Oops sorry. I got distracted by some bright Christmas lights. I haven’t told you the end of our road trip saga. So as I was saying:

Las Vegas…

Well there’s only one law in Las Vegas and it prohibits me from telling you what we did there. Punishable by death. Needless to say, trying to have an Occupy movement in Las Vegas is kind of like trying to eat a low sodium diet while living in the ocean. You will probably drown. So we took a break from our tireless campaigning and had ourselves some fun, finally.

We also added two new members to the Occupy Minivan Team. Gitana Gotay and Lindsey Yach joined us for the last leg of our trip. The Gotays were kind enough to have us over for pizza and beer and show us embarrassing photos of Gitana as a young girl.

Oh I forgot, we went to the Hoover Dam as well. It was real big. We were going to take the tour but it cost a lot of money and what little money we had left after Vegas couldn't be wasted on educational tours.

We arrived to the City of Angels on the weekend before Christmas. We met up with Spring and our other Peace Corps friend Sam (female) who was visiting for the weekend from Portland, Oregon. We stayed in Santa Monica with Lindsey and her roommate Sheuneen. Lindsey and Sheuneen are pretty much like 14 year old boys stuck inside 27 year-old lady bodies. Like they went to that genie that turned that little kid into Tom Hanks that one time but Tom Hanks’ body was occupied this time so they got put in late-twenties, female bodies. But their house is the same as Tom Hanks’ house in the movie Big. It has every toy and video game you ever wanted when you were an adolescent boy but weren’t allowed to have because your mom wanted you to read books and stuff so that you could grow up to be a better blogger.

From left: Duncan, Sam, Kenny, Gitana, Justin, Cameron, Andrew, Lindsey, Spring

On Saturday everybody went to the beach for sports day. My butt was still broken so I just hobbled around. Butt everybody else played soccer and basketball and longboarded and such things. The bruise on my butt had reached epic proportions. It was so spectacular that I was not able to walk into a room all weekend without instigating a “Show Your Butt!!” chant.

On Sunday Cameron’s grandparents, The Schlarbs, hosted us all for an end of Occupy Minivan party in Pasadena. I showed everybody my butt.

Party at the Schlarbs!

And there's cake!

And so the Occupy Minivan: Cross-Country Movement has reached its end. We hit the coast and occupied a parking spot. We can't go any further until we occupy a boat(2012). The movement has ended but its spirit lives on in each and every soccer mom and cleaning lady service. And in me.

Check out our music video:

We had had enough of the cold so we left Durango and headed south towards Arizona. Originally this blog was supposed to be part of the Pacific Time blog because we thought Arizona was on Pacific Time. So we went to the Four Corners (New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah) and ran around in circles. We thought we were time traveling but it turns out Arizona is a wasteful state and doesn’t celebrate Daylight Savings time. Daylight doesn't grow on trees you know. I guess all the old retirees in Arizona didn’t like the idea of giving up an hour of the rest of their lives. So we just looked like weirdos running around in circles instead of awesome time travelers because we were in the Mountain Time Zone the whole time.

Four Corners

NOT time travel. Even though it looks a lot like it.

Running between four states was pretty awesome though, time traveling or not. In fact it was so overwhelming for Justin that he went into shock and was just sitting in the van saying “There’s no place like home.” We weren’t sure what to do with him but we were close to the Navajo Reservation so we headed in to search for a spiritual healer to fix Justin. We found our spiritual healer in the Pygmy Conifer Forest near the ancient Anasazi cliff-dwellings. His name was Pumping Horse. He told us that we had bad spirits in the van and that we needed to smoke some healing tobacco from his peace pipe. I’m pretty sure he just meant that the van smelled like farts and lighting a match would help with the smell but you know how those Native Americans like to talk. So we smoked his peace pipe. The events that occurred during the next three days are unknown. All I know is that I came to three days later to find Andrew dancing with a tree and Justin trying to scalp Cameron with an ear of corn. But Justin felt better after that. We went to look for Pumping Horse to ask him what had happened. We found him at a gas station down the road. It turns out Pumping Horse’s real name is Phil Earp and he works at the Conoco gas station and we had just been on a three day Peyote trip. So that happened.

The Journey Begins

Discovering our Spirit Animals

They call him Dances with Trees

We decided to get out of Navajo country. We drove to Flagstaff, AZ. It was snowing in Flagstaff. A lot. Did you know that it snows in Arizona? Me neither. Luckily we had Cameron driving who had never driven in snow before. In Flagstaff we stayed with a friend of Cameron’s sister, Mikaela. Mikaela is Cameron’s sister’s name and her friend’s name. She lives in a typical grimy college house with three roommates. When Andrew walked in the sight and smell of empty pizza boxes and beer cans triggered a frat flashback and he took off his shirt and jumped on the table and yelled, “Woooo!!! Colleeeege!!!!!” I asked them for some tea and scrumpets because I’m much more refined.

One of the guys in the house said he liked our Occupy movement because it didn’t prevent people from getting to work on time. Shit. He was right. Until the following morning when we found this sign on the minivan:

We’re really getting the hang of this Occupy thing.

Flagstaff was our jumping off point for a family trip to the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately it was snowing a lot. When we got there the canyon was filled with clouds and we couldn’t see 10 feet in front of ourselves. I guess the clouds were pretty grand though. And the gift shops were nice. When we were about to leave we saw a blue spot in the sky and we ran to a lookout point where we caught a glimpse of a little section of the canyon. It was just enough to make us want to see more without really letting us see anything. The Grand Canyon must have a really good marketing team.

I think it's over there.

We found it. It's really not very Grand at all.

Andrew and Duncan give up.

Kenny refuses to admit defeat.

The Park Ranger told us that there are only 1 or 2 days a year with zero visibility. So we got to see something/nothing that not many people get to see/not see. Sometimes less is more.

But not in Las Vegas…

In Denver we spent two days with my sister, Anna, and her boyfriend John. They lent us their living room for a couple nights while we explored the sights in Denver and its surroundings. Anna and John’s apartment has a pool downstairs where the old ladies do water aerobics. We tried to join them but we didn’t know the code and the ladies wouldn’t get out to let us in. It was pretty rude. We finally figured out how to get in but by then water aerobics had ended and we had to make up our own workout. For Cameron and Justin that meant doing push-ups and sit-ups in the snow and then jumping in the hot tub to “shock their systems.” Whatever that means. Andrew and I invented our own water aerobics-esque workout. Kenny took a shower.

In the afternoon we headed into Boulder, CO to do a tour of the Boulder Beer factory. In the tasting room afterwards we met three people who were on a road trip that started in Toronto and dipped all the way down to New Mexico before heading back up to Vancouver where they were moving. They were stopping and staying with people from all the different Occupy movements along the way and documenting the trip. So they’re moving to the west coast and decided to turn it into a road trip with an Occupy theme. Somebody obviously read my blog and stole all of my brilliant ideas. Leave it to the Canadians.

One of the guys on the Canadian version of our road trip was from Colombia. He had been living in Toronto painting fire hydrants for the past year. We all spoke Spanish for a while to try to distract him from asking us questions about the validity of our Occupy Minivan movement. After we had “sampled” several beers we exchanged information, vowing to meet up again but being sure not to make any specific plans that we would actually have to follow through with.

Meeting the Canadians forced us to think about what we stood for. Occupy movements are known for their unambiguous objectives. Since we’re driving through Colorado for the next few days we decided that miners’ rights would be our next cause. I went on the internet and searched for mines and found one called Copper Mountain. We set out for Copper Mountain eager to make a difference in the lives of those poor copper miners. But we were too late. The miners had already been exploited and the mines exhausted and all that remained was a ski resort. So we went skiing instead. But we made sure not to enjoy ourselves.

A sit in at Copper Mountain.

Kenny Hood shredding the gnar pow.

After skiing we headed to Carbondale, CO to regroup. Our Peace Corps friends Dan and Phoebe arranged for us to stay with their friend Kylie. We went out for some food and beer and live music and had a great time. Carbondale is a small town but it has a lot to offer. So small in fact that the lead singer of the band we were watching also turned out to be the owner of the burrito joint that we ate lunch at the next day. After the live music we went back to Kylie’s house and tried to stay up to see the lunar eclipse that was supposed to happen that night at 4am. We played board games and Kylie and Justin entertained us with their Irish Flute/Ukulele duo. Around 5 am the moon was still there so we gave up and went to bed. We had some mines to find the next day and we needed our rest. We’re still not sure if the eclipse actually happened.

Rocking out with Carbondale Kylie.

We proceeded south from Carbondale towards Durango, CO. We stopped in a small coal mining town called Somerset. We drove up into the coal mine where a conveyor belt emerged from the mountains and dropped loads of coal into train cars that went on for miles. We drove the painted minivan through the mine hoping to make our presence known. Nobody seemed to notice. Then it occurred to us that those train cars were heading south, just as we were, and that that coal would probably be used to provide the electricity that would heat the house we would be sleeping in that night. So we left and went sledding instead. This was a decision I would come to regret.

1% of stockings will be filled with coal this Christmas.

We decided to drive/occupy the Million Dollar Highway which is named so because it cost one million dollars per mile to construct. That makes it a 1%er highway. And we weren’t about to let that slide. We were admiring the beautiful mountain scenery and staring down into the 300 foot deep ravines immediately to our right when we got the urge to go sledding.

$121,342 worth of asphalt.

Luckily we had picked up some sleds at Target the day before. We found a spot that upon first sight appeared to be the perfect sledding hill. So I began to climb with the sled, noticing all of the rocks below the surface of the snow. I should have turned around there. Then I got to the top and looked down and realized that hills always look steeper from the top than from the bottom. This hill was more of a cliff. As I sat on my sled contemplating the drop, I looked at Andrew and said, “But what if I get hurt?” Andrew shrugged, “Oh well.” I nodded. “Good point.” It’s not that I was too proud to back down. I back down from all kinds of challenges. But as a “scientist” if I ask a question and don’t know the answer I am obligated to find it out by any means necessary. So I mounted the sled and dropped in. I accelerated at about 9.65 m/s2, just below the acceleration rate of gravity. About halfway down the hill I had reached terminal sledding velocity (126 mph) when my sled hit a rock that was hidden under the snow and the sled shattered. Having taken care of the sled, the rock then proceeded to bash my butt bone with approximately 16.3 tons of force leaving me writhing in the pain at the bottom of the hill. So my findings are as follows: If I get hurt Kenny will be there to laugh uncontrollably and take pictures. The other guys waiting at the top of the hill with their sleds decided that my experiment was proof enough and slowly walked back down. Needless to say the mountains seemed much less majestic during the second half of the drive. I should have known a 1% highway would do that to me.

Oh mannn, I broke my sled. And my butt.

I got attacked by a snow shark.

The only good to come of this is that I am now sitting in the ski lodge and have time to update the blog. The bad is that everybody else is skiing on a beautiful, sunny day in the Rockies while I’m waddling around the base like a penguin. Evil triumphs once again.

Sad Penguin

I bet Shaun White can't do this.

We are staying in Durango with Cameron’s Uncle Mike and Aunt Monie. They have been very gracious in feeding us and putting up with my crippled body. We went out for a night on the town in Durango. Durango was the first place where we confronted resistance to our movement. We walked out of dinner to find four drunk college kids trying to wipe the paint off the minivan. Then from behind us another drunk kid yelled, “Get out of the way douchebags!” and pushed his way through to meet up with his friends. Finally! Affirmation that we are doing something right. We met up with another of Phoebe and Dan’s friends, Cortney. She took us to a pool hall and we celebrated our first confirmed angering of the public.

Mike, Monie, Dan (dog) and the crew.

Cortney knows how to live in the present.

The route.

After the radiator sabotage incident the Occupy Minivan Cross-Country Movement got off to a smooth start. Until I got to my first stop in Chicago. There I found out that I can’t party like I used to in college. But I survived the weekend and caught up with some old friends. My friends were not very impressed with the Occupy Minivan idea. But we had fun anyway.

The real Occupy Minivan movement began in West Liberty, Iowa where I picked up Occupier/Public Relations Director/Party Master Andrew Hanson. Unlike the hipster kids and homeless guys in Zucotti Park we take our movement to the real people. And/or (mostly or) the places where we know people who will house us. West Liberty is the first majority minority town in Iowa (52% Latino). The turkey plant (as in processing plant, not a turkey that grows in the ground) employs most of the people of West Liberty. The story of Andrew Hanson is the typical small town Iowa farmer boy story; born to a high school principal father and Polish/British mother in Sao Paulo, Brazil and moved to Iowa at the age of 9. Put on a leotard and started wrestling kids. We didn’t actually speak to any of the “real people” but I think that our presence there really made a difference.

From West Liberty we continued west to Des Moines where we picked up Occupiers Kenny Hood and Cameron Jones. Then we headed 2 hours north to the Hood residence into the middle of nowhere Clare, Iowa. If you’ve never seen small town Iowa then go to Clare. Actually don’t. I’ll just tell you about it. In Clare’s sprawling 100-foot-long downtown metropolis there is a soon to be closed down Post Office and a bar called Antlers. Antlers prides itself on having “more dead animals on the wall than clients at the bar.” They do not disappoint. If you continue down the cornfield, gravel road that must be home to several serial killers you might arrive at the Hood residence if they happen to have their lights on. Otherwise you’ll freeze to death. But once inside the Hood residence you’ll experience the only warmth found in frozen Clare, Iowa. The Hood family fed us a hearty Midwestern dinner (actually I think pasta came here from Greenland or Tokyo or something) and took us out to Antlers where the only thing more numerous then deer antlers were cans of Bud Light provided by the ever generous Phil Hood, proprietor of Hood Excavation. If you need work done on your septic tank in Iowa this is the man to call. “A royal flush always beats a full house.” Truer words have never been spoken. We also picked up a camera in Clare, IA which will provide the photos for the rest of this trip. Nothing photogenic happened before there anyway.

Left to right: Mr. Hood, Andrew, Kenny, Katie, Mrs. Hood, Cameron, Duncan, Kelsey (absent).

Hood house.

The road to Kenny's house. Caution: Serial Killer Crossing

We left Clare, IA in the morning and headed to the steak capital of the world, Omaha. We didn’t see any steaks or steak cows but we did score a free lunch form Andrew’s Jesuit priest friends at Creighton University. Peace Corps volunteers will mooch a free lunch off of anybody who so much as hints at an offer.

Welcome to Omaha!

Andrew's old frat house. It was frat-tastic!

I can do it!

How 'bout them apples.

From Creighton we headed to the rendezvous point for the final occupier/minivan lounge singer (yet to provide us any on flight entertainment) Justin Hitchcock. With our requisite fifth occupier needed to officially occupy a minivan we were finally ready to paint the minivan in true Iowa high school girls volleyball fashion. Anybody who questioned the seriousness of the Occupy Minivan movement previously now had no choice but to recognize our fortitude and teenage girl organization tactics.

The crew is complete. And we mean biz-nass.

Introducing the Occupy Minivan minivan.

The final leg of the Midwest leg took us through the exhilarating I- 80 section of Nebraska. (Tumbleweed rolls across the screen). Then we arrived in Denver, a mile high. The city, not the occupiers. We were high on social justice. We never would have made it were it not for the steadfast navigation of Mrs. Tom Tom (GPS). Not once did she complain of the perversion and flatulence circulating through the minivan.

Navigator Mrs. Tom-Tom

I left sunny, warm Los Angeles to spend Thanksgiving in the sunny,warm Northeast. Was it always 65 degrees and sunny in November? I know I’ve been gone for a while but I remember it differently. Freezing October snow storms were not followed by warm, sunny November days.

Spring (girlfriend) came too. I was going to make a pun about the warm weather and her name is Spring and so Pun: Spring (weather and/or girlfriend) at Thanksgiving in the Northeast. But I decided not to. It was her first visit to the New York area. And her first time meeting my family and friends. My friends kept saying, “Duncan, don’t f#@k this up.” So I think that means that they like her. And that they have no faith in me. These friends have requested that I mention them by name: Evan Conley (recently engaged), Peter DeLaFlor (the cop from the new Batman movie), Robert Shearman (you probably wanted him at some point), and David Monahan (If you stole his iPhone, give it back).

We walked through Zuccotti Park to see Occupy Wall Street but nobody was there really because they had all been kicked out and went home for Thanksgiving. Occupy LA just got kicked out of their tent city as well. So in an effort to support these Occupy movements I have decided to embark on a new Occupy movement called Occupy Minivan. But this movement will be different in that we will be moving. These other Occupy movements are not making progress because they are sitting in one place in tents. We are going to Occupy a Minivan and move our movement from New Jersey across the Northern United States and down to Los Angeles. Accompanying me on the Occupy Minivan cross-country movement is:

Kenny Hood: Occupy Minivan Director/Sporcle Master

Andrew Hanson: Public Relations Director/Party Master

Cameron Jones: Legal Counsel (Head Arguer)/Hygiene Counsel

Justin Hitchcock: Entertainment Director/Minivan Lounge Singer

Gitana Gotay: Motivation Director/Broddha

Duncan Peabody: Resident Blogger/Herbivore

We are all from Peace Corps Dominican Republic so we are experts in grassroots advocacy.

The minivan we are occupying is my mom’s (now my) silver 2003 Honda Odyssey. I want to name it Minnie Van Go(gh) but my sister, Lily, was driving it previously and she named it Old Bess. Lily used the minivan for her Dog walking job in Montreal so it smells like French-Canadian dogs; and that’s way I imagine Vincent Van Gogh smelled. Also Minnie Van Go (Old Bess) is moving to Los Angeles and she needs a hip new name if she’s going to make any friends out there. Life’s not easy for a minivan in Los Angeles. They eat way more gas than a Hybrid and they don’t have the beautiful bodywork of a Ferrari. Anyway you can call it what you like.

