Well March has been a month of traveling and splitting my time between Peace Corps activities and activities in my community. I had two especially fun trips this month that were very different but definitely both highlights of my time here so far:

1. Medical Mission!

In the beginning of March I went to work as a translator for a medical mission that came to a hospital near me to do plastic surgeries (the reconstructive kind, no implants or face lifts!) Peace Corps gets requests from various groups who come down here to do different surgeries for volunteers to serve as translators. The medical mission lasted six days; the first day we did intakes and the doctors assessed all the people who came, scheduling them if they were good candidates for surgery. Lots of the surgeries were scheduled for children who had cleft lips and palates, and most of the rest of the surgeries were for people who had bad scars from things such as fires and acid fights. Acid fights? Yup, we saw a lot of women who had gotten in fights and had acid thrown on them. These burns were especially deforming and many of the women who came in with them said they could not get jobs because nobody would hire someone who was deformed like that.

The rest of the week we were translating for the doctors as they were getting patients ready for surgery, coming out of surgery, and translating for family members and patients as they left the hospital. We also did quite a lot of translating between the doctors and the administration of the hospital we were working at. It was neat to be able to watch the surgeries and watch the entire process and also connect with patients and their families.

I also had a personally fulfilling experience that was kind of a follow up to when I worked in the hospital in Jimani after the earthquake. The day of consultations the doctors told me that a Haitian woman who had been an earthquake victim had been brought in. Since I speak a little Kreyol, they asked me to try to translate for this lady. We learned she had been brought in from another hospital across the country because she needed a skin graft on her leg and they couldn’t do it at the other hospital. We also learned she had been at that hospital ever since a couple days after the earthquake—almost two months! The doctors agreed to do her surgery the next day. So the next day I helped prepare her for surgery and explain what the doctors were going to do. She was very scared about the surgery, but everything went fine and she was allowed to stay in the hospital for as long as she needed to recoup. Given the conditions of a public hospital here in the DR and the fact that the women was alone, the doctors that I was working with were very concerned for her health (family members must stay with patients the whole time because the hospital does not provide caretakers to give them their food, take them to the bathroom, etc…) The doctors asked me if I could find someone to take care of this women while she was in the hospital, so I made a couple calls and a girl from my town and a Catholic missionary who lives in my town and used to live in Haiti came down to help. The girl ended up staying with the women almost the entire time she was in the hospital near us (two weeks), and the missionaries began to make preparations to take the woman back to Haiti.

This past weekend, the woman was brought back to Haiti by the missionaries, where I am told she had a tearful reunion with her family, who thought she was dead. After being in Jimani and having very little time to help patients individually and provide them some kind of social services, I was glad to have the opportunity during this medical mission to really help an individual who was affected by the earthquake.

2. Volleyball trip!

Of course, every time I go on a trip with my kids we have a great time. Two weeks ago, I arranged to take my volleyball team to a pueblo where another volunteer lives to have a mini tournament and stay overnight. I brought six girls, ages 12-15, and another team of six also came. We woke up early to take motorcycles out of my site. When we arrived to the bridge that we usually cross, it was being worked on, so we all had to load into a small rowboat and be rowed across the river to the other side where another motorcycle took us to the bus stop. As we were traveling on the bus, my girls were glued to the windows, peering out. One girl asked what every single town along the way was called. I realized that most of the girls had never been up this far north and had never seen these towns and cities. We arrived and played volleyball, ate, went to the river, and played more volleyball.

That night the girls ate together and then each one went with a girl from the pueblo to sleep in her house. The other girls on the other teams were mostly older than my girls, and at first I was worried that they wouldn’t integrate well. But by the end of the night when they were being sent off to their houses for the, they were all very comfortable, and I was not worried that they would be uncomfortable sleeping in a strange house.

The next morning my girls were the first players up and over at my friends’ house ready for breakfast. Three of them had been put in the same house and said they were treated so well: “The mother prepared our bathing water for us, gave us the biggest bed, and they even had a mosquito net!” It’s so easy to please these girls! All of the girls had positive experiences, and what they really loved was getting to know the neighborhood.

By the time the tournament was over, my girls had beat one team twice and lost to another team twice, but they certainly fought, considering they were the youngest ones there! I realized though that the most valuable experience for them was seeing a new town, seeing how people lived and worked there, and realizing that they too can get out of their town and progress.

We treated the girls to ice cream on the way home (some girls had never eaten at the chain that we went to) and then took another road back so we wouldn’t have to cross the river in the boat again. The girls arrived happy and incredibly tired, and of course all they have been asking me since is when we will go on another trip!

Hey Everyone,

I was asked to write a little something about my experience for Peace Corps, and this is what came of it; even if youre not a PCV, my real point is that there are opportunities for everyone to volunteer and work on the relief effort, if they find a reliable, responsible organization to do it through.

My Experience:

Over the course of the nine days I worked at the Buen Samaritano Hospital (Good Samaritan Hospital) which was providing medical care for Haitian earthquake victims, the other PCVs and I that were sent were assigned or took on a wide variety of jobs. Throughout the day any one of us could be found translating, registering volunteers, handing out food, organizing a patient tracking system, reporting to Public Health officials, finding the appropriate medical staff for the day, providing social services to families, and advocating for the patients. There were between two and six PCVs at the hospital every day and we all had more than enough work (most of us were working 18-20 hour days).

We were told by several administrators at the hospital that they couldn’t have done their job without the support of Peace Corps; we seemed to become the go-tos for patients, doctors and administrators when they had a question and didn’t know where to go. In the end, the PCVs became the link between volunteers and patients; Americans and Haitians; doctors and administration. I believe that being a Peace Corps volunteer in this country prepared us especially for this kind of work, and has made us valuable to the organizations that came into the country to provide relief.

Though many of us volunteers are used to the slow pace of Dominican country life, we were all prepared to work long hours at the hospital. Perhaps this is simply a characteristic of Peace Corps volunteers in general who are always willing to help, especially when their help is so solicited and necessary. Living in the Dominican countryside or pueblo has taught us the importance of being flexible and how to deal with the frustrating stops and gos of the Dominican administrative system at all levels. In a disaster relief area, this flexibility is necessary; no one knows what will happen the next day, who might show up, what patient might take a turn for the worse, or what organization might decide to help or not help. In the end, you must be ready for everything and change your plans and job description from one minute to the next; something that PCVs are accustomed to doing.

PCVs also come into situations like this with the flexibility in living standards that we have found necessary in our day to day lives here in country. While the lack of reliable water or comfortable beds may have discouraged some volunteers from working at the hospital, us volunteers were willing to sleep anywhere (frequently on couches) and were thrilled if there was water coming out of the shower spout! The daily meal of rice and beans didn’t phase us, and we never once thought about the money we were losing because we were giving up precious time to volunteer (we’ve committed to two years of no earnings!)

The last and most important reason that PCVs are so integral to relief efforts in their own countries or neighboring countries is their vast knowledge and experience of local culture and customs. The people at Buen Samaritano Hospital were working very hard to provide quality patient care, treat the volunteer doctors and nurses well, and make sure the hospital was running smoothly. At the same time, they were still accountable to Dominican officials and had to interact frequently with Dominicans. Unfortunately, there were very few administrators who spoke Spanish, and fewer who had lived in the country for as long as we volunteers had. For this reason, we volunteers often became the go-betweens between the American administration and the Dominicans who were working with us. We helped negotiate the meals being provided by the Dominican Civil Defense, as well as talk to and translate for public health officials and communicate with the military guards that the government was providing for us. Understanding the Dominican culture and language helped us communicate with the host country in a way that most of the administration could not.

Living on the same island as Haitians and interacting frequently with migrants in the DR also gave us valuable insight into the Haitian culture and allowed us to communicate and empathize with the patients. While there were few volunteers who spoke Dominican Spanish, there were even fewer who spoke Kreyol. With that in mind, even the little knowledge of Kreyol that we volunteers had helped us communicate with the patients and their families. It was Peace Corps volunteers and a few translators who were often the first volunteers in the hospital to learn of problems amongst the patients and families and help them look for solutions, trying to fill the void where social services should have existed in a normal hospital.

I am in no way saying that the work of one volunteer at the hospital was more or less valuable than another; no PCV who was at the hospital could perform surgery, serve as an ICU nurse, or had extensive knowledge of hospital administration. What is important to recognize is that in a disaster such as the Haitian earthquake, different kinds of knowledge and experience (especially cultural) is needed to help the relief effort. I believe that at the Buen Samaritano Hospital and in the various relief efforts across the island, Peace Corps volunteers fit a certain integral niche.

Beginning a week after the earthquake in Haiti, Peace Corps DR sent a team of Peace Corps volunteers who had nursing skills or spoke Kreyol to a hospital in Jimani. This hospital was not originally a large hospital, however due to the large amount of Haitians who were coming over the border seeking medical care, it was opened to treat them. The first team stayed for a week, helping out where they could in the wards and trying to organize all the volunteers who were coming from the States to help.

The volunteers worked long hours for a week and Peace Corps then asked another group to go out there to take over them. On Monday I arrived here in Jimani and began to help with two other volunteers. We are filling in for the volunteers who had been working on the administrative/volunteer part of the hospital. After hearing stories from them, it seems as if we came in as things were finally beginning to get organized, because at the beginning things were absolute chaos; partly because entire families were coming over the border with their loved ones and had to set up camp at the hospital, and partly because there were no records or organization of the volunteers who were coming in and out to help and how long they could stay.

Starting today things have begun to get really organized; a logistical team has been brought in to organize the entire hospital better, and we’re expected to help them in whatever way we can.

Let’s start at the beginning: I found out on Friday night that Peace Corps was looking for a team to go out to the border, and I immediately contacted my boss to let her know I was interested. I rushed around finishing things in my site, and on Monday morning I got on a bus from the capital going to Jimani. Almost the entire bus (Except for the driver, two Dominicans, and three Americans) were Haitians headed across the border. We squeezed in 5 per row (no aisle) and set off on the five and a half hour drive. Even though most people were headed back to Haiti to assess the damage of the earthquake on their hometowns and houses, they were a very chipper bunch, chatting away in Kreyol amongst each other almost the entire time (I tried to keep up but couldn’t do it). We made one bathroom stop about an hour into the trip, and then an hour before the end of the trip we stopped. I thought it was going to be a bathroom break, and it was, except it was completely out in the open. All the men jumped out and immediately began peeing outside the bus, and several women did the same thing. I was tempted, but couldn’t bring myself to do it! After we got on the bus, one woman began feeling sick. Several men started fanning her and trying to feed her, and in the process she decided she was too hot, so she simply took off her shirt and sat there for a good half an hour until she felt better! Nobody seemed uncomfortable with it in any way shape or form, which made me not worry about it either!

We arrived in Jimani and met up with the volunteers who had been there the previous week. They showed us a little around the town and then we went up the hospital to get a little orientation. The town itself seemed a little sleepy, but once we got to the hospital it was bustling with people. The hospital itself is two large buildings, one of which is really a hospital, and the other or which was set up originally as an orphanage but is currently four different wards to treat the patients. In addition, patients are in being treated in a chapel and under a large circus tent. Many of the patients that are supposed to be located in the orphanage decided to set up tents outside because they were afraid of another earthquake (there continue to be tremors).

That night around 6 I headed up to the hospital with the Peace Corps volunteer I was to be replacing to shadow her and figure out everything that was going on in the hospital. We did a lot of just running around, coordinating between the main office and the wards, some translation, and lots of registration of incoming volunteers. The patients here have been very grateful for the care they are getting, but there are some very injured people. There have been up to 300 patients in the hospital (although the numbers are becoming smaller as they get transferred to other hospitals or released) and many of those patients have bone fractures, or have had limbs amputated (250). I haven’t had much time to talk to patients because we’ve been running around doing admin stuff or pulled away for translation, however the tragedy can be seen everywhere; people fled Port-au-Prince for medical care, but now they are in the hospital with nothing, often because all their personal items were buried in the rubble, and they have no where to go back to. People have been very generous in donating money to the Red Cross and other medical organizations, which is an immediate need, however the cold facts are that this is a tragedy with lasting effects, and Haitians are going to need support in reconstructing their city, their schools, and finding homes for the displaced families.

Just an fyi friends, I have just gotten back from spending ten days in Jimani, where a hospital was set up to treat earthquake victims. It was the craziest, most exhausting, sad, interesting, eye-opening experience I've probably ever had. Haiti needs so much help, and will need help for quite some time. I promise I will update soon with some descriptions and stories, so keep checking in!

The Haitian Earthquake.

It’s been two weeks now since the earthquake in Haiti, and though it is not in the headlines anymore, people here in the DR are still thinking about it. In my community, as soon as the earthquake happened everybody was glued to the television. Most people are second and third generation Dominican-Haitians, so though they know they have family in Haiti, they have lost contact with them. However everyone in my community was deeply saddened and concerned about the Haitian population. There are several people in my town that do have known family in Haiti, and they have still not been able to contact them to see if they are alright.

I expected the people in my community to feel solidarity with the Haitians affected by the earthquake due to their roots, but what most surprised me was the reaction of the Dominican population. It is not a secret that Dominicans frequently discriminate against Haitians that live here and live in Haiti. The president of this country has often talked about cracking down on Haitian immigrants, and frequently when I tell a Dominican that I live in a batey, they warn me of the dangers of living there because of the “Haitians that could rob and hurt you” or the just say “Ay mama” and shake their heads.

But ever since the earthquake happened I have noted a change in Dominican attitudes towards Haitians. First of all, due to the short distance between our capital and the Haitian capital, Dominicans were some of the first search and rescue and relief teams that arrived in Port-au-Prince. People from all over the country have also arranged donation drives to send materials and money through the Red Cross to Haiti. Three small villages (including my own) made an effort to collect money and goods to send to the border, and the DR did a “tele marathon fundraiser” a week before the one in the States was broadcast. I have also just noticed Dominicans being friendlier to Haitians in general. This is a tragedy that hit a country that has already been through so much pain and suffering, and I think the Dominicans here have recognized that and have changed their mindsets to help their “brethren” (which is what they are now being called).

