Two years ago today, about 4:30 p.m., I was headed home to my campo house in El Limon, when I got a text from David. It said something like, “If I’m not mistaken, that was an earthquake.” His house in San Francisco de Macoris was shaking, so much that he went to stand in a [...]
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We live in a simple flat in a middle to upper class neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. It’s not Petionville, where all the aid workers and rich Haitians live. It’s Delmas 65, in the middle of the city, where dust makes a thin crust on allour belongings and it’s blazing hot in the summer. These days there [...]
I can’t believe it’s been five months since I packed Mittens and all my belongings onto an overloaded bus to Port-au-Prince, arriving 10 hours later next to the collapsed presidential palace in a hubbub of vehicles and pedestrians where a lone blan was waiting for me. I’ve been bad about blogging, and the excuse I’ve [...]
On my first trip back to the United States in December of 2009, I had been in the Peace Corps for more than nine months. I wrote a blog post about America’s Top 10. Now that I’m on my fourth trip back, I thought I’d do another list, with a different 10 things. Here goes. [...]
I thought the Fourth of July was going to pass with little or no recognition on our part. We knew of no Fourth of July parties – the closest we heard of was a celebration for Canada Day. But then, because we recently signed up to be wardens for the U.S. Embassy (an emergency notification [...]
David sent me this interesting essay about teaching an illiterate Haitian woman the very first steps of learning to sign her name. It’s written by one of the case managers in Fonkoze’s program for the ultra-poor. Worth a read.
Yesterday I finished up meeting with PSI about volunteering for them and called David, who was in the Central Plateau for work. He suggested I take a tap-tap there, as he did, and hang out. It seemed unlikely. But then I thought, why not? I packed my stuff up and went with my trusty mototaxi [...]
I’m about halfway through my second Haiti book, The Comedians, by Graham Greene. It’s easy to feel like you’re living it – not only because all the places are the same – the main setting is the renamed Hotel Oloffson, which is also featured in my Facebook profile pic. It’s also because the characters haven’t [...]
I have a Google alert for Haiti and lately, in addition the usual reports on politics, WikiLeaks, and mission trips, Rory McIlroy, the young golfer who won the U.S. Open, has been featured prominently. Everyone seems to love the story of how he lost it at the Master’s and then recovered with a trip to [...]
I just finished reading my first tell-all Haiti book, a canonical work called The Rainy Season by Amy Wilentz. It was great. I recently met a long-timer anthropologist in Haiti who said after years and years of living here you can see some flaws in the book, but I didn’t see them, and I found [...]
It’s been very strange, as my friend Alanna pointed out in her recent blog post about her visit to Haiti, to leave Peace Corps and enter the world of international development, whose capital might as well be Port-au-Prince, judging from the number of expat aid workers and NGOs here. Here’s a quick profile of the [...]
I started my first online classes toward an MA in Communication last week. One of my assignments in Research and Writing Methods was to search for academic articles on a potential thesis topic. My interest right now is the communication campaign in response to last October’s cholera outbreak in Haiti. Education is really important because [...]
Stop 1: Lunch at Epidor with a Haitian Creole professor. We had delicious whole wheat subs and talked about Haiti’s future with a well known Creole instructor and author. Stop 2: Manchester vs Barcelona soccer game with a bunch of European expat aid workers at a swanky hotel in Petionville, the hilltop haunt of Port-Au-Prince’s [...]
I feel like I’m overdue already for an update on life in Haiti. Here’s a random assortment of what’s been going on. 1. I’ve been reporting a story with friend and photojournalist Ben Depp, whose blog with wife Alexis I highly recommend you read. On Monday he happened upon an eviction of a camp in [...]
Last Friday, most of my dearest Peace Corps friends got on planes to the United States, where family, friends and even one boyfriend were waiting on the other side. I, on the other hand, went to a sketchy part of Santo Domingo at 5.30 in the morning and boarded a bus full of Haitians, who [...]
In the last few weeks I’ve said my goodbyes and had my last great moments in El Limon. My dear childhood friend Katie Gerber came to visit, we had my despedida, and I picked up the next volunteer who will be working in El Limon. Tomorrow, Mittens and I are going on the 6 am [...]
