next day was more of the same, but on the beach, not an island. And that was the conference. The youth were all really well behaved and fun and interactive, and the location was beautiful. The only thing not good was the food. Nobody knows why, but the cooking there was terrible. Leon got sick Sunday night, and I blame the food. There were hardly any fruits or vegetables, just lots of viveres, which are a whole host of starchy plants. The only vivere we’re really familiar with are potatoes, but down here they have a whole host of them: plantains, cassava, yucca, batata (kind of a sweet potato), yams…. Most of them are ok, but if you have them plain and boiled meal after meal, they just sit in your stomach like a big lump of dough. So they fed us lots of viveres and mystery meat. For example, one morning for breakfast there was boiled batata, scrambled eggs with ham, and hot dogs. Everyone was complaining by the end of the week, especially on Sunday when we were running out of food.

But now we’re here in the mountains, and we have wonderful food. Our doña (the lady of the house, pronounced don-ya), is so sweet. She’s about 72 and lives alone, although of course lots of her children and grandchildren live around here and the whole community knows her. Her house is really nice, a block house with a zinc roof that’s airy and spacious. She runs a nursery with tons of plants and flowers growing everywhere, and an empanada stand as well. She makes her empanadas from yucca flour, rather than bread flour, which makes them nice and yellow and healthy. Basically she makes the dough, cuts them out in half moon shapes, and fills them with chicken or cheese. As people order them, she drops them in the deep fryer and out they come, nice and crispy and sooooo delicious. She charges 15 pesos an empanada, which is about 50 cents. On good days she sells about 70 empanadas.

Anyway, she’s really friendly always asks what we want to eat. Her name is Maria, but everyone calls her Maria Dulce (sweet Maria). She’s the first doña I’ve heard of that actually gives me fruit and coffee for breakfast, because that’s what I asked for. Even though I told my doña in the city that, she insisted on giving us cheese sandwiches with salami on white rolls for breakfast (apparently she doesn’t view salami as meat). Doña Maria gives us lots of vegetables, the lack of which is probably the chief complaint of other trainees. And she gives good hugs. So we really got lucky with a good place to stay at for these 5 weeks.

Right now we’re in the community-based training part of our pre-service work. We stay here for 5 weeks and learn how to do practical things, like identify trees and plants, learn about gardening and how to build stoves (wood-stoves that are much more efficient than conventional Dominican ones), and get the feel of a rural community. Yesterday we learned how to make good compost piles (in the pouring rain), and I think we’re going to build one for our doña tomorrow, for her nursery plants. Our classes are on this huge coffee plantation, with a mansion that was used by the former dictator Trujillo. Trujillo ruled this country from the 30’s to the 60’s, and like most dictators, he did good things like build roads and organize schools and modernize the country, but also terrible things like torture and feed to sharks anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way. The mansion is beautiful though, and on a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean. Two days ago we walked around the coffee farm and learned about various trees and coffee plants, and then we went down to a community person’s farm and learned about plants there, how to identify them and where and when they grow. We’re definitely getting a lot of information in a really short time, but it makes the days go by fast. I feel really comfortable here, and hope we’ll get a site placement similar to this area.

Basically the days go by in a sort of scheduled way- breakfast at 7:45, Spanish class from 8 to 12, lunch from 12 to 1, and training at the mansion in the afternoon, which can last till 5 or 7, depending on the day. In the evening we often talk with the doña and people around here, do homework, and go to bed by 9:30 or 10. We have a long weekend this weekend (April 2-4) because of Easter, people take it very seriously here. Children have off of school all week, and the work week stops at 12 noon on Thursday. Lots of people go to the beach or visit their family in other parts of the country. Today Leon and I are just relaxing and catching up on some stuff. This morning some other trainees came over and we played cards and then went to the colmado to play dominoes and buy some snacks. Colmados are a big part of the culture here; they’re like little community stores where you can buy random things that vary from store to store. You can always buy beer there, and a lot of social life happens around them. You pull out plastic chairs and sit in front of the colmado and talk or play dominos (they always have a dominos game) and eat or drink. They have soda too, and a variety of baked goods that cost 5 pesos each (about 20 cents). In addition, you can usually get snickers bars, peanuts, crackers, coffee, batteries, dish soap, sometimes fruits and vegetables and various miscellaneous items. There’s definitely no equivalent to it in the states. Maybe the closest thing is a convenience store, with people hanging out there.