Hello everyone, here is an article I wrote for our local Peace Corps DR publication. I think I’ve mentioned that getting birth certificates can be difficult for people of Haitian descent, here’s one example:

Our Future, And Theirs….

I first got to know Eliza when we (a Canadian nun and I) tried to convince her to join our young mother’s group. We were pointed to her house while interviewing all the young mothers in the batey. She was sitting on the porch with her baby; her three year old running around naked. I knew she also had a seven year old because he came to my house often to dance reggaeton and gaga to my neighbor’s radio. We posed the usual questions, asking her how many kids she had (3), their ages (1 year, 3 years, 7 years), whether they had their documents (no), whether she had her documents (no), and what her birthday was (she was born in 1986). Whoa, what? 1986? I was born that year.

She was my age, already had three children and had blazed through two “husbands”. Despite our age, we have no similarities in life. We thanked her for the information, invited her to come to our meetings, and went to the next house. She didn’t show up to the meetings for the first couple months; I only got little tidbits of information about her from her son, who spent his days at my house when his mother “se fue,” whatever that meant.

When the young mother’s group was finally able to organize an 8th grade adult class to be offered in our town, more women began to show up for our meetings at the prospect of something new and exciting. Eliza began to come, and proved to be responsible, respectful and animated about the class we were going to offer. She participated during the meetings, listened to others, and seemed excited for the class. The only problem is she doesn’t have her acta de nacimiento (birth certificate), since her mother is from Haiti and does not have documents. I encouraged her to enroll in the class anyway and promised we’d work on getting the documents before the end of the year so that she could take the mandatory national exam. She has been a much more reliable student than most; she goes to class every week, attends the weekly meetings I hold for the women, and shows up on time every Thursday when we all come together and work on homework. She’s smart, and her oldest boy is also one of the smartest ones in his class. When I see her participating, it is obvious she wants the best for herself and her children; she hasn’t given up like some other mothers her age that I see around.

Eliza was born in the Dominican Republic, barely speaks Kreyol, and has never been to Haiti. A couple weeks ago I invited a migration lawyer to come talk to the group about documentation and the new laws that the Dominican congress had recently passed. He discussed the new law that is soon to be enacted which allows those who can prove they have lived in this country more than ten years to become residents.

“But of course” he stipulates “that means you have to accept the fact that the government first and foremost recognizes you as Haitian”

“But I’m not Haitian, I was born here, I am not going to accept being Haitian.”

Eliza’s reasons for not accepting Haitian citizenship are not clear; maybe she simply feels Dominican, possibly she fears being labeled as Haitian, or perhaps she herself has negative feelings toward Haitians. Whatever it is, she told the lawyer clearly that she would not accept that proposal, and went on to ask him what he thought about trying to get someone else other than her parents to declare her. He strongly discourages it because of the problems with documentation it can bring later on in life. Even though many people have done it here in my town, everybody knows that currently the fiscalias are making it harder and harder for anyone who appears Haitian or has a last name that is not “Dominican” to get their documents.

After the lawyer explained the choice she had: acknowledge that the government labeled her as Haitian and get proper documents, or fight the label but stay sin documentos, Eliza looked as if she was going to cry. She left for a while and came back later with her backpack, ready to do her homework after the meeting. The lawyer kept talking, but she was not listening any more. It seemed as if any hope was lost.

I like to think that we as volunteers all still feel very young. We still have hopes and dreams and we know that we have possibilities ahead of us: jobs, grad school, marriage, adventures. For Eliza, who is my age, without documents she is already old. She has very few opportunities to change the trajectory of her life if she cannot study, work a legal job, or send her children to high school. Her life will involve surviving in this batey raising her children, with the odd job in a “casa de familia” or in Bávaro taking her away from the community for a while. But she will always return, because it is here where she can survive best without documents, with the support of her family and friends. Her only hope is that she might be able to find someone else to declare her children, or that the Dominican laws may someday change.

Dominican laws about documentation are changing slowly, but many do not trust that they will stick, and still others doubt that any of these changes will be implemented. As Peace Corps volunteers we can work on documentation projects, bring people to the fiscal, encourage them to find their documents, etc… But there are some people, like Eliza, whose cases are currently hopeless. When the new Peace Corps director came to visit a fellow volunteer asked him what kind of opportunities are available to RPCVs to stay involved and help the country they served from home. Here is an opportunity. The Dominican government is not going to listen to our pleas for fair residency laws from here, not to mention that we are not supposed to get involved in in-country politics. Nor does the political system here embrace advocacy, letter writing and canvassing nearly as much (if at all) as it does in the United States. But once we return, we have the potential to lobby our politicians and international organizations to pressure the Dominican government into changing the citizenship laws that so blatantly discriminate against Haitian descendents. It is one way to continue helping Eliza and the countless others who we have met here and are struggling due to these discriminatory laws.

For more information on efforts to change the laws, please refer to:

www.mudha.org

As you will remember if you have been reading my blog, about a month ago we hosted a group of Escojo health promotors in our community to have an over night event. Well this weekend, it was our turn to go visit them in their community! Since we have limited funding for these events, the kids each had to come up with 150 pesos (about four dollars) to be able to come on the trip. I didn’t think a lot of kids would be able to find that much money, and by the time the deadline (Monday) rolled around, only about ten kids out of 19 had turned in their money. However, after that several other kids came and gave me the money for the trip. I couldn’t say no because I knew they had worked hard to come up with that money, but the problem was that by Thursday night, the night before the trip, I had a group of 16 kids—yes that’s right, sixteen teenagers between the ages of thirteen and nineteen—that were ready to get up at 545 in the morning to travel. Now let me just say that usually when we do trips or camps there is a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio of volunteers to kids—at this event it was going to be about 1:15. Needless to say, I was a little bit nervous about how the kids would behave and whether they would take advantage of the lack of adult supervision!

Because transportation is so expensive here, I began looking for ways to reduce the travel costs of a group that large, and luckily a friend of mine was able to help us out a bit. At 545 in the morning all seventeen of us piled in the back of a pickup truck and slowly made our bumpy way to the nearest town. There, I left five kids to pile in the car of a friend of my friend who works in the capital and offered to take the kids to the capital and drop them off at the bus stop of the next bus that we would be taking. Then I put another five kids in the back of a group of nuns' truck that was also on its way to the capital (I had to have a discussion with my kids before they got in about respecting nuns), and the other seven of us got on a public bus. Amazingly, we all ended up in the same spot and from there took another bus to a stop where the volunteer of the other group was waiting for us with another pick up truck to haul us all up the mountain to her community.

We arrived at the conference center where we were going to stay and were greeted by the other Escojo group. We had lunch, did some ice breakers, and headed to the beach. My kids, if they’re lucky, usually get to go to the beach once a year with the Canadians who bring them during one of their trips, so for them going to the beach was a huge treat! After that we got back and, to my surprise, the kids still wanted to swim in the pool. They swam and then bathed and set up the tents that they were going to sleep in (also the first time they had ever slept in tents)

That night we did workshops on leadership and discrimination, and then spent the rest of the night playing music and dominoes and just sitting around doing the typical Dominican “Compartir” (sharing). The kids were so excited to be somewhere other than their houses for the night that they couldn’t fall asleep early, despite the fact that they had been up since four and five am. It had begun to rain, and some of us had moved our mattresses into an outdoor meeting space that was more waterproof than the tents. All of my girls decided that they wanted to sleep there, and so I slept outside with my girls, which was great because it gave us a chance to have a mini sleepover and plenty of girl talk. Before going to sleep, however, I had to do several checks of the tents and other sleeping areas to make sure there was no “boy-girl” mixing. As far as I could tell, the kids were pretty respectful of the rules (I had to explain to my boys earlier that no, they could not just give a couple girls they had met kisses because we all knew that kisses led to other things that could have negative consequences).

We all woke up around 6 am with the sun; I personally woke up to the voices of my kids talking, and one even beating a drum (I promptly went over there and told him to be quiet, since others were still trying to sleep). The kids hosting the event did a great job; they had to cook and wash the dishes and clean the entire center that had been lent to them for the event—I was so impressed that they were being so responsible. I was especially impressed when they got up earlier than their volunteer to prepare breakfast for all thirty of us!

Before departing, my kids presented a great drama on the consequences of alcohol—I had not seen them rehearse it, but they got up there and performed wonderfully and gave out a great message! We then did an activity to practice making presentation materials, and then reflected on the last twenty-four hours. As my kids loaded into the pickup truck to go back down the mountain, they took out their instruments and began playing the merengues they have composed about Escojo. They played all the way down to the highway, and as soon as we got on the next bus they began to play again, getting a little more wild (our harmonica player and dancer claimed he was too hot, and before I knew it he was dancing around on the bus without his shirt!) While we were on that bus, one of the men who worked on the bus began hitting on me, calling me “mami” and harassing me a bit, which is pretty normal in this country. But to my surprise, my kids began to protest, saying that we were all going to get off the bus if he continued being disrespectful. I was touched that they were protecting me like that, I guess they have learned that I hate that kind of behavior and felt like it was their job to put a stop to it!

We arrived in the capital and all piled onto another bus that would take us to our nearest town. When we arrived, it was raining, and we had to wait quite some time until the pick-up that was supposed to come and get us showed up. We finally piled into that vehicle (which I was afraid would break every time we went over any big bump) and began to make our way back to Las Pajas. It rained on us the entire way there, and we were all getting very damp in the back of the pickup. Despite the fact that Dominicans hate getting wet and claim that if you get wet you will get a cold afterwards, the kids didn’t seem to mind the rain at all; all they could do was talk about what had happened at the “intercambio”(exchange) and who was “enamorado” (in love) with who. All throughout the trip, my kids hardly complained at all about whatever little problem arose (be it having to wait for a bus, walking to the beach because the truck broke down, or being hungry because they had left too early to eat breakfast, and on the last day we left late and didn’t eat lunch). They were troopers, and it was obvious that they were just happy to be traveling and knowing other places.

After being in my community for a year, it was fun to do this event because I saw some changes in myself and my kids. For example, I am now able to control a group of 16 teenagers on a five hour trip involving four different vehicles! During the drama and the workshops my kids were able to make significant contributions to the conversation thanks to the topics we have discussed in the classes I teach them. They also took me seriously when I asked them not to hook up with any other kids during the two days we were doing the event. I hope that this also reflects the fact that my kids have learned to be respectful and follow rules when need be. I think I have grown just as much as they have during this year; I have learned a lot from them and hopefully gained their respect, which is important when working in communities

It was also fun to see the group that hosted us working; they have been a group for longer than we have (the volunteer in that site is about to leave country) and they were able to lead a lot of activities and do a lot of tasks without the help of the volunteer, which is something I aspire to for my group. Despite the fact that being in charge of such a large group of youth was a bit stressful, and I arrived at my home exhausted, it was a great experience for both me and my youth, and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if the opportunity arose.

Well it seems anywhere I go I am able to involve myself in something that has to do with volleyball. Here, as I have mentioned before, I have a team that I coach in my site, and I have also been working on organizing several volleyball tournaments for teams that volunteers have been coaching.

This past weekend we had an overnight tournament near my site that went great. My girls were so excited to travel (even though it wasn't very far) and to spend the night somewhere else. The schedule went like this: We arrived, ate, introduced ourselves and talked about the rules of the tournament and good sportsmanship, then headed to a nearby school that had a court and played a round robin between all four teams. The teams were not exactly equal in size or skill (my team, for example had mainly 13 and 14 year olds, whereas another team had a twenty-year old), and several teams got absolutely creamed, but thanks to all our chats about good sportsmanship, the teams all supported each other and cheered each other on.

The first day my girls ended up winning two games and losing one (to the team that had the twenty-year old on it) and were happy when we left the court and went back to the center where we were staying. After shower time all the girls came down to the main room and one team gave a presentation on the consequences of teen pregnancy. After dinner and cake the girls did some activities to get to know each other better, and then they were supposed to go to bed. My girls at 9 pm had told me they were exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but at midnight they were still up giggling and running around.

Despite the late night, the girls woke up before 6 am to begin to get ready for the tournament. After breakfast we did several activities to get the girls thinking about self-esteem and how they affect their teammates' self-esteem, and then I taught them some volleyball cheers that we had in the States--they all loved the Ace cheers!

After that we headed to the court for the semi-finals and finals. My girls won their semi finals game easily, and then it was time for the finals, against the team with the 20 year old and several girls who actually knew how to jump and hit a ball really hard. My girls got super pumped up at first, but were a little scared in the first game and lost. The second game they came back from 3-10 to win 16-14 thanks to some good defense from my said and infighting on the other side. Unfortunately, the girls couldn't pull through and win the third game, but they fought hard and were proud of themselves for getting second in the tournament, and of course winning a trophy!

We finished the tournament by handing out trophies to the two first place teams, and volleyballs to the teams with best sportsmanship and the team who raised the most money for the tournament. The girls all had a great time and were excited to go back to their towns and keep practicing for the next tournament!

As you'll see in these photos, my team was "sponsored" by the Macalester volleyball team, who sent us uniforms, a net and balls, which came in handy for the tournament, thanks Mac!

One of the reasons I think many kids join the activities I do in my community is so that they can participate in the trips that go along with the activities. For the “Escojo Mi Vida” program (the group of youth health promotors in my site) every couple of months Peace Corps puts on a conference where two youth from each group are allowed to go. We also arrange what we call “intercambios” (quite literally, “exchanges”) where groups from different communities meet up for a day or two to focus on a new topic that they haven’t learned about, or review the information that they already learned. This past weekend, we had a group of seven youth and their volunteer come and visit our community for two days and one night, and I am pleased to say that it was a success!

