A big part of my job as a Youth Volunteer and educator is preparing my youth for their future. Informing them of the options available (work, school, etc). Identifying their skills and abilities to best choose a future path. Empowering them to pursue their goals and aspirations and, lastly, helping to prepare them for the next steps. This work can at times be frustrating in its lack of tangibility. I am essentially planting seeds in hopes that one day, long after I’ve left the island, the seeds will grow and prosper. It’s important work but as I only live here for a finite amount of time, I selfishly want to see the results of my efforts and see my youth put the work we do in the community into practice. This past weekend, I got just that. This year is the second in which Peace Corps DR has put on the Mi Futuro Brillante (My Bright Future) Conference. The conference is offered for those of us who work with girls empowerment groups in our communities and offers an unequaled opportunity for the girls from our bateys, campos and barrios. In this conference, volunteers each bring two girls from their community who are high school-aged and show potential for and have expressed interest in attending college in hopes of someday becoming a professional. All of the girls descended upon a nice hotel in the Capital last Thursday for three days of future planning. First, the girls took personality tests, telling them their personality types and which types of careers generally work best with their personality type. They received a presentation of professionalism and preparation for the next morning when they would meet and job shadow a Dominican professional. Each of the girls was asked their career aspirations and matched to the best of our abilities with a Dominican woman working in that career field. Nine professional Dominican women working in and near Santo Domingo agreed to participate in the conference. The women represented a wide variety of careers. There was a lawyer, a gynecologist, an orthodontist, two engineers, a psychologist, a nurse and two women who work for Peace Corps. Most of the women were young and served as ideal role models for our girls. All of the girls and professionals met for breakfast on Friday morning before departing to each of the professional’s office or workplace where the girls would get to interview and job shadow them. Volunteers accompanied their girls on the visit and my girls, Marta and Caina, visited an Industrial Engineer. Caina hopes to study engineering and Danelis, an Industrial Engineer living and working in Santo Domingo, showed us the plastics factory where she works. Danelis is effectively in charge of all that happens on the plant floor and the management of each of the plant’s 70 employees. The factory makes plastic lids and bottles used for bottled water and other beverages (an environmentalist’s nightmare). We were able to see the machines that made the bottles and learn about the process. The girls were able to see a woman in charge of what is often considered (at least here) to be a “Man’s World”. The visit was very interesting and empowering for the girls. Friday was the day when the girls saw what they can achieve in the professional lives. Saturday was the day in which they learned how to get there. In the morning we all hopped on Santo Domingo’s Metro and rode the few short stops to the UASD, the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. The UASD is the largest university in the DR and the oldest university in the Americas, founded in 1538. I had never visited the campus and was astonished to see how beautiful, modern and campus-y it was. The girls got to see a University campus, its buildings, its students and its energy.The conference served as an educational and empowering tool for the girls and a tangible success for us Volunteers. We tell our youth day in and day out that if they work hard and study hard, they can achieve their goals. Sometimes it can be difficult for them to firmly grasp what that hard work consists of and where exactly it can get them. At Mi Futuro Brillante, the girls were able to see and experience where studying can get you and what you can achieve through hard work. They got to meet young professional Dominicanas and visit the university they could someday attend and the office they could someday work in if they continue working hard and dreaming big. The girls felt inspired. We Volunteers felt proud. Everybody wins.Caina (left) and Marta (right) with Industrial Engineer Danelis

December is a tricky time in the DR. The weather cools to more bearable temperatures, school finishes up and life in general winds down before the holiday season. There is often not much work to be done in December and many PCVs go home for the holidays. Just another perk of being a PCV in the DR – flights to the US couldn’t be much easier.I would attempt to tell you about how I am spending my time in the USA, but my friend Duncan is a bit more eloquent and much more humorous in doing so. A group of us traveled cross-country while Occupying a Minivan. Read more here:Duncan Peabloggy

Easily one of my favorite Dominican Spanish words is chichigua, or kite. Every year around this time the chichiguas come out in full force. In fact, most fads here seem to be seasonal. Through the holiday season kites will be the rage only for the winds to die down in January when the games of cricket will take over the streets, then marbles, hula hoops and whatever else the kids can get their hands on.While some of these fads come and go, kites are one that seem to happen each and every year. Hula Hoops, for example, might be a passing fad brought on by a group of missionaries bringing dozens of toys to my community. Kites, on the other hand, are made and not received. Along with the increasing winds that pass through this time of year, the sugar cane also begins to flower. Children go into the cane, cut down this flower and use its stalk to make the base of their kite. They then rummage through their homes or the local garbage heap for plastic bags and some string and voila, a kite is born.If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times that the ability of a Dominican child to create and invent with limited resources is truly remarkable. With the most basic of materials they are able to build complex vaina. Whether they are creating a kite from scratch or fixing a broken bicycle, they live the adage that says, “One man’s trash is another muchacho’s treasure”. As a child, it would have never even occurred to me to make a kite. A kite is something you buy. But here even a 4 year old and scrounge up the necessary materials and creativity to make their very own chichigua. They might not have much but they have that, and that’s something.

The Dominican Republic is a country well known for its beautiful white sand beaches. It is also a small country – ensuring that all Dominicans live within a relatively short distance from any number of the aforementioned beautiful white sand beaches. This would lead many to the assumption that all Dominicans have been to the beach. That assumption is, regrettably, incorrect.Can you imagine living in Florida, Southern California or any of the Hawaiian Islands and having never been to the beach? I cannot. I can hardly imagine being from North Dakota and not having traveled to Florida, Southern California, Hawaii or elsewhere to visit a beach and catch a glimpse of an ocean. Lucky for some Dominicans who have been thus far in their lives deprived of swimming in the large bodies of water that surround their country, we Peace Corps Volunteers have Grant Money and we like the beach. This past weekend myself and 5 other Youth Volunteers who live in bateys offered their girls volleyball teams a weekend of facts, fun and of firsts. On Saturday, we 6 Volunteers and the 36 young voleibolistas met at a nearby retreat center for a day of learning. We Volunteers led charlas, games and activities dealing with Good Sportsmanship, HIV/AIDS, Teamwork and Dehydration. Lots of facts. At our last Volleyball tournament two girls fainted due to dehydration so we thought we’d drop some knowledge on the importance of pumping your body full of water. On Sunday morning we all loaded onto buses and headed to nearby Guayacanes, located along the Eastern coast and home to a beautiful white sand beach. We strung up a net and played volleyball in the baking Caribbean sun all day long. Lots of fun. For some of the girls, it was their first beach trip. That alone made the day worthwhile. I often feel as a Peace Corps Volunteer that what I really do here is offer opportunities. Opportunities for my community members to meet and know an American. Opportunities for my youth to learn about things they otherwise might never learn about. Or for them travel with me to Camps and Conferences in distant parts of their own country they otherwise would never go. Or to take someone to a beach they live less than 50 miles from but would never have seen had a strange white guy not been sent to live in their community for two years. The day was nearly perfect. The girls thoroughly enjoyed the surf and the sand. The Volunteers thoroughly sun burned themselves. I say nearly perfect because our beach day was on a Sunday – and Sunday is the day people here tend get drunk – and drunk men on the beach are attracted to 36 volleyball playing teenage girls and their 6 white friends like moths to a flame. We spent large amounts of time chasing away persistent drunk men with a Herman Cain-like tendency to sexually harass any female in sight. It is incredible to me how comfortable I have become in the past two years at scolding people. From children straight on up to adults. I have no reservations telling someone to get lost or stop being such an ass. Two years ago I didn’t even know how to say such things in Spanish. Now not a day goes by without it. Sadly, being blunt and/or short with people is effective here. If you simply ask the drunk assholes on the beach to “Please, go away. We’re trying to hold an activity. Thank you.” they’re simply going to persist. But if you are to say “Seriously dude, go away! How many times do we have to tell you no?” they might just get the picture and go harass someone else. As a male Volunteer, my life here is exponentially easier than that of a female Volunteer. Female Volunteers here, and I imagine in many (most?)) other countries, have to deal with copious amounts of sexual harassment each and every day. It’s gotta get exhausting. Not to mention ugly and degrading and gross. I knew it was tough to be a female here but after more than two years in this country, it took me one day at the beach for it to really hit home. Dominican men can be gross. Men can be gross. People can be gross. Why do people insist on being gross? But side rant on the occasional ways of Dominican men and hardship of female PCVs aside, the event was a major success. Our girls learned, they played, they enjoyed themselves and some of them had a major life experience of seeing/swimming in the ocean for the very first time. That’s big. And it’s all because we offered them a simple little opportunity.Our Beautiful Court

Lunch Break

Bumping, Setting and Spiking for the Tiguere Spectators

October 28th marked the official end of my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Or it would have were I not extending my service and sticking around until June. While I and many others from my group have extended and, therefore, treated October 28th as any other day, a number of people did leave. Closing this chapter and moving on to a new, more American one.

I never expected that when November 2011 rolled around I would still find myself here in the DR. I didn’t expect to still be writing these blog posts by candlelight, awaiting the return of the electricity so I can type and upload it to the interwebs. For more than two years now the date, the numbers, 10/28/2011, have been so meaningful. They represented a goal. A milestone. And now it has come and gone with little fanfare. This fall has been a strange one. September was undoubtedly my most busy and productive month as a PCV. It was followed by a major October slump. All peaks in Peace Corps seem to lead to an inevitable valley. And now November presents itself as another mountain to climb. Aside from the return of numerous Peace Corps camps, conferences, trainings and more, I’m starting to finally start seriously looking towards my life post-Peace Corps. Attempting to do some personal development on top of the Grassroots development. This includes researching Grad School programs, filling out applications, writing personal statements and deciding where it is I want to live when my time in the Caribbean comes to a close. America is big. It is home to many good schools. Lots of cool cities. How am I supposed to settle on just one place? Can’t people just commute from Denver to New York? Seattle and the Bay Area look close on a map. In the DR, mountains and cities and beaches and deserts are all just one uncomfortable bus ride away. I’m going from a country roughly the size of New Hampshire to a country in which New Hampshire is among the smallest of 50 fairly large states. America. It’s a daunting place. An unfortunate accompaniment to applying to Graduate School is the GRE. Yet another godforsaken standardized test in the life of an American student which does nothing to reflect one’s true intelligence/abilities. It costs $200 and requires a fair amount of studying. Trying to study in what is easily one of the world’s loudest countries borders on tortuous. There is literally no where one can go to escape the noise. I went to a large shopping center called Jumbo (think Latin American Target) last week to sit in the food court and take a GRE practice test. Jumbo is about 30 minutes away in the nearest city. It is glorious there. In the store I mean, not the city. The city, San Pedro de Macoris, is pretty awful. I sat amongst the bustle of people eating, shopping and getting wrapped up into the arms of commerce and even with all the noise and distraction, Jumbo provides a better learning environment than anywhere in my community. It's loud here. It's no wonder schoolchildren in the DR don't learn, they can't hear a god damn thing.November 2011. Still here. Who woulda thunk it? This country certainly has a strange effect on people. They simply can't leave. And when the finally do, they suffer from chronic hearing loss. Seriously, it's really loud here.