As soon as you make them, they change. For the last few months, I’ve been planning on starting an MA in Communication at Johns Hopkins in Haiti via online classes for the summer, then moving to DC to finish out the one-year program in person. Then David’s organization offered to sweeten his situation to keep [...]
Yesterday the elementary school principal, a Fulbright teaching grantee and I did our part to share what we learned from last weekend’s education conference by giving a day-long workshop for 19 teachers. I think we could have been a little better organized, but I should appreciate what a miracle it was to have that many [...]
I was in the guagua (public bus, in this case, more specifically a pickup truck) sitting two to the passenger seat on my way back to El Limón from Las Terrenas, watching the waves roll up the beach from the turquoise water, and I thought to myself, is this the last time I´ll make this [...]
Yesterday two graduates of my second round of Escojo Mi Vida, the Peace Corps DR initiative for sex ed, premiered their radio show “Escojo” on our community radio station, 100.1 Cascada FM. By Peace Corps standards, it was a miracle. Last week, we met in the park in darkness to plan out our upcoming trip [...]
From My pics Amanda and I were the main planners. I’ll be leaving my community and finishing Peace Corps in about one month (!!!), but this weekend some of my favorite fellow Peace Corps volunteers and I hosted a three-day conference for educators in one last hurrah of ambitious projects before this whole show is [...]
Yesterday in El Limon we concluded a second course of Escojo Mi Vida, a Peace Corps DR initiative to teach sex ed through peer health promters – ie, youth who learn about sex ed and then teach it to others. It was an epic graduation with 21 graduates, “padrinos,” or sponsors, who accompany the graduates [...]
One of Peace Corps’ world-wide initiatives is to empower girls through gender-based activities. In the DR, we have a program called Chicas Brillantes (Brilliant Girls) where volunteers form girls’ groups that do arts and crafts and sports and learn about self-esteem, standards of beauty, and women’s health. Through these activities, the program tries to instill [...]
After I came back to the DR from the States in January, I was inspired anew with how beautiful my community is on this little peninsula called Samaná. Knowing how short my time left here is, I decided to start taking pictures again, something you stop doing after you lose the tourist feeling and start [...]
On March 5, I completed two years in country. We arrived in Santo Domingo after one night in Miami on March 5, 2009. It feels like two years because we’ve done and learned so much. Congratulations to my whole training group!
Today I went to mass at the Catholic Church in town wearing red, white, and blue. It was the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day, commemorating this day in 1844 when a Dominican trio of commanders – led by the blue-eyed Juan Pablo Duarte – expelled the Haitians, who after gaining their own independence from France to [...]
I know, what happened, that I’m suddenly reverting back to college, or worse yet, high school. But considering that Peace Corps is a two year commitment, and there are two training groups that come in a year, in the DR we always have four groups of volunteers, with six months’ experience separating us. Since fall, [...]
This week was our Close of Service conference, our final get-together with our entire training group where we learn about reverse culture shock, Peace Corps health insurance, and talk about what we could improve about Peace Corps DR. We stayed at what for us is a swanky hotel near the airport in Santo Domingo, with [...]
I went to a girls conference for female empowerment and gender equality this weekend (a great lead in to Valentine’s Day, right?) with two girls from my sex ed group, and all the other volunteers were asking me what I’m doing after I finish my Peace Corps service in May. I told everyone how I [...]
A few months ago I watched Pedro Almodovar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother), a surprising tale of a woman whose son’s death leads her to revisit her past as the wife of a transvestite and in the process meets a nun who bears the same man a child. He is an incredible [...]
It seems funny to me, maybe proof of my own point that you can know how your culture affects you but never escape it, that I would write this post right after the last, about how I wish I could stop judging others and myself based on the American value of achievement and work. But [...]
I just got an e-mail from Peace Corps announcing the agenda of our Close of Service conference, the get-together with my training group that happens three months before we leave country to help us transition out of Peace Corps and back into American life. The announcement is long anticipated by my friends and I, who [...]