The volunteer who came to visit wanted her group to see what a batey was—none of them had ever seen a batey, and many of them live a somewhat cushier life than the kids here live. The plan was to have them arrive at lunchtime, eat, do different icebreakers with the group here, give a presentation about gender inequality, and in the evening do team building activities and have some time to hang out with the youth. The next morning we would do a short workshop on public speaking, and then some closing activities. I was very stressed in the days following up to the event because we had to arrange for someone to make all the food, figure out the sleeping arrangements, prepare the center, etc, etc… And, as we all know, it’s usually hard to get teenagers to do everything you ask them to do, so I felt as if a lot of the preparation burden was on me.

The day of the event, despite the fact that one of the motorcycles that was carrying two of the visitors broke down, everyone arrived safe and sound and was very happy with their food. During the icebreakers it was obvious that both groups were still feeling very timid, and there was little chatting in between the two, which got me nervous. As the day went on, however, the kids warmed up to each other, and by the time we sent them off that night to sleep in my kids’ houses, I was pretty convinced that there wouldn’t be any problems. My favorite activity of the day was a scavenger hunt that the kids had to do together in the batey; they had to ask around and find out how to say several “Escojo” themed words in Kreyol, as well as find some random items (including an animal--see photo!)

In the evening the visiting group gave a presentation on the concept of gender inequality, which I hadn’t talked about with my kids in so many words. My youth loved thinking about gender roles in our community and the girls especially liked the idea that their brothers should help them do chores around the house!

That night we had arranged for several team building exercises; we did one but then realized that what the kids really wanted to do was sing and dance, so we let them! My group played the merengue songs they composed about Escojo, the other group danced to the songs, and then they continued on well into the night singing and telling jokes (we tried to make sure they weren’t too inappropriate, however sometimes us gringas still don’t understand everything that’s said, and I’m pretty sure some jokes went over our heads!). It was fun to look around the room and watch all of them enjoying themselves and getting along.

The next morning we did a short presentation on public speaking and had them practice tongue twisters, then let them sit around and ask each other questions about one anothers' communities. They asked each other some really interesting questions and were able to learn a little bit more about how the others lived. Everyone was sad that the event was ending, but the kids were all planning the date when our group could go down south to visit the other group!

I was especially happy with the way the event ended because, after constantly nagging the kids to help me with everything the first day, as we were finishing we assigned responsibilities for the clean up, and EVERYONE did what they were supposed to! That was maybe the most successful thing I’ve done all year—a 100% success rate!

A Peace Corps friend of mine here is getting married next week, so to celebrate, sixteen of us went to the southern part of the country to hang out on the beaches and relax. We rested on a beautiful beach, used the pool at a nice hotel (of course, we couldn’t afford to stay there!) and did fun bachelorette party activities. Sounds pretty similar to a bachelorette weekend in the states, right? Well, some of it was very similar, but there were a couple things that reminded us that we were Peace Corps volunteers in the Dominican Republic, instead of people with jobs in the Unites States. Here are some examples:

--On the bus ride up to the hotel, we argued with a bus driver who was trying to charge us 75 cents more than normal for a bus ride. This included calling him a thief, him calling us thieves, and us paying him what we believed he deserved and then hurrying away. We consulted several locals later, who told us that the driver was indeed trying to scam us.

--One of the girls that was supposed to come to the party couldn’t because a snake had entered her house and eaten her kittens. She had to sleep in another house and missed the bus that she needed to take to get to us.

--Our plans to go out on the town the first night were foiled because the mayor’s daughter was having a “Quincenera” and all the local bars and discos had closed down for the event.

--when we went out dancing, we were dancing almost exclusively to bachata, merengue and reggaeton, not the typical disco music in the States!

Overall I had a great time, Dominicanness included! I was able to see a part of the country I had never seen before, and enjoy the company of my friends, many of whom I see very little!

August 28th-30th: Sports Camp!

So to inaugurate the new school year I took two of the kids to my community to a sports camp that a group of volunteers and I organized. There were about twenty-two kids and eleven volunteers, which was a nice, manageable amount of people. I brought one boy and one girl from my community, neither of which had ever traveled as far as we did the first day to get to camp (it was about a four hour trip, probably about eighty miles, but it took so much longer because of public transportation).

The first day there we did some activities to promote good sportsmanship, then a group of volunteers taught the kids how to play kickball and we organized several games. After that the kids went to the pool for swim lessons and games, and then had time to shower and rest before dinner. After dinner we did team building activities and had “reflection” time where we broke into groups and talked about our day.

The second day we woke up in the morning at about 6 am—none of the kids could stay quite till the designated 7am wake up call-- and did yoga with all the kids (they definitely thought it was funny at first, but calmed down and seemed to enjoy it by the end). They then jumped in the pool and afterwards we coaxed them out for breakfast. After breakfast a group of volunteers went over the rules to play soccer, and then the kids played till they got tired out. After a snack, another volunteer and I did a presentation on good nutrition and had them play games to learn about the different food groups. After that, we ate lunch and came back to play volleyball. I did a short session on the rules and techniques for volleyball and we went and played. We ended that session with two games of volunteers vs. kids, and I am sad to say that my team lost :(.

After more shower time, we had divided the boys and girls and had a “taking care of your body session” which lead to many interesting questions (on the girls’ side at least). Then it was dinner time, and we had planned a bonfire, but it began to rain and we had to make a makeshift bonfire out of construction paper inside the gazebo and eat our smores uncooked. It didn’t matter though, the kids were happy anyways, and just played dominoes and sand and danced around the rest of the night.

The next day, after another yoga session and breakfast, we reviewed what we had learned and handed out certificates and medals. The kids were definitely sad to leave! On the way back, we passed through Santo Domingo and I gave my kids a tour of the Peace Corps office. They loved it and wanted to stay there for longer than we could. They came back tired but happy!

I’m writing today to ask you for your help with a camp that a group of Peace Corps volunteers are going to put on this fall. The camp, called “Celebrando el Este” will be a three day camp involving forty kids from all over the Eastern region of the country. At this camp the kids will learn about different countries and cultures and learn to identify and combat racism, gender discrimination and stereotyping through interactive workshops and activities. When they are finished with the conference they will be asked to return to their communities to coordinate activities and presentations related to the themes that are addressed over the course of the conference.

While the East has areas that are economically developed, the majority of the youth attending the conference hail from humble families where they have many hardships and few opportunities. Many times gender discrimination and racism are factors that contribute to these hardships. Here in the DR there is a complicated relationship between Dominicans, Haitians and their descendants. This includes blatant discrimination against Haitians and anyone that might have Haitian blood. This camp is an important opportunity for youth (of both Dominican and Haitian descent) to dialogue about current issues that they encounter in their communities. By doing so the camp's goal is to work towards the elimination of discrimination and promote understanding amongst youth and their communities. We hope that these youth will learn about other cultures and examine their own identities, and in doing so, begin to think beyond their neighborhoods and current lives and aspire towards a better future for themselves and their communities.

The campers themselves are required to raise funds to participate, however in this case we also rely heavily on individual donors such as yourselves to help cover the costs of food, lodging and transportation. If you’re able, please consider sponsoring a camper by donating money at the Peace Corps-sponsored link below. We are asking you for a small contribution to our cause in order to help fund this conference. Any amount would help us put on this very important camp. In order to donate, please go to the link https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=517-315 .

Sometimes the website may be down, so if it doesn’t work the first time, please try, try again! We would love to send donors Thank-You cards in appreciation of your generosity. If you would like to receive one, please be sure to fill out all the contact information on the donation web form.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Brianna, future Celebrando el Este campers and all the Eastern DR Peace Corps Volunteers

Well the hot summer here has made me lazy and a bad blogger, but I’m back and ready to write! In my last entry my Escojo group had graduated and I was hoping that they would begin to give presentations and multiply the information that I had taught them. Well I learned the hard way that summer is not really the time to start anything new or ambitious—here in Las Pajas, since a lot of kids live with their grandmothers or aunts, the kids leave for the summer to go spend time with their real parents in the cities. Almost as soon as my Escojo group graduated, about half of them took off to the cities, leaving the rest of us in Las Pajas, struggling to plan activities. The same happened with my volleyball team—about half the girls disappeared during the entire month of July! After adjusting to the initial shock of a town with half as many kids as there used to be, I decided to adjust my plans for the summer, this is what I ended up doing during these months:

--The Peace Corps assigned me and two other volunteers who lived near me to coordinate the sub-regional Escojo conference in July. This gave us plenty of work since we had to plan the agenda, rent the space, organize transportation and food, etc… We decided the conference theme would be discrimination; kids from ten different communities sat through four different presentations on stereotypes, homophobia, sexism and discrimination against those living with HIV/AIDS. I must say, I think we gave the kids something to think about, the discussions that took place during the homophobia presentation (a word most kids had never even heard of) and the sexism presentation were certainly interesting. In regards to homophobia, most kids ended up saying this: “If we can’t change them [meaning gay people] we should at least accept them and help them if they need it,” I guess we’re kind of getting somewhere….

--Volleyball, volleyball and more volleyball. Though a lot of the volleyball team took off to go visit mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, the girls who stuck around over the summer were bored, which meant that they arrived at my house around 3:30 every day asking to play volleyball (practices were supposed to be twice a week at 5 pm). We ended up playing almost every afternoon, occasionally playing with the boys as well, the only problem was the boys (ages 15-17) had no mercy for the girls, and would end up hitting the ball as hard as they could at them, without thinking that those techniques didn’t necessarily provide for a fun game. Eventually the girls told me that they didn’t want to play any more with the boys, so I kicked them out and told them to form their own team (which they have yet to do).

--A group who did stay around over the summer were the young mothers that I had began to meet with in March and April. Our meetings were canceled the entire month of May because it rained every day, so in June I decided to start up again. The women didn’t have a clear idea of what they wanted to do as a group, so I decided I would give a small course on reproductive health. We had four classes discussing reproductive organs, pregnancy, family planning and condoms. I think they all really enjoyed learning about new things and sharing advice and stories with each other.

--Towards the middle of the summer I began to realize that the younger kids were really really bored, and decided to start tutoring a few kids at my house who were behind in school. A large group of kids began coming, so we moved the classes to the community center and I began classes focused on several books that we have—For three days in a row we would read the same book and then do educational activities related to that book, such as math problems, practicing with vocabulary words, and an art project. The first week was great, I had two groups of about six kids each, one older and one younger and we read The Hungry Caterpillar and did activities with the book. The next week, a lot of parents had heard I was giving classes and so I ended up with three groups of about 10 kids each. I got some of my volleyball players to help me give classes, but it was a struggle to keep all the kids under control. By the third week kids ages three to twelve were showing up, and my volleyball girls got sick of helping, so it was me, trying to control thirty children who were running around and shrieking. I understood why their parents had sent them to me, they couldn’t stand them in the house any more! But I couldn’t get anything done either. Luckily for me, during that week a group of Canadians donated about twenty large boxes of toiletries and clothes that took up the entire community center, so I canceled classes saying that there was no room to do anything in the community center (whew!).

--I was lucky that I could use the donations to cancel classes, but the donations also created a lot of work for me and my project partner. The group of Canadians came and asked us to hand out all the donations in the best way we thought possible. This meant that every day for about a week we sorted through toiletries and clothes, trying to make sure that every family in town received the proper amount of toiletries and clothes. Of course, it’s impossible to make everybody happy, and by the end of the week I was so sick of people coming to my house asking me to change what they had received or asking more for more things. When the time came for me to leave for vacation (Argentina to visit Rakaia!) I had a cold, was exhausted, and so grateful for the chance to get on a plane and fly far, far away!

So that was my summer, now I'm preparing for volleyball tournaments, sports camps and the school year to come, which will involve teaching literacy and math to fourth graders, training and new group of Escojo kids, and some other projects here and there, I'll keep you all updated!

After twelve weeks of classes, my group of sex ed health promotors graduated from their course! The program is called “Escojo Mi Vida” which literally translates to “I choose my life”. The classes, which I taught once a week, covered subjects such as self-esteem, values, decision making, abstinence, STDs, HIV/AIDS and adolescent pregnancy. A lot of kids came at first, but the kids who graduated where the ones who came to ten out of the twelve classes and passed a test to prove that they knew the information.

At the beginning of the course there would be thirty kids in the classroom, some of which had come because they were interested in the material and others who came because they just wanted to hang out with the friends. Eventually the kids who weren’t all that dedicated or interested in the class stopped coming and we ended up with fifteen kids who prepared to graduate.

The days leading up to the graduation were a bit hectic but preparing for the graduation was good for the kids because they learned how to plan a big event. The kids had to break into committees to decide on the agenda, what food they were going to serve and how they were going to decorate the place. They also had to assign which graduates were going to talk at the graduation, and the last two days of the event, with the help of my dad, they did some acting exercises and planned a skit about adolescent pregnancy.

The day of the graduation the kids all showed up three hours early to decorate the community center and make last minute plans. An hour before it was supposed to start all the kids went home to get ready. At seven o’clock when the graduates were supposed to be there only about five kids had arrived, and by seven thirty when the event was supposed to start there were more little kids waiting for the graduation to begin than there were graduates in the community center. My parents kept asking me if we shouldn’t go round up the kids and other community members so that we could get started. Being used to Dominican time, I told them not to worry, and sure enough by about 8:15 everyone was in their seats and ready to go.

The graduation started off with a prayer, then I welcomed and thanked everyone for coming, then the students talked about what Escojo was, what they had learned and what their plans for the future were. They preformed their drama and then our community leader said a few “words of support”. The kids then had to do a type of “swearing in” where they each had to stand in front of the audience and say what they chose for their life, for example “I choose a healthy life” or “I choose to help and educate others” or “I choose to prevent STDs”. After that they received their certificates of completion and played a “Perico Ripiado” (a type of merengue) that they had composed about Escojo. Our community leader wanted us to march around town so that more people knew what this graduation was all about (this was the first graduation to ever happen in Las Pajas). We marched to another neighborhood chanting and cheering and then played the song again. We finished by going back to the community center, handing out a small snack and playing the song once more.