The Occupy Minivan Cross-Country Movement itinerary is as follows:

December 2011

2-4 – Chicago, IL

5-Iowa City, IA (

6- Des Moines, IA

7- Omaha,NE and Lincoln, NE

8-9 Denver, CO

10- Crested Butte, CO

11- Durango, CO

12- Navajo County and Flagstaff, AZ

13- Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

14- Hoover Dam, NV

15- Las Vegas, NV

16 -19 Los Angeles, CA

If you happen to live in one of these cities/towns then come say “HI!” and sign our petition to support collective bargaining rights for soccer moms.

I had intended to embark this morning but some Wall Street Fat Cats caught wind of my plan and must have poured some sort of corrosive acid on the Minivan’s radiator causing the transmission fluid lines to corrode. But if they think they can put the brakes on this movement so easily then they have seriously underestimated Occupy Minivan. This isn’t just a revolution. This is 3000 revolutions per minute.

You know those programs where you can see what you would look like with a different haircut before you get one? Well the other day I stumbled across something similar that shows you what you will look like after a certain amount of time living in a particular city. So I tried it out to see what I would look like after one year living in Los Angeles. The results are frightening:

Caution: Persons in the photo are much less hipster than they appear.

I went home for my friend’s wedding last weekend. Hooray for John and Kay! Kay is a poet so that’s why I rhymed. Well the wedding was very nice. The autumn leaves were red and orange and yellow and….white. White with snow. From the snow storm. In October. And to think, Alannis Morisette thought rain on your wedding day was ironic. Well how about snow, Alannis? It was like that Guns and Roses music video for “November Rain” where all of the people at the wedding were running and knocking stuff over, except it was “October Snow” and it was all indoors and we didn’t really realize it was snowing.

The wedding wasn’t the only thing unprepared for the snow. The trees were not expecting the early snow either and they didn’t have time to take their leaves off. And wet snow on a leafy tree is heavy. So the trees fell over and knocked down every power line in the northeast. And the power went out for five days. When I first heard the power was out I just laughed. Yeah, I don’t now if you heard but I was just in the Peace Corps for two years. I don’t need electricity. Except that in the DR the lack of power is acceptable because it’s always 85 and humid. New Jersey in October after a fresh snow is slightly colder. Like 40 degrees colder. Anyway I spent the final days of my NJ visit huddled around the fireplace gaining a new respect for Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia.

The other day I went to help build a community garden at a school in LA. It was being built by an organization started by a crazy Irishman named Thomas O’Grady. Thomas O’Grady does not agree with behavioral psychologists who believe that positive reinforcement is the superior motivation technique. Instead he yells at you and belittles you while you work. But he does it in a way that you don’t really feel like he’s being mean. For example, “You suck!” or, “What are you thinking!?” It really worked for me and I got lots of work done as part of the carpentry crew. I can’t wait to go help with the next garden build.

One difference between Los Angeles and the Dominican Republic is that instead of paying middle aged women to wash my laundry I pay machines to do it. LA is pretty futuristic. I like going to J.J.’s Laundromat near my house because everybody speaks Spanish and the two things I really miss about the Dominican Republic are Spanish and sitting around waiting for stuff.

I have officially completed my first 10 days as a Los Angeleser, which is what we like to call ourselves. So far, so good.

I should clear one thing up before we get started on Phase II of the Duncan Peabloggy Project. As you know I’m from the Northeast. So are a lot of you. We northeasternists have a pretty ugly view of Los Angeles. Plastic people and Latino gangs mostly. But I come from the most stereotyped state in the country. We New Jerseyites are not all blowouts and fake tans you know. Goerge f’ing Washington left Delaware in a rowboat to come to New Jersey because he heard it was so sweet. So I’m optimistic about living in LA and seeing what it’s really like. That said I will probably continue to make fun of LA just as I make fun of New Jersey, using every stereotype I can think of. Because a lot of them are warranted. And the other ones are funny.

I live in Echo Park. It’s pretty close to downtown LA (aka DTLA). Its main attraction is Echo Park, a nice park with a man-made lake in the middle. Except the park is under construction so the lake is drained and the park is closed and it’s just a big mud-pit right now. Very unattractive. And to make matters worse they are not even making proper use of the mud pit. That pit could comfortably house 200 adult pigs tied to sticks pounded in the ground. And guess how many they have there? Zero! I’m going to bring in a mud-pit efficiency consultant from my community in the DR.

Everybody in Echo Park and the rest of Los Angeles has a hipster bike. A hipster bike is basically a road bike that has been “pimped out” with fun colors and strange looking components. I bought a hipster bike…. Don’t judge me. It was affordable and nice looking and I needed transport. LA is big. And now I’m very attached to the bike. The other day I stopped in to a convenience store after work to buy a Gatorade. The refrigerator and cashier were right next to the doorway so I left my bike in the doorway unlocked. That was dumb. So I was looking in the refrigerator realizing there was no Gatorade when I saw a guy run up to my bike and jump on it. And he wasn’t just taking it for a test spin. So I darted out of the store and chased him a half a block and tackled him into a wall. He jumped up off the ground and yelled in my face “What are you doing man?! Are you crazy!?” I’m not sure if he was yelling at himself like I do when I screw up a point in tennis, because it was pretty obvious what I was doing. Anyway I took my bike back. The handlebars were a little bent to the side but they can be fixed. He walked away from me yelling, “Ima kill you bro! You’re gonna get killed comin’ around here!” (latino gangster stereotype!) I’m not sure if he was really going to kill me or not but I thought it best not to wait around to find out. Now you might say it was stupid of me to tackle him. In fact some people have already told me it was REALLY stupid. But you’re missing the bigger point of the story. I was about to settle for a Snapple even though I wanted a Gatorade. But the Universe said “No! Go get your bike from that guy and go to 711 and get two Gatorades for $2!” And I did. And it was refreshing.

I got a part-part-time job with a company that does installation of Greywater reuse systems. Basically they reroute the water from your laundry, sink, bathtub, etc. so that it goes to irrigating your landscape rather than to the sewer. (http://greywatercorps.com/about01.html) It saves water. Lots of water in a place as dry as Los Angeles. The company is called Greywater Corps. It’s kind of like the Peace Corps. Well it’s not. But it is a Corps. And I like working for Corps’s. They sound like they have a real mission. There was an organization that was called the Greywater Guerillas that installed illegal greywater reuse systems in people’s homes, because it is prohibited by building codes in many states. I’ll admit that guerilla sounds way cooler than Corps. And I am a big proponent of illegal altruism. But they’ve since tried to legitimize themselves by changing their name to Greywater Action. Action? That was the name of a church retreat I went to in high school. Where’s the militaristic zeal? A company without a paramilitary reference in its name is just not a company that I want to work for. Plus they never offered me a job.

Well that’s all that’s happened so far I guess. Tune in next time for another exciting episode of The Real Duncan of LA.

Done. Termindao. Finito. My two years of Peace Corps have come to an end. I am currently chasing the sun towards Los Angeles in a large aircraft. I have a feeling the sun will win. It’s been doing this race for billions of years and still seems to have way more energy than a Boeing 757. But there are plenty of other stars in Los Angeles. I’m sure I could beat some of them in a race. I’d beat Oprah in a foot race, hands down. But mostly I’m going to Los Angeles to see about a girl. If I happen to get “discovered” and become the next big thing in Hollywood then so be it. I don’t think any of us will be very surprised.

I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog for the past two years. This is the first thing I’ve ever really written except for some coma-inducing college essays. I probably wouldn’t have continued it for two years if it wasn’t for all the nice comments and encouragement from everybody who has been reading it. So thank you for helping me to discover this new hobby. I think I’ll keep going with it for a while if you don’t mind. I mean the title is just Duncan Peabloggy. Nothing about the Peace Corps. I just happened to be there when I was writing it. So now I’m going to Los Angeles and I’ll blog about what’s going on there. It isn’t the third world but it definitely is bizarre.

They’re playing Captain America on the plane, no doubt under strict orders from the United States government to re-indoctrinate me with a healthy dose of war and spandex-clad superheroes. What the government didn’t take into consideration was the fact that two years in the Peace Corps has turned me into too much of a cheapskate to buy those crappy $3 headphones.

Welp, here it goes!

I wrote this for the volunteer publication so I thought I'd share it with you as well. It is kind of specific to the Peace Corps so if you don't enjoy it it's only because you're on the outside and not because of my lousy writing. I've translated all of the Spanglish in parentheses. Here it goes:

The Plight of the Aardvark in Southeastern Botswana

According to the Oxford English Dictionary an Aardvark is “A South-African quadruped ( Orycterŏpus capensisCuv.), about the size of the badger, belonging to the insectivorous division of the Edentata, where it occupies an intermediate position between the Armadillos and Ant-eaters. I’m not an Aardvark, and this article is not about Aardvarks, but you’re crazy if you think I’m going to keep reading the dictionary until I get to the part about the American. That book is all character development and no plot.

But I wanted to read about the American because they tell me I am one. I’m skeptical. I was always under the impression that I was a “Man of the World.” Don’t ask me where I got this impression. I had done some traveling before I came here. A few months here, a few months there. But the problem with having done some traveling is it gives you a false sense of worldliness. And you get all of these college students coming home from a semester of drinking with other Americans in very Americanized bars in Spain who are now “wordly.” Well I was most definitely “worldly” when I signed up for the Peace Corps. I was not an American. American was Texas. American was 9-5 office job. American was credit cards and debt. I was above all of that. Destined for greater things. Like unemployment or a manual laborer in a communist nudist colony. But I was wrong. Because when you don’t spend more than three months in a place you never get past the First Stage of Culture Shock. I don’t remember what the stages are as they explained it to us in training because I wasn’t paying attention. Seriously, they talked at us a lot. And it was hot. But I’ve now looked back on the past two years and my time here does seem to fall into four vaguely distinct stages.

Stage 1: F#@K YEAH!

When I arrived in my community they all looked at me with a bit of distrust. But I was not worried. Yeah, the guy who took a cross-cultural psychology class in college is going to get worried. Come on! I immediately switched into objective thinking mode. What if a 25-year-old Guatemalan guy had showed up at my house in New Jersey and said, “Hi, I Pablo. I come for fix your plumbing. You help me?” I’d say “No way, Jose!” But I know better. “It’s OK.” I said to them in my head. “I am wordly. I understand you people.”

At first everything is very new and exciting. “Oh boy, they play their music so loud here. What an interesting cultural observation!” and “Poor drunk, toothless, old man. American imperialism has reduced you to this. Of course I’ll give you cinco pesos (approx. 13 cents).” All these cute and interesting cultural differences! I would laugh with my friends, “Oh I had a class today and only three of 15 students came. It’s not their fault though.” Nothing could defeat my idealism. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was built in 27 months.

Stage 2: ARE YOU F#@KING KIDDING ME!?

“AHHH! LAZY! LADRONES (theifs)! DON’T KNOW THEIR ASS FROM THEIR HEAD!”

Stage 2 is ugly. Getting stuck in Stage 2 is very dangerous. Stage 2 breeds hatred and racism and ulcers. Because eventually the “cultural quirks” that were so fascinating two months ago become “rage-inducing idiocies.” This is the part where you argue vehemently with the cobrador (guy who charges you on public transport) over those five pesos because “it’s the principle of the thing.” Nevermind the fact that you’re on the guagua (bus) to Cabarete (beach town) with a red bracelet duct taped to your wrist so you can rip off the all-inclusive. This stage is ugly but necessary. It’s tough love. Time to shake your romantic notions of the third world. Poor people are like rich people except with less money. Some of them suck. Some of them are awesome.

STAGE 3: OH WELL, F#@K IT.

Being angry all the time is very tiring. Eventually you won’t want to do it anymore. You’ll take some deep breaths and pull out your yoga mat and pop a horse tranquilizer and pass out on your floor. And when you wake up you’ll have come to the realization that the country is the way it is and you are not going to change it. Even if that does happen to be part of your job description. You do your job and put up with the absurd, no matter how You start to talk about the United States like it’s Candyland. “I can’t wait to go back to the United States and lick my chocolate ice cream roof!” If you never leave this stage then that’s OK. It’s relatively harmless for the most part. Despite what famous quote sayers might suggest, apathy is not the root of all evil. People with opinions – crazy, evil, stage 2, opinions – are. But if you can, try to push through to the much more ambiguous Stage 4.

STAGE 4: WE’RE ALL F#@KED.

While you’re in the acceptance stage your fury level will drop from a red alert to a green alert and your objective thinking device will be enabled once again. You will think about the United States and realize that we are also stupid in our own special way. Our government is plenty corrupt and equally unable to get things done effectively. We don’t rip off foreigners directly, we just buy everything from people who do. We don’t litter, because that Native American man cried a tear back in the 1970s, but the consumption of a single American results in the environmental contamination equivalent of 10,000 Dino cookie wrappers on the ground. Every country has its own flavor of bullshit. It is a bullshit not inherent in the people but learned over time. And once you’ve gotten used to the smell of your own bullshit it just becomes the normal smell and all other bullshit smells funny and makes you want to punch holes in the wall. But it’s important to remember that your bullshit is just poop too.

So then maybe that’s what it means to be an American. It’s the preference of a certain type of poop. But then where does that leave us? Should we just forget about this whole idea of helping other people and stick with our own kind? Wrong. People need help; in the USA and the DR and everywhere else. But your offer to help others does not obligate them to take on your ways. So while it might make you furious when people show up an hour late and don’t show enthusiasm when they’re digging holes in the ground, you can hardly blame them for not wanting to live in a constant state of stress and depression. Though a happy medium might be nice. So the next time you’re in a meeting and an Aardvark shows up an hour late and interrupts you to saludar (shake hands and say hi to) everybody, remember that that is just the way of the Aardvark.

We’re doing a small water system project in my friend Cameron’s community in the southwest of the country right now. It’s a Batey (Haitian sugar cane cutting community). Batey 9 to be specific. That is the beautiful name it was given by the sugar cane company.

Batey 9 is where they invented the term “When it rains, it pours.” The majority of the year it is drier than a British sense of humor lost in the desert without water. Nobody even knows I’m white because the constant sweat and dust combine to form a natural blackface which can only be removed with a Brillo pad. But then about four times a year the sky drinks a couple wine coolers and loses its inhibitions and opens up to Batey 9, gushing about all of its condensation problems. The result is a giant mud puddle.

Then the mosquitoes emerge and have massive mosquito orgies in these puddles. But don’t let the sexual promiscuity of these insects fool you. These are not hippy mosquitoes. Once all the wet n’ wild procreation is done the mosquitoes organize into highly efficient, blood-sucking warfare units. Unit six is assigned to Cameron’s house and is especially deadly. We are forced to retreat into the force field (mosquito net). The mosquitoes hover around until we emerge for more provisions or to carry out bodily functions and then they attack like little buzzing vampires trying to cash in on the Twilight/True Blood craze.

Speaking of bodily functions, the Bateys in the southwest have a very interesting design feature in which the houses have no bathrooms. I’ve come to have a very loose definition of what a bathroom is in this country. Any kind of hole in the ground with a structure that will not collapse in the next five minutes meets my requirements. But in Batey 9 they literally have nothing. So you have to go outside and poop in the fields. You might think that this sounds freeing, the open air on your bum, no tan lines. It’s not. It’s hot and dusty and there are thorny bushes that poke your butt if you’re not careful. Except at around 6:30 in the evening when there’s a nice breeze and the sun sets over the mountains. Then it’s nice.

Everybody in the Batey speaks Creole (Haitian) which I don’t understand. It’s strange to be in a place where I can’t understand the people. One benefit is that rather than seeming like an odioso for not making small talk they just assume it’s because I can’t speak Creole. I’ve started learning some important basic words such as food (“manje”), water (“dlo”), and elephant (“elefan”) so that I won’t lack food or water if I ever find myself at a Haitian elephant farm in the middle of an African savannah.

We started work last week. Everything was going uncomfortably well until Saturday when we were finishing up the connections to the houses and the pastor came over to tell us about a community ordinance which requires all water taps to be inside the house. Now I’m pretty sure all “ordinances” in this community exist only in the Batey 9 ether but we decided to comply anyway. Or Cameron and I did. All of the people working with us threw a fit and controversy ensued. This put me more at ease and I was able to start working the way one should work in the Dominican Republic, surrounded by conflict and grudges.

Cameron and I work pretty well together because we’re very different. Cameron has a mild case of OCD and would, if given the opportunity, undergo an operation to become a robot so that he could be more efficient. But then he would get stuck on a task and his mainframe would not allow him to move to the next task until he finished the first one but his wiring screws up and he overheats and needs to cool off. I am more of a squirrel, immersing myself in a task for 30 seconds, then looking up, look left, look right, look left, look right, “hey, that tree looks nice!” scurry, scurry scurry, immersed, repeat. So together we are a squirrel robot which everybody knows make the best water engineers.

UPDATE: Success! We finished. Everybody has water. Hooray.

Digging to China.

The three musketeers install the taps.

The knee bone is connected to the shoulder bone.

Yay water!

-“NICE HAT!”

-“RICE CAT?!”

-“NICE HAT!”

-“YEAH, MIKE’S FAT! SO?”

-“NO! NICE HAT!”

-“YOUR COUSIN IS A RED-HEADED POLYNESIAN STRIPPER?!”

This is a typical attempt at talking in a Dominican night club or bar or public transport or on a porch. If there’s one thing in this country that never fails to reach its full potential, it’s the volume of the music. And not just any type of music. The WORST kind of music ever (invented, obviously, by a horny, violent, tone deaf, sadistic little bastard) Reggaeton. Now Merengue and Bachata are also played here and on occasions when my iTunes stumbles upon a Merengue or Bachata song and sends it through my earphones at a reasonable volume it can actually be pleasant. But in the colmado (bar/convenience store) they turn it up until the speakers are blown and you mostly hear loud scratchy sounds. Reggaeton is bad at any volume. Even if you mute it, but it’s still playing, it is excruciatingly terrible. Not that they have a mute button here. They only have an “UP” volume button which raises the volume of the music at an ever increasing rate directly proportional to the rate of hearing loss in this country.