The end of September marked the end of my 26th month as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps service is a 27-month commitment. You do the math. The end is near. Or it would be anyway had I not made the decision to extend my service and stay on the island for another 7 or 8 months. I’ll be continuing work in my community while taking on leadership roles within Peace Corps DR with our Camp Superman and Deportes para la Vida initiatives. Even as I’m sticking around for a while, the end of October marks a milestone. A number of Volunteers from my group, those who arrived together to the sweltering summer heat of the DR in August 2009, will be heading back to America to begin their lives as ‘Returned’ Peace Corps Volunteers. The imminent finish line becomes more apparent and more realistic with every passing week. In early September, the 38 who remain from my group attended a 3-day Close of Service Conference intended to give us all the tools necessary to readjust back into American life. Then a few weeks later the most recent edition of the PCDR Publication ‘Gringo Grita’ came out and featured surveys filled out by the 38 of us entering our final month of service. It is essentially a yearbook full of our funniest and most cherished experiences of the past two years. Now we’re in October and people are starting to leave the island. Volunteers are hopping into taxis headed for the airport and simply disappearing off the island. The support system and family of Volunteers we have shared the past two years of our lives with are moving on to different and more American things. It is a strange and nostalgia-filled time of service. How 27 months can pass by so damn fast I will never know. When someone first applies to the Peace Corps, they can’t help but think 27 months seems like a long time. A sizeable time commitment. It’s not. Well, it is, but it’s not. It feels like just yesterday we stepped off a plane in Santo Domingo and were thrown headfirst into an endless cycle of cultural and linguistic misunderstanding. To sweat, mosquitoes & colmados. To rice, beans & viveres. To Dengue Fever, Intestinal Parasites & Scabies. To meeting Dominicans who treated you like family and to meeting 50 strange Americans who in two years you would recognize as family. It’s almost impossible to believe that so many of us are now in our 27th and final month of service. It's strange. It's sad. It's exciting. It's unfathomable. It's here. It's now. It's happening.Where does time go?

It is September and in some northern parts of the world, summer is turning to fall. Children are back to school. Leafs will soon be changing their color. Weekends will soon be dominated by football.

Here in the DR, fall doesn’t exist. It’s as hot as ever and the Tropical Storms and Hurricanes that keep passing through have allowed mosquitoes to reproduce in alarming, Dengue Fever-inflicting numbers. There unfortunately is no football, though the Dominican Baseball League will start up again in October, which is better than nothing. And children will return to class whenever the hell they feel like it.

Classes were to officially begin nationwide on the 17th of August. That was three weeks ago. But neither the teachers nor the students had any interest in holding class so early in August. It’s hot after all.

The overwhelming majority of children in this country attend public school (if they attend school at all). Public school is held in sessions, or tandas, taking place in the morning from 8-12 or in the afternoon from 2-6. The tanda system lessens the inevitable issue of overcrowded classrooms and the limited number of trained teachers in the country. The tanda system also allows for just 4 hours of class time per day. Of those 4 hours, maybe 2 are actually devoted to education. The other two involve arriving late, leaving early, idly sitting and throwing rocks at one another.

The education system is a problem. A big one. For my money, it is the biggest issue this country faces.There is a big push here to bump federal spending for K-12 Education up to 4%. Currently, the government devotes just 2.3% of the GDP to K-12 Ed. This is one of the lowest percentages in the Americas and in the world and goes a long way to explain how the school system here can be so abysmal.For reference: the US gives 5.8%, placing us 37th internationally. Socialist Scandinavia gives the most of all developed countries (naturally) with Denmark giving the most at 8.5%, ranking 8th internationally. Fellow Caribbean nation Cuba gives the most at 18.7%.With Presidential elections upcoming in 2012, this push for 4% has gained a lot of traction and presidential candidates are hopping on the 4% bandwagon. Meanwhile, the city of Santo Domingo is building a second line on their Subway system, the Metro. Yes, here in a country that suffers from daily power outages and where millions have no access to potable water, there exists a beautiful and well-functioning Subway system in the Capital city. The new line of the Metro is under construction and receiving a whopping 6% of the GDP this year. 6% for one stretch of subway tracks in one city. 2.3% for K-12 Education across the entire country.I don’t mean to suggest for one second that money is the one single ingredient that makes for a functioning education system. It is one of many factors. But if a country places such little value and such little investment into education and its society’s future, it should expect little results.I would also argue that the United States should offer a far higher percentage of its GDP to education. The richest, most powerful country on Earth shouldn’t be 37th at anything. Students in Denmark receive free, high level education through college. American students receive an education of varying quality depending on whether they live in a suburb, an inner city or somewhere in between before entering a university system that will leave them under a mountain of debt. The education system in the US has all kinds of problems but looks positively ideal next the DR’s system.Kids in my community have finally decided it is time to go back to school this week. They have dusted off their uniforms, donned their new backpacks and braved the sun's rays to walk down the dirt road to their modest school. Maybe they'll keep going every day. Maybe they'll learn something. Maybe someday their government will invest as much in their future as it will for one Metro line stretching a few short miles. Maybe.Off to school

Eliecel heads to his first day of Kindergarten

Melinda & Loren look to beat the heat under the shade of an umbrella

Dominicans generally have little knowledge of the world outside this small island. While I recognize this to be a generalization, after two years here I also recognize it to be accurate. This is especially true for Dominicans living in the more marginalized communities where Peace Corps Volunteers live and work. I obviously don’t expect people in developing countries to jet set across the globe, but I would expect the local education system to offer, well, some basic education. I’ve also been here long enough to know this is too much to ask. In order to educate our Youth about the world outside the island, some volunteers teach world geography courses. Another way we teach our youth about the world is through annual regional diversity conferences. These conferences take place in the Northern part of the DR (Celebrando el Cibao), the Southern region (Celebrando el Sur), and here in the Eastern region (Celebrando el Este). These conferences bring youth from around the DR together to discuss their diversity, their communities, their country and to learn about important themes like discrimination, immigration, culture and religion in the world. This year, along with another volunteer, I planned and organized the Celebrando el Este conference. In mid-August, 35 Dominican youth aged 12-20 got together to do a number of activities and learn about the region, the country and the planet they call home. Like most human beings, Dominican youth learn best by doing. So instead of simply talking at the kids, we got interactive. The kids learned about DR culture and history by playing Jeopardy. They painted a giant map of the world and learned some facts about World Geography. They used that same map to discuss immigration patterns and treatment of immigrants in the world; a very pertinent topic with the DR’s own immigration issues with Haiti.Learning an Irish Jig as we Dance Around the WorldThe kids exercised by doing Yoga, learned new dances by ‘Dancing Around the World’ and made Hummus, Pesto & Bruschetta in our ‘Dips Around the World’ activity. They traveled around the globe and ‘visited’ 9 countries, learning about each one and earning a stamp in their Passport. They saw discrimination firsthand in a powerful activity known in the Peace Corps DR World as ‘Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood’. Enjoying freshly self-prepared Hummus, Pesto and BruschettaCelebrando el Este was the most educational Conference I have been part of in Peace Corps. Our kids not only learned a great deal in one weekend, but retained the information as well. The two girls I brought to the Conference couldn’t stop talking about how much they enjoyed themselves and are inspired to paint a World Map Mural in our community. The Conference has also inspired me to teach a Celebrando el Mundo course to my Boys Club.My girls from Cachena receiving their certificates in front of our beautifully painted World MapJust as a lack of access to books leads to lower literacy rates, a lack of maps and no knowledge of geography can lead to a lesser curiosity of the world. I hope a large map mural in the community and some educated youngsters will spark the interest of others to learn more about the DR and the world we live in.Celebrando an Educational Weekend

The first Tropical Storm of the season has come and gone. Here in the Eastern region of the DR the storm, named Emily, brought some wind gusts and about 24 hours of rain but nothing too fuerte. My site resembled a lake through Thursday afternoon but now things are drying up and the mosquitoes (and probably the cholera too) are coming out in record numbers.

I’ve been very fortunate in my now two years here in the Caribbean to avoid any major Tropical Storms or Hurricanes. In 2009 there were no notable storms and in 2010 one hurricane passed through but did most of its damage in Haiti, naturally. I think we won’t be so fortunate in 2011. August begins the height of the storm season and already we’ve had a named storm and many more predicted. I am generally one of those people who kind of enjoys storms. The claps of thunder. The smell of wet grass. And here in the DR, rainy days allow for socially acceptable laziness and exorbitant amounts of sleep and/or good reading. Win Win Win. On rainy days, meetings are cancelled, classes are unattended and humans are indoors. You see, the only things Dominicans like less than direct sunlight (see recent post) is rain and being wet. I am also generally one of those people who like to try everything or experience everything at least once. So part of me wants to be able to say I experienced a hurricane, earthquake or other natural disaster that occasionally wreaks havoc on this part of the planet. That being said, I am also accustomed to experiencing storms from inside a structurally sound house or even a basement if the occasion calls for it. Here I have neither a structurally sound house nor a basement (nor anything resembling either, for that matter). Even Emily’s modest wind gusts had the zinc roof trembling and the rains leaked through it all day. A mild hurricane could lift my house a la The Wizard of Oz and carry it far from Kansas. So while I would love to one day say I have lived through a hurricane, I would prefer it happened in a post-Peace Corps stage of my life. Maybe in my retirement years when I live in a beachfront, hurricane-proof fortress. Or when Richard Branson invites me to holiday on his private island; he surely has a storm shelter. Until either of those absurdly unrealistic dreams becomes a reality, I'd prefer the hurricanes keep a safe distance from this island.

Barcelona, Spain. 1992. The best basketball team ever and one of the most illustrious collections of talent assembled in the history of international sport wins an Olympic Gold Medal and brings pride to a nation.

Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. 2011. An extremely mediocre group of PCVs competes against a city’s best ballers and brings pride to no one. A Volunteer friend & fellow Iowan just put on a weeklong basketball tournament in his urban barrio in the city of Puerto Plata, on the DR’s north coast. This past Saturday, a compilation of the best local Dominican players in the tournament was invited to test their skills versus a team of Peace Corps Volunteers. The Peace Corps Dominican Republic Dream Team, if you will. A number of the best players among the Volunteers were unable to make the trip, but we liked our chances nonetheless. Due to transport issues (read: Santo Domingo traffic), myself and two other Dream Team members arrived late and missed the entire 1st Quarter of the game. After emptying our bladders following the 5-hour car ride and quickly lacing up our sneakers, we erased a 6-20 deficit and took a halftime lead into the nonexistent locker-room. We had averted disaster and a win by the Americans looked inevitable. In the 4th Quarter, the younger Dominicans caught fire, regained the lead and defeated the mighty Americanos. It was not the Dream Team’s best showing. We won no medals. There was no national anthem. Our pride took a hit. But after the game the Dominican players were taught a few things about HIV/AIDS and were filled with self-confidence and pride of their own after defeating an American Equipo de Sueños. I suppose that's an acceptable consolation prize. And the beer we bought afterwards, used to regenerate our deflated self-esteem, that was a good consolation too.

It seems to be hot just about everywhere. A heat wave is devouring North America and pushing thermometers even in northern lands like Minnesota and Ontario well into the 100s. While it’s not that hot down here, each day brings a debilitating temperature consistently in the 90s. This would be easily tolerable if air conditioning was commonplace or even if the electricity was on during daylight hours to power fans. Alas, we sweat. Dominicans, for being a Caribbean people, are not fond of the sun. They avoid sun as fervently as American children avoid broccoli. They are professionals at seeking out even the smallest slivers of shade. They do everything in their power to avoid making their skin color darker. If they get too dark, people might think they are Haitian and being a Haitian is not a popular thing here in the DR. Being racist against Haitians is a popular thing though.Dominicans’ reasons for avoiding el sol are not simply racial but also very practical. Not surprisingly, it is quite a bit cooler in the shade. When it is too hot to be indoors and AC is decades (maybe longer) away from being a household staple, the shade is a good place to be. I suspect shade-sitting is a sort of national pastime in many developing nations. Shade-sitting. A national pastime.My daily uniform while here in my community usually consists of khaki shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops. Not exactly the business casual ensembles other Americans my age sport to their day jobs. But the current heat wave here has downgraded my uniform to basketball shorts, a sleeveless t-shirt and occasional barefootedness. Part of me thinks this is lazy. Another part of me thinks I am really beginning to dress like a local. Sometimes it rains in the afternoon and the heat takes a break from its onslaught. Then the rain stops and the humidity sweeps in like a wet blanket, making people long for the unrelenting dry(er) heat of the mornings. I suppose heat is preferable to the hurricanes predicted on the horizon. August and September mark the high point of hurricane season. People educated in the way weather works say this will be a highly active hurricane season. Hopefully the people who predict weather patterns are as incorrect about this as they are about most everything else. Easily one of the things I dislike most about living in the DR is the lack of seasons. I want four distinct seasons in my life. I want to wake up, feel the early morning temperature and be able to judge, by that alone, what month it is. With the exception of the few months in late spring when the rainy season is upon us, it is always summer. An endless summer. Many Americans probably think that sounds great. But I want seasons. Four of them. Changing leaves, mounds of snow, rainy springs and hot summers is the climate for me.Hang in there America. Soon enough it will be fall and you will be able to slip on a light jacket and watch the leaves change. Or spend a crisp Saturday afternoon tailgating at a football game, letting cold beer keep you body warm. Our summer never ends. The heat wave lasts 12 months, and then it starts all over again.

The first week in July, PCVs in the DR attempted something previously undone in PCDR history. A 5-day Camp for Dominican muchachos aged 10-14. This marked the third summer in which Volunteers here in the DR have put on Camp Superman. The first camp in 2009 took place over three days, 2010’s camp stretched to four days and this year we upped the ante to five. More days, more activities, more fun and more knowledge dropped.

Along with two fellow volunteers, I helped plan, organize and coordinate the camp beginning back in February and saw it through its fifth and final day last week. It required much work but ended as an epic, muddy success. On July 6th, 16 Peace Corps Volunteers left their respective communities throughout the country and made for the idyllic mountain town of Los Bueyes for the 3rd Annual Camp Superman. As in all Camp Supermans, the idea is to teach young boys how to become young men. To reach young boys in their more formative years before they reach the vulnerable ages in which far too many young Dominican males succumb to delinquency or premature fatherhood. The Camp offers the boys a chance to meet boys from other parts of the country and the unique opportunity to camp in tents, go on hikes, eat s’mores and simply enjoy the great outdoors. Through various educational activities revolving around themes such as Gender, Nutrition, HIV/AIDS Prevention and more, the boys learned valuable information to take home with them to their respective communities. There is also much time allotted for sports, arts & crafts, science experiments, swimming in a beautiful river and doing other fun activities synonymous with Summer Camp. On the Saturday of Camp, we had spent the morning hiking to a beautiful waterfall and were on the homestretch of five days when the skies opened up and the rains fell hard. Our initial reaction was to play. Some boys played dominoes and board games under cover from the rain. Others joined a large game of mud soccer and got dirty. Boys and Volunteers alike were covered head to toe in mud and loving every second of it. Then the flash flood warnings came, tents got flooded, clothes got wet and things almost hit the fan. Fortunately, Peace Corps Volunteers are a resourceful bunch. 16 people worked together to clean tents, hang dry clothes, build a super tent where all 42 boys had a slumber party and saved the day. There are few other people I would want on my side during a torrential Caribbean downpour while caring for 42 muchachos than PCVs. Camp Superman 2011 was an enormous success for both Dominican boys and PCVs alike. The boys were able to enjoy a unique life experience and Volunteers were able to watch the young boys they work with day in and day out in their communities grow and mature before their eyes. In just 5 days, an ordinary boy can learn to become Super.

*Pictures forthcoming. Si dios quiere.

My Escojo Mi Vida youth group graduated from my Sex Ed / Life Skills course in late May. With the course finished and the summer months ahead, we arranged to do 3 community service projects. One in June, another in July and a third in August.Project #1 – A Community MuralAmong the first sights one takes in upon entering Batey Cachena is a large wall on the side of a row house barrack that is peeling away multiple layers of decades old political campaign ads. The wall is ugly. So we painted it.My youth came up with a design that offers a welcome to and description of the community. The wall includes baseball players, sugar cane cutters, a school and an open bible featuring a verse chosen by one of my Christian youth. Each of these are accompanied by the words: Land of Baseball Players, Land of Hard Workers, Land of Professionals and Holy Land (a bit much).We are not nor do we pretend to be proper artists. For that reason the final product was a little lackluster and nothing resembling a work of artistic genius. But my kids did the work themselves and the townspeople seem to like it. Success.

Artists at work.

Welcome to Cachena. The finished product.

I'm back to the noise and unrelenting heat of the DR after 2 weeks Down Under. Australia was a great time but it was somewhat of a tease to be in such a large country for such a small period of time. Can't wait for a return trip to visit other great cities and the bush. That said, experiencing Sydney, diving in the Great Barrier Reef and cuddling koalas with the fam isn't a bad way to spend a vacation.

Sydney Opera House

Sydney Harbor Bridge. We climbed to the top!

Giraffes, Zebras and a skyline view at Sydney's Taronga Zoo

SCUBA Diving in the Great Barrier Reef

Hand Feeding Kangaroos

'Cuddling' Koalas

We left Los Angeles on June 2. We arrived in Sydney on June 4. And June 3? It would seem to have not existed for myself and the other 200+ people on our massive Airbus. For the first time in my life, an entire day has escaped me. Bill Bryson, Iowa’s greatest author, is able to put it more poignantly than I:

“Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the International Date Line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of the earth, it appears I had no being.” – Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. On Thursday June 2, I will board a plane in Santo Domingo and on Saturday June 4, I will land in Sydney, Australia. My youngest sister has been studying abroad Down Under since February and the rest of the fam is going to join her for 2 weeks Aussie greatness. The journey to the world’s largest island, the only island that doubles as a continent and an overall desirable vacation destination will be a long one. But the ends will most surely justify the means.

My Escojo Mi Vida group celebrated their graduation last night. Escojo is a Peace Corps initiative in which we volunteers teach Dominican youth about sexual health and life skills. Over the course of the past 3 months, I have met weekly with my Escojo group to discuss themes ranging from decision-making, HIV/AIDS, discrimination, STIs, the human reproductive system and more.

The HIV rate in the DR is (arguably) between 1-2% and higher still in batey communities like my own. The teenage pregnancy rate is also high and a large part of the problem is lack of education and lack of easy access to condoms and other birth control methods. The goal of Escojo is to educate youth in volunteer's communities to make good life decisions and to educate themselves about sex and HIV/AIDS.

Eleven youth aged 13-20 graduated on Monday. Looking ahead, we hope to do a number of community service projects over the summer. A strong youth group has been lacking here in Cachena for some time and we hope to change that with Escojo.

10 teams. 60 girls. 4 days. 1 camp/volleyball tournament. Sirve Con Fuerza.Sirve Con Fuerza is Peace Corps’ national volleyball tournament. Teams from Volunteer’s sites all over the country come together to test their talents, practice, play, learn and meet new people. I am far from a volleyball coach. I do live in a site where most everyone, male or female, enjoys playing sports. The boys are constantly playing baseball and hoping to be the next local phenomenon to get a Major League contract. The girls focus their attention not on the baseball diamond but the volleyball court. In November the women in my site erected two large poles into a patch of dirt, wrapped a snow fence across the poles and a volleyball court was born. Since then there has been scarcely a single day in which the girls and women of Cachena have not played volleyball. While I’m not a coach and have been hesitant to take on a more formal role with the local players, I wanted to reward my girls for their hard work and persistent practice by bringing them to Sirve Con Fuerza. Since February I have been teaching a course for young girls called Chicas Brillantes. My Chicas group is made up of 16 girls ages 9-16. Each week we talk about a subject involving gender, gender empowerment and showing young girls what they can achieve in this machismo, male-dominated culture. A number of my older Chicas Brillantes are volleyball players and were invited to compete against young girls from all over the DR. The tournament/camp was a great success. The teams were placed into two separate brackets based on talent levels and played lots of volleyball over the course of 4 days. My girls turned out to be one of the better teams and took home the award for Good Sportsmanship. While the girls obviously want to win, a volunteer is likely to be more pleased that their team won a Sportsmanship award than a Championship. The girls also learned about Gender, Nutrition, HIV/AIDS and more. Since arriving back in Cachena after the camp, my girls have been playing lots of volleyball. The entire community was impressed with how much they improved in such a short time and many people made a point to come to my house and tell me how well the girls are playing now. All the boys are now begging for a Basketball Camp where they can improve their skills.I recently received a grant to work on sports, and specifically girls volleyball, in my site and hope to keep working with these girls in the future. They will definitely be a favorite to win Sirve Con Fuerza in 2012.The volleyball court in Batey Cachena.