One of the last projects I’m trying to squeeze out in my last months as a Peace Corps Volunteer is maybe the most ambitious yet. A few volunteers and I are working on planning a conference for principals and teachers in schools where we talk to them about, well, radically changing the way they think [...]
I flew back from my third trip to the U.S. as a Peace Corps Volunteer on Sunday. I stayed the night in the capital and returned to my site on Monday, feeling a little like a hometown hero riding on the back of a motorcycle with all my luggage as people excitedly greeted me after [...]
It´s almost time for me to go home again! This time it´s my sister´s graduation, and Christmas, and New Year´s. I´ll be in one of my very favorite places, Gainesville, Fla. I´ve been anticipating this for a month now, because the last month has been busy with parties, youth conferences, and visiting friends. We had [...]
I can’t remember exactly when the idea came to me, but I’m pretty sure it was part of my lamenting that there are no cool places to take students on field trips, when I thought it would be great to take my journalism class to tour Listin Diario, the newspaper of record here in the [...]
This weekend two students in my journalism class and I participated in a workshop sponsored by the Office of the First Lady, or the Despacho de la Primera Dama. Held in Santo Domingo, it brought two journalism professors from the University of Miami to give two-day crash courses on community journalism, with the aim of [...]
There is a doña in my neighborhood whom I walk by almost every day. Almost every day, this elderly woman is doing laundry, not an easy task with the semi-automatic washers here in the DR. Since she washes for an entire household, she puts load after load into the machine, bends over to manually rinse [...]
I went to an event last weekend at a volunteer’s community library, by far one of the most incredible projects in Peace Corps Dominican Republic history. (OK, there’s no way I can back up such a claim, but you’ll just have to see it.) We celebrated art night, a gathering of volunteers who shared artistic [...]
http://www.youtube.com/v/mfNSd2i1YmU?hl=es&fs=1On Wednesday, the group of youth I taught through the Escojo Mi Vida reproductive health program did their weekly radio show on HIV/AIDS. They invited a woman living with HIV they knew in the community who is much more open about her situation than most, who experience deep shame over being infected with the virus. [...]
Last night I had the unique experience of becoming a godmother! I know! This lady in my community has befriended me. She has HIV, and I met her because she works with a volunteer in a nearby town in the support group they have. She asked me to be the godmother for her son, and [...]
From Conociendo El Limon Dear friends, I`ve been absent, I know. First, a bout of the one-year blues, as a fellow volunteer has dubbed it. Then, my computer died! Or se jodió, got screwed up, as we say here in the DR. In other words, my ability and enthusiasm for sharing my experiences has been [...]
This week I had a visit from a fellow volunteer who has built a beautiful, fully stocked and staffed library in her community. It´s a truly incredible project that will provide an opportunity for youth in her town for years and years, no doubt. But it also highlighted for me another of the tough questions [...]
I have been having a tough time readjusting to life in the DR after a fantastic trip to the US. Basically, I left for the States feeling satisfied with my work. I came back with fresh questions about the significance of it all. So I thought maybe I should try to sort out these conflicting [...]
From Actualizado recientemente That’s a John Prine song, pa que sepan. This weekend was the Fourth of July. We met up in Las Galeras, a town on the tip of the peninsula where I live, to sunbathe, dip in the ocean and river, drink rum and dance bachata. It was a bucket of fun. Some [...]
OK OK OK OK OK OK As my DJ friend Chupy would say on the community radio station when he’s going for an extra creative transition between songs. I have officially started ”La Hora Americana” on our radio station at the community computer center. a little bit of English lessons, a little bit of American [...]
From Foolin’ around Here´s a dorky table I made to vet some of my project ideas for the coming year. Blue is positive, purple is maybe, and red is no. Now that I´m fully integrated in Dominican culture, I´m chronically late. So you can forgive me for the one-anniversary blog post coming, well, tarde. My [...]
This weekend I went to a youth conference for a sex education program that Peace Corps works on nationally. It´s called Escojo Mi Vida, or I choose my life. It works through volunteers, who teach a youth group in their community about STDs, teen pregnancy, and safe sex, and then spreads through the graduates, who [...]
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