A friend called me “crotchety” the other day which, as he explained to me, means that I am kind of like a grumpy old man. And I’m rereading what I just wrote about the music and I see how this could be taken as the writing of the only crotchety 25 year-old in the Dominican Republic. But no. Reggaeton, and the volume it’s played at, is some sort of rhythmic masochism which I refuse to accept just to be considered the opposite of crotchety (“good natured” according to synonym.com). Rant over.

The Dominicans have another name for me here that is similar to crotchety. I haven’t told you about this name before because I was ashamed. I wanted you all to think I was a happy go lucky globetrotter. But in the eyes of a Dominican it is not so. And it’s time that you all know. For those of you who know me, you know I’m not a very talkative person. And I don’t always greet people with a great big smile and a firm handshake. And I’ve learned that my normal, everyday, walking around face that I wear here does not express enthusiasm. Well in the Dominican Republic if you aren’t smiling and emphatically greeting everybody you see and making small talk then you can only be one kind of person: an “Odioso.” (gasp!) This translates roughly to “The Hateful One.” A bit harsh, I think. It was officially coined by the members of another volunteer’s community where I spent a lot of time, apparently not saying hello or smiling. Now in my head I am neither crotchety nor odioso. I like people. And I like talking to people. I just sometimes don’t see the need for the niceties and small talk that are so important here. So in the future if I seem angry or hateful towards you, it is probably not the case. But I also probably don’t want to talk about the weather. So I am whatever that makes me. I won't worry about it until I stop laughing at fart jokes.

As I enter my final season on this Island I have to think about the future of my projects. My stove project is a young baby, just learning to walk. But I can’t raise it anymore. So I’m giving it up for adoption. My thesis study is like the obnoxious toddler I never wanted but I can’t just abandon it because everybody tells me that’s not a good thing to do. And my second water project is like my unborn baby that Cameron and I conceived (immaculately) a while back and is about to be born. I will probably have to leave pretty early in its life but thanks to you guys I almost have enough money to support it from abroad (*cough* see blog below! *cough*). But enough with the baby analogies. They’re pretty creepy.

Let’s try Star Wars. So in this stove project I am like Yoda except that I am shorter, greener, and wrinklier than he is. I’ve gotten pretty good at using The Force (fire) for good (cooking). But I’m getting on in years and I won’t be here for much longer so I have to pass this knowledge of using The Force (fire) for good (cooking) on to some young Jedi (other Peace Corps Volunteers). Because Darth Vader (smoke) is using The Force (fire) for bad to carry out the evil plan of The Empire (respiratory diseases [the reason for Darth Vader’s breathing problems]) and so we must use the light-saber (improved cook stove) to defeat Darth Vader (smoke) and be one step closer to blowing up the Death Star (umm…). So this month I will be training the young Jedi (Peace Corps volunteers) how to use The Force (fire) and their light sabers (improved cook stoves) for good (cooking). And I am hoping that one of the young Jedi (Luke Stovemaker) will turn out to be even more powerful than I and be the hero of the Galaxy (Dominican Republic) by defeating Darth Vader (smoke) and bringing down The Empire (respiratory illnesses). I am also holding open auditions for Hans Solo, Chewbacca (no hair required), and Leia. Their analogical representation has yet to be determined.

Yeah so basically I’m trying to dump this project off on somebody so it doesn't die when I leave. It shouldn’t be a problem because it’s a pretty rad project. In my opinion. As if there were any other.

So as I’ve mentioned I’m doing three different projects right now. They are all in different places. So I spend most of my life commuting from one job to another. The result is that I never really spend any significant amount of time in one place. So I don’t pay rent for any house anymore. Meaning I’m homeless. I just wander around like a hobo with my backpack and duffle bag. I’m like Jack Kerouac except I work for the US Government.

But being a Peace Corps hobo is not all that it’s cracked up to be. For one thing there aren’t any freight trains around here. I’m forced to travel in crowded llttle vans and Toyota Camrys that won’t move until everybody inside is sufficiently uncomfortable and oxygen levels are dangerously low. And I’m not allowed to have a car or a motorcycle here. I’m only allowed to ride on the back of motorcycles with maniacal drunks.

And carrying bags around all the time gets uncomfortable. Sometimes I have to pay for an extra seat for my bags on public transport. Which is not fair because my bags aren’t even good for conversation or giving back massages. There is a store called La Sirena in the cities that is basically a Target or Wal-Mart. When you enter you have to leave your bags at the bag-check because they’re afraid you might steal stuff. Unless the bag contains a computer because then they’re afraid they might steal it. So I just put everything I need for the day in my backpack with my computer and drop my big bag at the bag-check. Then I walk out a different entrance and go wherever I have to go, light as a compressed brick of feathers, and return at the end of the day for my bag.

Luckily I’m a hobo with nice friends so wherever I need to go I have place to stay. No park benches for me. Also I have a regular income, even if it is regularly very little. So I don’t just eat corn from a can. Well not everyday at least. Then there's also the fact that I'm sitting by the beach on a sunny day in the Carribbean as I write this. Anyway I’m looking forward to finishing up some of these projects so that I can transition to being a tramp instead of a hobo**.

** A hobo is somebody who travels around looking for work. A migrant worker pretty much. A tramp is somebody who just travels around and only works when he really has too. A bum is somebody who neither works nor travels unless the police poke him.

Hey everybody! So you know how I finished that water system I was building? A lot of you mentioned that you didn't have a chance to donate to the project and you were really bummed about it. Well I felt bad so My friend/colleague (colleague is a dumb word) Cameron and I started another water project so that you guys wouldn't feel left out. You're welcome!

This water project is in a Haitian Batey in the south of the country. We will be connecting about 30 houses to an existing water system. You can see a good description of the community and the project at this website:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=517-455

That is also the site where you can give money!

Like the last water system I built, this one will not get built unless we do it. As Peace Corps volunteers we can fill a niche that no government or big aid agency can. And as always we guarantee that 100% or your donation goes directly to construction materials. The community members will provide all of the manual labor for free and Cameron and I will be Engineer, Contractor, Community Organizer, Accountant, and Water Boy for the huge salary we receive from the Peace Corps.

Thanks everybody! Send any questions or comments to me at dpeabody@mail.usf.edu.

So in the city there are these guys who sit on the side of the street in chairs and scream “Compramos oro, plata!” (“We buy gold, silver!”) They sound like the guys at baseball games selling Cracker Jacks. (Do they still do that or am I thinking of 1953?) And then people bring their silver and gold to the buyers and sell it to them. And I’m like “Duh!” This whole time I’ve been wasting my time going places to buy stuff. But I’m the customer. The seller should come to me if they want to sell stuff. So now rather than going to the store I just stand in the middle of the street and yell what I want.

“We buy toilet paper, pineapple, and potato chips! No we prefer Baked Lays! We’re watching our figure!”

Most of my time recently has been spent working with clay. Clay ovens, clay stoves, clay water filters. The great thing about the Peace Corps is that you don’t have to know how to do anything in order to be considered an expert. Prior to the Peace Corps my experience in ceramics was limited to 7th grade studio-art class where I made a crappy ash tray for the zero members of my family who smoked. In the US that nearly qualifies me for a job at Wendy’s. But here that makes me Director of the R&D department of Campo Kenmore’s new state of the art wood-fueled kitchen.

So I’ve been spending my time playing with clay trying to design low-cost, efficient, wood-burning cook stoves and bread ovens. It’s actually a very fun job. We’ve developed a prototype for both so we’re going to begin testing them soon. When those are done we’re going to start branching out into wood-burning computers and wood-burning airplanes.

Now that our stove is nearing completion the ceramics artists I work with are getting very excited to release it to the world. One of the artists, Isabelle, called me the other day because she realized we hadn’t come up with a name for the new stove model. For example, past stoves have been called the “Lorena” stove and the “Rocket” stove. Now Isabelle is a nice lady but she’s kind of dumb. I’m not being mean. I’m just saying I wouldn’t get in the Cash Cab with her. It’s to say that her work wasn’t exactly instrumental in the creation of this stove. So it surprised me when she very matter of factly asked me, “Do you think we should call it Isabelle or Isabelita or something like that?” Nope. I sure didn’t. I was thinking something like “Fire by Peace Corps” or “FireGoodCookYummyStove.” But I guess we’ll have to have a vote. I have a feeling none of those will win.

May and June are very rainy here. It’s been raining pretty much every afternoon for the past few weeks. It doesn’t bother me because I’ve always liked rain. And rain has an added benefit here in that it is a perfectly good excuse not to do something. Why didn’t you go to the meeting? “It was raining.” Are you going to school today?” No it’s raining.” Hey why did you just take a bite of my sandwich? I don’t even know you. You just walked into this restaurant, right up to my table, grabbed my sandwich and took a giant bite from it. What the hell? “Um, It’s raining?”

So we usually just work in the morning and then call it a day when it starts raining. The rain will stop as we approach July. But by then it will be way too hot to work a full day. That will bring us to September so I just need an excuse to work half days from then until October when I leave.

This is an article I wrote for the volunteer magazine here:

I’ve got a lot of experience in all sorts of things. In kindergarten I had a brief stint in building log cabins and Stonehenge type structures for 4 inch tall people. I earned several awards for my work including a Gold Star and the prestigious Smiley Face. In elementary school I was an artist, specializing mainly in portraits of Ninja Turtles. My pieces were shown on refrigerators throughout the suburbs. A lot of housewives predicted big things for my future in the arts but an addiction to Rice Krispie Treats ended my career prematurely. By Middle School I was a cardboard rocket scientist. After two years and zero successful moon landings (or friends) I quit.

In high school I was an athlete playing in front of tens of people. But I buckled under the pressure and my career ended at the age of 18. (Ah, those were the glory days.) In college I got into the hard sciences. I did some really important work in looking at other scientists’ work and trying to rewrite it without looking at it, in under 50 minutes. I came out with a hangover and a lot of pieces of paper with numbers between 0 and 100 written on them. In graduate school I decided that the hard sciences didn’t have enough practical application for me so I switched to Environmental Engineering. I saved a lot of theoretical trees and water and gave some really revolutionary talks on what everybody else was doing wrong.

Finally I came to the Peace Corps. There was a community where the water was in one place but the houses were in another place. We put pipes in the ground and the water ran through them and arrived at the houses. The people were happy.

It’s not to say that I didn’t have fun or enjoy what I did before I got to the Peace Corps. But no matter what hobby or subject of study I happened to be trying out that month I could never convince myself that any of them really mattered. As soon as I got to a point where I had a relative grasp on something I got bored and moved onto the next one. As Americans we seem to have a need to “find our calling.” “I was meant to be an actor.” “I was meant to be a doctor.” “I was meant to pierce my nipples and hang heavy weights from them in front of an audience.” But that’s kind of bullshit, right? Biologically speaking you were born to eat, drink, breath, poop, and reproduce. And I’ll concede that companionship is a necessity as well. So in building this water system I was fulfilling one of the basic needs of human life and it made sense to me. I have come to the end of the project and I would still like to build more water systems. I don’t want to research the effect of water availability on peoples’ ability to solve the Rubik’s cube. I just want to bury tubes in the ground and put water in them. Or build stoves that take harmful smoke out of people’s kitchens, allowing them to breathe. Or make water filters that remove harmful bacteria from people’s water so that they poop the way biology intended. Or teaching Sex-Ed classes to allow teenage girls to choose when they want to reproduce. So then Duncan extended forever in the Peace Corps and lived a simple but fulfilling life. Well no.

I’m sure Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie will attest to the fact that it’s hard for an overprivileged white kid to live the Simple Life. No matter how much I like my work I still feel the need to leave my house each weekend and head for civilization and Americans, like a dolphin coming up for air and then doing a sweet flip and making a giant splash, soaking an obese lady wearing a visor and a fanny pack. I use technology (internet, television, Ipod, Furbies) and eat American fast food. I complain to other Americans about the lack of manners and politeness and honesty among these simple people. And no matter how much I like simple answers to simple questions I continue to complicate my mind with books and brain pushups. So I want all of these things. None of which is a basic need. None of which was born of simplicity. They were born of science and imperialism and entrepreneurism and religion and law.

So I find myself stuck between two worlds in an overpopulated place called hypocrisy. I want the comfort and familiarity of America but the work and freedom of the Peace Corps.

So I need to find a compromise. Equally rewarding and necessary work must exist in the United States. We, as Americans, have the same basic needs as anybody from the third world. We’re just disconnected from our basic needs. Our world begins when the food reaches the table and ends when we flush the toilet. I’d like to do something that expands that view to include the before and after. I want to let people know where their food and water comes from before it enters their mouth. Let them know where their poop goes after it leaves their body. And I realize what I’m describing is not a job, it’s an environmental studies textbook. Except that to understand an environmental studies textbook theoretically is one thing, but to understand it in the context of your life is another thing. And living in my campo has forced me to face the reality of how drastic the effects (human, animal, and ecological) of an “American lifestyle” are compared to that of the Third World. So I don’t want to fall right back into my previous life and forget everything I’ve learned here.

Instead I could push for a return to simplicity while living among the complexity of the United States; a simple/complex system that combines the best of the Dominican campo (local food, decentralized waste management, rainwater catchment, hanging out) with the immense amount of information and technology in the United States (urban farming, biogas digesters, conservation practices, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.). I will call it simplexity (Yes, I’m sure I’m not the first one to coin this term). So it’s not a regression to pre-industrialized USA. It’s more like packing up the really good things of the First World and taking them with us as we backtrack our steps to meet the Third World somewhere in the middle (the Second World?) to have an organic beer and shoot the shit. Oh yeah, and, ideally, I would just like to do this four days a week in a non-competitive atmosphere with decent benefits.

Moral of the Story: Please send all job offers to dpeabody@mail.usf.edu accompanied by a 500 word essay explaining why you want a semi-intelligent, sporadically motivated, beer-loving, manboy in your workplace. Or just write “Free Cookies!!”

Law of Conservation of “S”: The quantity of S’s in a closed language does not change over time. S’s cannot be created or destroyed but they can change places.

We’re all familiar with this law from our freshman year Physics of Writing class but it’s rare that we get to see it in real life. Until we come to the Dominican Republic. They tend not to use the letter “S” in everyday conversation (or writing). Words like “busco” become “buco.” “Dos mas” becomes “doe ma.” “Yos Yos Mas” becomes “Yo Yo Ma.” Etc. They are aware of the fact that the letter “S” exists and that it must be used or the laws of physics will be proved wrong and the world will implode on itself and form a black hole. They hear the “S” on the news or in their soap operas or in the lisp of a Spanish aid worker. They just don’t realize that there’s a method to their S-ness. And so when it comes time to sound intelligent or sophisticated they put the “S” back in their speech but in the wrong words and places. Just wherever they decide it sounds nice. Usually in every word that can possibly accept an “S” (This has to do with the number of valence S’s that the word has. But we won’t get into Linguistic Chemistry right now.) So “Hola” becomes “Holas.” “Acueducto” becomes “Ascuedusto.” But “Dos Mas” remains “Doe Ma.”

Now that my water system is done and I am working in other parts of the country I only spend weekends at my mountain home. And with no work to be done there it has become more like a vacation home than before when it was more like one of those trailers that they have as offices at constructions sites. Now I look forward to waking up lazily and having a cup of coffee and traveling a total of 10 meters in a day.

I’ve been using some of my time to encourage the artistic talents of my five-year old friend Manuel. We color in a Toy Story coloring book. But not in a lame kiddish way. It’s more like neo-modernist, abstract art. Do we stay in the lines? Yeah, Right! Sometimes people are all like, “Hey, shouldn’t that pig be pink?” And we're all like, “Hey shouldn’t you shut your face.”

When Manuel is having a little trouble finding his creativity, I teach him an age old artists trick called “getting plastered.” He chugs a liter of rum and the creative juices start flowing. I sometimes wonder whether it is bad for five-year-olds to have unhealthy drinking habits in the developing world but the WHO doesn’t have any statistics about it so who really knows.

Anyway none of that really matters because I just found out Judgment Day is on May 21st and the people who are worthy will go up to heaven or something. I use curse words so I probably won’t get the E-vite. Then in October of this year the world is going to end. It’s strange, and a bit disheartening, that this date coincides with my finish date in the Peace Corps. Here I thought the world would be saved when I left the Peace Corps when in reality it’s going to end.

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow. This blog is dedicated to my Mother. Happy Mother’s Day Mom! She’s a nice lady. She’ll probably be one of the ones who gets to go up to heaven in a couple weeks.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Remember Duncan Peabody (AKA Duncan Peabloggy) the Peace Corps volunteer who wrote that blog back in 2010 about his experience building a water system and living in the Dominican Republic? He was living large. He had the fans, the house in the mountains, the Peace Corps stipend, the public transport. He had it all. But we have heard very little from him since he finished his water system. What became of him?

We caught up with him recently and found out. It seems the completion of the water project left a pretty big hole in his life. It had consumed his Peace Corps career up until then and with no materials to buy or workers to boss around he didn’t know what to do with his life. He started spending a lot of time in his house sniffing fabric softener and ordering worker ants to carry crumbs from one place to another on his floor. The critics and his fans forgot about him and his life spiraled downwards. A month later he was busted by the police trying to break into a Laundromat in the city screaming “I need my sheets! I know you’re in there Downy Bear!” He sobered up in the slammer and decided he needed a change in his life so he headed back to the United States. He went through two different rehab treatments in Los Angeles and Colorado. They were both very successful. With his mind no longer Downy fresh he decided to return to the Dominican Republic and try for a comeback…

The rumors are true. I have just returned from the United States. And not just the regular United States. The Los Angeles United States. On the way there I had a layover in Miami and everybody was speaking Spanish so I didn’t realize I was back in the U.S. yet. Then I landed in L.A. and everybody was speaking Spanish so I didn’t realize I was back in the U.S. yet. Then I saw a hipster. Hello America!!