It was fun to have the graduation because it awarded the kids who had worked hard during the course and it allowed for the community to understand better what Escojo was and what we will be doing in the future. The kids also had a great time and were still talking about how much fun the graduation was several days later—that goes to show that they enjoyed it and were proud of themselves, probably the most important part of having the graduation!

THE PREPARATION:

One of my big projects in the past couple months has been forming a volleyball team and preparing to take them on a trip to visit another volunteer who also has a volleyball team. The twelve girls on my team are between ten and fourteen years, and one of the main reasons I have been able to convince them to practice twice a week and be good sports is that I told them that we would go on a trip. In the month before the tournament the girls came to practice religiously twice a week, and wanted to practice more but I put a limit on the amount of times a week we could practice. They also arranged to have a raffle to raise money for the trip. While they were busy selling raffle tickets I took no more than five trips to the capital city of our province (about an hour away) to beg the politicians for money to pay for the costs of our transportation to the camp/tournament (which was what we were calling it). Here in the DR if you want something done in your town (such as a road paved, building built, etc) or you just want something (like a job, or money to pay for a car rental to take 12 girls on a trip) the standard procedure is to go ask one of the many “local” politicians to give you whatever you want. So I began by taking an hour long motorcycle ride to our “mayor”’s office in the capital city. By the time I arrived there were twenty people waiting to talk to him, and I didn’t have time to sit and wait as well. So I left him a letter with his secretary who told me to call back every couple of days to see if he had received it. I did just that, but in the end she basically told me that he wouldn’t grant any request unless you talked to him in person.

After several more unfruitful trips to his office and the Senator’s office (they both were never in their offices) to ask the same thing, I finally got lucky and called one day when I was in the city, talked to the secretary and was told to hurry in, because the mayor was finally in the office taking requests. I went to the town hall and waited outside his office with about fifteen others. People were being called in one by one to talk to him, and then suddenly the secretary came and told everyone to go into his office. Now there were about fifteen of us all in his office, all vying to get his attention. I decided to go shake his hand, to let him know that I was there (I had met him several other times at various events, so I was pretty sure he recognized me) and then sit back and let some other people fight over his for attention. After three groups talked to him, I got closer and sat down in a chair next to his desk. The girl in front of him was asking him for a job, he told her to come back on Thursday and talk to his secretary. Then he turned to me. I explained to him that we were going on a trip to participate in a volleyball tournament/camp and that we were asking him to donate some money to help us pay the car rental. He said, "Oh no, I can just send one of our buses to take you". And that was that, after a month of trying to contact him, and contact the car rental company and find a driver from our town, he had solved all my problems. I tried to get him to give me a phone number that I could call to confirm the day before to make sure the bus would come, and he gave me his personal cell phone number and then sent me on my way.

During the week I tried calling that number several times, but of course he never picked up, so the day before I made several calls to make sure that the bus was coming, and finally talked to the right people, who told me that they would arrive at 8am (a little later than I had hoped). Meanwhile, my team had raised 500 pesos (fifteen dollars) which was enough to buy everybody ham and bread to eat for breakfast in the morning and bake three cakes to share with the other team. The girls were all super excited, borrowing clothes from different sisters and friends to make sure they all had the same uniform, and claiming that they were going to wake up at 5 am to do their chores and get ready. I told them they could not arrive at my house until 730.

THE CAMP

Almost all of the girls arrived at my house at 7am, the same time that the bus arrived. The girls were pleased to point out that I had told them to come at 730 because I thought that the bus wouldn’t come until eight, but I was wrong and they actually came at the right time. There was a flurry of bread and ham cutting and serving and then we all piled in the bus. Before we even left town the girls wanted to stop at a small store to buy candy and soda with the money that their parents had given them. We arrived pretty quickly to where we had to go, and were greeted there by the other team.

We had the camp in the elementary school, using their outdoor concrete court and the facilities the school had. We began by introducing ourselves to the other team, then we did some relay races and warm up drills. After that we practiced passing, setting, hitting and serving. We forced the girls to make groups so that there were half girls from my team and half girls from the other team. When we finished with the drills the girls were absolutely exhausted, so we took a break, ate some cake and then just rested and hung out. The girls from the other team went home for lunch while my team stayed and ate food which some of the mothers of the other team had prepared for us.

When everybody returned after lunch we talked about good sportsmanship and then did a team building activity where we blindfolded each team member and put out object on the court. The teammates had to guide their blinded teammate from the sidelines through the court without her stepping on any of the objects set out. The girls loved the activity and were disappointed that we didn’t have time for every single girl to try being blindfolded.

Then we began the tournament. My team had twelve girls and the other team had eleven. Since we wanted everybody to get a chance to play, and everybody was already exhausted, we played four games to just eleven points. My team won every single games, and boy were they excited!!!! Throughout all four games they were chanting and cheering (we had to stop several of the cheers because they did not quite show “good sportsmanship”) and celebrated every win as if it were the national championships. After that we mixed the teams and had them play several more games, and then of course the coaches had to play! Let me just say, the Las Pajas team won that game as well…

We finished the day off with some song and dance and then started packing up to go home. My girls were very tired, but insisted on passing by a local store on the way home to by more candy and small gifts for their families. We drove home in the pouring rain (it has rained almost every day this month). When we arrived on the dirt road that leads to our town all the girls started pretending they were crying, wailing that they wanted to go back to the camp. When we arrived in town they started singing and chanting to make sure that the entire town knew that they won. I was exhausted by the time we got back, but it had been a successful day and my girls were proud to say that they had won!

"Why is it raining?"

"BECAUSE GOD WANTS THE MANGOES TO RIPEN!"

Yes friends, it's mango season, and every day little boys have brought me mangos for breakfast, I must say, I can't complain! Of course, the beginning of mango season also means that it's the beginning of the rainy season, and for about two weeks it has rained every afternoon, making the roads impassable, especially on motorcycles! Every time I travel I have to plan my returns for the morning so that I don't get stranded in the rain.

An exciting trip

So I have a volleyball team of twelve girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years old, and we are planning to visit another volunteer's team where we will have a little camp in the morning, and a workshop on nutrition and sportsmanship and then a tournament in the afternoon. The girls are so excited because they have very few opportunities to leave Las Pajas. They have begun to sell raffle tickets to help pay for the trip, and though many people have signed up to buy them, here people have the bad habit of not paying for things. If the girls keep up the good work, we probably will raise about forty-five American dollars which is a good chunk of money here! Even though the girls at times have ehm, shall we say, poor sportsmanship, they are trying very hard to work together as a team and go on this trip, which I think will be good for them.

"Teacher, you are beautiful"

--Say the 11 year olds I am teaching English to. I have been teaching English in the school as well as to a group of high school and college students, and I must admit I like it more than I thought I would. It is one thing that everybody is very enthusiastic about and wants to learn. Since here the kids address their teachers as "profesor" in Spanish, they address me as "teacher" in English. It cracks me up every time when they say things such as "teacher, you are beautiful" or "teacher no tengo pen" (i don't have a pen). I also really enjoy inventing fun games for the kids to play in order to practice English--when trying to teach classroom objects I placed all the objects on the floor and had the kids race to see which team could find the object I named first--they ended up on the floor trying to hold one another back from reaching the object. I can't say how much they actually learned, but it was a lot of fun to watch grown men grab onto each other's legs and be pulled across the floor when trying to reach an object!

That's what's going on with me for the most part. I hope you all are doing well. Keep in touch!

Hello everyone,

So right now I am involved in organizing several summer camps that involve youth and Peace Corps Volunteers throughout the country.

In order to fund these camps, which are great ways to get youth out of their communities and give them an opportunity to travel and meet other people, we need help from the US. There isn't much money here in the DR to finance youth camps, so what PCVs do is set up a online link through Peace Corps Washington where people can go online and donate to our cause. Right now I am working with 9 other volunteers to organize a 3-day sports camp where each volunteer will bring two kids from their community to participate in different sports and workshops about sportsmanship, leadership and how to take care of their bodies. It's shaping up to be a ton of fun and a great experience for the kids! However, we still don't have quite enough money to pull it off. If you are interested in helping us out, you can make a donation by going to this link: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=517-296 It would be greatly appreciated, and I will be sure to post pictures and a full report after we have the camp in August!

So if you have been following my blog with any regularity recently you might have noticed that I have not been very consistent in writing lately. That's because I've been busy trying to make a house out of an abandoned classroom in a condemned building. Yup, you read right! Let me explain:

For the past three months I have been living in a little apartment attached to a house where some Canadian nuns live. They are leaving in the next couple days to go back to Canada for six months, and for various reasons I decided about a month and a half ago that I would like to move out before they left (I felt uncomfortable about having to look after the whole house while they were gone, and it is slightly removed from the rest of the community). There is a building in my town that used to be a rural hospital, but it was abandoned about ten years ago because the structure wasn't sound (the foundation was not sturdy and rain filtered through the roof at times). Two different families recently have fixed up parts of it to live in, and between their two parts there was a large room that my project partner at one point had used as a classroom for his before-school program but had not been used in about a year. There was tile through most of it, however a side part was missing a bit of floor, and in the far back where there used to be a room to do washing my project partner swore that there were tubes that we could use for a bathroom. So I decided to fix it up—the things that Peace Corps required me to do was fill in an open wall with cement that was currently only covered with tin, put a door on the other side of the room, secure the windows and doors, and of course fix the bathroom. My project partner told me to hire my neighbor to do all the carpentry work and I decided to hire a friend of mine who works in construction to fill in the wall and the small amount of floor that needed to be covered. One day I went and bought about 200 dollars worth of materials, thinking that this would be all the materials that I would have to buy in order to fix up the house, since it was the list that my “workers” had given me. HAHAHA!

As you all know, construction and house repairs can be frusterating in any country, but what my project partner claimed would be a week long project turned into a month and a half of trips to the hardware store, pestering the people I needed to do the work, and fretting about my ever-growing costs. Here were several of the problems:

1. The supposed “tubes” that we would be able to connect to the toilet and use as drains did not exist, so we I had to buy new tubes to put in the house. Then we went to find the tubes that lead to the septic tank, and couldn't find them, which made me think that we would have to put in all new tubes. So I paid someone to dig a ditch towards the septic tank, and we left it for a while while trying to fix other things and waiting for April to come so that I could get paid again and buy the tubes. When April came someone else started digging and we found some of the tubes that we needed! However, it also meant that the ditch that the first guy had dug needed to be filled in and a different ditch had to be dug.

2. The guys who did the floor and wall for me worked really fast, but my neighbor who was going to do the “woodwork” took about a month to do a job that could have been done in less than two days.

3. Every time someone came to work in the house they realized they needed some other kind of nail, or piece of plastic, or wire, and so I had to take an expensive ride to the nearest hardware store (30 minutes a way) in order to buy it.

4. Domincans like to give advice and get involved even if nobody asked them to; though some suggestions helped a lot, most of the time when someone came in to tell me what I had to do or how I should have done it, I just smiled and nodded and tried to tune out.

Finally, a month and a half after starting, I moved in with the help of several teenage boys and lots of little kids. It was a frustrating process but once I moved in I felt at home. Even if a lot of people did want to come in and give too many opinions, I also have to give a lot of people credit because so many people came to my rescue during the process and helped out immensely. Here is a list of all the people who helped:

 2 Catholic nuns (furniture donations and moral support)

 1 Evangelical pastor (electricity installation, ideas for how to fix the house up, the only one who could actually motivate some people to work on it)

 1 carpinter (doors, windows, the division to make my bedroom)

 2 guys who have worked on the construction of hotels in tourist areas (plumbing installation on the inside—note that they are not actually plumbers—filling in of the wall and floor)

 2 Haitian men in their 60s who dug the ditch while all the teenagers lounged around and watched (believe me, I gave those teenagers plenty of grief about the fact that these older men worked harder and were stronger than them)

 The man who presides over the parish here (wood donation)

 2 drivers for the NGO I work with (they installed the toilet and were able to get the right tubes for me)

 6 14-18 year old boys (two would take me to the pueblo when I needed to buy things, two covered up an open window with tin, two helped me move my furniture and paint)

 1 2 year old, 1 three year old, 2 five year olds (they helped me put rocks in the yard to make a path and moved the last of my belongings from my old house to the new one—gotta love willing child labor!)

 2 preteen girls who helped me clean the patio and the floor

As of right now my house still isn't completely finished—I still need to put lights in the bathroom and we need to connect the tubes for the toilet (I've been using other people's bathrooms when necessary—thank goodness for the sharing, open culture of Dominicans!), but those things will hopefully be done soon. The kids in my town love that I have a house right in the middle of the town where they can come and play, so I've had to set down some rules. First, if there are more than two kids they have to play in the yard—they can't come in my house. Also, they have to wear shoes (kids here have bad habits of running around barefoot everywhere, which is dangerous because not only can they cut themselves easily but there is a lot of animal waste around town, and plenty of diseases can be spread if kids are stepping on cow or goat poop). Finally, if they make a mess, they have to clean it up—the picture below is of two six year olds who were trying to climb up my wall and peek in my window. They left footprints on the wall so I told them that they had to scrub the wall as a punishment—they actually loved it and ended up fighting over who could use the scrub brush! Here are some photos of the construction of the house and my little helpers--Í'll post more pix later.

Doing the art collage

The inside of the center

The truck that brought us to the event.