Sirve Con Fuerza. Cachena were in the orange t-shirts on the far side of the court.

The Dominicans in my site are incredibly resilient people. They unflinchingly face the hardships thrown at them by everyday life and have almost no fear. They regularly deal with fist-size cockroaches, rats the size of kittens and mangy street dogs. They don’t flinch at the sight of a tarantula or snake. They are unimpressed by the constant onslaught of bugs and creepy crawlers endlessly invading their lives. What does scare a Dominican you might ask? Frogs. It is entirely inexplicable to me. Not the mice. Not the rats. Not the snakes. Frogs. A large, fat toad will give them a start, but a small frog that an American child might keep as a pet in a terrarium is enough to set off a small heart attack in my doña.On Friday night I was laying in bed reading and waiting for the electricity to kick on when screams came emanating from the next room. My doña and two host nieces were beside themselves and asking my assistance to kill a frog that at this point had only been heard and not yet seen. We regularly sit and watch rats large enough to abduct small children run freely in the rafters without giving them a second thought. But the possibility of a frog in the house was enough to set everyone into hysterics. They say it is because frogs jump that they are scared. Well tarantulas jump. And bite. And kill. But no one seems to be afraid of that fuzzy ball of death. The ‘they jump’ argument doesn’t hold water for me. Rats carry diseases. The most common rat-borne disease in the DR is leptospirosis. This can be spread through rat urine and result in liver and kidney damage. Rats are known to carry over 70 diseases ranging from typhus to Hantavirus to the bubonic plague. THE BUBONIC FUCKING PLAGUE! That doesn’t worry anyone here. Only Kermit must be killed. So on Friday night as I come out of my room, using the light from my headlamp to guide myself, I see a 5 year-old, a 9 year-old and a 42 year-old standing on the couch (The couch where mice so often like to call home). They are begging me to exterminate a frog that may exist. Using said headlamp, I eventually make out the form a frog no larger than a golf ball sat idly under a table, undoubtedly wondering what the commotion is all about. They want me to kill it. I want to name it and give it a jar full of flies. My hesitance leads to them calling for the nearest muchacho to come take my job as exterminator. Muchachos can do anything and do it for free. Want to buy something at the store? Send a muchacho. Need to send a message to the lady down the street? Send it with a muchacho. Need to kill a 1-inch tall tree frog? Call a muchacho. They do it all. The muchacho who relieved me of my position missed with a couple whacks of a broomstick and the frog hopped away to temporary safety. My doña was disappointed and fears its imminent return. Meanwhile mice are pooping everywhere and eating my clothes and no one bats an eyelash. This is just another example of how strange and oftentimes irrational phobias can be. We as humans are faced with myriad threats every day and it is clowns (coulrophobia), constipation (coprastasophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia) and other random things that make people’s blood run cold. Humans are weird. The escapee frog’s name is Arbolito. A jar of flies awaits his return. Or swift death if a Dominican finds him first.The hunt is on.

Muchacho with machete. Dangerously effective combination.

Throughout my Peace Corps experience and especially in the 2011 calendar year, I have become a semi-professional camp counselor. I’ve had the good fortune to take many young Dominicans from my communities to a number of fun and educational camps, conferences, trainings and more. These camps offer much to our youth including, but not limited to, seeing other parts of their own country, meeting youth from other communities and regions of the DR and learning valuable life skills.In a volunteer’s first year, these camps are often something you simply attend and bring youth to. In a volunteer’s second year, these camps are planned, organized and facilitated by us veterans. In April, I co-coordinated my first camp. For the past 2 summers, Peace Corps has offered Camp Superman, a camp for boys aged 11-13, in which boys camp outdoors, play and learn to be a man. Delinquency and tigueraje are all too common options for young men in the DR and through Camp Superman and boys clubs in our communities, we volunteers attempt to educate young boys about being respectful, educated, mannerly young men. As more and more volunteers begin boys groups in their sites, the Camp Superman model is starting to take off and this year, for the first time, we held a Regional Camp Superman in my very own beloved eastern region of the DR. Two fellow youth volunteers and I did the coordinating and logistical work to make the camp happen. Thirteen Peace Corps Volunteers and 32 Dominican muchachos went to a beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sánchez to spend three fun and educational days in the wilderness. We played games. We slept in tents. We ate s’mores by a campfire. We hiked to a waterfall. We made superhero masks and capes. We discussed gender and what it means to be a man. We gazed at the stars. We swam in the river. We taught about HIV/AIDS and how it can be prevented. We had a great weekend in which everyone, volunteers and boys alike, thoroughly enjoyed themselves. The Regional Camp was a success and did much to prepare us for the upcoming 5-day National Camp in July. My life as a semi-professional camp counselor continues into the summer and my life as a camp planner and coordinator is about to kick into high gear in the months ahead.The muchachos of Cachena

Team Green

Camp Photo with T-Shirts, Capes & Masks

It's harvest season. La zafra. Sugar cane fields throughout the eastern region of the DR are being set ablaze and backbreaking manual labor is all the rage.For the past few months I’ve been able to look across the endless, llano plains covered in cane and see orange glows in the distance. Faraway cane fields being burned. The glow is actually quite breathtaking. The deeper into harvest season we get, the more glows that can be seen each night. I am staring at one right now that is at least one mile away but seems to be engulfing the entire batey. The ash falls like a light snow and leaves everything covered in a layer of cachispa that the children catch like snowflakes and shove into their mouth (claiming it tastes like boiled eggs). The cane is lit on fire to burn away any dead or excess leaves and to scare away any critters, vermin or snakes calling the cane fields home. After being burned, the cane is manually cut by able-bodied men (primarily Haitian immigrants) wielding machetes, collected into large trucks and driven to the nearest processing plant. In the past week I’ve gotten to see the cane cutting first hand. The sugar cane around Cachena was burned and the picadores got to work. The cutters often work shifts of 12+ hours (in the baking Caribbean sun) and are able to cut between 3-4 tons each day. At the moment, they are paid approximately 150 pesos ($3.80) per ton. Somewhere around 13 dollars a day for impossibly difficult physical labor. Meanwhile the sugar cane companies make bank by exploiting people living in abject poverty. A large number of bateyes are owned by the sugar cane companies themselves and only cane cutters and their families are allowed to live there. It is the closest example to indentured servitude I know of. The landscape looks much different when not covered by seas of 10-foot tall sugar cane. Nearby communities are visible for the first time in a year and mountains can be seen in the distance. It’s an interesting time to be in the batey. Already, new sugar cane is growing like a weed where it was harvested just weeks ago. The cycles begin again. One of the growing and harvesting of a crop. One of human rights violations. Both of which will continue long into the foreseeable future.

Flames rising over rooftops.

Taking in the show.

Saturday was Graduation Day for my Engineers Club. We started meeting back in January, doing a different science activity/experiment each week and I told them way back when that we would graduate in 12 weeks. They didn't forget.

In Dominican culture it is very important to have these graduations, ceremonies, etc, to recognize the work one does. There must always be an end goal. Very little doing something for something's sake. So although we still have many experiments left to do and will continue meeting weekly, a graduation was to be had.

In was a simple ceremony in which we discussed the work we have done. My boys who went to Engineers Camp talked about their experience in the mountains of Jarabacoa. We did an example of an experiment (Lava Lamps) for the audience of invited parents, siblings and random community members. Certificates were given to the graduates and we had the obligatory brindis, which is a small snack (in this case soda and cookies) for all attendees.

It was a fun day and the boys enjoyed being recognized for their work (and the cookies).

The graduates and invited guests.

A select few showing off multi-colored 'Lava Lamps'

With their certificates.

March 8th marked the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In recognition of that milestone, volunteers around the DR put together numerous activities to celebrate the big day.Here in the Eastern region of the DR, we waited until the 28th of March to celebrate but better late than never. Two female volunteers organized an extremely interesting event in which girls from 7 different volunteer’s communities would take photos of women in their lives and put them on display.Our youth rarely get the opportunity to express themselves in an artistic manner and have certainly never been to a museum, art gallery or art exhibit of any kind. The photos the girls took were hung on display in a community center, along with a caption explaining the photo, for all to see and enjoy. Along with the photo exhibit, volunteers facilitated a writing workshop in which the girls learned about prose, poetry and letter writing. The girls wrote their own original pieces and shared their writing and/or their photos with the group.This is not an easy country in which to be a woman. No country is I suppose. If it were easy we wouldn’t need days like International Women’s Day in order to recognize the achievements of women and examine the gender inequality that continues to exist in the world. That said, the DR is tough for females. It is always very encouraging and empowering to see young girls come together in this country and get the opportunity to have fun, be unique, learn new skills and do the things we so take for granted in the US of A.This was one of the encouraging and empowering days.The Cachena group doing the Aplauso del Pelotero

Prose Writing Activity

My Girls with their Photos

I just made it back from a 4-day camp with 3 muchachos from my Engineering Club. Twelve volunteers and 32 boys aged 11-14ish spent a Thursday to Sunday high up in the mountains teaching, learning, swimming, playing and feeling colder than any of these boys had in their entire life.