Hipsters have taken over the country it seems. Or at least LA and Denver. Barack Obama now wears tight, cut off jean shorts behind the podium when he gives speeches. Now I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old ex-pat but there’s some irony to point out here. The hipsters spend lots of money on trendy clothes and maybe rip them up or something to make them look poor. (Or do they come like that?) In the Dominican Republic campo the people spend a little bit of money on one nice looking outfit and take good care of it so they look wealthier than they are. I don’t really understand either idea, but who am I to judge. So I’ve come up with a great charity idea. The hipsters will buy clothes that actually look like the money they cost and they will send them to my community in the Dominican Republic. In return the people in my community will send their hand-me downs to Los Angeles. Not only will this fulfill the needs of each group but it will also help to strengthen hipster-dominican relations which have been an area of concern recently.

Other than that project I have three smaller (realer) projects that I’m working on in my remaining eight months.

The first one is the ceramic water filter study that I have described in previous blogs maybe. It’s a research project with my University that I’m doing for my Master’s thesis. We gave people ceramic water filters and now we are finding out if they work and if the people like them and stuff. It’s nice…

The second project is a new wood burning stove design we are working on. The idea is to make the chamber of the stove out of molded pieces of refractory brick. We would have an existing ceramics factory manufacture the pieces. Then Peace Corps volunteers would deal directly with the ceramics factory to order their stove sets. In the volunteer’s community they would assemble the pieces and enclose them in the cement box of their choice and throw in a chimney. Then the people would stop inhaling smoke. So in theory this seems like a good idea. We just need to do some R&D to make sure the stove works in practice. No problem right?

-Just find a ceramics factory and show them the plans and ask them to build you a prototype. Tell them you’ll give them money for their work. They like that. (In the business world we call this “paying”)

-Then show up on several occasions to check on progress. Find that the ceramics expert had to “step out” for the day. But it’s ok. This is only the third time he’s said he would be there and then not shown up. Oh and he hasn’t gotten started yet because he doesn’t have the materials.

-Call again to make sure he’s still interested in this work. Of course he is. Very much. Hey Duncan give me a call back tomorrow and we’ll discuss where to go from here. ….From where? The beginning? Didn’t we discuss that?

-Hey it’s tomorrow but your phone is off. “You’re fired.” – Donald Trump

And so I am still at ground zero. I’m looking for a new ceramics expert. But theoretically I like this project.

My final project is a Youth Engineers Club. Basically I just build things with this 15 year-old kid Martin who wants to be an engineer. He invites his friend along so that we can call it an “Engineering Club” and not “two guys building stuff”. (A minimum of three persons are required to qualify as a Club though this does not oblige all gatherings involving three people with similar interests to label themselves a Club) But his friend doesn’t really care about what we’re doing and he’s pretty obnoxious. We built a simple solar oven but before we could cook with it my host-brother decided that it looked a lot like garbage and ripped it up to construct part of a cage for his fighting cocks. We’ll have to spend more time making things look pretty if they’re going to survive. A good lesson for a future engineer. Martin, not me.

A special water system inauguration blog post!

” Mission Accomplished!” The priest who was doing the inauguration ceremony said those words (in Spanish). I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make fun of me by comparing my with George W. Bush. Either way I thought the mission was more or less complete. Assuming the mission was just to bring water from one place to several other places. But then I guess there’s more to it. W may have been right that it was the end of conventional warfare in Iraq. The part that you can plan and execute. But then that was followed by years of guerilla warfare. So I think we’ve finished the conventional construction phase. And now we enter guerilla construction. Leaks will catch us unawares. Attacks will be fast and erratic. There might be casualties. But we will move in a dispatch with them as efficiently as possible. Eventually the plumbers I have trained will be able to deal with the attacks on their own and my presence will no longer be necessary. Luckily I’ve already drilled everywhere in the community and extracted all of the self satisfaction there is to extract so I will have no problem turning control over to the local plumbers and heading back to my country. So I guess the priest WAS making a George W reference. Except that W landed on an aircraft carrier in a fighter jet. The baton twirling routine I did before my speech had the potential to be even more badass than W’s jet landing until the crotch of my sequined leotard ripped during the finishing split and suddenly nobody was looking at the baton that I was holding above my head.

Otherwise the Celebration was very nice. A priest came and moderated the event. He told me when to speak. I spoke. It was uninspiring. He made them applaud after each sentence anyway. Then my Dona/President of the Water Committee gave her speech. It was animated and passionate and I think she only breathed three times in the whole ten minute speech. I’d like to see David Blaine do that. They presented me with a framed certificate in appreciation of my role in the project. The name on the certificate was Senor Duncan. Apparently they didn’t know my last name so they just put the name of a grade school Spanish teacher. But really I like it even more than if they had used my full name. At the end of the ceremony the priest blessed the water and we threw it on the crowd. I was hesitant to throw the blessed water because I’m not very holy and I was afraid the water that came from my hands would burn peoples’ faces like acid. It didn’t though.

All my Peace Corps friends showed up to support me and make fun of my fear of public speaking. Even some white doctor people I didn’t know showed up to show their support. A creepy Dominican guy hovered over the American girls from the moment we arrived and kept asking the guys to introduce him. Girls like persistence.

After the blessing of the water there was a photo shoot. The people in my community love to be photographed but they don’t really understand how it works. So people were just walking into pictures that they weren’t supposed to be in and facing the wrong way and blocking the people in front of them. It was hilarious chaos. Their mothers obviously don’t make them get together for Christmas photos every year.

I slaughtered a turkey to cook for dinner before the ceremony. The way they do it here is by hanging it upside down by its feet and slitting its throat. I decided that if I couldn’t slaughter a turkey then I was a hypocrite to eat turkey. Also that turkey had been trying to get me to smoke pot for the past few days and saying “What are you chicken? Bok! Bok bok bok!” Luckily the Ninja Turtles taught me well when I was a kid so I said “I’m not a chicken, you’re a turkey!” (See YouTube for reference: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_GgUNF5sTA) And so I had to kill it. And what better time to do it than for a celebration. Killing the turkey gave me a simultaneous rush of adrenaline and sadness. Then we defeathered it and tore out its insides so that it would look more like the turkeys that come wrapped up in the grocery stores and we could forget that it ever lived. We rubbed some spices on it and put it in a bucket to wait for night time.

I took a nap around 3pm. I was all tuckered out. I woke up a little bit later.

Around nightfall all of the white people who still remained headed up the mountain to the camp site which was a piece of cow pasture that I picked at random. We brought the turkey and some charcoal and prepared a lopsided spit to rotisserie the chicken. Large quantities of rum and wine were consumed. Justin played the guitar and we sang and danced like savages.

But then things took a turn for the worse when Andrew, still feeling some of the adrenaline from the turkey slaughter, ran and jumped on the bull’s back in the cow pasture. The bull started bucking wildly and as Andrew went flying off his belt buckle got caught on one of the horns and Andrew was stuck hanging over the bull’s face. Cameron reacted by grabbing the guitar out of Justin’s hand and trying to smash it over the bull’s head but he hit Andrew instead and Andrew went unconscious. Jenni immediately whipped out her camera and started taking pictures. They were uploaded onto Facebook before the whole thing was over. Kerri was already asleep. She woke up and looked over at what was happening and told Cameron and Andrew to shut up. Amy and Justin continued trying to harmonize on “Total Eclipse of the Heart” but it was disturbing me more than the scene with the bull. Meanwhile Kenny was talking with one of the cows asking her to reason with her husband. She lifted up her tail and pooped. Cameron saw it and immediately applied hand sanitizer. Suddenly Omar came running out of the tent in cowboy attire and clown makeup and yelled “Don’t worry I saw this on Animal Planet!” He started running around trying to distract the bull and then hid in barrels. I think he meant he saw it on ESPN2. Finally Paul walked over to the bull and punched it in the back of the head and screamed, “I do what I want!” The bull fell to its knees. Andrew came to and looked around and said “Yeaaaah Dawg!” and snapped his fingers. Then Kelly got abducted by aliens. She giggled.

That was all bullshit. But we did have a lot of fun camping.

Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Feliz Kwanza! Happy Winter Buddhist Holiday! And so on. How about just Happy New Year! We’re all on the same calendar right? At least as far as business affairs go. And let us not kid, I mean business.

First off I want to thank everybody who donated to my project. You filled it in just a week. I still don’t know who you are but as soon they send me the list I will thank you personally. Because of your donations we were able to get water to everybody’s home for Christmas. Well I think we did.(updates soon[ish]) There was one little job left to do before we could release the water but I had to go the airport to come home for Christmas so I left it to them. But I called them from the airport and they said that water was arriving. I don’t see any reason for them to lie about that. So I’ll be back on the 27th (weather pending) to see the water come out of the tap and jump up and down shrieking and flapping my hands like they’re on fire. They’ll all have seen it already so they’ll just be like “Silly gringo. He gets excited about running water.” It’s true though. I’ve been taking running water for granted for 25 years but I’m pretty excited about this particular water. Funny how things are so much more interesting when my ego is involved.

We’re having the official Inauguration for the system on January 8th. We’ll have a ceremony and people will pray a lot and thank God. Maybe they’ll thank me as well. Usually there is a party afterwards. Unfortunately the guy who likes to party the most in my community lost his mother a couple weeks ago so he is supposed to mourn for a while and I think he’s a little bummed out about it. (His mom dying and that he can’t party.) It’s funny how Dominican’s treat death. They spend tons of money they don’t have and tons of time mourning dead family members. At the same time they tried to not connect water to this one guy’s house because they think he’s going to die soon. When he complained that that was unfair they said, “Fine but we’re not going to bury the pipes deep because when he dies we’re going to dig them up and use them somewhere else.” Now I know I have to be accepting of other people’s cultures and beliefs and all that but it seems to me that they should show a little more consideration to living people. That way they’ve already got a head start on appeasing the dead person and they don’t have to mourn for as long.

The United States is pretty cool. It’s really comfortable. I’ve been seeing a lot of people here. Some of them are people I know so I stop to talk with them. They’re all like “Hey, how’s the Peace Corps?” and so I’m like “It’s good.” And like a lot of other cool stuff has happened too.

A bunch of us volunteers are going to get together for “Campo Christmas” when I get back to the DR. They’re all coming up to my community for a camping trip. We’re going to sacrifice a turkey and some vegetables. And then we’re going to camp in tents. People in my community think it’s weird when we camp I think. They don’t really get it. They just don’t see what’s so fun about sleeping somewhere with no electricity or running water or a cement floor and cooking on an open wood fire and just hanging out with people and talking without the distractions of internet and television and iPhones. I really hope that with my guidance they’ll eventually learn how to appreciate nature like us Americans do.

And there’s your quick holiday post. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Hi everybody! You look really nice today. Did you lose weight? I really like your haircut. Speaking of haircuts I need $2,000 to finish a water system. Oh and that shirt looks really good on you.

Yeah. It’s that time. This is the problem with knowing people who work in grassroots development. They always ask you to just give away money. They’re a bunch of frickin’ communists if you ask me. But still…..please?

With this Peace Corps Partnership Program I’m trying to raise $2,000 to finish the project. The other money has come from various other grants but we’ve come up $2,000 short. This money will be used to build one more tank and tapstands. The blurb on the website for donating is a little outdated. I wrote it when I thought I needed $5,000. So you guys are getting a really sweet deal. To help you decide whether you really want to donate to this project I will give you the PROs and CONs and you can decide which outweighs the other.

CONS

- There is a crapload of aid in the Dominican Republic. Every high school student and his fat friend want to come down here to help poor people for a week because it’s pretty nice for a poor place. The Dominican government loves it because tons of international money pays for the development of their country and they can continue to pay for hookers, mansions, and big signs with their faces on them.

- There’s no guarantee that I won’t take all of this money and go live at an all-inclusive resort for a month (Actually there is. I have to produce receipts and write reports on where this money goes).

- If you have 4 apples and give one apple away then you have 3 left. Three is less than 4. Money follows these same principles.

PROS

- I’m tired of getting jerked around by politicians.

- The government is never going to help them because they have no votes to offer, they add very little to the local economy, and they have no political connections. They’re nice people though.

- International aid is not going to help them because the houses are so spread out that this system is not cost effective. There are billions of people in the world that need water and aid organizations are going to choose the places based on cost efficacy. This has logic. But it still leaves my community without hope of water. Luckily I have the ability to ignore logic.

- Cost effective or not I’m still going to be able to provide water for about 200 people for $14,000. That means that $70 can provide a person with clean drinking water for the rest of their life. That’s a pretty good deal if you’re into that kind of thing.

- All of the money donated will go directly to the project. If you donate to big organizations half of the money gets lost in bureaucracy and administration. But I’m my own administration and I work for free.

- All donors will be offered an all expenses paid trip to the Dominican Republic (Does not include airfare, in-country transport, food, alcohol, or any lodging which is not my house. Also if you don’t donate you can come too.)

- It’s tax deductible. Stick it to the government!

OK well the results are in and there are 7 PROs and 3 CONs and everybody knows that 7 weighs more than 3. Looks like you’re going to have to donate.

In all seriousness this is a very good project. The beauty of the Peace Corps is that the volunteer lives where he is working and can monitor and evaluate the project for two years. The volunteer gets to know the community and can provide them what they actually need rather than what some big name economist who has never been to their country says that they need. The result is a much more personal type of aid that, though not as grand as big aid plans from the UN or World Bank, is way more efficient and effective for the population that it serves. (If you’re interested more in this idea read White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.) But all academic, international development bullshit aside, these people could use drinking water and we can make that happen at very little expense to us.

Here’s a quick summary of the project that I did for some other proposal, for those of you who don’t know what it’s all about:

The two communities, El Brison and Las Batatas Arriba, are located high in the Cordillera Septentrional in the north of the Dominican Republic. They have neither running water nor electricity, and access to the communities is difficult or impossible by automobile depending on the weather conditions. As a result the communities have been largely neglected and remain completely without infrastructure, apart from a one-room elementary school.

The communities have determined that the most pressing concern to be addressed is the lack of access to clean drinking water. As such they have requested the help of a Peace Corps Water and Sanitation Engineer to help in the construction of a gravity-fed water system with a stream catchment to provide drinking water to 49 homes. The water system will be complemented by the formation of a community water board to govern the water system and health and hygiene promoters to teach the community how to use the water responsibly to improve their well being.

The water committee is comprised of two men and three women who meet biweekly to discuss the construction and maintenance of the water system. The committee has implemented a monthly quota to be paid by each household for the lifetime of the water system which will be used towards the operation and maintenance costs. Two plumbers will be trained to be the main caretakers of the system and will earn a small stipend for their work. All of the manual labor for the project will be provided by the community members themselves who will be divided into five work brigades. Each brigade will work one day a week on the water system until its completion.

Upon the completion of the water system seven women will be trained and certified as health and hygiene promoters. They will visit the rest of the homes in the community to teach mothers about health and hygiene practices for themselves and their families.

The project takes a multi-faceted approach towards improving the health of the community through organization, infrastructure, and education. It will serve as an example to the community for all subsequent development projects.

Happy 21st blog! Finally I can get rid of this fake blog ID. I just tried to think of a creative acronym that is like the DMV but its where you get your bloggers license but I didn’t think of one. But imagine if I did. I’m drinking an American beer right now to celebrate this 21st blog. It was donated to me by a visiting fan. American beer is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. Sliced bread which was soaked in water and then allowed to ferment in a sanitary and temperature controlled environment with hops; thus producing beer.

I’m almost done with my water system. Kind of. Like, by Christmas all of the houses will probably have water but then there will be several kinks to work out before we can really call it a finished product. But nearing the end of this project has made me reflect back on this past year. And I’ve realized that, in a way, building this water system has been a lot like raising a child. I know what you’re saying. “Duncan how do you know what raising a child is like when all of your children are illegitimate and you don’t even pay child support because you’re a “volunteer”? Well I know because raising a child is a lot like building a water system and I’m doing that right now.

You see in the beginning I was like, I’m ready to build a water system but I just don’t know if I’m in the right financial position for it right now. So I waited till I got some money together and then I started the project. It was a boy! We named it Acueducto after its Roman grandfather.

So we started with the basics. Gluing pipes together. As the old saying goes, “You have to glue pipes before you can build a ferrocement water tank.” The workers had no idea what they were doing at first. They made lots of mistakes. Granted, I also had no idea what I was doing. This was my first water project. But I pretended like I knew everything and my word was the final word. Funny thing is they bought it. Or at least I was the bread winner in this project so they had no choice but to do what I said.

But eventually they started to get the hang of things. And with that they began questioning my authority.

- “Have you really built one of these before?”

- “Yes.”

- “But you’re so young and you’re still in school. Did you have pre-graduate constructions with another community?”

- “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

These were the beginnings of the teen years. They started to realize that I wasn’t as all-knowing as I pretended to be. They stopped showing up to work. When I told them I was disappointed in them they screamed, “I wish this project had never been born!” And it hurt. But I pushed on, knowing that this was a phase and eventually they’d come around.

And they did. Eventually they began to take more responsibility. And I began to trust them with things that I wouldn’t have previously. Sure they still showed up drunk every so often but who hasn’t showed up drunk to work before. It probably happens at NASA all the time. They began to appreciate what I was trying to do here and realized that it wasn’t so easy. Even if it was obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing every step of the way, I did a pretty good job in the end. (Props Mom and Dad. I was just kidding about the illegitimate children thing.) And soon will come the day when I have to let them go. They can basically build this thing on their own now. They come to me every so often for advice or bail money. But it’s time to let them screw up and learn from their mistakes. And then forget what they learned and screw up again. And so on. And then they’re 25 years old and living in a third world country and I have no idea what happens after that. But I’m excited.