The girls waiting for the bus and practicing their poem

For about a month and a half now a volunteer who lives a half hour from me and I have been planning an event for International Women's Day. Our original idea stemmed from the fact that the Gender and Development Peace Corps Committee here in the DR was offering small grants to volunteers who wanted to host events in their sites. My friend and I decided to hold an event together that would bring mothers and daughters to celebrate the day together, since often we have seen that mothers and daughters don't have much interaction apart from household chores and daily life. Our idea was to bring mothers and daughters from 3 different sites together (about 30 total) and do team building activities and a health presentation with them. My friend lives in a site where there is a very strong, active youth group and she proposed the idea to them. The group loved the idea and wanted to expand it to 100 people and include a march. In early February we found out we had received the grant from Peace Corps and I took a group of my youth to her site to have a meeting about the event. We then planned on inviting about 80 people from 4 communities, doing a presentation at the beginning, then a presentation on women's health and an art activity, closing with a small ceremony and lunch. The grant we got from Peace Corps was not going to cover all the costs of such a large event, so we decided to do a raffle as well to raise funds.

During February we sold raffle tickets and did some preliminary planning, and the first week of March we had to do lots of shopping and running around to get the event ready. On my side, I had to make sure my youth sold their raffle tickets, that we invited the right number of mothers and daughters, and that we had transportation to the event. Many girls here in Las Pajas don't live with their mothers; they live with grandmothers or aunts or other relatives that take them in while their parents are elsewhere working, so I told the girls to simply invite older women who they respected and wanted to spend the morning with.

At the end of February we had a scare because we found out that a softball tournament that was being organized by the government of our province was going to start on the same day as our event, and many girls in my community were going to be involved in it. We decided to continue with the same date because we had already arranged for that day, and even though a lot of girls did go to the softball game to play, in the end there were plenty of people who wanted to come with us—partially because I had told them that we would stay that afternoon to watch the softball game.

On the 8th we were supposed to go in a bus from my friend's town who would come and pick us up in the morning. My friend paid the driver half of what he said he would charge us the day before he was to pick us up, and we planned to pay him the other half at the end of the day. Knowing that in this country things can be a little unreliable, both my friend and I were a little worried about the transportation, and indeed the morning of the 8th, after I had told all the participants to be ready to go at 730 am, my friend called and told me that the driver didn't want to take us and had returned the money to her. That threw me into a frenzy, so both she and I tried to think of solutions. Finally one of the girls that was going to go with me went and woke up one of the few men in our community that has a truck, and told him (not asked or begged, which I would have done, but no, she TOLD him) to take us to my friend's community, which amazingly he did. So instead of riding in a bus, all of us girls, dressed up for the event, climbed into the back of a truck that usually carries cows or large pieces of iron, and happily rode the half hour through sugar cane and cacao fields to my friend's community.

When we arrived at 9 o'clock (the event was supposed to start at 8) we were the first ones there, and we had come from the farthest away. We waited until about 930 when some people trickled in, and then just decided to start the event with the 30 or so people that were there. We did introductions, several important people from the community talked, we did some fun ice breakers and my girls presented a poem they had written. We finished with a team building activity where groups of two had to carry one another like babies, on their backs, or had to lie down one on top of the other; the ones who did it the slowest were out. The women enjoyed the games a lot, and it was fun to see everybody having so much fun, laughing and practically crying while watching grown women try to carry each other!

After a break for some coffee and crackers we came back to do an art activity. We had each pair of “mothers” and their “daughters” set goals for their daughters' future and then make a collage of those goals. At first we were a little worried because some of the mothers don't write and we thought they might get discouraged with the activity, since the first part they are supposed to write the goals. But the teams worked together and in the end everybody was coming up to us to show us their collages and their goals.

We then took a short break and came back for a presentation on birth control that another health volunteer gave. She talked about all different kinds of birth control that people could use, had the girls race to see who could put a condom on a banana the right way, and then had them play a musical chairs type game to remember all the different kinds of birth control she talked about. They enjoyed that a lot, and definitely learned something as well.

We finished by giving out certificates to all the women and eating a good hearty meal. At times the event was incredibly hectic and I will admit I was afraid it might be a flop, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, and I know that everyone enjoyed it.

After the event all the women who had come with me went to cheer on the Las Pajas softball team who had just began to play at the field in the town we were in. My volunteer friends and I cleaned up and then headed over to the field as well. For about 3 hours we were all there cheering on the team—even though the sun was bright, it was incredibly windy and everybody had been up since 7 am when our team won everybody went and ran a victory lap around the field, chanting and cheering. We stayed a while longer to watch the other teams play and then all the women who had come with me piled into our truck and we went back home, chanting and cheering as we left the town and chanting and cheering as we entered Las Pajas. When the girls got out of the truck they continued dancing and chanting about the win, even though the softball team hadn't arrived home yet. When the team did arrive, they all went directly to the local “disco” to dance “ga-ga,” a kind of dancing and music with Haitian roots. My volunteer friends returned to Las Pajas with me so we watched some of the festivities, but we were too tired to continue with the girls, who were up half the night celebrating. All in all it was a great day for the women of Las Pajas!

So the 27th of February is the Dominican Republic´s Independence Day, and practically every town celebrates it with a parade/march of some kind. The schoolchildren celebrated it this past Tuesday with their teachers (because the teachers live in a different city and didn´t want to come to our town on a holiday). However our community leader wanted to celebrate on the actual day, so he told his students from the before school program and the rest of the community that they should come to the march on Friday morning at 8. By 830 there were only the children in their uniforms waiting to march, so we started off, and I feared it would just be us marching around town (many people had told me that they were going to other cities for the day where the festivities were more exciting and lasted all day). However as soon as we began walking through the community other people joined us and by the end of it we had a huge group of people marching in the hot sun, chanting, singing and playing the drums on pots and pans. We finished the march in front of the community center where they sang the national anthem and the children did a coreographed march. Here are some of the photos:

Unfortunately, adolescent pregnancy is fairly common in Las Pajas. Despite the fact that contraceptives and condoms are available at our local clinic, ever since I arrived I have seen way too many young pregnant girls and mothers. The one who I have had the most contact with is my eighteen year old host sister, who was about five months along when I arrived, and so, according to the math, was due to give birth sometime in February. I had accompanied her to a couple doctor's appointments here in Las Pajas and in the nearest city, and tried to encourage her to go to all of her appointments, however she did not go to see the doctor in the city or have a sonogram during all of January and Februrary, and because of this had no idea when she should expect to give birth. There are several reasons that she did not go to see the doctor: first of all, to travel to the nearest city where there is a certified OBGYN (in Las Pajas we have interns who have finished school but are not yet doctors) it is about an hour's ride on a motorcycle and then a bus, so the traveling alone is tiresome. Secondly, the cost of the trip is not cheap for the expecting mothers, which makes it even more difficult to arrive. Thirdly, my sister unfortunately is still young and does not quite know how to manage her money, so by the time she had an appointment to go visit the doctor, she had spent her money on other things and had none left to travel.

Finally on February 23rd she went into the nearest town for a checkup, and when I arrived at my host family's house for lunch, I was informed that my host mother had ran out the door because my host sister had called to tell her they were going to perform a C-section on her. I called my host sister at noon and she said she was waiting for my host mom to arrive and for the doctors to perform the C-section. By two when I called again, she had a healthy little boy and was recovering from the surgery.

I went into the hospital the next day to see her and the little boy. My host mother had spent the night there and was planning on staying there until they released my host sister. She wasn't just spending the night to keep my host sister company; in public hospitals here patients need to have someone stay with them because there are no orderlies or nurses who stop by to help them with anything. My host mom had to help my sister bathe, go to the bathroom and look after the newborn. Patients also have to bring their own sheets and provide their own food, so when my host mother dashed into the city after she got the call, she went with a pair of sheets, but I also brought clean towels in the next day when I came to visit. My host sister was also fortunate that her uncle lives in that town, so he was able to bring them food every day and run errands for them.

While I was there visiting the only time I saw a nurse was when she came into to change my host sister's IV; it was my host sister's uncle, my host mom and I who helped her to the bathroom and helped her bathe and change clothes and care for the baby. My host sister was lucky that she had a little privacy because there was no one else in the hospital room with her—even though there are about 8 beds in each room. While the hospital wasn't dirty, it wasn't clean either; there were no trash cans in the room and the bathroom didn't even have a place to hang and IV. While they weren't the worst conditions ever, I must say that these women are very strong to be able to give birth with very little attention and inadequate facilities!

Many women after giving birth return to town the next day on a motorcycle, but since my host sister had had a C-section, that was definitely out of the question! She spent two nights in the hospital and then we were luckily able to arrange for a man in our town who has a truck to pass by and pick her up. She arrived home and since then has had plenty of visitors, however acccording to Dominican tradition, she basically has to stay inside the house for the first month (especially at night) after she has given birth.

Well it's been a while since I last updated, but that's not for a lack of stories to tell! The past couple weeks have flown by, mainly because I moved out of my host family's house, my mother came to visit, and I had to go to a week long In-Service Training that Peace Corps provided to prepare us for the next year's work. Let's go step by step as I explain these three events:

New House:

First, as most PCDR volunteers do, after living with my host family for three months I moved out of their house and into a little place of my own. Because Peace Corps does not allow us to live in houses with tin walls, and there are no houses available in my community that are made out of block or wood entirely, I cannot at this point live completely on my own. However, the two Canadian nuns who live here part of the year have been nice enough to offer me the apartment that is attached to the side of their house to live in. The apartment is pretty basic (it used to be a garage) but I do have my own INDOOR bathroom (though I kind of prefer a latrine because you don't have to clean it or worry about using too much water) and I have my own separate entrance. I have two rooms—one for my bedroom and the other as a living area/kitchen where I have a small stove and keep a bucket of water near it to wash and cook with. Though it's not very lavish, according to Peace Corps living standards it is a very nice place!

Moira's Visit:

Yup, my mother came to visit for almost a week and got to see my entire town and meet practically everyone in it! She arrived on a Tuesday and I went and found her at the airport and we spent a day and a night in a small hotel near the beach. We enjoyed the sunshine and water, but my mom was swimming in the water and got caught in some coral, which put a damper on things because little coral pieces were stuck in her feet and hands and we had to treat them the entire time she was here in order to get them out.

After the beach we took a bus and then some motorcycles into my town. My mom was worried that the motorcycle drivers wouldn't be able to carry her suitcase and my backpack on their motorcycles, but she soon saw that it was no problem at all (the trick is to set the suitcase on the front of the motorcycle and the driver simply has to balance it while he is driving). We arrived in Las Pajas and for the next four days our days mainly consisted of meeting people and visiting with them. I think some of the highlights for her were the warm bread that a woman in my site backs nightly to sell, and getting her hair braided into cornrows (she has a couple pictures you should ask to see if you can!).

The people in my community loved meeting my mom and ever since I got back from my training they have been asking when she is going to come again and when the rest of my family will come (the boys in town are particularly interested in when Rakaia—my 15 year old sister—will be coming to visit)

In-Service Training:

At the end of my mother's visit, she and I as well as my two “Community project partners” traveled into Santo Domingo. My mom went to the airport and my two project partners and I went to a hotel for the night before we took off for another city in the morning. For our training, all the youth volunteers and their project partners, as well as our bosses and trainers, met at a retreat type center in the mountains. For the past three months each volunteer and their project partner had been preparing our community diagnostic to present at the training, and so for the first day we all presented our diagnostics and discussed our plans for the future. The next day was full of planning projects and doing “teamwork” activities with our project partners. It was nice to be able to spend some time with my project partners outside of Las Pajas, because we all had time to discuss our projects without interruption. We now have lots of plans for the future, but the projects that we are going to begin this month are:

English classes

A girls' volleyball team

More activities for the recently formed youth group

An event in a neighboring community for International Women's Day

After our project partners left us volunteers stayed for several days to do more trainings specific to Peace Corps and to talk about projects that other previous volunteers have done. It was great to be able to chat with my friends about their communities and swap ideas, however I returned rather overwhelmed with all the information and plans that had been discussed. The days following the training have been for planning and sorting through all the information we got.

This month I will also be traveling to the capital for “Committee Weekend” which is where all the volunteers meet and form committees to work on certain projects. I will be helping to plan several weekend camps for youth (one is a tournament for volleyball teams, another is a sports/nutrition camp and the last, a diversity camp) as well as checking out what other committees do. This month is a short one, but it is certainly chock full of plans!

Wow, it's hard to believe that we're almost finished with January, I feel as if this month has just flown by! What have I been doing? Well, that's a good question, because thinking back, I can’t think of what, but I have been busy! A lot of my time recently has been taken up with meetings--meetings with the “Junta de Vecinos” (Literally translated—Neighborhood Group, but basically the group that takes care of community infrastructure, sanitation, etc); meetings with my youth group, and then the small group of leaders within that group; organizing discussions for teenagers with our local doctor; meeting with our “health promoters” and an outside NGO that wants to do a nutrition program for children, etc.. etc.. etc...

But with all these meetings, I still don't have much to report, many things, such as my youth group, are just beginning, so things are going slowly—I'm just excited that we have elected a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer!

Since there is so much, yet so little, to report right now, I'm going to instead focus on something that I haven’t talked about much: day-to-day life here. First off, electicity: I had mentioned a while ago that our electricity is not always reliable, but it is supposed to have a schedule—it's usually on from 10am to 2 pm, and then returns around 7 pm and goes out sometime in the early morning. Every night when the electricity comes on everyone in the community cheers, and every day at 10 when the electricity comes on about half of the community turns on their music full blast while other half turns on their TVs to start watching the telenovelas.

The water here is also come and go—my host family has a spout in the back of their house and when there is water we fill up lots of large buckets and during the day we use the water in those buckets to bathe, wash the dishes, wash clothes, etc... My host family has a latrine out in the back of their house as well as a private area made out of tin and wood where we bathe. The house itself is considered a normal house around here—it has a cement floor and is made of tin and wood. It is obviously not impermeable to mice, rats or big bugs, but it's comfortable enough. My host mother and I have our own rooms, while the brother and two youngest sisters share a room. The oldest sleeps in the barracks next to our house.