The Engineers Camp, Soy Ingeniero, was held in Armando Bermudez National Park in La Cienaga, Jarabacoa. La Cienaga is among the highest towns in the Dominincan Republic (and the Caribbean) and the primary set off point for hikers heading to Pico Duarte, the highest mountain in the Caribbean. It is an entirely different world than what most of our kids are used to with thick, green forests, ice cold rivers and very chilly nights. We spent the week doing interesting science experiments like building mousetrap cars, building boats of recycled materials, doing density and chemistry experiments, learning about robotics and more. They also did numerous teambuilding activities including having to climb a 10-foot wall as a team and pass through a “spider web” that volunteers put together in trees. There were campfires with s’mores, dips in an ice-cold river, HIV/AIDS activities and intense competition amongst the 4 teams of boys. I have now been to around 10 youth camps and conferences and Soy Ingeniero definitely stands out above the rest. The boys were able to experience a place they never have before and, for many of them, a place they’ll never experience again. The boys were well behaved and engaged in the activities before them. The volunteers facilitated fun and interesting activities and the kids ate up the material. It was among the few camps in which at the end of the weekend, the boys are sad to be going home and the volunteers aren’t burnt out and ready leave. Everything went well and my 3 Engineers are eager to share the new experiments with the club. *Pictures forthcoming

A kind of big thing happened last week. A congressional delegation visited a neighboring batey and the community of a Super Volunteer friend of mine.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. As part of the commemoration of that milestone, a congressional delegation, led by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, visited the DR to learn more about Peace Corps and the work we do here. Other members of the delegation included Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Representative Peter Welch of Vermont and Representative Xavier Becerra of California. The senators and congressmen were accompanied by their spouses, assistants, security teams and the entourage one would expect of such a visit. The delegation was also accompanied by Aaron Williams, the International Director of Peace Corps (and a former PCV in the DR) and the US Ambassador to the DR, Raúl Yzaguirre. A fairly distinguished group of people to say the least. Immediately after their plane landed, the delegation was driven to Batey Experimental (10km down the road from me) in order to visit a Peace Corps community and learn about a volunteer project. Peace Corps Volunteers from each Senator or Congressman’s home state accompanied them on the bus ride to the batey and talked all things Peace Corps. Upon arrival in Experimental, the delegation was met by members of the community and Peace Corps personnel, myself included, and sat for a short presentation led by the Volunteer who lives in the batey, Kerri. Kerri, her host mom/community leader Victoria and USAID reps spoke briefly about their work in the batey. Then a number of Kerri’s youth participated in a Deportes para la Vida activity against volunteers from the delegation. Senators Leahy, Conrad & Hagan, Director Williams and others joined the Dominican youth in playing a game called Encuentre la Pelota (Find the Ball), which teaches that you can’t tell simply by looking at someone if they have HIV/AIDS. The members of the delegation seemed to really enjoy the game and participating alongside young Dominicans. After some gift giving to local youth and obligatory photo ops, the delegation went for a tour around the batey to see first-hand the living conditions of the local people and to also see the living conditions of the volunteer, who lives in her own house. We volunteers translated for the members of the delegation as they asked questions to the people of Experimental and answered questions about the daily life of a PCV. As the batey is quite small, population 350ish, the tour was short-lived and the delegation hopped on buses to Santo Domingo where they had an evening reception at the US Embassy with invited Peace Corps Volunteers and other Peace Corps personnel. The following day the delegation visited Haiti before returning to the US of A. It was an extremely unique opportunity to see a congressional delegation visit a neighboring batey and to meet the Senators, Congressmen, Director, Ambassador, etc. A very small number of volunteers were able to participate in the day’s events, making it a cool honor to be able to participate. It was also very humbling to see such distinguished individuals sincerely interested in the work that we do here. As some of you may know, national service organizations like Peace Corps and Americorps have taken a hit in their funding since the new congress took over. Americorps faces huge cuts and possible extinction. The Peace Corps, which received a large funding increase in 2009 following Obama’s election, has also had their funding cut. These visits by congressional delegations hopefully show to the powers that be how valuable these service organizations can be. If we can pay billions of dollars to bomb countries like Libya and trillions to fight wars in the Middle East, we can certainly afford to fund Peace Corps, Americorps, Teach for America and similar organizations and try to make America and the world a better place. Official Peace Corps News Release of the Visit Video of the Visit Produced by Senator Leahy's 'People' Save Americorps

From time to time teams of medical professionals come from the US to the DR to offer their services free of charge to Dominicans in need. From time to time these teams of medical professionals ask for Peace Corps Volunteers to assist them as translators. A few weeks back I was on of those volunteers.A group of surgeons, nurses and OR technicians from Albany, New York, make the trip to the DR once each year and offer numerous types of plastic surgery. They aim to do work on children with cleft lips, cleft palates or other deformities. I, along with 3 other Peace Corps volunteers, assisted them with their mission in early March. For the past few years (and this year too) the group has done their work at the Hospital Dr. Antonio Musa in San Pedro de Macoris. The Musa, as it is known, is located just 20km down the road from my site and is where people from my own site go when they are ill. The doctors arrived from snowy Albany on a Saturday and on Sunday we did intake for potential patients. Scores of people showed up with afflictions ranging from full body scars to small, almost unnoticeable scars and everything in between. There were fewer children and less cleft lips or palates than the doctors were accustomed to seeing, but a lot of people in need. Surgeries and operations were scheduled for the week and began on Monday.From Monday to Thursday, more than 40 patients were worked on. Our primary role as volunteers was to translate for the doctors and to chat with patients and try to put them a bit more at ease before surgery. We got to meet a lot of interesting Dominicans and a number of patients were from communities near to my own. It was great to be able to make a personal connection, as small as it might have been, with someone living in a batey just up the road or in a nearby city. The small bits of familiarity went a long way to the Dominicans surrounded by strange white people. Translating brought us into the OR itself as we talked patients through the anesthesia process. After they were asleep, we became spectators in the arena that is the OR. It was a mildly intimidating place at first. No one wanted to be the asshole American kid who passed out at the first sight of blood and then needed surgery himself. After seeing a thumb reconstruction on Monday morning, I had no fear and loved being in the OR and in the thick of it whenever possible. The patients we saw came from all walks of life. There were children born wither proper fingers or toes. Adults who had scars from acid burns. An infant born without an opening to her vagina. Three different people who had had their ears bitten off (Tyson/Holyfield-style) in fights. People with scars from machete fights. And much, much more. I had never realized before the medical mission that throwing battery acid on another human being is a common form of vengeance here in the DR. Machete fights yes, malicious acid attacks no. We saw multiple cases of people covered by large scars from acid thrown on them by angry friends of jealous lovers. We also saw a man whose wife, after learning of her husband’s infidelity, doused him in gasoline and threw a match. His entire upper body was covered in scars and the skin of his forearm and bicep had fused together. The doctors unattached it so that he had further arm motion. The team from Albany Plasticare was great to work with. They did a lot of incredible work in a very short time period. When not at the hospital we got to know the doctors and nurses at the hotel we all shared. It was interesting and inspiring to see the work they did. As a PCV, so much of my work is educating youth and preparing them to make healthy decisions in the future. We very rarely see the immediate impact of our work and often struggle to quantify the work we do. The doctors on the other hand could change lives for the better in a matter of hours. They could see the benefits of their work in no time whatsoever. Being part of a medical mission and spending time in an actual operating room was certainly a highlight of my Peace Corps service. Best looking fake doctors in the DR

My batey and others like it throughout the Dominican Republic are well accustomed to having groups of foreigners (almost exclusively Americans and Canadians) drop in for visits. It is almost always a Christian group on a service trip or from time to time a group taking a day trip from their all-inclusive Caribbean vacation to see how the other half lives. The visitors usually make a loop around the batey, snap a few pictures with children, hand out some new toys or used clothes and promptly return to their beachfront hotel feeling very good about themselves and the momentary impact they have made on people living in poverty.I have very mixed feelings on these frequent visits. While these visits can potentially be positive cultural exchanges, there is rarely an actual exchange that takes place. The visitors rarely speak Spanish. They are only here for an hour or two, an insufficient amount of time to exchange names and phone numbers, let alone culture. The visits often amount to nothing more than a group of white people dumping off loads of used stuff and coming dangerously close to what I would define as exploitation. A good (and admittedly cliché) way to look at Peace Corps service and an overused Chinese Proverb says: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,Teach a man to fish and you teach him for a lifetime.” I have two years of Peace Corps service in which to share some culture, drop some knowledge and, with some luck, make an impact on a number or individuals or (with lots of luck) an entire community. Whether it is through basic literacy, sex education, gender empowerment, volleyball skills, proper marshmallow roasting or English language curse words, I’m trying to teach something and create sustainable projects and knowledge that will continue long after I’m gone. Few things can be more undermining to that process than for a busload of Americans to pull into my site every two weeks and hand out free fish of all shapes, sizes and shiny colors. I can’t compete with that. I have no fish to give away. And I don’t blame the people here for preferring free fish to the hard earned kind. Life is already hard. Why complicate it by learning new skills when someone is going to give you what you need? After tourism, the second highest form of income in the Dominican Republic is receiving remittances from friends, family and myriad baseball players in the U.S. and other countries. This is a culture well accustomed to and very comfortable with waiting for help from outside and not always willing to fix problems from within. This past Friday I had a chance to host and plan a productive visit in my community with a group of study abroad students from Virginia Tech. The students are spending the semester in the DR and, as part of a course on agriculture and economics, they wanted to visit a batey / small agricultural community and see and hear first hand how difficult the life of a cane cutter or of people living in bateyes can be. Having an opportunity to actually plan the activities and arrange for community members with intimate knowledge of local agriculture and cane cutting to lead and participate in activities made for an excellent opportunity for experiential learning. My superstar youth and community leaders gave a tour of the batey while I translated. We visited a nearby parcel of land where the community members communally grow all different kinds of crops and food. We walked through sugar cane and later had a productive discussion about the life of a cane cutter, life in the batey and life in America. Later that afternoon the students visited the batey of a neighboring volunteer and learned even more. It was an extremely positive experience and showed me how productive these visits by gringos can be under the right set of circumstances and with some guidance. It hurts to know that after this productive visit, it is just a matter of weeks before a new group of white people shows up and puts us a step back after a large step forward. So it goes. Peace Corps as an organization has 3 simple goals: Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. The visit by the Virginia Tech students succeeded in fulfilling both Goals 2 & 3. All in all a successful day in the life of a Volunteer.Tour of Batey Cachena

Community leader Wilfrido showing off guandules (pigeon peas) and discussing local agriculture.

February 27th is a very busy day in the Dominican Republic. It is both the Dominican Independence Day and the height of Carnaval.Carnaval is best spent here in the city of La Vega, where parades of masked and costumed persons and thousands of onlookers fill the streets to partake in all kinds of debauchery. Innocent bystanders are routinely pummeled in the ass with inflated pig bladders. So it goes. Traditional La Vega Carnaval Masks and CostumesI am disappointed to announce that I did not make it to La Vega for the second year in a row. I instead was in my site where, due to an ever-increasing number of Christians living in my community, they no longer celebrate Carnaval. Christians here are not allowed to participate in the drinking, dancing and other devilish components that make up Carnaval. Some of the non-Christian children did get into the spirit and painted their faces. A far cry from the shenanigans in La Vega, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.Mama with face paint and pelo loco

My Engineers Club has now completed half of the 12-week course we set out to do in January. This week we did what was easily my favorite, and most of the boys’ favorite, experiment to date. We went retro and made lava lamps. I went through a phase in junior high in which my bedroom walls were covered with black light posters. Long, fluorescent beads hung from my doorway. A black light illuminated the many posters while a strobe light simultaneously flickered in the background. I also had a lava lamp. The only thing missing was Grateful Dead music and illegal substances. Those came in a later stage of life. The Soy Ingeniero manual a fellow volunteer put together has instructions for doing a great number of scientific experiments and activities. Lava Lamps are one of them. With a 2-liter bottle, some cooking oil, water, food coloring and Alka-Seltzer tablets, you have a homemade lava lamp. Granted, these do not plug into the wall and bubble for hours, but we rarely have electricity anyway so there’s no need. The boy’s loved making the ‘lava’ bubble and I felt like a giddy 13-year old as I watched the Alka-Seltzer do its thing. As a celebration for completing half of the Engineering course, I put on a movie night for the boys. Popcorn, soda, Valentine’s candy from the US of A (thanks Mom!) and my laptop and we were set. We watched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (or Lluvia de Hamburguesas in Spanish). It is a pretty stellar animated film that incited a lot of discussion amongst the boys about science, invention, right vs. wrong and other topics. It was great to see that even while full of caffeine and sugar the boys were able to have a discussion about the movie before going home and bouncing off their parents’ walls.Movie Night

Cupcakes!!

