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.

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.

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.

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.

Our day in Photos.

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

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.

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.