And now, the other part of daily living: food. We eat similar foods just about every day, so here, for example is what I ate today and yesterday:

Breakfast: Fried green plaintains (green on the outside, meaning they are not sweet) with fried salami,

Yesterday: a soup of noodles with garlic

Lunch: Chicken fried in seasoning with onions and garlic, rice with peas cooked with onions, garlic, salt, bullion and oil,

Yesterday: rice cooked with beans and onion, garlic, salt, etc, and boiled eggplant cooked with plenty of seasonings.

Dinner: Boiled yucca and fried egg,

Yesterday: a bowl of cream of corn flour (pretty similar to cream of wheat).

During the day when we're lucky we also have plenty of fruit: bananas, oranges, sometimes papaya, etc.

As you'll notice, vegetables are a bit lacking in my diet, mainly because here in the community noone sells or grows things like carrots, tomatoes or lettuce (the two vegetables that you do see here are squash and eggplant) but when I go into the bigger town nearby I usually try to buy some kind of vegetable.

Soon I will be moving out of my host family's house and will be living basically on my own, but I am going to continue eating lunch frequently with my host family because, even though I would have never believed this four months ago, I have come to like eating rice every single day and I know I cannot prepare the rice like my host family can!

My host mother preparing the chicken for Christmas.

This is a picture of one of the baseball teams with their "Madrina" (literally translated, godmother) on the opening day of the tournament.

This is one of my favorite people in the batey-an older man who eats with us, has taught me some Kreyol and brings us yummy things from his garden like peas and bananas! It just so happened I caught him when he was wearing this funny hat one night.

Here's some recent pictures I've taken, three of them are of the baseball tournament that the kids in my community organized--notice the cows in the background! The picture of the three girls are three of my neighbors, and the two girls on top are my two youngest host sisters.

Well my Christmas might have been a little more mellow that I had expected, but my New Year's was certainly satisfying! The festivities started around 8pm when a group of neighbors made a bonfire in a tire in a field in the center of town. A small group sat around with music blasting, and I went and visited them and tried to take some pictures of the bonfire and the people there and those passing by. I then went down to the Evangelical church where they were having a service until midnight. There was plenty of singing and praying there. At 11 I went up to the Catholic Church where there was a mass being performed by a member of the community who is currently enrolled in the seminary. We prayed, sang, gave thanks, discussed what we wanted in the New Year, and at about 15 minutes till midnight everybody started to sing. The atmosphere was very upbeat and at midnight everybody sang loudly, hugged each other and danced around—even my host mother and some other older ladies were jumping up and down and dancing!

After midnight I headed down to the third evangelical church where both evangelical congregations and gathered to wish each other Happy New Year's. I went down and greeted them all and then the kids gathered in the back of one of the churches where they too had a bonfire going. That night they were doing a type of Secret Santa gift exchange (although, to give you an idea of the differences between here and the US, here the cost of the gift was supposed to be about 2 US dollars). After everyone settled down they started the exchange, and every person who was giving someone else a present had to present it—most people made a little, funny speech and then sang a song, which was fun, but some got even more creative and rapped or sang some kind of reggaeton-type song and danced around. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun to watch!

On New Year's day I headed to the nearest beach (which is about an hour away) to meet some fellow volunteers who had spent New Year's eve there. It was, of course, very relaxing and gorgeous. I came back to my community only to be invited to yet another church celebration where another gift exchange was taking place. This celebration was more like a normal church service, but the highlight was when four seven-year olds did their first “pantomima” (a kind of pantomime/interpretive dance the evangelical girls do to Christian music) and then when that same group of seven year olds got up and sang accompanied on the drums by a two year old who actually did a great job on his little toy drum!

Well Merry Christmas everyone! The Christmas celebration I had here was certainly different from what most of you might have done for the holiday, but it was fun and interesting nonetheless. Here in the DR people celebrate Christmas Eve moreso than Christmas day. The day was spent preparing food and cleaning the house for the dinner that would take place that night. At five I went to the Catholic mass (surprisingly, none of the other churches were having events on Christmas Eve). There weren't a whole lot of people who attended—many people were busy catching up with family members who had come back to the community to visit for the holidays, but the mass was nice nonetheless; we prayed, sang, and sang some more.

Upon returning I stopped by the "community oven" which is located in a community leader's backyard and was the spot where everyone was baking their chickens (most people here do not have ovens, so they paid a small fee to pay for gas to use the community oven on Christmas). We picked up our chicken and went back home. The electricity hadn't come on yet so we decided to wait until it came on to eat, however by 730 it still hadn't come on so we decided to eat anyways. We had baked chicken, bread, a salad of beets, eggs, potatoes and carrots, and spaghetti. That night was pretty mellow; once the electricity came back on my host family put on a movie and I went to visit the Canadian nuns and a few family members who were visiting them. We ended up going back into the church to look at the small Christmas tree that was lit up and we sang a few Christmas Carols (in French and Spanish) to make it feel a little more like Christmas.

Christmas day was a day of rest—all night people had been playing loud music and partying, and at 430 am the Catholic church had a service that mainly consisted of singing. Since I couldn't sleep with all the music anyway, a few of my host family members and I went up there to sing. We sang, drank ginger tea and had some Christmas candies. I returned home to sleep some more and spend the day visiting with people. The rest of the day was pretty mellow—Christmas day isn't really a day when people get presents (the kids got presents for the “Dia del nino”--day of the child, that were donated by a Canadian organization) but they do get new clothes—all the children that are enrolled in what I call the “church school” and have foreign sponsors get a check to go to a certain store and buy a new set of clothes. In the afternoon everyone dressed up in their new clothes and paraded around, and when the kids got tired and went back home, the adults went out to celebrate in the discos.

Christmas night I went and sat with some of the “jovenes” (teens) that were not out in their new clothes because many of them could not afford them, or they did not want to go to the bars with the other jovenes. Instead, they were sitting in a circle with a drum, an empty paint can and a couple other makeshift instruments and they were singing, rapping and joking around. They sang their Evangelical songs, but also made up raps about the “Americana”(that would be me), and invited me to sing (I sang “Jingle Bells” for them). At times half the circle was laughing hysterically because of some rap one of the kids was singing or the way they were dancing. That might have been the best part of my day; seeing that these kids, though they have very little, can be incredibly creative and enjoy themselves as much, if not more, than anyone else.

My life lately has been a mixture of formal work in the school and after school programs as well as lots of informal work, such as getting to know people and identifying areas in the community that need to be strengthened. I continue teaching PE classes which exhausts me every time (these kids have a lot of energy and little discipline) and I have also taught some English classes to 7th and 6th graders. The government says that starting in 6th grade the kids must learn English, however the teachers at the school right now were trained to teach a specific subject in the high school and so they never learned English and cannot teach it very well. I am trying my best to teach the kids the basics, but there is very little time in the day to teach them.

I have also filled in every once in a while at the after school program and continue meeting with youth twice a week to plan events and organize “charlas” or “talks”. I had discussed with the boys organizing a baseball tournament, because in past years the older boys always played a tournament that lasted several weekends in December and January, but in the past couple years no one has taken the leadership of it and last year the tournament didn't happen at all. With a little guidance from me, the boys planned what they needed to do in order to begin the tournament (the most work was cutting all the grass that had grown on the baseball field—the boys probably put in 15 hours cutting the grass with machetes) and by the time I had returned from Thanksgiving the tournament had been planned and they played that Saturday for the first time. I was so happy to see them organizing it almost completely by themselves, all they needed was a little help from me to begin with, but then they took off! They have three teams that play two games every weekend, and they are keeping some stats and at the end the winning team with receive a trophy and the most valuable player will receive a medal.

The after school program funded by foreign donors also organized a volleyball team for the girls in the community, and I am serving as referee when the girls play. The games, though there are no lines and a very low net, get very heated, yesterday I had 4 girls screaming at the top of their lungs at me and each other about a call I made. Luckily they forget about it quickly and move on to the next point where they are cheering because they won.

Informally I have spent time getting to know more people and learning a little bit of Kreyol. Also, because it is the end of the semester a lot of the high schoolers are studying for exams or filling out take home exams that I have been helping with. I am beginning to understand why people put their kids in private schools if they can here, because there is very little support and instruction in the public schools. For example, the kids are supposed to learn English in school, but the professor gives them very little instruction and then a difficult take home exam. A lot of these kids have come to me to have me fill out the take home exam because they have absolutely no idea how to do it. Another thing; the kids have to pay for the take home exam (30 pesos each, about a dollar) which they can basically have anybody (such as a native English speaker) fill out, while the kids who do not pay have to take a monitored exam during the school day. This kind of system makes me very greatful for how demanding and dedicated my teachers were in the US!

The next couple weeks involve a trip to the beach to relax a little, and then lots and lots of Christmas activities (the public school, after school program and the church school are all making food and giving gifts to the kids)!

Well here in town I have made many friends; little children, old ladies, middle aged women, old men, teenagers, etc... I have also made some not so common friends:

My latrine—I'll spare you all the details, but beginning the first night that I arrived I have had some stomach problems, and so me and my latrine have become very good friends, I am happy going to it for help at all hours of the day and night, and it accepts me kindly.

My cell phone—this is obvious, it keeps me mildly in touch with the rest of the world, and whenever I need a break from my host family I tell them I'm going to make a call and go into the countryside where I get better signal, and a break!

Recently I have had several friends that would not go away when I wanted to sleep: I had mice in my bedspring. For about a week now I could hear them scurrying around somewhere under my bed. My host mom put some poison in my room and we found one dead next to the poison the next day, but I still heard the noises. Last night my host brother saw a rat scurrying towards my room, and so my host mom put a rat trap in my room. At about midnight I heard “snap!” and then rodent shrieks, then the sound of the metal scratching around on the concrete floor, and then nothing. I knew the mouse was dead, but I didn't want to see it. I tried to sleep and I woke up again early in the morning to the sound of more scuffling under my bed. In the morning I went outside to listen to the radio (where it gets better signal) and told my host mom that a rat had been killed in my room. I am trying to be independent and prove to my family that I can do normal Dominican things such as cook and clean, but I decided to leave this chore to one of my family members—I'm not that brave yet!

As I was sitting outside she came out with the rat trap—the rat was pretty large and pretty dead, which was a relief. Unfortunately, I still knew that there were more wandering around down there. This afternoon my host sister informed me that she had seen a dead mouse in my box spring, and finally we got the courage up to try to get it out. My host sister and I moved the mattress out into the hall and with our neighbor we tipped the box spring up, and there was not one but three mice scurrying around and one rotted mouse head sitting there on the floor. I never thought I would be one to scream when seeing a mice, but me and my neighbor and my sister shrieked a little, and the children came running to see what all the fuss was about. My neighbor yelled for a stick to kill them and my host sister came back with a machete, but my neighbor wanted something large and blunt. A boy ran in with the handle of a broom and my neighbor batted around a little, but in the end the mice ran into the next room free. At the very least they are not in my box spring anymore....

A couple minutes later the pastor of a church came by to inform me that they also have a mice problem, and that mice seem to be infesting a lot of the houses in the area. Great...I'm gonna keep looking around for a cat, it seems the only way to keep these mice away!

Last night when I went to bed there were dark rain clouds on the horizon. I assumed it would pour for an hour or so at night, as it sometimes does, and be sunny the next day. But when I woke up in the middle of the night it was raining very lightly, and it continued this morning and throughout the day. This was the first day it had rained all day, and it was also the first day I had worn jeans in the community (yes, it was that cold!)

I took this opportunity to sleep in a little longer, and get caught up on some “documentation” of interviews and meetings that I had to do. I didn't feel too bad about staying in the house, because nobody else was leaving their houses either. The professors for the public school never arrived, and classes were cancelled in one of the after/before school programs. It's not that it was raining that hard, in fact, it was basically sprinkling all day, but since there are no paved roads, any time there is any water at all in the streets it makes them very muddy and difficult to get anywhere. So all day, everybody was in their house.

After I got done doing some work I came and sat with my family. The girls were doing some chores, my host mom was cooking and a neighbor who lives next door but comes over to eat with us (since he's not married and doesn't have a wife to cook for him) was sitting in the room as well. I decided this was the perfect time to start learning Kreyol, up until now I have only mastered how to say “How are you?” in Kreyol, but this alone charms all the old Haitian men who come and greet me. So I began asking our neighbor how to say certain things. He is a small, wirey though still strong man who came from Haiti forty years ago to work in the sugar cane fields. He now grows some food on a plot of land he has, and he always brings us bananas and plaintains to eat and sell to others. He is one of the ones who is particularly thrilled that I can say “I am good, how are you?” in Kreyol. So he started naming things around the room in Kreyol, and I went writing them down phonetically, since Kreyol is basically a phonetic language. My host mom would chime in every once in a while with a word as well. Soon I had two pages full of words, but remembered very few. Thanks to my French skills however, I was able to impress my family by counting in Kreyol (the numbers are basically the same as French).

When it finally stopped raining for a while I made a very slippery trek over to the health clinic. The clinic is run by the government and has a nurse and an intern (a student who has studied medicine in the university for 5 years and is now giving a year to the governmet) who live there during the week days and then leave and go back to their homes in the city during the weekends. Today the doctor was the only one in the clinic, so I got to sit down with her and do a little bit of interrogating about the health in the community. Some of the problems she sees most frequently have to do with parasites, dehydration of children (a result of vomiting and diahrrea, which is also related to parasites), diabetes, high blood pressure and a lack of folic acid in the older population. We also discussed the absence of family planning and the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the community. It was interesting to talk to her about what she has seen so far, and how important education is in preventing things such as parasites and dehydration.