We got “consolidated” a few weeks ago because of a hurricane/tropical storm that was passing by the island. To me the word “consolidation” is closely related with “efficiency.” One consolidates in order to become more efficient. Not so with the Peace Corps. This consolidation, which was meant to save us from a hurricane, ended up being nothing more than five days in a nice hotel with three buffet meals a day all to avoid a little drizzle on the fifth day. They pretty much spent on me four months salary in five days. Now I’m not complaining. I don’t bite the hand that feeds me. Because it’s my own usually. I mostly just wanted to thank you, the tax payers of the United States, for paying for my vacation. You really shouldn’t have. Like seriously, it was unnecessary. But I’m glad you did.

You know what would be a fun thing to do hypothetically? To collect the wristbands that tourists wear when they’re at all-inclusive resorts. Then tape them onto your wrist and go and pretend to be a guest at the all-inclusive and drink and eat for free all day and swim in the pool and act like a tourist. I suppose if I did do this I would pretend I didn’t speak much Spanish so as not to attract too much attention to myself. Sometimes for my own entertainment I would speak really bad Spanish (“Yo quiero un glasso of wino, por favor.”). Also I would probably spread out my visits so they didn’t start to notice me as a regular. Wouldn’t that be neat? If it wasn’t so dishonest I would totally do that. I don’t though. But if I did actually do it sometimes and I was just pretending that it was a hypothetical situation even though it was actually a real situation I would wink at you right now. But I’m not WINKing at you.

I know this is Twenty and I never did a Nineteen but I did start a Nineteen but then I decided it was stupid so I saved it with the intention of going back and unstupidifying it. But that never happened so I finally just decided to abandon it altogether. But it was already saved as Nineteen in My Documents and I didn’t want to erase it but I also didn’t feel like renaming it something like “Aborted Blog” because that sounds like something that would get me in trouble if super conservative, pro-life space aliens ever got a hold of my computer. So I just called this one Twenty. Nineteen will someday be discovered and released on the DL as a rare previously unreleased blog and hipster future kids will get their pretentious hands on it and say things about how this was from way back before Duncan Peabloggy sold out and had something real to say. Which is a ridiculous claim because I’ve had absolutely nothing real to say from the start.

I start a lot of sentences with "But". I think it's just to stick it to my grade school teachers who said I couldn't. I guess I use the word "but" a lot in general. Like inside of sentences too. I like buts.

But so even for Twenty I couldn’t really think of anything to write for a blog. But it’s been almost a month and I like to try writing at least one blog each month. So I’m going to try to force this one out. And as we all know you have to be careful when you’re forcing one out because it could come out like shit. Usually one idea pops into my head and inspires me to start writing and then the momentum carries me into a couple more ideas. No such luck in September. Not a creative thought in my head. So I am turning once again to my muse. That stupid f’ing cat in my house who is bothering me as we speak. Or as I blog.

My cat is the proud new father of at least one new kitten! How do I know? Well my cat has no tail. And it was the only one on my mountain without a tail. The previous owner told me it was because he was born that way but I always just figured that he didn’t want to tell me about the sadistic six year old who cut off its tail with a machete when it was a kitten. But then a new cat was born up the mountain recently without a tail. Scandal! It seems my cat is a bit of a Catanova. But my cat doesn’t spend any less time pestering me and laying around my house so I guess he’s embracing the Dominican tradition of making babies and then not caring for them ( I’m still not going to cut his balls off. It’s not right.). Anyway I asked my friend Google about these cats without tails and he referred me to his buddy Wikipedia who, contrary to the slanderous claims of that asshole Academia, is a very reliable source of information. It turns out my cat is a Manx cat. His family tree has ventured all the way across the Atlantic, beginning on the Isle of Man between Great Britain and Ireland, to end up in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. And now the tree has grown a new branch. You’re intrigued by this, I can tell. I’ll continue:

“The Manx (Manx: Kayt Manninagh or Stubbin) is a breed of cat with a naturally occurring mutation of the spine. This mutation shortens the tail, resulting in a range of tail lengths from normal to tail-less.”

Just fascinating. According to the Cat Fanciers Association (that’s a real thing!) Manx cats are very rare. The white ones can be worth over $4,000. You know, if you fancy that kind of thing. Mine’s black. Worth about a dollar.

“The Manx tail-less gene is dominant and highly penetrant.” Hence the new tail-less kitten. “Kittens from Manx parents are generally born without any tail. Having two copies of the gene is semi-lethal and kittens are usually spontaneously aborted before birth. This means that tail-less cats can carry only one copy of the gene.”

And so on. If I write any more about this my head will explode from the excitement but I encourage you to look into this more and perhaps take up Manx cat breeding as a weekend hobby.

The highway that runs through the nearest town to me sucks. Like it’s in incredible disrepair. So nobody likes to drive on it. Especially big trucks that need to deliver materials to me. And because the highway sucks so badly that the government has to protect it from overuse because they wouldn’t want it to get damaged? So there are soldiers from the National Guard at the entrances on either side of the highway and if any trucks drive past their checkpoints they have to show a permit to enter the highway. But as it turned out one of the trucks delivering pipes to my site got stopped and did not have a permit to pass. So I had to go out there to try to convince the guards that these materials were for a good cause and they should let the truck pass. Yeah right. Plan B: “I work for the Government of the United States! Let me pass!” That one made them laugh. And rightfully so. Because, though I do technically work for the US government, my position gives me about as much power as a mail carrier. Plan C. Bribery. It’s the only one that ever works. (footnote) So the driver had to pay the Guards to pass and then I had to pay back the driver. I wasn’t sure at the time why it had to be done that way. We finally arrived at the police station in town where we leave the tubes because after all of that I didn’t have the energy to try to convince the driver to head up the mountain. And I was talking to the police guy who I’ve met a few times and I started asking him why the Guards charged me $3000 pesos because that seems like a lot to me. And as soon as I started asking the driver starting yelling at me, very urgently, to go to where he was. So I went and he very slyly placed $1000 pesos in my and said kind of threateningly, “We’re all set now. Do you understand?” And I did. I was being bribed not to tell the policeman about having to pay a bribe. And I think it was because the driver was in cahoots with the Guards and they were both ripping me off. And if I told the policeman he would probably make the driver bribe him to not tell anybody about the bribes. So instead the driver bribed me back with a third of my own bribe to them. It was all very exciting because I had never been bribed before. Except for I guess maybe my parents bought me ice cream when I was little so that I would shut up. And I’m sure those bribes were accompanied by a few threatening words as well.

Footnote: Yes I am copying David Foster Wallace. But it’s fine because I paid him off. So back in the day when I was a wide-eyed but tail-less Peace Corps newbie I would have gone a on a diatribe about how bribery and corruption are what is keeping this country down. Engineers bribe politicians to give them government contracts. Politicians bribe law enforcement to look the other way while they bury dead hookers. Dead hookers bribe some guy in hell to sneak them into heaven because business is better up there. But now that I’ve been here for a year I don’t think that’s really what the problem is. It’s mainly gravity that’s keeping this country down. But until they get some significant results from that hadron collider in Switzerland we’re going to have to leave Gravity be. The thing is that corruption is so widespread that there’s no way to eradicate it completely. So what we need to do is take a page out of the book of those hippies who want to legalize marijuana (if they haven’t already torn out all the pages to roll joints with) and legalize corruption so that we can then regulate it. Am I right? Or did I take the wrong page out of that book? I’m hungry. I wish there was a Taco Bell up here.

Due to the overwhelming response to my question and answer session and the realization that some of my family members don’t know the difference between a question and a suggestion (when you say “just a suggestion” that usually infers a suggestion) I won’t be able to respond to all of the questions. But all of the questions were excellent and I encourage all of you to keep on keeping on and stuff even if you’re a reject. So I am going to answer Kyle and Lily’s questions because I thought that they showed the most thought and interest and existence.

Kyle of Guildford, CT says: “What is the scariest animal you have seen in your village and what did it have for breakfast?”

Great question Kyle! Well the scariest animal I have seen would have to be the town drunk on a rainy Sunday when he stumbled into my house and kept saying “I’m too much man!” until he passed out sitting up a chair. And despite his claim of being too much man I found him to be more animally. And judging by the vomit pile it left on my floor it must have had fried eggs and boiled plantains for breakfast.

Lily of Chatham, NJ says: “How's your project going? What stage you at now?”

Well Lily your first question was quite good. Great use of the contraction. Your second question, however, is not a full sentence. Anyway my project is coming along pretty well. We are in Stage 3: Bargaining. We should reach Stage 4: Depression by October.

I knocked my friend Justin’s tooth out a while back. It wasn’t on purpose. We were playing tackle football and my elbow apparently collided with his two front teeth. I didn’t feel it so I still don’t think it was me but they claim the two teeth marks dripping blood on my elbow were evidence enough to convict me. But really those could have come from anywhere. Anyway it wasn’t really a big deal. He looked up a little shocked and short one front tooth and everybody started pointing and laughing at him. Because we thought it was funny. But then he had to go making a big deal out of the whole thing being like, “Dude, my tooth is gone. It won’t grow back! That one was supposed to last for the rest of my life!” You know just being a real downer about the whole thing.

But so the thing is that since I’m in the Peace Corps and they’re part of the US government, kind of, they like to know where I am at all times. But they don’t have a really big budget like the Department of Homeland Security so they can’t bug our phones and houses or follow us in surveillance vans disguised as dry cleaning trucks. Instead they just ask us to call this voice message system and let them know our whereabouts and stuff. Pretty reasonable, right? Except on the weekend of the tooth-elbow collision I didn’t call in. And so when Justin explained the story behind his missing tooth to the people in the Peace Corps office my name surfaced as suspect numero uno. And the Peace Corps staff put 1 and 6 together and got 7. But then they realized that I was away from my home without calling the Whereabouts line. Busted. So now I’m on double secret probation in the Peace Corps. Now I know that some of you might call Justin a snitch for leaking my name. But those are your words, not mine. I would use the word “rat.” Luckily our friendship is much stronger than the root on Justin’s right central incisor so we’re still best buds. In a way it’s poetic. I ruined his mouth and his mouth ruined me. Not that he really “ruined” me per se but it wouldn’t sound poetic if I used two different words in that sentence. And I had just told you that it was poetic.

This double secret probation thing got me to thinking. In the last quarter of my quarter century of life I have had trouble being a part of any type institution without being put on some sort of disciplinary probation. And this leads me to one very obvious conclusion: that institutions are stupid and I am a recurrent victim of power abuse and conspiracy.

Speaking of conspiracies have you guys heard of this global warming thing. Usually I never trust a scientist but I think they might be on to something here. It’s flipping hot. If I hadn’t been born in August I would say this month has to go. I have to pretend that all my shirts are a few shades darker than they really are because they’re completely soaked by the time I get ten feet from my door. The hard part is when I wear a white shirt and have to explain why I’m wearing a see-through shirt. I’ve seen some guys with mesh tank tops. They’re kind of like fishnet stockings for man torsos. Pure class. I think I’m gonna get me some.

I heard a new Dominican superstition that I really liked. One of my work brigade leaders said he doesn’t let his wife wash his underwear if she’s sick. She can wash everything else but if she’s sick he’ll wash his own underwear. I think he's right. I've started taking my Doña's temperature before she does my laundry.

Sometimes we camp.

Brainstorming with Matt Damon over an ice cream cone about our next screenplay.

As you've probably already guessed I can jump a lot higher than most people.

My cell phone came with a Miley Cyrus ring tone.

Sometimes we cook in the middle of nowhere and pretend we're a group of wandering nomads. Gnome ads. No mads. Words are funny.

Haha. Who IS that guy!?

Oh yeah I work too. We dig the trenches. Then we have water.

>

But we dig a LOT. About 9km. That's European for 5.7 miles.

I just returned from the Duncan Peabloggy Tour 2010 in the United States. I visited Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and New Jersey and did some readings and signed autographs for my fans and stuff. I seem to have a large following with cashiers and bartenders because they were the ones asking for my autograph the most. I hung out with Matt Damon in LA. We’re looking into writing a screenplay together.

I met with one of my fans in New York and he told me that he thought there should be pictures on this blog. I told him to shut up if he knew what was good for him. But an idea occurred to me. Ask other people if they have suggestions for the blog. I know what you’re thinking. “Duncan, how could WE possibly improve on YOUR blog?” A valid question. But one thing about the pursuit of perfection is that nobody is perfect. Unless one person steals ideas from other people and passes them all off as the ideas of one single man and then he looks like he’s perfect. So from now on if you have any suggestions for how my blog could be improved please list them in the comments section and I will see to it that each and every one of them is given the careful consideration that it deserves and then I will steal it and pass it off as my own.

On second thought, scratch that idea.

I will put up some pictures though. As soon as I take some. They won’t really have much to do with what I’m writing about though because most of what I write is lies.

When I joined the Peace Corps I had these illusions of being like one of those really passionate and stubborn development workers in the movies in poor places. Like that lady from that one movie where she’s like “Hey pharmaceutical guys! Stop testing those drugs on poor African people!” Remember? Except she got killed. I think my biggest problem is that I have no big corporation to fight against. I think Dole did some bad stuff in this country with banana farmers or something. But maybe that was Panama. (My research assistant quit.) I’m at the top of my game when I’m trying to do something illegal or defy some authority figure. But here I don’t really have any adversaries except for the mountain. And people like mountains and nature these days so nobody would take my side in that battle. I guess the mayor could be my adversary but he’s not hindering us so much as just not helping. Plus he’s so fat and looks like a frog and I don’t even know who would play him in the movie about my story. Obviously Matt Damon would play me. I’d throw in some Jason Bourne type stuff. Beat up some secret agents and shit. But unfortunately I just have regular problems like there aren’t enough donkeys to bring up all the cement and space aliens stole all my pipes.

I think my cat is agoraphobic. That’s the one where they’re afraid to leave home right? It never leaves the house. I think in the US there are lots of agoraphobic cats that they just call house cats. But they don’t exist here. Kind of like ADD is rampant in the US but here those kinds of kids are just “bad at school.” Sometimes when it’s bothering me I throw it out the door and it turns around and runs right back in like I just threw it in a pool of acid with acid-tolerant piranhas wearing acid-proof cat lasers and previously regular, but now acid-washed, jeans. My cat hates acid-washed jeans. Sometimes I play a game with him where I throw him out the front door and shut it really quickly and then we both sprint to the back door to see who gets there first and if it’s me I close and it. We always have a good laugh after that game. At least I think he’s laughing. It’s a whiny, crying type laugh.

Another idea that I had that was completely mine and not a suggestion from anybody else and especially not from my friend Kyle was to do a question and answer thing. I thought that was a good idea that I had because I’m completely out of material and am back to talking about my cat. So from now on if you have questions about what I’m doing here or what I would do with a million dollars if I had to spend it all in one place then you can ask me in the comments section. It doesn’t have to be interesting. What did I have for breakfast? You won’t know till you ask. It was an apple. Shit.

Pictures to follow…

In the development world, Haitians are the new black. (Pun intended, but not in a racist way.) Helping the Haitians is sexy. All the celebrities are doing it. You no doubt know this from the headlines on all the development mags in the check-out line at Shop-Rite. But if donating to Haitians is fashionable right now then donating to the Dominican Republic is kind of like wearing shiny MC Hammer pants and LA Gear shoes that light up when you walk. There are a few people who still do it. They started doing it back when it was “in” and they continue doing it because they’re too legit to quit. But everybody else knows that it’s just not cool anymore. They invest their money in whatever fashion (third world country) Vogue (Bono) tells them to. The Dominican Republic is the fat, loud sister in stretch pants and an oversized sweater from Marshalls while Haiti is Kate Moss, cocaine-chic, dressed in Calvin Klein. (Or something. I only really know what ISN’T fashionable.) So if the fat sister wants the guys (donors) to hang out with her she has to invite Kate Moss. And I think this is exactly what my boss was thinking when he decided that we would disguise the construction of our water storage tanks as a training program for Haitians. And we got the funding. So now some Haitians will come to my tank construction (dressed in Calvin Klein I’m sure) and we will teach them with the hope that they will go back to their country and build more of these tanks where they are badly needed. What, you think that’s a dirty trick? Well to that I say, “Can’t touch this.”

If you’re offended by my comments about fat people then I’m sorry. Well actually I don’t care. Here pointing out that a person is fat is like pointing out that a person is tall. One thing I like is when I’m on the Guagua and it’s full and a fat woman waves it down and everybody groans and says, “Oh c’mon! She’s way too fat to fit in here.”

And she gets to the door and a guy says:

“Lady, you’re pretty fat to fit in this Guagua.”

But she just smiles.

“You’re right, my fatness sure is inconvenient in situations like this. “

And then she squeezes in and spills over the guy next to her and he turns to his friend and laughs:

“Man she sure is fat.”

And then everybody drives away content. In the US that same situation ends with a slap to the face or a lawsuit.

Now that I’ve started working everyday it’s hard to look at the bigger picture. What am I actually doing here? (Saving the world, duh.) If I just gave you a quick rundown of my average week it would go like this. I start digging trenches with eight Dominican men at 7am and finish at 3 pm. Then I go home and shower and cook dinner. Then I read a book or watch a movie. Then I go to bed. On the weekends I usually go and hang out with Americans at the beach or in the city and we drink beer and chat about stuff. Assuming I work everyday that’s a 40 hour work week. My monthly salary is US$333.33 which means I get paid US$2.08 and hour for my manual labor job.