I'm kind of a P.E. teacher. For the past 3 weeks (and the next few months) two of my superstar youth and I have been spending Wednesdays in the local school teaching Deportes para la Vida (Sports for Life). Deportes para la Vida (DPV) is the program I received training for in December. It’s a really great program that uses sports and games to teach kids about HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy and other problems facing Dominican youth. In our local school there is an hour set aside for P.E. every Wednesday and Friday. But as there is neither a P.E. teacher nor any athletic equipment or guidance whatsoever, P.E. hour is spent sitting in the shade and/or throwing rocks at one another. I don’t blame the teachers for wanting an hour of rest since students here have the ability to drive one completely insane, but that P.E. hour could be put to much better use. Enter Deportes para la Vida. So far we have worked with 6th, 7th and 8th grade students, as those are the kids best able to grasp what HIV/AIDS is and the ones most likely to have hormones in overdrive and/or be sexually active. The kids have been really responsive to the program and we can see instant results in their knowledge about HIV/AIDS after each activity. The students might be little monsters in the classroom but, for whatever reason, they have been really attentive and engaged when given the chance to run, play, compete and learn outdoors. So it seems that for the spring semester, I am more or less a P.E. teacher. The great thing about the DPV program is that what I am actually teaching is Sex Ed and Life Skills but the kids feel like they’re in P.E. A nice head fake to trick the kids into learning.

Easily my favorite ongoing project and looking forward a true passion project of mine in the year to come is my Boys Club. A group of 15 muchachos aged 10-14 who meet weekly to work, play, learn and experiment. We have recently starting working with a fellow volunteer’s Ingenieros Dominicanos, Dominican Engineers, manual. The manual is full of interesting activities dealing with science and engineering and, so far, the boy’s are eating it up. Last week we did an exchange with another volunteer’s boys group in a nearby batey, which was a huge success. We spent the morning doing fun and educational activities and the boys got to leave their communities and meet new muchachos. The boys of Cachena and Experimental at the intercambio.This week in our Engineering Club we made volcanoes, a science experiment each and every American has done but that my kids could have never fathomed before today. They might still have trouble explaining what a chemical reaction is but they relished the opportunity to make their own volcanoes and especially enjoyed making them erupt. Showing off an erupted volcano.

Raudy getting his hands (and no doubt his school uniform) dirty.With the leftover flour all the boys made a giant pot of bollo, a typical local dish consisting of little more than flour and water that migratory workers from the lower Antilles brought to the DR and is especially popular in the bateyes in the east.The boys preparing bollo.

Enjoying the finished product with salami.

Last weekend I made a quick trip into the mountains here in the eastern region to scout out a site where we would like to hold a boy’s camp. While I live in the sugar cane-covered plains, the mountains are but a bus ride away. Just ninety minutes on the guagua brought me to the beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sanchez.

Pedro Sanchez from the LomaMy primary objective of the trip was to scout out the sight for the camp but I had the good fortune of tagging along on a bit of an excursion as well. The local guides group was climbing up a loma to some caves in order to clean up the trails and clean up garbage in the caves themselves. The guides group has had a Peace Corps volunteer working with them for the past few years and currently have a new volunteer as they try to attract tourists to their beautiful mountain setting. I gladly tagged along on the trip and quickly learned how out of shape I am after a lazy holiday season and some time spent stuffing my face in the US of A. After struggling to the top of the loma, and a nice long descanso, it was time to dive into some caves. We went into three caves in total and each subsequent cave was deeper, darker and home to more murciélagos, or bats. In America, if you are visiting caves as a tourist you will most likely be walking along carefully manicured and well-lit walkways ensuring one’s safety. In the DR there is none of the above. We climbed down rocks and boulders in the dark with only a few headlamps to lead the way. The deeper we got, the darker it got. The darker it got, the more bats there were. The more bats there were, the more guano there was to trudge through. It was fascinating to watch the young Dominicans who had been visiting these caves since their childhood run and jump through the dark with ease without a single misstep. It is akin to the Dominican children who live near the beach that have the ability to climb a palm tree, knock down a coconut and climb back down in 8 seconds flat or the kids from my site who can cut down a stalk of sugar cane and tear it apart with their bare teeth without a second thought. Dominican kids develop some fun abilities. The bats were at both times cool and eerie. They could be heard but not seen, without the flash of a camera that is. They would begin to stir each time we approached and the entire cave would echo with their movements. The third and final cave we visited is home to an estimated half million bats.Entering the 3rd CaveThe ground in the cave was covered with guano that locals collect to use as fertilizer and that gringos like me inadvertently slip-n-slide through. All the Dominicans had huge rubber boots with great traction and I was roller-skating around with sad excuses for hiking shoes. By the time we had gotten in and out of the second cave most everyone was completely covered in bat poo. The guides and locals were covered because they had a bat poo fight the way Iowans would have a snowball fight. I was covered because I slipped and fell a dozen times. So it goes. Thankfully Dominican doñas can rid of any stain and have no problems with poop. It was a fun excursion and succeeded in physically kicking my ass. I learned that I will need to work out a bit before finally deciding to tackle Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the DR and all of the Caribbean, which is a volunteer rite of passage to climb during their service.Murciélagos

The Dominican Winter Baseball League takes place each year between October and January, when the Major Leagues are in off-season. The league consists of just 6 teams. A number of Major League players and up-and-coming farm team prospects participate in the Winter League to hone their skills for the upcoming MLB season. The team nearest to my site is the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. As I live nearby (about 15 miles), I have deemed myself an Estrellas fan based solely on proximity. They play in San Pedro de Macoris, the mecca of Dominican baseball, where many of the great Dominican peloteros call home. This year marked the 100th anniversary of the franchise. In all of those 100 years, the Estrellas have won just 3 titles. In a league of just 6 teams. The Estrellas are the (not so) lovable losers of the DR league. The Dominican equivalent of the Chicago Cubs. Due again to proximity and a lack of a professional team in Iowa, I regard myself as a Cubs fan. Both teams have a tendency experience long spells of losing seasons followed by teams with great promise who choke and leave their fans again disappointed. The Estrellas last title was in 1968. One difference between the Cubs and Estrellas is that the Cubs inability to win the big game has become somewhat of an endearing trait. They have one of the country’s largest fan bases. Many, myself included, can’t help but fall for the lovable losers from the North side. Fans stay loyal and each October dutifully utter the words, “maybe next year.” The Estrellas fans don’t find the losing reputation to be quite so endearing. Many have given up entirely and taken to cheering for one of the other 5 teams that win from time to time. This year the Estrellas made it to the league championship against the fellow team from the eastern region, the Toros of La Romana. It would have been fitting for the Estrellas to end their 42-year title drought in the 100th year of the franchise. But in true Estrellas form they lost a best-of-9 series 5 games to zero. The whole San Pedro area was abuzz only to see their team break their hearts once again in a rather embarrassing 5 games to 0 fashion. I’ve yet to hear anyone suggest “maybe next year.” The Estrellas playing Escogido in the Capital

For more on the Eastern Stars and an interesting read check out this book, Eastern Stars, that is making the rounds amongst volunteers living in and around San Pedro.

After spending Christmas in the States, I arrived back in the DR with gifts in tow. I could not possibly have come back empty handed to a chorus of Dominicans asking, ¿Que me trajiste? (What did you bring me?). This is a phrase we volunteers hear more often than we would like. Sometimes after just a quick trip to the Capital for a meeting the local children will ask what we’ve brought back for them. A trip to the giant mall of a country that is the US would surely attract much ¿Que me trajiste?.I obviously couldn’t bring something for everyone and focused my give-giving solely on my host family. I found many trinkets and toys in the US that would be perfect to momentarily peak the interest of local children with short attention spans while also buying things with few parts and little monetary value for when they were inevitably broken. I found crayons, kaleidoscopes, baseballs, candy, etc. And I bought some Christmas stockings for my host family in hopes of sharing some American customs and culture.Since Dominicans do not traditionally exchange gifts on Christmas but on Three Kings or Epiphany Day (January 6th), I was able to partake in the gift giving in both the US and the DR. My most daring purchase was something I planned to buy long before heading back Stateside. Quite often groups of American missionaries pass through my community and other area bateyes and almost literally dump gifts into the hands of Dominican children. (This creates a dependency and makes our job harder - but that rant is for another time.) The most prevalent of these gifts are knock-off Barbie dolls that little girls cling to. They spend hours on end combing Barbie’s bleach blonde locks until the have removed each and every hair on the doll’s head and lose interest. Not even batey children want a bald Barbie. The doll is always the same: white skinned with blonde hair and impossible measurements. The gift I planned to buy each of my 3 young host nieces (ages 8, 6 and 5) was meant to be somewhat of a social experiment. I bought each of them their very own Barbie or baby doll, but each of the dolls had black skin, just like my nieces themselves. I knew that one of two things would occur. 1) The girls would love their dolls and relish the fact that the dolls ‘looked like them’ in some way. 2) The girls would be quick to label the dolls as ‘ugly’ or in some way inferior to the cheap white Barbies they have grown accustomed to. I once watched a video in a college class dealing with this exact issue. When given a choice between white and black dolls, both white American and African American children overwhelming choose the white doll. They say it’s better, it’s prettier, it's nicer and generally preferable to the other. I was interested to know that while this may hold true in a multi-racial United States of America, would it also ring true in a developing nation of dark-skinned people? While I had obviously hoped for scenario 1 to take place, I knew that the more likely reaction was that of scenario 2. And, lamentably, scenario 2 is exactly what unfolded. The 8 and 6 year-old nieces feigned interest in their Disney Princess Barbie for a moment before quickly moving on to the white Barbie knock-off their parents had gifted them. The 5 year-old wasted not a second to label her doll as fea (ugly) and has never touched it since. Experiment failed. Unwanted dolls aside, my host family generally enjoyed their gifts and a successful holiday was had by all.

How it can possibly be the year 2011 right now I really don’t know. Upon joining Peace Corps many future volunteers, myself included, look ahead thinking two years is such a long time and here I am with 10 months left to go not knowing where the time went. This experience is passing by at warp speed.

