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.