Now let’s consider a hypothetical situation in the United States. I work a manual labor job in New Jersey where all of my co-workers are Hispanic men who only speak Spanish. We work from 7am to 3pm. Then after work I go home and shower and cook dinner. Then I read a book or watch a movie and then I go to bed. On the weekends I go to the beach or the city with my American friends and drink beer and chat about stuff. I get paid US$10 an hour. Now obviously anybody who took economics in college knows that I have to account for more than just income to compare standard of living. Here rent on my house is US$55 per month and includes laundry service, house cleaning service, and lunch. Additional groceries and goods cost US$80 per month (ish). Total monthly expenditures: US$135 (This doesn’t take into account the weekend stuff). In the US a house of similar quality rents for US$0 because it is some guy’s tool shed. But for the sake of our comparison let’s say I find a rat-infested, two room, shanty for $200 a month. Then food and laundry are an extra US$300 a month bringing my monthly expenditures to US$500 a month. When I plug these numbers into the equation used in the internationally respected Duncan Peabody Living Standard Index, the Dominican Republic rates 0.405 and the hypothetical US situation rates 0.312. (First one to figure out how the index is calculated wins a candy bar.) I’m pretty sure lower is better in my index so the hypothetical US situation wins.

Right here is the part where I explain all the beautiful subtleties of life here in the Dominican Republic which render this study null. But I don’t feel like it. I’m pretty sure there are a million reasons why this is better, right? Or maybe at least six. Obviously I’d rather be here helping these people build a water system than in the US helping a rich guy get a beautifully landscaped yard. Plus this looks good on my resume. A guy just gave me some bananas. That never happened in New Jersey. And also….hmm…..Shit. Well it’s better, OK? Just trust me.

I had a rat problem in my house so I got a cat. It was a hand-me-down from another volunteer. Now I have a cat problem. It’s not that I dislike cats, its just that I don’t LIKE cats. (There’s a subtle active vs. passive distinction between the two phrases.) Now you might say, “Fine you don’t LIKE cats, but on a relative scale of 1 to LIKE, a cat would certainly rate higher than a rat.” Cats don’t cause leptospirosis and they’re much more cuddly than rats. But recent discussions on Haitian vs. Dominican relations have gotten me thinking about the unconscious stereotypes that shape the way we think about other beings. Now I paid very little attention during these discussions so I can’t tell you very much about Haitian-Dominican relations. But I think they probably said something along the lines of “Dominicans have been given more opportunity to develop, blah, blah, blah, I’m boring.” This same school of thought can be applied to cat vs. rat relations. Ever since that little incident with the Bubonic plague rats have gotten a bad rap as being “dirty” and “diseased” whereas cats are referred to as “domesticated” and “kitty”. But we have to analyze the underlying causes of these differences, the largest of which, I would argue, is the difference in the distribution of aid. Now aid to cats has been approached in a decentralized manner where hundreds of millions of aid workers around the world care for a cat or two (I think more than 3 make you a “cat lady”). These cats are provided proper sanitation (litter boxes), clean drinking water, and a nutritious diet (Meow Mix). They grow up with love and encouragement to learn new tricks and play with balls of yarn. They receive sexual education (castration) so that their population does not get out of hand. Rats, on the other hand, have received very little aid over the years and thus have to fight to get by. They leave turds all over your clothes because nobody ever educated them about hygiene and sanitation. They steal your food because they are starving and have families to support. They are diseased because they don’t receive proper health (veterinary) care. So the vicious cycle persists. And we ignore these facts. Because we don’t like the way rats fit into “our” world we support the cats so that they can continue to commit genocide against the rat population. The same tactics that powerful governments and large corporations use to oppress populations who oppose their interests in other countries. So next time you’re deciding which animal population to support with your hard earned money, consider the rat. Is it really “bad” or is it just a victim of foreign (species) interventionism and disproportionate distribution of resources?

You will notice that my previous two blogs have contained sections in which I compare and metaphorize( when you turn off spell check every combination of letters is a real word!) animal and human life. It’s part of an animal rights campaign I have started called “Animals are people too.” My next project is a multi-species production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

On a more human note I have received a donation from a human stranger in California for the water system that we’re building for the humans that I live with. I don’t know who he was but it was awfully nice of him to do that. What he doesn’t realize is that I now have to begin work on my system. This will severely cut down on my beach time. I think I will write him a thank you note. In it I will not mention this blog because I don’t want to ruin his illusion of having just sent a large sum of money to a serious and responsible water engineer. If he (you) does happen to stumble across this blog then I’m sorry but I already spent the money and you can’t have it back. I’m actually a semi-capable human being, I promise. So May 31st is the first day of work. I just went to the tube factory and gave them lots of money in return for hundreds of long, plastic cylinders. Now we will bury them all in the ground and shoot water out of them into peoples’ homes.

The translation for the verb to borrow in the dictionary is pedir prestado which when literally translated means something like “to ask to lend.” This implies that the person borrowing a thing asks permission. But Dominicans’ idea of borrowing is pretty loose and sometimes borders on theft (which is basically just borrowing without the returning part anyway). But I don’t really care because it’s usually just pens or paper or peanut butter and it’s happened in every house I’ve lived in thus far in country so I write it off to a cultural difference. So sometimes things are “borrowed” from my house without permission but I want them back. But if I say “Hey did you ask me to lend you my scissors” then that sounds accusatory when really I just want to know if he borrowed my scissors because now I need them to make paper snowflakes. And so…huh…well I’m not sure where this is going. Basically some ants just bit me and I want to ask my host-brother whether he borrowed my ant killing powder but I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing him of stealing.

I used to eat all of my meals with a family. Then I told them that I just wanted to eat lunch with them and I would cook breakfast and dinner on my own. The idea was that way I could stop eating the starchy roots (viveres) that they served me every morning and night. But to them it’s not dinner if there aren’t any viveres. So I cook eggs or something for dinner and I’m satisfied. But they’re horrified. So around 9pm there’s a knock on my door:

Dona: “Duncan are you sleeping?”

Me: “No, I usually sleep with the lights off.”

Dona: “Oh ok, I brought you these viveres.”

Me: “Oh well I already ate. Thanks though.”

Dona: “Oh ok well I cooked these and then I brought them to you.”

Me: “Yeah but I already ate and so I’m full. With food.”

Dona: “Right well I’m just going to ignore everything you just said and put these viveres on your table and you eat them, ok?”

Me: “OK thanks Dona.”

And this happens every single night. So not only do they take without asking. They give without asking (or listening). People who are different than me are crazy.

I witnessed a territorial dispute between two dogs the other day. A bigger dog came into a smaller dog’s territory and started peeing on his stuff (a tree stump and a bush). The smaller dog came over growling and started peeing on his own stuff again to cover up the pee of the first dog. It went back and forth like that with dogs lifting legs until the invading dog couldn’t pee anymore. So he lost the battle and left. So it turns out that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight but rather the size of that dog’s bladder and how much water he drank that day. Which made me think that if humans settled territorial disputes this way we’d have much less blood shed and the winner of the battle would have nutrient rich soil from the all of the urine, which would lessen our environmental impact due to the extraction and processing of phosphorous. Also we would completely eradicate the weapons trade and instead develop stock holds of water and beer and the most efficient diuretics, which is really just good practice anyway. If anybody happens to be at the next World Summit on Peace (Or War) you should mention this idea. One suggestion would be to leave out the butt sniffing part because our senses of smell are really not good enough to get any substantial information from that.

I'm not a cheek kisser usually. I'm not opposed to the custom but I don't initiate the cheek kiss salutation. But one of the ladies here did initiate the cheek kiss and once you do the cheek kiss there's no going back to handshakes. And now all the other ladies see that she does the cheek kiss and so they're like “Oh, he's a cheek kisser” even though I'm not. And so they start doing it. Then I'll give one a cheek kiss and their friend is there and it's really awkward because I haven't established a cheek kiss hello with that friend yet but I just cheek kissed with the other lady so if I don't do it with them does it mean I don't like them as much? So the cheek kiss has spread like wildfire and now I have to cheek kiss all the ladies. And some of those old ladies are aprovechando (taking advantage). The kisses are getting wetter and trying to steal some lip. I just want to go back to the weird handshake where you grab each others forearm like some sort of Asian wrestling (Why Asian Duncan? I'm not really sure).

Yikes. Kissing old ladies and peeing contests. They told me living in the campo might screw with my head. Let’s see if I can find something less perverse to talk about.

Last week I participated in a hitchhiking race across part of the country. I’m going to leave out some details about some of the rules of the race so as not to disgrace myself and the Peace Corps. I’ll just say that sometimes Peace Corps volunteers need to partake in some harmless, self-destructive behavior which is in no way condoned by or affiliated with the United States Peace Corps. But basically the point is to begin in one part of the country and hitchhike in pairs to another part, preferably one located on the beach. Except you cannot tell the driver that you are a Peace Corps volunteer. Also you are encouraged to dress up in costume and invent reasons for why you are hitchhiking. So this is how I ended up on the side of the highway in biking spandex telling strangers that we needed a ride because our bikes got stolen. The first ride we got was from an ambulance. The ambulance had its sirens on and was on its way to the hospital with a patient but decided that it was worth it to stop and pick up two gringos in spandex. It’s a very relaxed culture, even in emergencies. There was only one empty seat up front so I rode in the back of the ambulance with a doctor and a mother and teenage boy delirious with dengue fever and hooked up to various IVs and apparatus. Needless to say they did not seem to think the situation was nearly as funny as I did. But my point is that an ambulance on its way to the hospital is probably the best way to win a hitchhiking race. I didn’t win though. The next ride was from two French, book publishers. They were much more entertaining than the kid with dengue but they didn’t drive as fast.

I thought it would be nice to expose the people here to some Dominican cinema (while simultaneously cheating Dominican cinema out of money) by purchasing some pirated Dominican movies for 50 pesos in the city. So I brought them back to the campo and showed them to the muchachos and they didn’t want to watch any of them. They did however want to watch a Jean Claude Van Damme movie in English without subtitles. (As I later found out they cannot read subitles anyway.) In fact they will watch anything in any language as long as it has “fighting or shooting.” I’m pretty sure that it is the dream of every male in my community to marry a rich, white girl and move the United States and become a real life Dominican Chuck Norris.

Hmmm...well that's all for now I guess.

I have about 8 years experience in journalism. Or I had an experience in journalism about eight years ago. I wrote an article for my high school newspaper about the Dave Matthews Band. I took a brief 8 year hiatus after that article because I was having trouble dealing with the fame. But recently I decided to come out of hiding and write an article for the Peace Corps magazine. Except it was rejected. And I deal with rejection even worse than I deal with fame, so I'm afraid that my journalism career has finally come to an end. But before that I will allow you to read the article that ended the long, illustrious journalism career of Duncan Peabody. Because let's face it, if you're still reading this blog after 7 months you either enjoy my sub-par writing or you've continued to read it because of some feeling of obligation. And frankly I'm OK with either of those scenarios. So here it is:

I hate cliches more than you do. It's true. Especially the one about people going to the Peace Corps to find themselves. That's what some people said I was doing when I told them I was going to the Peace Corps. Except they said it more like “stupid child doesn't know what to do with himself” more than “how wonderful, he's embarking on a journey of self-discovery.” Anyway I didn't want to believe it. But as I've found out you can't very well be thrown into a radically new situation like this and not learn at least a few things about yourself. That goes especially for somebody as self-absorbed as myself.

In this case the radically different situation is a campo in the clouds. Before this I was living in gigantic strip mall called Tampa, FL. My closest experience to rural living was a failed attempt at growing basil on my balcony. To counter the urban sprawl I decided to try to be super green. In Tampa it was easy to talk about being green. I did it through Gmail chat on my computer in my cubicle in my windowless office lit by flourescent lightbulbs. All I had to do is say “Man when I get out of Tampa I'm gonna do this and the world will be better because of me.” I just had to finish my Masters first so I could be pretentious on two counts. “Yeah I'm gonna save the earth but I'm gonna do it much smarter than you because I have a higher education.” (followed by a smug smile). In Tampa being green meant going to the local farmers market for half your food and then buying the rest in the grocery store, imported from Sri Lanka and Nicaragua. I conserved electricity by turning out the lights, if I remembered, when I left the apartment. I conserved water by leaving piss in the toilet until a bacterial growth started on the toilet bowl and I had to make excuses why a girl had to use my roommates bathroom instead of mine. Ha. Just kidding. Girls never came over. But pretty much I was single-handedly saving the world from being destroyed.

But now I've been sent to the middle of nowhere where the topic of conversation ranges from corn to cows and then inevitably strays towards the weather. Eating local means bountiful harvests of carbohydrates. Conserving water means bathing with the last half gallon in your bucket because you're too lazy to walk down that stupid muddy path that always make the front pop out of your flip flop and then you trip and spill half the water and swear that next time you won't wear flip flops but then you do. Conserving electricity is easy because there is none. So now I'm living green for real but not in the sexy way that movie stars live green but in the impoverished way that poor people live green.

So I guess I have in fact learned a few things about myself over the past four months. Mainly that I'm not nearly as badass as my Gmail chats would have you believe. I need to charge my cell phone so that I can talk about something other than animals sometimes. Or at least about different animals that they don't know about here like deer and kangaroos and panda bears.

Also I like movies and they require technology and electricity. Sometimes you just need to curl up with a romantic comedy and have a good cry. But that's because you're a sissy. I eat steak and watch Rambo and lift heavy shit up and down.

And even though I want to get closer to the earth I don't want my floors to be made of it. It makes my pants dirty when I put them on. Or it would if my floors were made of dirt, but they couldn't possibly be because that's against PC policy.

Eating local is easy enough. Drinking local is not. Stop arguing about which Dominican beer is better. They all suck. The bread is bad here too. The yeast must be infected or something.

So it turns out I din't have what it takes to be green. I bought a little solar panel and a toxic lead-acid battery to charge my computer and phone. If I didn't already have floors made with atmosphere polluting cement (But I do because it's against PC policy to have dirt floors. I just told you that.) I would be planning on putting them in soon. I cut down a bunch of trees to plant a garden so that eating locally didn't have to include all the local health problems as well. And as long as I'm at it I'm going to go ahead and build a gravity-fed water system with lots of petroleum based plastic so that I can have running water. I still don't know what to do about the beer.

I guess you could say I went green and then took a few steps back to a more yellowy-green. Chartreuse perhaps. Somewhere in the space between the Y and the G in ROY G. BIV's signature. But I'm not yellow. If you call me yellow I'll beat you up.

Talk is cheap. And the Dominicans that I live with are poor. So they talk a lot. At first I didn’t really understand them so I figured they had a lot to say but as I start to understand them better I realize that they say in 20 minutes what could be said in two. It’s just wasteful really. Maybe if they trimmed the fat and spoke more efficiently the market price of talk would go up and the things they said would be worth something. That was kind of a cheap shot, but seriously they are professional liars here. Except here lying is not the moral no-no that it is in the US. In the US we have the decency to hide the fact that we’re dishonest. Not so much here. Let’s see some examples:

Example 1:

Motorcycle driver: That will be $70 pesos.

Me: No it will be $40 pesos.

Motorcycle driver: Oh, I didn’t realize you knew the price. OK $40 pesos. Hey do you want to be friends?

20 minutes later:

Me: The moto driver tried to rip me off.

Neighbor: Oh yeah that’s because you’re white and he thought he could get more money out of you.

Me: Right, I got that. But shouldn’t you be enraged that your fellow countryman was trying to rip me off even though I came here for two years to help you have running water?

Neighbor: No, you see, you are white and he is Dominican. So he lies to you to try to get more money because he thinks you don’t know what it should cost.

Me: OK, bye.

Example 2:

I’m walking up to teach Spanish and I stop by one of my student’s house to wait for him.

Student: Just give me one second, I have to finish copying the homework.

Me: Oh, ok. But shouldn’t you be more secretive about copying the homework that I assigned you for the class I teach?

Student: Well I didn’t have time to do it because things here in the middle of nowhere are very busy and there’s just no time to do a five minute homework assignment within three days.

Me: Well don’t bother copying it. You won’t learn anything unless you do it.

Student: But I’m doing it right now.

Me: No, you’re copying your sister’s homework.

Student: Yeah. (Looks at me, confused, as if I might be retarted and he’s trying to decide.) Do you want a banana?

Me: OK, bye.

My new light bulb has made me the most popular guy in my community after 7pm. I always had light bulbs in middle school but I never had any friends. But here when the sun sets the neighbors flock to my light bulb like moths, mistaking it for the sun. Also these moths bring uncharged cell phones with them. Being popular is nice and everything but nighttime was the time when I practiced useless hobbies like juggling and yo-yoing and learning Spanish. How am I supposed to learn Spanish if there are Dominicans all over my house. And how embarrassing will it be if I return to the US in two years and I can’t even juggle well. There’s two years of my life down the drain.

Me: I built a gravity-fed water system in the mountains of the Dominican Republic.

Potential employer: Mmm hmmm, that’s nice. How are you at juggling?

Me: Oh, well, um…..you see….i got this lightbulb…and…well not so good.

(No longer)Potential employer: Yeah well I’m afraid you just don’t have what it takes to work in this engineering firm.

Me: I understand completely.

It seems I am writing a lot of dialogue. I don’t know why. Maybe I should do screenplays. For crappy sitcoms.

There is a serious fire ant problem in my house and my garden and my current country of residence. My shack is home to many critters including rats, tarantulas, and lizards but none of them bother me so much as the fire ants who’ve decided to make their homes in my floor. Contrary to popular belief, fire ants are not named fire ants because of their fire fighting abilities. It’s actually because it hurts like a bastard when they bite you. The other day they decided to go exploring in my clothes so when I put on my pants they started biting me. I had ants in my pants. I also had them in my bed and my food but bed and food don’t rhyme with ants. So that’s unacceptable.

Happy Valentines Day! Well for some of you anyway. For some of you it was probably just depressing. Cheer up though. You're bringing me down.