The past month has only accelerated the feeling that life is passing by too quickly. I spent some time in the US for the holidays. I just couldn’t go one more year without a White Christmas or knowing what it felt like to be cold. It was great to see the snow and feel the cold and even greater to leave knowing I wouldn’t have to drive in it and deal with it for the next 3 months. After some very welcome R&R in the States, my younger sister came and visited me here in the DR for a couple weeks. We traveled around the entire country, jumped off waterfalls, hung out in bateyes, hit the beach, camped in the clouds, celebrated a New Year and her 20th birthday. It was a whirlwind of a trip and a great way to kick off 2011. Now it’s back to the grind and trying to get as much as possible accomplished before these last 10 months disappear as quickly as the first 17 did.I'm usually not one to make New Year's Resolutions, but this year it seems almost necessary as my time here ticks away. One thing I really hope to do is the write and blog more often so as to better document this experience and share my life here with people back home. This is a resolution I am pretty confident I can do. Another is to start weaning myself off of meat. I am far too weak to become a full-fledged vegetarian, but I would certainly like to start eating less meat before my impending arrival back in the US of A. I'll start out as a weekday (okay, maybe 4 days a week) vegetarian and go from there. This resolution may be harder to uphold.I would resolve (as most everyone does) to exercise more but I know myself too well for that. Playing basketball and volleyball in the batey will just have to be enough.And lastly I intend to spend more time in my site and focus on the community and the things we are trying to achieve. I've had some great fun in this country and traveled a lot. In the next 10 months I want to focus more on work and less on play.Happy New Year - Feliz Año Nuevo - Welcome 2011

My last big hurrah before heading home for the holidays was a 5-day camp/training to learn all about Deportes Para la Vida (Sports for Life). Deportes Para la Vida (DPV) is a Dominican offspring of Grassroot Soccer, an American NGO that “uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV.” Grassroot Soccer uses soccer and athletics to educate about HIV/AIDS in the developing world, primarily in Africa. Deportes Para la Vida works towards the same goal in the DR. As soccer takes a backseat to baseball and is not embraced by Dominicans as in most all other countries, DPV is working to educate using a number of different sports including baseball, basketball and volleyball. The training was the longest I have participated in as a volunteer. Each of the 8 or so volunteers brought 2-3 youth leaders from our communities to receive the training along with us. The goal was to train the DPV curriculum to Volunteers and our youth so that we can return to our communities and multiply the information to our youth. DPV consists of many fun and educational activities and will be a really fun course to do with Dominican youth. Along with the two youth from my site who attended the training with me, we plan on teaching the course during P.E. each week in our local school and drop some HIV knowledge while having some fun.

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to attend an intercambio with 24 young Dominican chicas aged 11-18. I was the only male at the event along with the 24 girls and 4 female volunteers.

The intercambio was for Chicas Brillantes, a Peace Corps initiative for young Dominican girls. The overnight intercambio featured sessions about the female body, art activities, volleyball games and much more.

Chicas Brillantes is a girls club that many volunteers do that covers topics about adolescence and young womanhood and includes many interesting activities and opportunities for young Dominican girls. The girls clubs work year round in anticipation of their seminal event, Camp G.L.O.W. (Girls Leading Our World), which takes place each summer.Verdict is still out as to whether I will be starting my very own girls group in the months to come. The intercambio reinforced the importance of working with girls in this machismo culture but also how many headaches may come with working with girls aged 11-14. Vamos a ver.

Last February, a barancon housing more than 40 people burned down here in my site. All of those 40+ people were displaced and a 2-year-old girl died of smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire was a candle, being used during one of many daily power outages, that tipped over and eventually reached the highly flammable zinc roof. The displaced were forced to move into already overcrowded homes with extended family and neighbors and have lived in these uncomfortable conditions for the past 9 months.

A barancon is a barrack commonly found in Dominican bateyes. The barracks were built for the migratory Haitian sugar cane workers and are simply a long concrete buildings divided into several individual housing units. Many units are nothing more than one 10x12 room where entire families live. The vast majority of people in my community live in barracks. In response to the burned barrack, the community began to construct a new one in August, with economic backing from USAID and Save the Children, to help ease the overcrowding that was going on in homes since the fire.After months of construction followed by weeks of institutional bureaucracy, people here were able to move into their new homes this week. Watching the move was like watching ants march. The entire community got involved and were carrying suitcases, tables, chairs, mattresses, televisions, etc, in an endless flow until all people and their belongings had been moved and situated in their new homes.While overcrowding is still a problem, it is much less of a problem this week and a number of families are happy to be in new homes.People moving into the new barancon as seen from my porch

Eliecel moving into his new casa.

It has been a long, educational and stormy couple of weeks. After days spent despedir-ing a group of good friends (Felicidades 517-08-02), learning all about the ugliness of cholera and celebrating Halloween and one year as a Peace Corps Volunteer (Felicidades 517-09-02) in a beautiful beach house, I learned a new language in 3½ days. Mwen te aprann pale Kreyól. Twice each year Peace Corps DR offers a weeklong Haitian Creole course for volunteers living in bateyes, near the border or in communities with a large Haitian/Creole-speaking population. As a volunteer now living in a batey, I got the opportunity to participate. The training is traditionally held in a batey in the southern part of the country but due to the imminent wrath of Hurricane Tomás, this year we were sequestered to a neighborhood of Santo Domingo for the week. After the initial frustration and disappointment of having Creole training in the Capital and not in a batey full of Creole speakers, training got underway as Hurricane Tomás arrived. Creole is a very basic language and in less than 4 days I feel like I got a firm grasp on the grammatical structure and some basic vocab. I have already sought out two Creole speakers in my community, ages 6 and 7, to practice with on a regular basis until I get brave enough chat with adults. As Creole training ended, the brunt of Tomás, the first hurricane to make landfall on the island in my time here, was arriving in the DR. All volunteers living in various high-risk areas of the country, including the Capital where I was, were consolidated to hotels for safety and security reasons. While hurricanes are not something volunteers look forward to, consolidation due to hurricanes is something all volunteers dream of. Air-conditioned hotel rooms with endless hot water, flushing toilets and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Magical. The amount of weight gained by volunteers during consolidation must be an astonishingly high number. It was a very relaxing couple of days spent with good friends before returning to volunteer reality.

As anyone who owns a computer, television or reads a newspaper well knows, cholera has come to Haiti. This ugly bacterium has arrived on the island of Hispaniola and is wreaking havoc on those living across the border and still displaced by last winter’s earthquake. As if living in makeshift shantytowns wasn’t trouble enough, Haitians now must concern themselves with the threat of fatal, white diarrhea. Can these people ever catch a break?

As we share an island with Haiti, all Peace Corps volunteers in the DR were brought to the capital last week to have a crash course training on avoiding cholera when it eventually and inevitably makes its way across the fronterra and into la República Dominicana. Hay que prepararse. As if an earthquake, cholera and a long history of colonialism, slavery, dictatorship and abject poverty weren’t enough, a potential hurricane moving across the Caribbean has changed course and has aimed its ugly head directly for Port-au-Prince. The lack of proper shelter will make for a serious disaster if and when the storm strikes areas of the country already devastated by the earthquake and currently suffering from a cholera outbreak. Dios odia a Haiti.

When I initially began this blog, I thought of it as a way to document my Peace Corps experience, update friends, family and interested parties back in the States and, in doing so, give some insight into the life of a Volunteer. I have admittedly failed miserably in Year One to do this.

Like all volunteers, my service to this point has been a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs, highs and lows, peaks and valleys. Things in my first site left much to be desired and my lukewarm feelings towards that site and my work there certainly made for a lack of blog material. Now I am about to complete my first calendar year as a Volunteer, am living in a new site and ready to give this blog thing another go. I’ll try to be frequent and substantive in my entries in the weeks and months to come. So without further ado, here is my week in volunteerism in the DR... After a nearly a month of getting to know my new community, learning names and faces and completing the second community diagnostic of my service, I was finally ready to get some classes and projects underway here in my new site. We had planned to start with English classes as, naturally, that is what the youth in the community seem to be clamoring over above all else. (Translation: Sex Ed and basic literacy can wait…I want to know what Vin Diesel is talking about in all those Fast and Furious movies) I had spent this past weekend in the Southern region of the DR at a despedida for a volunteer friend who, along with an entire group of volunteers, are about to finish their service and return to the US of A. (Congrats y Suerte 517-08-02) I passed on a scenic brunch and free ziplining on Sunday to ensure that I would be back in my site and well-prepared for Day 1 of English class on Monday. This is where volunteer reality set in and things slowly began to unravel. As I awoke and got ready to head to the local community center to give class, I was informed that there were a group of doctors in the community center giving free AIDS tests all day. Class canceled. So it goes. Doctors administering AIDS tests to the community for free is exponentially more valuable than my teaching basic English and playing games with Dominican youth. No sweat. We’ll start Tuesday. Unless the key to the community center has been lost that is. The key is typically kept in the colmado across the street. On Tuesday the colmado does not have the key. The president of the Junta de Vecinos does not have the key. Nobody seems to have the key. Class canceled. Again. Key eventually turns up, as expected, and class begins Wednesday. Had this series of events happened last December, a month after beginning my service in my first site, I would have been frustrated and concerned that this would be a recurring theme in the weeks and months ahead. Now, after having a year’s worth of experiences in the DR, the frustration never comes. I know for a fact that this will recur in the weeks and months to come. Shit like this happens here. Así es la vida. As a volunteer, you are to plan for each class, practice, charla, etc, while knowing that things will never go exactly as planned. Something always comes up. Doctors come. Keys are lost. It rains. Students show up 50 minutes late (or not at all). Sometimes that's just the way the galleta crumbles.

The Major League Baseball regular season may have just ended on Sunday, but teams are wasting no time looking ahead to the future. A scout from the Chicago Cubs stopped by yesterday to check out some of the local talent. A team from here in Cachena took the field against a team from the nearby pueblo of Consuelo as the escout looked on with interest. The visit seemed very informal and was more observational than anything else, but I would selfishly love it if a member of my community someday played for either the I-Cubs or Chicago Cubs. I foresee nights spent in sports bars bragging of knowing the Cubs' starting shortstop when he was still a shoeless, underfed Dominican kid playing stickball in the cane fields.

Just two days earlier a caravan of locals in a rundown guagua traveled to the airport to greet Pedro Ciriaco, Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop and Cachena native who is back here in his home community during the offseason. Tis’ the season when the big leaguers and minor leaguers make their way back here to the batey and abandon the American lifestyle, American food and indoor plumbing for a couple months.While I knew that mine was a baseball community, I did not realize just how deep the talent pool might go. Most every male aged 16-24 seems to be an above average pelotero and at any given moment, there are 8-10 youngsters hoping to be signed and swept away to the Land of Plenty. In a community of approximately 300, having even 1, let alone 10-15 players with big league potential is pretty amazing.