Tomorrow in the evening we’re going dancing with some of the other trainees. We’ve learned the basic bachata and meringue step, so hopefully we’ll eventually be good meringue dancers.

Until next time.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

some photos

Here a few photos. I will post more when time (or rather internet access) permits.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Week One

It’s hard to believe we’ve only been here a week. (I’m writing this on Saturday, I’m not sure when I’ll get to the internet.) Because we seem to always be busy doing or learning something new, it feels at least twice that long. This past week we had classes every day. We have several hours of language per day and then we have various cultural classes like learning to dance meringue and learning to play dominoes, which is an extremely popular game here. We’re still in a neighborhood of the capitol, Santo Domingo, which is hopping city with a noisy, sprawling population of several million.
This past week we learned many of the public transportation routes, so that I can now be fairly confident in navigation my routes. Unlike many countries which have fixed stops for bus, the buses here stop anywhere to pick up or drop of passengers. Thankfully they all follow fairly fixed routes, but there is no printed map showing what numbers go where. You just have to ask the locals.
Sunday afternoon we’re getting a history tour of the colonial part of the city which boasts the first hospital and university in the Americas. There is also a beautiful cathedral in old town that is thought by many to be the oldest cathedral in the Western Hemisphere. The inside has been restored, but the exterior still looks quite authentic. Of course, like the “gringolandia” of many foreign cities, there are some fabulous cafes in this area. After the tour I’m looking forward to a cold cerveza and cheese fries as small variation from my daily diet of rice, plantains, and beans.
The food here is actually very delicious. It might take some getting used to having rice with almost every meal. Actually, some days it’s every meal. But that’s when you get a rice and pineapple juice for breakfast. It’s amazing. Plantains are boiled or fried (my favorite). We also get a fair amount of fresh fruit (pineapple, mango, oranges, banana, avocado, tomatoes) and vegetables (red beets, cabbage, eggplant, carrots, potatoes, yucca). There are various other fruits and vegetables which I never heard of before and am still learning their names. Meals are usually also served with a little bit of chicken or beef.
As much as I love the city, I’m aching to get out into the countryside. Pollution here is quite a problem. I’m pretty sure there are no emissions regulations for vehicles, and, unlike many big cities in the States, no noise limits. I live on a fairly quiet street, but if you’re (un)fortunate enough to live near a bar or little general store (called a colmado), you can sleeplessly enjoy ear-popping music until midnight or later almost very night of the week. Recycling (as we know it) is pretty much non-existent. Dominicans do much better then we do at reusing stuff until it’s worn out, but plastics end up on the street and in the streams. It’s almost impossible to find a public trash receptacle in many areas. Only about 4% of the DR’s sewer water sees a treatment plant; the rest finds it’s merry way out into the waves of either the Atlantic Ocean or the Caribbean. The pollution problems of the countryside and the city are very much the same, it’s just that with the city being so congested, noise, air, and water pollution become so much more visible in everyday life. The country is currently suffering from a major water shortage. In my neighborhood we haven’t had water (to wash and bath with) for 5 days. We buy drinking water in big bottles, so access to that isn’t a problem as long as you have money. When the water comes for a few hours everyone fills up tanks on top of their houses. These tanks usually last a few days, but now most people in my neighborhood are out of water, and are forced to buy water from tank trucks on the street. There is definitely a lot of work to be done regarding the environment here if the DR hopes to have a healthy future.
The week of the 15th we are going out to the countryside for 4 days to visit other volunteers to see what their work is like. I’m excited as I’m visiting a small town in the south that’s very close to the Caribbean. Maybe I’ll spend a day at the beach.  Anna is heading to a northern town near some beautiful mountains. We’re both looking forward to getting away from the noise of the city for a few days.
The week after that we are heading to community in the north to begin our technical training. We’ll live with a new host family there for about 6 weeks while getting specific training on how to address some of the many environmental challenges the DR is facing. If we survive all that, we come back to Santo Domingo to get sworn in as actual volunteers, not just trainees.
And then the real fun begins.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

aqui estoy!

I´m here in Santo Domingo. Full-time language and cultural training starts next week, 8-5 , 6 days a week. We are staying in a barrio with a wonderful host family. I don´t have time to write more now, but I´ll post next week.

Viva el caribe!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

I will post . . . someday

I'm still in the Queen City. This is a test post. I hope to update when i get to where I'm going.