One day I was in a taxi with some other volunteers and a Polish tourist. He was talking about how fast he could run, like Polacs always do. I told him that I could run faster than him. He was so outraged that he made the cab driver pull over right there and then and we raced in the middle of the street. It was about a 100 meter sprint. I stumbled out of the gate and ended up losing by inches. It was a hard defeat to take. But the one thing about racing european tourists in the Dominican Republic is that there's no do-overs. A few weeks later we spotted a european tourist (nationality unknown) in the park in Santo Domingo and I raced him and won. It was a little too easy. So now I'm 1-1 with momentum in my favor. If you know of a european making his way down to the DR who is looking for a race let me know.

I think I might have made a couple of friends my age in my community. And by friends I mean they found out I can watch movies on my laptop and now they hang around my house a lot till I ask them if they want to watch a movie and they say “Oh yeah, well sure I guess, I hadn't really thought about that but if you're offering then I guess I could find the time.” But I'm not complaining. We're using each other and that's what friendship is all about. It's not that I didn't enjoy hanging out with middle aged women and four year olds but it's nice to talk with somebody my own age. Not that we have a whole lot in common either. They're super nice. The problem is that they don't really do sarcasm or cynicism or self-deprication and I don't communicate very well in other ways. I can hardly blame them. It's hard to be cynical about life if you didn't have a comfortable childhood in the suburbs and parents who paid your way through college as you did your best not to graduate. But saying what I actually mean just doesn't feel right. Without the sarcasm it's just complaining.

I am an English teacher now. I'm not sure if I'm very good at it. I think it's good to try teaching first in a remote community in the country that has the worst education system in Latin America because expectations are lower. Then as I get more confident I'll move to the 2nd worst and eventually I'll teach in Cuba.

There's a goose that hangs out in the street sometimes and bullies me when I walk past him. He hisses and then lowers his head and starts charging at me. I run backwards and kick at him so he won't peck me. I hope nobody has ever seen me do it. I don't know why he picks on me. I think it's a defense mechanism that he uses to protect himself from ever getting close to somebody because he's scared he'll get hurt. But I wish he would stop because someday somebody is going to see me running away from a goose.

There's a water volunteer in the community near me. Both of our communities are part of the same district so we're working with the same Mayor to plan a party to raise funds for our projects. So we want to have a joint party. But the leaders of her community said we couldn't go to their party and then my community crossed their arms and turned around and started pouting and said “Fine! I don't want to go to your stupid party anyway. Jerks.” But we told them tough noogies, they had to learn to share. So if this engineering thing doesn't work out at least I'll be qualified to be a nursery school teacher. Luckily our Mayor has come through for us 0 out of 3 times so far so it probably won't happen anyway.

Happy New Year! I disappeared. Now I'm back.

A lot of people have been asking me recently where my inspiration for these blogs comes from (that's a lie). And I say, “I don't know, Franklin, because I pay a team of writers to blog for me.” And then they look at me funny because I don't know anybody named Franklin. But I asked my writers where their inspiration came from and they said it was from the money I paid them, which is really the purest form of inspiration there is.

I got to play baseball with the muchacos in my town the other week. The guys from my community go down to the lower community and have a baseball game in a dirt field surrounded by barbed wire. So I showed up and tried to get myself on the team. They just laughed at first until they realized I was serious. In the Dominican Republic, I've discovered, you are incompetent until proven otherwise. So they gave me a quick batting test and I passed and they let me play. The first ball hit went right to me and I caught it and everybody was very surprised because they hadn't given me a catching test. The second ball was not to me but nobody else was running after it so I thought I would run over and make a really impressive catch and everybdy would cheer and lift me up on their shoulders and name the field after me. Except instead of that I ran into the barbed wire fence and sliced my arms up and got caught. When I finally got untangled I was covered in blood. But since this was my first tryout I couldn't leave so I just walked back to my spot and kept playing with blood dripping down my arms. I thought maybe if I tried to act like it was nothing it would erase some of the embarrassment of running into a barbed wire fence. But I think the bloody white kid in the outfield just made everybody uncomfortable. The rest of my performance was mediocre.

Campo Guilt: A feeling of guilt resulting from spending extended periods of time away from your Peace Corps community; the time is generally spent with gringos.

So whenever I leave my campo I'm supposed to feel guilty the entire time. It's part of the Peace Corps experience I think. I don't know why we're supposed to feel guilty. My community got along fine before I arrived. I think If I'm only there 25 days a month instead of 30 they will continue to be ok. Anyway sometimes spending 30 days out of the month there is impossible. Did you know that in the Dominican Republic and a lot of other developing countries they only have 28 days in February. It's really sad. Anyway, I've yet to find an issue so pressing that it couldn't be solved the next day or the next week. So I am unable to feel campo guilt. A friend pointed out to me that psycopaths also don't feel guilt. So I might have that to look forward to. But sometimes I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I think with so many Catholics in my family it makes me guilty by association.

I went to Florida to spend Christmas with my family and celebrate Charlie Peabody's defeat of lymphoma. We stayed at a place with a golf course and lots of old people. I played golf. I don't like golf. DISCLAIMER: If for some reason you have it in your head that I have never partaken in any illegal activities in the past then you're right, I haven't, and you should skip to the next paragraph. If you are an important Peace Corps person monitoring blogs then you should also skip to the next paragraph because you're wasting tax payers' money and need to learn to skim. I find a lot of similarities between golf and marijuana, and not just because the word green is often used when talking about both of them. I used to like to do both of them pretty frequently. But at some point I realized that I didn't really care for either golf or marijuana. They're both expensive and just make me feel awkward. And I'm pretty sure people are laughing at me the whole time. So I usually just turn either down when it's offered. But every couple of years somebody will offer, and it's been long enough since the last time that I convince myself that maybe I might like it this time. So I do it but then immediately I just want it to end. But it lasts for hours and there's no way out. So if you ever see me about to do either of these things, please stop me. Not to mention that golf can get you in a lot of trouble with the law. I wonder how awful it would be to play golf high.

I helped out as an interpreter in a medical mission near my community. A group of med students and doctors from the University of Southern Maine came down for two weeks to give clinics in the surrounding communities, but most of them don't speak Spanish so that makes me an expert. One day I got to interpret for Dentist Dave. Patients would come in with rotting teeth and Dentist Dave would shoot them up with novacaine and yank the teeth out with a set of pliers. This is how dentistry must have done back in the 1800s. Except Dentist Dave told me that they didn't have novacaine in the 1800s. Apart from rotting teeth they all pretty much have high blood pressure and diabetes from the awful diet here. Unfortunately they don't have a Whole Foods in the area to buy overpriced health food. I interpreted when the clinic went to a community near mine and some of my neighbors showed up for consultations. I won't go into details but I had to ask them some pretty uncomfortable questions about very private things. I hope it won't make things awkward between us. After dinner every night we had story time where the students could talk about their experiences from that day. I only have mean things to say about that so I just won't say anything. Very early in my time here in this country somebody asked me a question in an email. If I was forced to choose between only using a spoon or a fork for the rest of my life, which one would it be? I picked spoon. I think it was the right decision. Give it some thought.

I'm writing this by candlelight. Just like dead people used to do. This may confuse you because the internet can't run on candlelight. But I'm writing this in a notebook. Then in the future (right now) I will pass it to the internet using the fancy technology one finds when he descends from his backwards mountain village. So I struck up a conversation with a deaf/mute guy on the guagua (public transport) the other day. My spanish is OK now, my sign language is limited to spelling my name, but somehow I'm pretty good at communicating with deaf spanish speakers (not actually a spanish “speaker.”) But anyway Alejandro the mudo lives in Pedro Garcia with his two sons. The smaller one is also mute. Dad is alive. Mom is dead. Six brothers. Three sisters. Afraid to fly in airplanes. Then he gave me his phone number which isn't that weird here normally but he's deaf. It took about a minute of silence for the irony of this transaction to dawn on me so when I started laughing I just looked like a crazy person laughing to himself. Later that day I was propositioned by two hookers in Puerto Plata. I told them “No” in English, Spanish, and sign language all at the same time. The family that I eat my meals with has a kitten. It's very small and it licks my toes when I'm eating. I'm not sure if my feet taste good or it's just trying to clean them for me. If you're thinking that it sounds nice, it's not really. Cat's have dry tongues. And foot fetishes are weird. So I end doing a little dance under the table with my legs while I eat to avoid the cat. Kind of like one of those russian dancers who kicks his legs out while in a seated position but his upper body doesnt move. Except I cheat and use a seat. And I don't flail my arms out because I'm eating. I just finished a 500 page book about modern philosophy but I don't feel any smarter. Philosophy seems dumber though. Did you know that 17% of professional baseball players in the United States are Dominican (includes the minors) but 39% of professional baseball players who test positive for steroids are Dominican. (I would site my source but I don't feel like it. Anyway you can't accuse of me of plagarism because I'm in a different country where it's probably OK.) Some of them don't even know it because they're managers just shoot them up with lots of crap and say it's B vitamins. I think the root of the problem is the lack of potable water in this country. That's not true at all but I just realized I was talking about something that doesn't directly involve me and I got bored. One of my volunteer friends is working with youth baseball players here along with a Domincan Red Sox pitcher who comes here during his off season but whose name I don't remember. Anyway I practically am almost friends with famous baseball players. I finished the surveying of my pipeline. It is very long and very steep which has resulted in a budget that is very expensive. I met with a representative from the local government who didn't promise me any money but promised to help me find some money. That was friday and I still hadn't heard from him by Tuesday so I went to his office to ask him what was up and he was not very happy to see me. He told me he would arrange something for when I get back in a couple days. I'm not going to keep my fingers crossed. He doesn't seem very fond of me. You'd think he would be since it's aid workers like me that relieve him of the responsibilty of developing his own country. But I shouldn't start bad talking too much in case he actually comes through and I have to eat my words. Well I'm in the capital for a couple days for thanksgiving. We're having a big gringo get together with turkey and fun and games. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, especially Cameron's grandparents, the Schlarbs. This thanksgiving I am thankful that I was not sent to a muslim country where alcohol is prohibited. Check ya later.

I did it. I'm a real live Peace Corps volunteer. We swore in last week, had a little fiesta, and shipped out to our sites, never to be seen again. Until Thanksgiving. Plus there are volunteers that live near me. And I have cell phone service. So it's not THAT extreme but I am living without running water, electricity, internet and English.

My site is very pretty. I'm still not quite used to the idea of walking out of my house and seeing mountains and the ocean but I like it. And I'll be taking it for granted soon enough. It's very quiet here. There are no colmados blaring loud bachata music, ruining the tranquility of the campo, like there was in training. I sound like a cranky old man when I say that. But let's face it. I'm 24 years old and I;m not getting any younger. It's time for me to grow up and start dissapproving of the things I used to do in my youth. Like drinking. I tested the waters on that subject by saying that I drink A beer with freinds on special occasions. They just stared at me so I decided to leave it at that.

I think it's because they're so religious. They trapped me in one of their religious get togethers yesterday. It's the kind where they are so thankful to God that they start mumbling all at once and then they work themselves up into a fervor and they're all yelling "Gracias a Dios!" and then they climax and start to calm down and mumble some more. Then the men pass out and the women try to cuddle with them. All but that last sentence is true. It scared me a little bit. Does religious tolerance mean that I can't make fun of people's religion like that? I think that's religious sensitivity which I'm not obligated to practice as far as I know. Immediately after the service ended they all walked outside and gave numbers to some guy for the local lottery. So much for waiting 30 minutes after church before gambling. They're all going to get spiritual cramps.

Afterwards I started making a community map to get a better idea of where all the houses are located and how many people this water system is going to serve exactly. As such I had to stop in each house and try to make awkward conversation. Luckily they're all extremely nice. And they all offered me coffee and I didn't want to decline so I drank way too much coffee and now I'm wired and writing this and pausing to do push-ups every couple minutes. I probably won't sleep tonight. Besides coffee they also give me way too many oranges because they all have lots of orange trees. I eat oranges all day and drink orange juice with every meal. It was awesome for the first two days but now I have to make excuses for why I don't want oranges. I really like oranges. There's no reason I should have to be afraid of them. Can you get Vitamin C poisining? I've been doing a lot of machete practice recently. I wear it in a leather sheeth attached to my belt with my pants tucked into my rubber rain boots. Just like a Dominican. I even participated in some authentic Dominican deforestation the other day to clear way for my garden. I was really excited but full of guilt. Tomorrow I'm going to collect cow poop from my neighbors' pastures to improve my soil. I think it will be a good conversation starter. "Howdy Neighbor. Just here for some cow shit. Coffee and oranges!? Sure!" As far as the aqueduct is concerned...first of all I know that aqueduct is not the correct term but here that's what they call it so I'm just going to continue saying it. You know what it means. As I said I started visiting all of the houses in the neighborhood to get a count of how many people are living in the two communities. I'm making a rough map at the same time so that I have an idea of where the pipes will go from the water source. Monday we are going to go search for a second source because I did the calculations and the first source that we found isn't going to provide enough water for both communities. So I'm going to find a second source and take water from both and run it to a single storage tank. After the visits are finished and I have two good sources I am going to begin surveying the route that the pipeline will take so I can start designing my system. We are trying to get this done early so that we can develop a rough budget to request some funding from the local government. They have to have it by December to add it to their budget for next year so we are pretty rushed. But if it works out it will be nice to have some of our funding already and to make the local government take at least some responsibility for the development of their province. If I am able to do all that by Thanksgiving then I have all of December and January to do whatever I want since I can't start construction in the first three months. I guess I would spend those months working on my design, looking for further funding, and pursuing other small side projects.

One of these side projects will be teaching english classes which you know is pretty absurd if you have witnessed my public speaking abilities. But we are fairly close to the beach and a lot of the youth here want to learn English so they can work in tourism. So I'm going to start in a couple weeks and see how it goes. Speaking of which I'm retyping this in an intenet center near the beach. So I'm going to leave here and go to the beach. Suckers...

Two posts for the price of one! I wrote the post below a week ago but I never posted it. So read it a week ago. And read this one today. Today is Sunday. A good reading day.

I got back from my site visit yesterday. The site is pretty spectacular even though it's not on Pico Duarte. I'm way up high in a mountain in the north but I'm pretty close to the beach in Puerto Plata so I have huge panoramic view of the ocean and the city below me. Cars and motorcycles can't make it up that high, or at least I've yet to see one up there, so it will be interesting carrying all of the aqueduct materials up on mules. I've got my own little casita next to the family of my water committee president. I would tell you that the the casita has dirt floors but it's against Peace Crops policy for volunteers to have dirt floors so I don't have dirt floors.(wink) We had a community meeting while I was there and I gave a less than impressive speech. Those of you who know me well know that I'm the worst speech giver in the East. Well I'm even worse in the Carribean. They speak spanish here. FYI. But anyway we got our water committee formed and things are underway so I'm excited.

I don't know how much people actually care about the actual work I'm doing here so I'm going to write about it in it's own paragraph in italics so you can skip it if you want. So a provisional water committee has been formed. This is basically a group consisting of a President, Treasurer, Secretary, and two people called Vocales who do very little as far as I can tell. My presidenta is a Woman named Maxima. She's awesome and is super gung-ho about the project and also wants to do some health promotion stuff so I think I'm going to do a gardening/nutrition program with the women there. So in the next three months I will go around to each family in my community (actually two different communities, 68 houses in all) and interview them about health, water, sanitation, etc. I will also determine my water source(s) and make sure it has sufficient flow. And then I will start my topographical survey to make sure that there will be significant pressure in the pipes for water to arrive at each house. As soon as that is all complete I can begin designing my system. It is going to be challenging because the communites are really spread out so I'm not sure where to run a main line yet but as I get to know the community better this will become more evident.

My house brother is really into cock-fighting. He has a cock that he's training right now that lives next to me and wakes me up at 5 am. I think I might fight it. He plucks all the feathers off of the cock's legs and back because he says it makes them look better or fight better or something. I think it looks ridiculous. Then he chews tobacco and spits it under the cocks wings. I haven't figured out what this does yet. His name is YuÑo. The guy not the cock. The Ñ is actually lower-case but I can't figure out how to do that one. But if I just wrote Yuno it would probably completely change your opinion of him so I'm going to stick with YuÑo. YuÑo is 25. He and his father have land where they plant corn and lots of fruit trees so I have fresh fruit juice with every meal. And avocado. I'm not sure I've gone a day in this country without eating avocado. But it's ok because Nurse Jo says avocados are healthy fat so we can eat as much as we want. But Nurse Jo is Canadian. Like Mike Myers and Pamela Anderson.

The first night I was there YuÑo handed me a bowl with ten oranges in it and a knife but didn't say anything. So I stared at the oranges for a bit and then I asked what he wanted me to do with them. He just looked at me like I was an idiot and took the bowl away. Then he started peeling them and halving them and handing them to me. So I said, “Should I eat them?” and he looked at me again like I was an idiot. So I ate three of them. I was pretty sure he didn't expect me to eat 10 oranges because that's a lot. So I stopped at three. Then he made juice with the rest of them. I still don't know if I was supposed to eat the three oranges but I think it was a test and I think I failed miserably.

But things got better the next day. We were building a little caseta behind my casita for me to take bucket showers in. I proved to him that I know how to nail stuff so he lets me nail stuff now. He still doesn't trust me with the machete. Somebody who can't peel oranges obviously can't cut down trees with a machete. Also he tells me not to go into the forest because I'll get dirty. I just go anyway. So I think during thefirst few weeks at my site I'll have to prove to my host family that I am not completely imcompetent. They let me go to the bathroom by myself so I think I've made a good start.

I'm back in the capital for a week now wrapping things up. Wednesday we have our swearing in ceremony where we officially become volunteers. It sounds like a bunch of pomp and circumstance for nothing but I've been told recently that I'm too cynical so maybe it's nice. Then thursday we're going to get down and party. One last dose of gringo before we head out to our site for good.