Integrating into a new community is certainly easier when you understand what people are saying and why they are doing the strange things they do. Having a grasp on the language and culture of the DR has made for a smooth transition into my new community, Batey Cachena. Cachena is a small community of approximately 250 people set in the sugar cane-filled plains of the eastern Dominican Republic. The entire community consists of one dirt road lined on both sides by barracks constructed decades ago for migratory sugar cane workers. The migratory workers no longer migrate nor work in the cane fields. They have made a permanent home of Cachena. Two things stand out as interesting: Whereas most of the migratory workers brought to the DR to harvest sugar cane came from Haiti and many bateyes have a majority Haitian or Dominican-Haitian population, the workers in my community were brought from the lesser Antilles island of Anguilla. Rather than Creole, some of the immigrants here speak Caribbean English comparative to that of Jamaica. Unfortunately, very few people here still speak this English and the younger generations born here speak only Spanish. My site is about 15km from San Pedro de Macoris, the Mecca of Dominican baseball where superstars like Sammy Sosa and big league shortstops galore call home. Baseball here is the escape that basketball is in many American inner cities. To many, it is the only perceptible means of escaping an impoverished life. People live, eat and breathe baseball with the hopes of being seen by a scout and whisked away to the US of A. From my small community alone, there is one major league player, three minor leaguers, multiple teens waiting to be called up and a handful of adults who spent a short time playing in the States before seeing their life-long dream disappear far too early. I am still in the initial stages of getting to know everyone and spending endless hours sitting on porches and complaining about the heat, a volunteer rite of passage. Remembering names and faces, playing Uno with the local kids, daily basketball games with the local dudes and waiting for the electricity to come back on takes up most of my day at the moment. The transition from one site to the next was far easier than expected and I most certainly made the right choice in changing sites. *Pictures forthcoming.

After two long months of being stranded in limbo between two places, I am moving to my new site on Monday. The past two months have easily been the most mentally and emotionally difficult of my service. Now I get to tackle the mental and emotional stress of integrating into a new community and starting all over again. While my new site is very much different than my old site, it is just one hour down the road and not a huge adjustment geographically. I will still be in the same eastern region of the country and can even take the same bus to and from the capital. The way of life will take some getting used to though as I am moving from a pueblo with good infrastructure, 24-hour electricity, indoor plumbing and many ‘modern’ amenities to a batey with poor infrastructure, sporadic electricity, latrines and a complete lack of ‘modern’ amenities. Bateys are communities found here in the Dominican Republic created years ago by sugar cane conglomerates. The bateys are situated in and around sugar cane fields and in the past were populated by migrant workers, brought primarily from Haiti, to harvest the sugar cane for extremely low wages. Over time, many migrant workers have stayed in the DR and began families and lives here. Bateys often have large Haitian populations and are among the poorest and most underdeveloped communities in the DR. The physical layout of my community is strangely familiar. Situated in the eastern plains of this country and surrounded on all sides by sugar cane fields, the views from my community very much resembles the small towns situated in the cornfields of Iowa. The similarities end there. I’m looking forward to meeting my new community and getting back to work after many idle summer months.

August can be pretty brutal here in the DR. The heat is relentless. The sweat is endless. Energy and ambition are hard to come by. No es facil. This past week marked my 1-year anniversary since arriving in the DR. It is impossible to believe that an entire year has passed. Sometimes it feels like just yesterday we arrived, other days it feels like years. A new group of trainees has arrived in country and we are slowly becoming the wily veterans on the island. Just a year ago, I was stumbling off a plane, wide-eyed and melting in the Caribbean heat. I’m still melting, but most everything else about life here has become much more simplified. While I should feel like a veteran and be moving into a new stage of my service, lots of changes are happening in my volunteer life at the moment. After months of stagnation and agonizing debate over what is best for both myself and my service, it has been decided that a site change is in my best interest. I will be leaving my current urban site for a much different, much smaller site. The process leading up to this decision has easily been the most difficult aspect of my service to this point. I will be moving in the weeks to come and in many ways will be starting my service anew. It is an exciting transition and I know it will be best for me moving forward. I’ll be sure to document the move, introduce my new site, explain what a ‘batey’ is and all that fun stuff over the course of the next month.

Almost one week later, I feel as though I’m still recovering from the exhaustion that comes with spending 4 days with 30+ muchachos in the Dominican wilderness. Last week was the second annual Campamento Superman, where young boys aged 10-14 from all over the DR come to camp, play and learn how to be Supermen.

The trip from my site to the beautiful mountain site of Los Bueyes was long. Really long. Eight hours on 4 buses long. That might be tolerable to you or I, but to my two 11 year-olds who have rarely been outside of the barrio, we may as well have been traveling to Asia. Add to the trip that one of my boys struggles with carsickness and the travel days become even longer. But we made it and the weekend was full of activities both physical and educational. The boys slept in tents and lived life in the great outdoors. We bathed and spent many hours splashing around in the crystal clear river. We played all sorts of camp games like tug-o-war, had slip-n-slide relays and went wild in alka seltzer tag, a twist on tag where each person is given an alka seltzer tablet to wear around their neck and a bag full of water to splash each person’s tablet. The last ones standing with an intact alka seltzer tablet win. We also put on a science fair, talked about gender and what it means to be ‘men’ and painted Superman plaques. The Dominican boy scouts were on hand to teach wilderness survival tactics and local guides led a nature hike. A Dominican group called Futbol para la Vida came to teach about HIV/AIDS awareness and let the kids and volunteers act out their World Cup aspirations on the soccer field. All in all it was 4 days full of activities for muchachos and volunteers alike. I was concerned that the boys might get brave and venture out on their own from time to time, especially at night. But fortunately for us, most all of the boys had seen the Dominican horror movie Andrea that takes place in the same region of the country we were camping. Any thoughts the boys had of wandering alone in the wilderness were immediately erased by thoughts of monster lady Andrea lurking around. Any late night noises or bad nights sleep were attributed to Andrea. This fictional character helped keep the boys in check. Each night we sat around a campfire and made s’mores. I think volunteers missing the simple pleasures of camping and the great outdoors in summertime back home enjoyed these moments even more than the boys. My two muchachos were a handful to say the least. They were among the, shall we say, least well behaved campers (understatement). But they had a blast and in the end I’m glad it was them that participated. It will be months before their doñas will be able to pry the Campamento Superman t-shirts from their bodies.

Photos of Las Galeras, Samaná, and an epic 4th of July weekend.

La Playita near our beachfront Villa

Beachfront Villa with Pool (on the right) = Greatest Idea Ever

Beach Football on Playa Rincón

Patriotism on Rincón

Paradise

What a glorious 4th of July that was. A massive crew of volunteers and many visitors from the States overtook a beautiful beach town on the Dominican peninsula of Samaná. We rented a number of houses all over town and I found myself with 15 good friends in a beachfront villa with a pool. Not a bad way to celebrate our independence.

The beaches were amazing, the games of American football on the beach were intense, the company of so many PCVs was great and the stories unforgettable. A 4th of July pageant, multiple renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and various other patriotic tunes, plus a surprise 30th birthday party for a fellow volunteer only added to the fun. Now it’s back to reality (sort of). This week is Camp Superman, a boys camp put on by volunteers that began last summer. A group of volunteers, myself included, will be taking 2 muchachos each from our communities to a beautiful mountain site where we will camp out and put on a 4-day summer camp. More on that (with photos) to come next week.

This past weekend, a group of us finally made the trip to Michés and Costa Esmeralda. Michés is a seaside town 90 minutes north of my city of El Seibo. The coast that begins in Michés and moves east along the Bay of Samaná and the Atlantic Ocean is known as the Emerald Coast and is one that is undeveloped and absurdly beautiful. People in and around my site have ranted and raved about this, the nearest beach to my site, since day one and I finally took the opportunity to see what all the hype is about.

The trip was almost scrapped at the last second due to the unrelenting rains that have dictated life here in the DR for the past few weeks. But some bravery and a propensity to roll the dice and trust that all things will fall together got us on the bus north. The bus ride from El Seibo to Michés is worth the trip itself. The climb up into the Cordillera Oriental passes through lush green mountains, by large waterfalls and to the northern coast. It was something straight out of Jurassic Park. The beach at the city of Michés leaves much to be desired but a 3-hour walk along the coast will lead to Playa Esmeralda, a hidden gem and one of the DR’s most beautiful beaches. The long walk flies by as you cross rivers, climb drooping palm trees and stop periodically to cool off in the calm waters. In the 8 hours we were away, we never saw so much as one human being (almost). The rains stayed away. The beach was ours. I would love to post photos that show just how beautiful the Emerald Coast is, but on our walk back to the city to catch the USA/Ghana match, we finally ran into 2 human beings, 20 minutes from our destination. These human beings decided to rob us. My camera with the day’s photos was taken by two ladrónes with broken bottles and bad attitudes. Michés has a reputation for being a bit caliente, so we knew not to bring much cash or valuables. Our cameras and small amounts of pesos were all they got away with. In the end, we walked away unscathed aside from some pretty serious sunburn, annoyed about being robbed by 2 tigueres with broken bottles. While my first experience as the victim of a crime in the DR put a blight on the trip, the deserted beach, the impeccable weather and the 6 hour walk through Caribbean beauty was fantastic. Playa Esmeralda is, to the point, the most beautiful beach I’ve seen in the Dominican.

I have survived my first trip home to the States during my service and am now slowly readjusting to life back here in the DR. Being in America after a 10-month stay in the Caribbean was interesting. Not nearly as strange as I thought it might be but a change of pace to be sure.

Only after removing myself from the rat race that is American life was I truly able to see it for what it is. It makes me more thankful for the tranquility of life here in the DR even while knowing that when my time here is up, I will reenter said rat race without missing a step. Inevitable. Until that day, I have much time to cogerlo suave aquí. America is a pretty wild and incredible place. A land of consumerism and hot water on demand. Of personal motor vehicles and freaky fast internet. Wild and incredible. Now I’m back and it’s summer, aka Hurricane Season. The rain is even worse than it was when I left (which I didn’t believe possible). Most days seem to be spent indoors waiting for the rains to pass. Thank Dios for podcasts and books. School is out and daily schedules have changed completely. I feel like I am having to learn the daily life of my community all over again. So I’m readjusting back to Dominican life and summer schedules, starting to use Spanish again after a 2-week hiatus and waiting for the first of many hurricanes predicted to pummel the Caribbean. It’s going to be an interesting summer.