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.