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!