I had been chatting with her for about an hour when four teenage boys came in carrying a seven year old who was crying. They explained that he had jumped off of a wall and cut his foot on a piece of zinc (tin). He foot was bleeding a lot, and so the kids laid him on the operating table and the doctor began to clean the wound and stitch it up. When she gave him the shot he started screaming and crying because he thought that the doctor was going to amputate his foot, which of course the teenage boys were telling him was going to happen. He tried to get off the table and the 4 boys and I had to use all of our strength to hold him down. We had to hold him there for a good six or seven minutes while she was stitching up his foot, and for about 5 minutes he was screaming and crying and yelling curse words that I only recently learned. When the doctor was about finished his parents came in. They didn't seem particularly worried or sympathetic; they just stood there and said, "I told you not to leave the house, now are you going to wear your shoes?" The doctor told them that they had to be sure and get him another tetanus shot (the clinic hasn't received the medicine from the government lately so the family has to take the 45 minute motorcycle ride to the nearest town to get it), and gave him some more medicine. Then one of the boys carried him to his house on his back.

I asked the doctor if she had to stitch up a lot of kids, and she said it happened very frequently, and once two boys came in together because they had been throwing rocks at each other and both needed stitches in their head. I must say, this community is certainly lucky that it has this clinic to patch them up when things like this happen!

**Note--three days letter I went to the little boy's house to check on him, he was already running around and in perfectly good shape, despite the fact he had three stitches!

Well things are certainly picking up here in Las Pajas, I have now officially become the community photographer/lifeguard/PE teacher/youth organizer (what my real job is supposed to be)/community documenter.

Let me start off by saying that, as most of you know, I'm not one to sit around all day not doing anything. So although Peace Corps wants us to focus on our “Community Diagnostic” for these first three months, I have decided that it's not going to take up enough of my time, so I have taken it upon myself to find other things to occupy my time. One of those things has become teaching PE at the local elementary school. Previously I had gone and visited several classes at the public school and helped teach some classes at what would be the equivalent to an after school program in the US. It's actually another school run by a community member here; kids from k-4th grade go to this school the first part of the day, and the public school the second part of the day. This school evolved because public schools here only offer 3-4 hours of schooling a day, and adding in recess and settling down time, the kids only get about 2.5 hours of instruction daily. To make up for that, many communities, including mine, have these before or after school programs. When one of the teachers can't make it, I sometimes stand in for them and try to teach a class to third or 4th graders. Believe me, it is NOT easy, I now have so much more respect for teachers anywhere, but especially elementary school teachers! Part of the problem is that these kids are squished into small, hot spaces to learn, and there are so many children that it is hard to keep them under control. They also, understandably, have a ton of energy and nowhere to expend it. That's how I got the idea to teach PE. Two Canadian nuns who are working in the community and I met with the elementary school teachers and told them what our strengths were and asked them where they needed help. They jumped at the idea of giving the kids PE classes, because they have so much built up energy that goes towards fighting and being rowdy. So last week I began giving PE classes, however I ran into several challenges:

1. There are no balls or bats at the school. The other day I asked the kids if they wanted to play baseball and they said yes, they found a little squishy ball and broke a stick in half to use as a bat. It worked fairly well, I must admit, but it would be better to have the real thing.

2. There is no field or court in the school. There used to be a concrete court with basketball hoops, however the hoops have since broken off and the concrete has cracks. There is a field-ish area a little ways from the school, but taking a group of kids over there and trying to keep track of them would be a nightmare.

So my version of PE for these kids (I had 3rd and 4th graders one day and 5th and 6th graders the other) was running around a lot, stretching, playing an active version of “Simon Says” and teaching them some kickboxing moves (only the kicking part, I didn't want to start with the boxing and get them fighting with each other again!). Unfortunately, these things can only entertain them for so long, so after that we played some makeshift baseball. I am going to rack my brain for more activities for next week, but I have one more problem: I still haven't figured out how to say “play tag” en espanol...if anyone knows please let me know asap!

As I mentioned before, I have also become the town photographer. I took pictures of all the kids that go to the local high school 45 minutes away so that we could send the pictures to the Canadian donors who finance the trip. After that, my neighbor asked me to take pictures of her daughter's second birthday party, which I gladly did. Of course, my host family had to jump in on the fun too, so I was asked to take a picture of my pregnant host sister as a “7 month momento” and then, since the rest of the family didn't want to be left out, they had me take a picture of them as well. I have a feeling the picture taking is not going to stop any time soon!

Another job here: Lifeguard. Two weeks ago a large group of us (ranging from 4 year olds to 30 year olds, though I had only announced the event to my youth group) decided to trek to the river, which is about a half an hour away on foot. When we arrived the current was fairly strong, and since I was one of the few who could swim, I was charged with the task of helping other people across the river to the other side where there is a more beachy area. Some people were afraid of the current, but I have to admit that I don't know where knowing how to swim would have been much help—this part of the river was only about 2 feet deep. I was also in charge of making sure the little kids didn't cross into the deeper part of the river.

My real job: Youth organizer. My youth group has been making a lot of progress, and every time more kids show up than I would have ever expected! We can only meet at about 8pm because of all the activities and different schedules the kids have. The problem with meeting so late is that occasionally we do not have electricity at this time, and we can't have a successful meeting. Two nights ago we were going to meet and talk about the different sports they wanted in the community, but the electricity didn't come on until 9pm, so there was no meeting. The next night, when we were planning on meeting and discussing how to clean up the community, there were kids coming at 730 and 745 just waiting for the meeting to start. In the end we had about 30 kids listening to the doctor talk about cleanliness, and then discussing what we need to start a volleyball and baseball team. It's amazing that these kids are so enthusiastic about these activities, and I love seeing them take the responsibility for getting things done!

Last job: Community Documenter. Since I am doing interviews now with different people in the community, we are asking them what kinds of things affect the community and what they would like to see in the community. Almost everybody says that the road leading out of the community is a huge problem; there is only one road and it hasn't been maintained since the sugar cane company was up and running about 12 years ago. Because of it's current state, a 12 kilometer trip to town (a little more than 7 miles) takes 30-45 minutes on a motorcycle, and is incredibly unpleasant. If the road were in better shape, people would be able to travel more quickly and frequently to the nearest town to study and work.

The other main problem that affects the community is unemployment; ever since the sugar cane company closed down there has been no steady employment in the community. Most people live off of their gardens where they grow plaintains, yucca, potatoes, etc... In order to make a little more money people make and sell small snacks, such as pieces of bread or candied coconut. Many people get a little bit of help from the government, but when we went around interviewing people we would ask them what financial resources they depend on, or to put it more simply, “How do you eat or get your food”? A lot of the people interviewed simply said, “Sometimes we don't eat.” So with some other youth in the community we have gone around asking these kinds of questions to community members and documenting their answers. In January I hope to present my findings to the entire community, so that they know they are all concerned with the same issues and from there we can begin working on thinking about what we have in the community and how we can use it to solve some of the problems that exist here.

Some of you may be wondering what exactly it is I'm doing here in my community, especially since I have just arrived and haven't started any projects. Well, it's a legitimate question, and it's one I'm asking myself every day. For the first three months that I am here in the batey I am supposed to be doing a community diagnostic (basically researching the community, getting to know people and getting to know what the community needs and wants from me). This of course means that I have to be pretty self-motivated, because nobody else here really knows that much or cares much about this diagnostic. This first week here I have spent a lot of time just seeing the area and getting to know people. Here is a normal daily schedule:

630 am Wake up, go running with some of the local youth

730 am bath and eat breakfast

730-830 or 9 am Sit on my porch, write in my diary, watch the kids going to school, say hi to everyone who passes

9-12 Go visit the school, or the after school program or the church school. Sometimes at the before school program I'll be asked to stand in for a teacher if someone is absent (let me tell you, I was not prepared the first time to teach a bunch of 3rd graders!)

12-3 Sit on my porch, eat lunch, chat with neighbors, moan about the heat

3-5 or 6 Visit school or church school again, go out and sit and chat with other families in the community, maybe jump in on a game of baseball or volleyball

6-8 Sit on my porch, try to help prepare dinner, hope that the electricity comes on

Rest of the night: Sometimes I go to a church service or youth group meeting, but other times just sit outside and chat with people.

My work on the diagnostic will become more concrete soon: I am planning on interviewing a lot of youth in the community as well as visiting houses and interviewing the families. I would also like to do a couple focus groups with the neighborhood association and the public school teachers. Just recently the pastor I am working with made the kids receiving scholarships to go to high school form a youth group, and he put me in charge of it. This has taken up some time in my day, because we have met several times (once to take a trip to the river) and just last night I did an activity with them that will help me with my diagnostic. However, these meetings only take up an hour or two or my day, and the rest of my time, there is lots of sitting and chatting involved in my “work”. Sometimes it comes easily, other times I just sit in silence with my neighbors, and every once in a while we'll comment on someone walking by, or the weather, or the electricity situation.

While I'm at it, let me explain this electricity situation: when I was here visiting before, there was a schedule; the electricity would come on at about 9 am and last till about 1pm, then go out till 7pm when it would come back on and stay on the rest of the night. It was fairly reliable and pretty convenient. Now, what the people here are saying is that the government owes the power companies lots of money which it has yet to pay, and so the power companies are cutting the electricity more frequently and everybody in the country is suffering. This past week we've never really known when the electricity will come back on, so when it gets dark we all just sit outside chatting, and when the lights come back on everybody claps and cheers and gets up to tend to things inside the house. Sometimes it's nice to have the chance to just sit and chat, but other times I'm dying to get back in the house and read or clean my room or do a number of other things that are hard to do by flashlight.

Well today I accidentally went to church three times (I only intended to go once). As I have mentioned before, there is a large Evangelical population here in Las Pajas, but of course Catholicism is the dominant religion of the country, and accordingly there is a Catholic church in the community. Since I had already been to the Evangelical church services, and didn't want to give the impression that I preferred one religion over the other, so I told my host mother this morning that I would like to go to the Catholic service with her in the afternoon. I then left to go visit the host family of a former volunteer in the community (or so I thought). When I arrived at their house there was no one there, instead I found one of the youth leaders, who said that the family was in the church (an Evangelical church) and that I was welcome to come. Since I didn't have anything to do, I agreed to go. This group does their bible study on Sunday mornings, and they were all watching a video about religion. I stayed there for a while and then went back to my house.

After a hike into the hills with some of my host brothers and sisters and some neighbors, I came back to the house to get ready for the Catholic church service. I went with my host mom to the church, where there were about ten little kids playing the tambourines and drums and singing to begin the service. Since Las Pajas is so far away and a small community, a priest only comes once a month, and the rest of the time church members lead the services. Today two older members were leading the services. I must admit, I felt much more at home in this church, not because my beliefs fit more with one sect or the other, but because the service was much more like the ones I am used to in the United States—there was praying, some singing, and a short sermon. I had actually avoided the Catholic church services (and all church services in general) here in the DR up until I arrived in Las Pajas because I feared a long sermon, rituals that I wasn't accustomed to, and awkward parts of the service, such as communion, that I couldn't take part in because I am not Catholic. I was pleasantly surprised with this service; the sermon was short, the songs were fun and I didn't have to sing, since I didn't understand, but I happily clapped along, and when it came to communion, for some reason I don't quite understand, only the two people running the service and one other man took communion, which only consisted of a wafer, no wine. Nor did I have to do any kneeling, because in this church there is nowhere to kneel, and the floor is cement.

About halfway through the service there is a ritual, similar to most American churches, where everybody greets each other, usually with a handshake. Here however, no one is shy, so during this part, everyone greeted one another by saying “la Paz” (Peace) and hugging each other. I don't think I have ever gotten so many hugs by strangers in my life.

Towards the end of the service the man in front formally recognized my presence and thanked me for being there, which was very kind of him, so afterwards I went and thanked both the directors of the service, who then gave me another hug and told me I was always welcome. One thing that was very different from the Evangelical services was that this church was not full by any stretch of the imagination. There were a group of young children there, and then the rest of the churchgoers were mainly older parents and grandparents, there was no one my age or in the 15-30 year old range.

I came back to sit around with my host family, and quickly the electricity went out. We were sitting in the dark when a girl came by and asked me to go to her church service. Once again, since I didn't have anything to do, I went. This was a different Evangelical church that I went to this time, but the service was similar; lots of singing and dancing and a short sermon from the pastor, followed by lots more singing and dancing and a raffle for a bag of food in order to raise money for a new floor for the church. Though both kinds of services were fun to go to, I see myself going to the Catholic one more because, as I stated before, it reminds me more of churches in the United States. However, if things keep going as they are, I might end up going to a different church service every night of the week!

Hello Friends,

I am sad to report that the blogs that I have written on my computer will not open on this computer, so I cannot post them at this time, and with the little amount of time I have, I cannot rewrite them. However, I just wanted to let you all know that I am safe and sound in my community, pretty hidden from the rest of the world. I was able to find out that Obama won HOORAY, and I must say that everyone in the DR is also happy about it. Forgive me for not writing more, I promise I will try to find some way to post soon!

Hello friends!

Here is my new blog, the entries below are those that I have written in the ten weeks I have been here thus far. There are far more to come! Enjoy and keep in touch!

The following is a description of just one of the days I spend in my community while visiting:

Today was a busy day, in the people sense of the word, not necessarily in the doing sense of the world. The morning was spent playing cards with my host brothers and sisters and the neighborhood children. Every once in a while new kids would stop by to introduce themselves and ask me when I was going to give English classes (that's the second most common question they ask me, apart from if I'm Canadian or not—a lot of Canadian volunteers come for small amounts of time). I try to talk to each of these kids, get a little bit of a sense of who they are, and of course memorize their names. We chat about baseball, school, their community, and I sometimes attempt to explain to them where I come from, though it's difficult to do without a map.

For about an hour my host brother and walked around to see more of the community; we went and saw where the clinic was, though we couldn't go in because it was closed. Then we went up on a hill to visit a barrio I hadn't seen yet. This barrio is a little more secluded and muuch more quiet, which was one of the reasons a women there said I should live in that barrio.

After lunch we sat on the patio more. A guy that works for one of the churches documenting the “adopted children” from that church came over and showed me all of his pictures of Canadians that had come by. After that I got ready to go to my meeting with the “jovenes” (young people). We tried to publicize it as much as possible, but it began to rain just when the meeting was supposed to start. This postponed it a bit and meant that only about 12 kids came. Still, it was good for me to introduce myself to them and get to know a bit about them. I asked them what they liked about their community, many mentioned the sense of unity that existed. I also asked them what they would like to see in their community. Many wanted more sports activities, some mentioned that they would like to have more laboral opportunities, and others, of course, wanted English classes. After the meeting I went back to my house, then walked with my sister to see the local disco, where people were beginning to arrive for a night of dancing and drinking. We did not go in, but I was able to meet a couple more jovenes, they are of course the ones that I would not meet at the churches. I am beginning to realize that it is important that I go to different places in the community so that I meet people from different groups.

At seven I was picked up to go to church. Seeing as I didn't go to church much in the US, and I had never been to an Evengelical church service, I was excited to see how this one would turn out. This particular church service was going to be lead by the youth group, and supposedly they had a special activity planned. We arrived by flashlight, since the electricity still hadn't come back, and I sat down and began to watch. I hadn't really thought about it when I sat down, but by chance, I sat down on the women's side of the church, it was only later that I realized that the two sides were separated! At the beginning there were lots of people singing and praying, then the service began, with different people leading songs and speaking about the bible. Towards the end of the service, during one song all the kids got up and began to dance around the room. Because of their religion, evangelicals are not able to dance normal dances, however they are able to move their bodies when praising God, and this is just what they were doing; in two separate lines the boys and girls marched up the aisle of the church moving their bodies, and then marched around the church. They did this several times, and every time they passed me I was smiling, no matter what you believe in, it was obvious that these kids were enjoying themselves and doing something they believed in. The jovenes were never able to do the activity they had planned because the electricity didn't come back in time, and the church was only lit by candlelight, but all the same it was an interesting, enjoyable service. I still have two more Evangelical and one more Catholic church to visit!

I arrived in Batey Las Pajas in the afternoon, after a long ride in a small bus along the coast, up into the sugar canes, and along a shaky, half rock, half dirt road. One of the first things I saw was the school, painted yellow as are all Dominican schools, surrounded by houses. One of my project partners (who I will be working with in the future, and who brought me from the capital to the batey) told me my house would be right in front of the school. My bags were brought on motorcycle around the road over to my house and then I was brought over to the house.

My house is a green, wooden house with a little porch. When I arrived two older women were sitting outside in plastic chairs, watching the people pass. I was immediately hugged and kissed by both of them, and introduced to one as my new host mother--the other quickly added that she lived in the houses next door and I could also consider her my mother. I then met two of my host sisters, a 17 year old and an 11 year old, who showed me the house. The house is simple, but has everything neccesary; it has electricity when available, a faucet in the back for water, cement floors, and a place to bathe as well as a latrine out back.

I spent the five days in my community getting to know the area and the community members. The batey gets a lot of support from churches in Canada, as well as a church in Colorado. Thanks to these churches, the community now has electricity and water faucets, as well as several different after school programs and many other programs to support the youth in the community. The people are very friendly; every time I was introduced to someone they got up and offered me their chair, telling me to sit down and chat.

The batey itself has four different “barrios,” and I have heard estimatesof between 250 and 350 houses total. It has a makeshift baseball field, four churches, a school, two after school centers and lots of little “colmados” (kiosk type stores). When walking around, greeting others, it is not uncommon to trip over a chicken, see a goat, or have to move out of the way for a herd of cows that are coming down the street. Outside of the batey there are field of sugar cane, open fields, and plots of land growing beans, yucca, plantains and plenty of fruit trees. Several times I was able to go into the hills with some of the kids and it was amazing to see all the open space and sugar cane that's out there. Not only was I able to walk around in the sugar cane, but several times I could be found walking along, chewing the sugar cane happily, not thinking of the disappointment of both my dentist and I at my next appointment.

When I left on Sunday morning, I knew I had been placed in the right spot. I am in a place where the people want to work together to improve their community; there are several strong NGOs working in the area that I can learn from and help progress, and best of all, there are a ton of enthusiastic youth who want to hang out and learn from me. I can't wait to return!

Last weekend we were sent to visit other volunteers so that we could see how they lived. Another trainee and I were sent to a city called San Francisco de Macoris to visit a volunteer who is now a Regional Volunteer Leader, which means they have already finished their 2 years of service and have now extended for a year to live in this city and be a contact point for all the volunteers living in the north. After taking a truck down the mountain and then negotiating with a taxi driver to take us to the city, we arrived. It was a lot hotter in the city, but we were happy to be in a new place. After we met the volunteer we went to her house, which is nice according to Peace Corps standards (it had running water and everything). We ate lunch and sat around and pelted her with questions about her service. One of the more interesting things she had to show us was a list of everything she spent one month when she was trying to justify getting a raise. The things she spent the most amount of money on were work-related expenses (copies, folders, books, etc), transportation and food. It was nice to see her budget and where we could cut down on some expenses and what we had to keep in mind when spending our meager salaries. After lunch we walked around the city, our host showed us all the cool, posh restaurants, bakeries and cafes in the city that we of course couldn't afford. She said she felt bad for tempting us, but it was cool just to look in the windows and imagine what we could be eating. We also went to a big supermarket, an activity that I later found out many volunteers who went to cities did, just because big grocery stores are a novelty when you are living in a small town where there is none. At the supermarket we got ingrediants to make brownies, and as soon as we got back we began making them. Our host, like most volunteers, does not have a fridge or oven, but she did have a “baking pot” which is basically a pot that is shaped kind of like an angel food pan, with a whole in the middle, and then a top with holes around the side so that the air will circulate around the entire thing evenly. The Peace Corps Dominican Republic quaterly magazine publishes recipes for this kind of pot in each issue, so we used the recipe and made some excellent brownies, which are also rare in this country! The next day we ventured into the “campo” to visit some other volunteers who still lived in their sites. We first took a minibus to a little village where a technology volunteer was living. He showed us around his town, which was a nice size, and then we all got on motorcycles to go out to the “campo campo” (super small town in the countryside) to visit another volunteer and some other trainees who were visiting her. Her site was interesting, it was very, very small and rural. The one thing that all of us were surprised at was the state of her latrine. She shared a latrine with another family, and it was in awful shape; there were bugs and toilet paper everywhere and it smelled awful. Apparently even when she cleans it, the other family that she shares it with doesn't bother to keep it clean. That definitely made all of us hope that we would not have to use a latrine, however later a neighbor told us we could use her latrine, and when I went in that it was actually quite lovely: it was painted dark green and light green, it was completely clean and there were no bugs (somebody said a frog lived in there and took care of the flies, but I didn't see it). After that I felt better about the prospect of using a latrine. We had a lunch of chicken fajitas and guacamole at that volunteers' house and just hung out. Another interesting part of her living situation is that little kids were constantly playing outside her house and peering in at all the “Americanos”. After talking to some other volunteers, they made it clear that many people set limits as to where the kids can play and when people can come over, so that they can at least have some privacy when they need it. After lunch and hanging out, we each got on another motorcycles (I forgot to mention that we were not driving, we have to hire drivers which is a pretty common thing to do here) and headed back to the pueblo, where we caught a minibus to take us to the big city to find a bigger bus headed in the right direction. When we got to the bus station we had to do a lot of haggling to ensure that we did not get charged to much, but we finally got on and then got off at the bottom of the mountain. From there we got in a truck for the very long trek back up the mountain. The trip itself was only two days, but traveling took a lot of our time. The total cost of transportation was 800 pesos—about 23 American dollars, however for us, who as of right now are receiving about a dollar a day for spending money, that was a lot of money! Welcome to Peace Corps life!

Today was my birthday, and it seemed as if everyone knew (we have already been warned many times that news here spreads like wildfire). It quickly circulated among the other volunteers that my birthday was Saturday, and since everyone wanted to go out dancing this weekend anyways, we all agreed on a place to go on Friday night, to dance and celebrate. Somehow almost all fifty volunteers managed to agree to going to a bar/dance club on Friday. Only a few people had actually been there previously, and the rest of us were anxiously awaiting our first Dominican dances. Five other girls who live in my neighborhood and I pulled up to this venue after a long taxi cab ride, and were pleased to see that most of the other volunteers were also there. The place that we went is called the Car Wash (yes, in English) which was actually kind of confusing because there are many venues called the Car Wash. Apparently the only way they could get people to come wash their cars in a country where it always rains is if they also provided a bar and a dance floor, which is why many car washes also serve as party areas at night. We arrived at this Car Wash, which was a pretty large open venue, and saw that it not only had a bar and a dance floor but a Jumbotron playing a baseball game at all times. At first we all just sat around chatting, some danced merengue, but most of us just sat and watched, since the majority of us are new to merengue. Suddenly, after a break in the music, the dj put on some good ol' American hip-hop and rap, and within seconds every single American was on the floor dancing. The Dominicans just sat there in awe, a few men tried to get in on the action, but they were clearly out of place. I woke up on Saturday morning to my host mother carrying three chickens upside down by their legs through our house to our little back porch area. I ran for my camera, thinking the chickens were dead and she was going to defeather them, but when I ran back to see them, there they were, squaking around with the family's tiny chihuahua running in between them. I went out with my friends to the grocery store, and by the time I got back one of those chickens was cooking in a pot of soup, which I ate about an hour later. My host mom promises that the next time she kills a chicken, I can watch and learn. I spent the rest of Saturday hanging out with other volunteers, then I ate dinner with my family and was just relaxing when my host mom's sister and her children pulled up in a car and told me to come with them. The kids, who are 6, 9 and 13, are very energetic and were clearly very excited to have me over to their house for a “surprise” party. We picked up my other “aunt” who is the host mom of another volunteer, and talong with the volunteer, we went over to their house. Since my cake wasn't ready yet, the girls insisted that I walk up and down the street with them until it was ready. They made sure my eyes were covered as I walked in the house, and then sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, attempted in English and then sang another congratulatory song in Spanish. We ate some of the cake, took more pictures than you could ever imagine, and then began dancing. Everyone had to dance with me, since I was the birthday girl, and then they all danced among themselves. Later, the girls put a song on called Maraca, which is basically a song that encourages people to dance reggaeton, which is a dance form that children really shouldn't be emulating. The 6 year old and 10 year old got up there and danced around, while I alternated between thinking it was a hilarious sight and being rather horrified that their mother was allowing them to dance that way. Then they put it on again and insisted that we gringas dance. The girls had already taught my friend this dance, so she was used to it by now, but I almost died laughing when I got up there and tried to mimic them (when in the Dominican Republic...)—these little girls certainly knew what they were doing, and I did not! All in all, it was a good birthday, and quite the cultural experience!

Today we went to the downtown of Santo Domingo. We of course had to have our language professors help us down there, because the directions and buses are all very confusing. We went first to the best hospital in the DR, which is where we are to be treated for all of our medical problems requiring attention from the hospital, even if we live four hours away. The hospital was nice, clean, and had AC (a big plus!). After that we went to the Peace Corps office and met the staff and looked around. The office has been in the same large house for about forty years. It's a house that used to belong to a very rich family during the Trujillo era, but PC now rents it . The offices are great, there are a ton of resources for volunteers, air conditioning, wifi, computers, a lounge with cable, basically a place to go if you need a little piece of the US. All of the staff was so nice, both the PC medical doctor and the PC director gave us hugs just because =), and everybody was emphasizing that they are here to help and support us. After that we got a bite to eat and went to the “Zona Colonial” which is the touristy part of Santo Domingo, with all the old cathedrals and national buildings. In the cathedral there were a lot of Mausoleums, one that supposedly contained Christopher Colombus's ashes, but I don't quite believe that. We continued to walk around the colonial zone and then made our way back to our barrios. For me, the most fun/interesting thing that happened today was something very normal for most Dominicans: A ride on the “Gua gua”. Gua guas are local public buses that travel certain routes. There are fairly small, smaller than the normal school bus but bigger than our vw van. Despite their size, five people are supposed to sit across each row of seats (technically there are four seats, two on one side, one on the other side and one that folds down to block the aisle). Of course, many people are packed standing in the front where the seats end. My favorite part of the Gua gua is the “cobrador” who is the guy who rides in the doorway, announcing the route to all and any who are listening. To us it seems like every cobrador who passes is trying to convince us to get on, even when we know that is not the route we want. When the bus fills, he leans over everyone, making things very uncomfortable, so that he can collect everyone's money. Our cobrador today packed as many people as he possibly could in the car. Some refused to get on, but he didn't get the hint, and at the next stop he would try to pack more people on. We were riding with some other volunteers who had to get off before us, they had gotten on first, and were thus in the the very back, but they had to get off before the rest of the people in the front (and there is only one door—in the front). When they announced that they had to get off, everyone started grumbling a bit, people had to get off and lift up their seats, and others had to step out of the gua gua, to let our friends off. Then something so organized happened that it took me by surprise: everybody was yelling that those going to Pina (I'm assuming the last stop) should move to the back, and when we told them where we had to go, they told us to move to the front a bit. There were several ladies looking after us, making sure the cobrador knew when we needed to get off, and telling us where to sit down (we had gotten up and were falling all over people because we were standing while the bus was moving, trying to get to the front). The fact that everybody had their own collective system, without the rules posted or noted anywhere, was something I had never seen in public transportation in other places (In Buenos Aires people would push each other and jump in through windows to get a good seat). I was also touched (though it was probably normal) that some of the older ladies took care of us and made sure we were all right.

Okay friends, I've decided that I'll start a blog so that I can put up all my anecdotes and not bother you all with too many emails. Just remember, I still want to hear from you all!