Do something out of the ordinary this week. But not cock-fighting.

And I'm back. In the capital. It's hot and stupid here. But its great to see everybody again after five weeks of sector segregation. We went to the Car Wash Saturday night to celebrate our return, with Presidente and dancing. Great fun.

Training wound up very well. We taught the Donas how to cook pizza on stones, over a fire. It was a pizza marathon. Eleven pizzas in all. It was a great success. Until the next day when my Dona made me dinner with the leftover cheese that had been sitting out since the night before. That made me vomit four times. But nobody said bringing pizza to the Dominican Republic was going to be an easy job. Pizza Corps.

Oh and we also did some work on their water system while we were there. But that didn't make me vomit so it was much less rewarding.

One day we hiked for 6 hours to get to another town that was slightly less interesting than the one we were living in. Then we hiked back. But the in between parts were really beautiful. Every couple hours it was like we were in a different country because the landscape is so diverse. And we passed the town where the guy was murdered.

Oh yeah, a guy was murdered near us. He got shot. Apparently he was suspected of a different murder but he got let off, but the family of the dead guy still thought he did it so they came and shot him. They brought the body down through our town because you couldn't reach that town by car. It was wrapped in a sheet but the foot was sticking out. I didn't see it but Justin saw the foot and he confirmed that the foot was in fact dead. As for the rest of the body we'll just have to assume that it was dead by association.

We had a going away party with the community on our last night. They got some traditional drums called palos that they banged (banged? it's definitely not bung. but banged sounds funny) on and people chanted. It was cool. And the thing about the campo is that when people hear about a party, word spreads at the speed of sound. It would spread at the speed of light but they don't have the internet. So pretty soon the small community of thirty houses was swarmed by motorcycles and trucks and horses and it turned into a really big party. I don't think most of the people there knew how it started or even realized that there were six gringos there but it was fun nonetheless.

And now we're back in Santo Domingo again. Tomorrow we're getting cellular telephones. Have you heard about these things? Really impressive. So now you will be able to reach me by phone. If I give you the number. And tuesday we're going to visit our new sites for five days. My site got changed at the last minute so I am no longer going to be in a beautiful mountain town near Pico Duarte. I'll tell you about the new one when I get there. It's still on a mountain I think.

I've also developed ridiculous dreams of bringing soccer to the mountains of the Dominican Republic. It doesn't make any sense culturally or geologically. But culture and geology are just imaginary barriers engrained in our minds as young, impressionable children. We need to do away with the cultural stereotype that soccer balls don't roll up steep inclines.

I posted some new pictures from Training in Mancebo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42992225@N06/

Okay. So I realized that my character development has been lacking. I think I should introduce you to the major characters in my story thus far. We are six water volunteers in total. I´ll describe them briefly and assume that they´re ok with it. Plus they´re probabaly fed up enough with me from the 12 hours we spend together everyday so I don´t think they´ll read this. So we have, in no specific order: Gabriel (Grabiel), lived in Ghana, Egypt, Nicaragua as a youngin, hydraulic engineer, pretty much a poster child for the Peace Corps Water volunteer. Jennifer, history-poli sci major, enjoys sharing her feelings and hugging people. Ryan(Bryan), appears to be your average environmental engineer just out of college but then he plays the guitar and dances like a latino. Justin (Yotin), civil engineer but you wouldn´t know it, likes the guitar, beach, beer, babes, San Diego, etc. Amy(Emily), small in stature but the strong, outdoorsy type . Me (Donkey). OK now I can use their names and you´ll kind of know who I´m talking about.

So first off the big news. I got my site assignment. I´ll be spending the next two years of my life up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Well not really, but kind of. My site is equidistance between Pico Duarte (highest point in the country) and Jarabacoa. The closest town you might find on a map is called Manabao. It is supposed to be incredibly beautiful there so I´m pretty excited. The only drawback is that all of the other water volunteers are going to be living up north near the beach. But I´ll get to visit them and go to the beach and it´ll be lots of fun and stuff.

We decided as a group to see how long we could go without speaking english. It´s kind of like fasting except you´re allowed to eat but only food that you don´t know how to cook that well. So you´re still getting the food you need but it doesn´t taste so good. Maybe that metaphor sucks. Well anyway it kind of turned into more of a Ramadan fast because we´re pretty good about speaking only spanish during the day but if it´s just us americans hanging out at night English starts to find its way into the conversation. But Ramadan is cool too. And my spanish is improving maybe.

Thursday was Amy´s birthday. We cooked pancakes and went to the colmado and drank Presidente and danced. Amy danced the entire night because there were three women and 40 men there. Except she likes the guy who wears the blue shirt who is named blue shirt guy, I think. Last night they may or may not have kissed. I´m not sure if that´s a ridiculous invasion of privacy to share that with a bunch of people but you don´t know her so it doesn´t matter really. When you spend all your time with the same people you just start to talk about their lives as if they were your own.

Other than that it´s just been a lot of building stuff. We built a springbox last week and started on a water sedimentation tank. We´re going to finish that up this week and start on the aqueduct river crossing. I´m learning a lot and hurting my back carrying cement and gravel. My two year old host sister continues to yell at me while I eat. Some poeple reading this have told me that I am being too mean to the children. But I really like all the other children in the town. I just happen to have gotten stuck with the most obnoxious ones.

OK happy autumn. I hope you are all psychologicaly well and practicing good hygiene. Until next time.

Halfway through tech training. Sad news. Our trainer Ryan got really sick and had to head back to the United States. We´re not sure exactly what is wrong with him yet but we´re hoping the best for him.

Happy news. We built a latrine last week. One more family will now be able to poop in privacy. This week we´re going to build a springbox for the aqueduct that they already have in the town. Then I think we´re going to build a ferrocement sedimentation tank. Exciting stuff.

We have a meeting this afternoon to try to establish a Water Committee in the town. We´ve prepared some ridiculous skits to illustrate the importance of water governance. I´m not sure how a bunch of gringos making asses of themselves helps make a water committee but I´m all for it.

Otherwise not much has changed in Mancebo. Last Saturday we drank some rum at the colmado and started dancing and the whole town showed up to watch us. I sometimes feel like a zoo animal here. A dancing zoo animal. But eventually they started dancing too and it was great fun. Everybody was talking about it the next day.

We decided to get out this weekend and so we´re here in Ocoa using the internet and stuff. Yesterday we went on a sweet hike to the top of the loma. We could see the ocean from there. On the way back we stopped by some giant waterfalls to bathe ourselves. We did a photo shoot there. Then we hiked the rest of the way in our boxers and hiking boots. It was pretty funny, I think.

The two year old who yells too much in my house decided that she likes my name so she stands next to me at every meal and yells it at me until I run away. I try to answer her but she doesn´t want to have a conversation with me. She just yells my name for 15 minutes straight. It´s absurd. One time I threw a balloon at her face.

I´m trying to load photos but the internet is too slow here so I think you´ll be left photoless once again. Just know that where I am is more beautiful than where you are and that I have gotten much more attractive. That´s what I wanted to show with my pictures.

Ummmm....huh. I don´t have a whole lot write about this week. I´m sorry this post is so uninspired. I´ll try to stir something up so I can write a more interesting post next time.

Here´s a link to a few photos my friend put up:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42992225@N06/

The first two are of the place in town where there´s a waterfall and we rock climb and stuff. The next two are from our hike yesterday.

Hello. I found the internet! It was right here all along. I´m in the nearest city to my training site right now for a day of R&R. Unfortunately there is no rest for me because I have so many people counting on me to update my blog.

I´ve been in Mancebo for 1.5 weeks now. It´s a tiny community at the end of the world with a population that changes every time you ask somebody. I´m going to go with 250 people. That might be way off though. There is no electricty or cell phone reception or McDonalds. An organization came in and put solar panels on all the houses about 10 years ago but all of the batteries have died and almost nobody replaced them. I guess they didn´t really like electricity that much. But there are two colmados (bar/liquor store) in the town that have generators so they can blare bachata music. Even the most quiet, peaceful spots in the country play their music way to loud.

One thing that is pretty wierd is that a lot of 14 year old girls get married to 30 year old men here. I know I´m supposed to be undertanding of their culture but that´s a little disturbing for me.

There is a sweet river at the end of town that has carved deep valleys into the rock. We go there a lot and rock climb and fall into the river. There are also waterfalls to jump off of. It´s very cool. We go every day that it doesn´t rain which is about half the time we´ve been there. We´re usually followed by twenty little kids, until the deep part because most of them can´t swim. That´s the only place you can get away from the kids in town. Also bathing in the river is way better than bathing in the latrine. Something about cleaning myself next to a smelly shit pit doesn´t seem right to me. I think its the shit part.

I think my Dona is trying to kill me via carbohydrate poisoning. She feeds me enough for 3 people. Every time I eat I sit sit around, comatose, for an hour until I´m sure that I can move my body without exploding.

There are three kids in the house. A 10 year old niece, an 8 year old boy, and a twoish year old girl. The 8 year old is really obnoxious but I think we´re starting to work somethig out. Whenever he is really bothering me I just say mean things to him in english. I´m not sure if that´s immature or not. Then I just tell him to go away in Spanish and he usually does. Then he comes back 20 minutes later. The two year old is really cute but she has trouble controlling the volume of her voice. Usually, in spanish speaking countries, my name is pronounced Dooncon but for some reason in this town they call me Donkey. I´m not sure how that happened or if I should be insulted.

For now I will go go eat lunch and then jump in the back of a pick up truck. It takes about 1.5 hours to get back to Mancebo and most of the way is unpaved. It´s really uncomfortable and I think it´s causing me brain damage.

Pictures will come soon. Or at least I will keep saying that.

Tomorrow is the last day in Santo Domingo. Thursday we ship off to the mountains for technical training where we'll learn how to build all the stuff we'll need for the aqueduct and how to set up local water governance. The place we're going is called San Jose de Ocoa and I've been told it's one of the most beatiful places in the interior of the country. So that's promising. Especially since the group I'm going with is mostly male engineers. I'm going to need something pretty to look at.

Over the weekend I went on a three day visit to a water/sanitation volunteer who has been here for a year now. I got to see how he lives and what his work is like. He's a pretty cool guy. Kind of like the Survivorman of the Peace Corps. He has a little wooden shack in the mountains in a community of about 250. He has dirt floors, no electricity, no water, and the nearest town is a 30 minute walk. He builds stuff out of wood and bark and stuff that he chops down in the woods. And he cooks over a wood fire. I told my director that I wanted a site like that. I might regret that a year from now but for now I'm real excited. He also has a horse named Zap that he rides into town. I want a horse but with a better name. Anybody got any good horse names to suggest? Except I don't really like riding horses and it seems like more responsibility than I can handle. But besides that I think it would be fun to have one. Maybe I'll just get a cat. He also has tarantulas living in his house. I'm less excited about that. He bathes in the river with the other men and their animals. It seems less than higienic if you ask me.

I found out that my site is going to be somewhere in the north of the country, in or around the province of Puerto Plata. There are nice beaches up that way. So start planning your vacations to come visit. Everybody's welcome. Even if I don't know you. Unless you're weird or a serial killer or something.We can go surfing and drink Presidente. We don't have to stay in my shack if you don't want to.

I think my family here was trying to get me to marry the daughter of the dad from another marriage. It made for some very uncomfortable situations. Apparently “Do you want to come over and use the internet?” doesn't just mean that. Anyway my mom said I can't marry anybody who doesn't speak english. That still leaves like a billion people so it's not so bad.

I got a sweet new motorcycle helmet because some parts of the country can only be reached by motorcycle taxi. I haven't gotten to use it yet but I look pretty cool with it on.

Today the nurse told us that we will be spending approximately 2.6% of our lives in the Peace Corps based on a life expectancy of 85 years. And since I'm 24 that means I still have 69.2% of my life left to live when I get back to the states. She used it as a reason not to get AIDS while I'm here. I wasn't planning on getting AIDS anyway but it's nice to put things into perspective like that. 2.6% isn't really that much.

I have two exams tomorrow to see if I've been paying attention for the past three weeks. I haven't really, but I think it was mostly stuff about helping poor people and not getting diseases. It's probably easier than quantum physics. There's no Hilbert space in the Dominican Republic. That was a physics joke.

I'm going to put up some pictures when I have a chance. I forgot the cord for my camera so at the moment I have no way to put the pictures on my computer. Luckily my writing is very descriptive and pictures aren't really necessary.

Bean Smoothie Recipe: Cook beans. Put them in a blender and make them liquid. Add milk, cinnamon, and a crapload of sugar, give or take a teaspoon. This is how you make habichuelas con dulce. I made this with my family yesterday. It's actually quite tasty despite the fact that it kind of looks like what would happen if I drank the tap water here. It's pretty filling too. I drank two glasses and that was dinner.

Last week was the first full week of training. 8 – 5 everyday. My spanish is improving slowly. I think that it will continue to frustrate me until I can speak it perfectly. I wish I could just take a pill to speak spanish. They have pills for everything else.

We learned how to get around the city using public transportation. Here you either take a carro publico or a guagua depending on where and how far you are going.. The carro publico is like a taxi except that it follows a route and picks up passengers along the way. So rather than yelling at you if you try to squeeze in one extra passenger they require it; 4 in the back and 3 up front, including the driver. The guagua is a small bus that travels a specific route. There are about 25 seats but on one trip we counted as many as 54 people in the guaga. Some people were hanging out windows and doors while we drove on the highway. The rest of us were contorted in uncomfotable positions with armpits in faces and worse (the phrase “awkward boner” was shouted a few times). It's a pretty fun way to travel.

Friday night I went to the car wash with a bunch of other volunteers. But you don't just wash cars at the car wash in the Dominican Republic, which is good because none of has a car. Here the car washes also have a bar and a dance floor so if you bring your car to get washed you can drink and dance too. That way when your car is clean you're sweaty and drunk so you can drive better. It's pretty much brilliant. I think I'm going to open one up in the United States when I get back. I'm trying to learn to dance merengue but the tall, awkward, white part of me keeps getting in the way.

The Dominicans never pass me the ball when I play basketball with them. It's kind of like playing pool basketball after the first 10 minutes because I sweat so much. Although the Dominicans stay pretty dry. I think it's because they play a “zone” defense which basically means we're gonna stand up top here while you try to guard three people. I need to find a soccer field.

Sunday we took a tour of the historical district. It's actually pretty cool because Christopher Columbus hung out here a lot back when he was disovering shit. Did you know that he never even stepped foot on the North American continent? But we still have a holiday for him (Easter). After the tour we went to the see the Carribean ocean which is right there but it was depressing because the beach is literally covered in garbage. But there is a fun game there where little kids with wooden boxes and soap try to clean your shoes when you're not looking and if you don't run away fast enough you have to pay them for it. Except I was wearing sandals so I had to play Don't Step on the Syringe instead. In that one you either win or you contract AIDS (That might be an insensitive thing to say. But somehow my stating that fact makes it ok to leave it there).

5 days down. I can't believe it's almost over. Only 26 months and 25 days to go. Time really flies when you're sweating profusely all day, everyday.

I got to oreintation in DC on Wednesday and they tried to scare us. “Whatever you imagine could go wrong is something you should be worrying about.” I wasn't scared though because I'm not scared of anything. Except snakes and girls. Also they made me change my clothes because they didn't meet the dress code. Not so much fun really. But a good chance to get to meet all the new volunteers. There are 50 other volunteers who are going to be working in the country in all different sectors. Five others are Water and Sanitation Engineers like me.

I was told I have to be very careful what I say in my blog because I am an ambassador of the United States or something and there's probably close to a million people reading it everyday. It's really stifling my creativity. So much for my Pulitzer. So I'll have to decide what to do about that.

Anyway we arrived in Santo Domingo the next day and I started sweating. We went to a retreat which, to my dissapointment, had neither trust falls nor high ropes courses. So I don't think it officially counts as a “retreat” but I did get a rabies vaccine so it wasn't all dull. Every time you get a vaccine here they give you a lolli. That's not a joke.

So the past few days have been more orientation stuff and vaccines and lots of boring paperwork. On the plus side they did give me a pink notebook with women's shoes and purses on it. The 8 year old daughter in my host home is really jealous. No way she's getting her hands on it.

The next three weeks will be spent in the capital, mostly doing spanish classes. I had an oral exam to see what level I will start at. I talked about delivering pizza in high school and playing rugby, which she thought was a dumb sport. I guess in this culture they don't like to run around in really short shorts and drink beer out of a shoe. Talk about culture shock. What do these people do for fun?

Saturday we had a half day at training and then I spent the rest of the day hanging out with my host family. The woman I'm living with, Dona Elba, has a husband and six kids but only four that live in the house. There are two girls Lili (8), Kati (11), and two boys, Fradul(14) and an older one Frendi(?) whose age I don't know but I would guess 18ish. He's not too interested in my being there. And that's not paranoia, my Dona actually told me that. I guess I'm the 18th volunteer they've had in their home so he's probably had enough with the Gringos. Lili likes me though. She talks to me all day and I understand about half of what she says but she doesn't really seem to notice. Then I say something and she stares at me funny for a second and then laughs and starts talking about something else. You know your Spanish is good when 8 year olds laugh at you.

I gave them a pack of cards with a different US state on each card and some interesting facts about each state, such as the population and the state bird. That way they know what a fun guy I am. We played cards and gambled with mints. I kept losing but they gave me more mints because they felt sorry for me. Or I have bad breath.

There are other volunteers in my neighborhood. My host mom said I could have friends over whenever I want, which is pretty neat. We went to another neighborhood to play baseball one time. I still think baseball is a dumb sport but they all love it here so I'll just have to learn to like it.

And Sunday my family and their aunt and cousins and friends and I all piled into a pick up truck and drove to the mountains and hung out by the river. It was pretty awesome. We swam in the river and cooked pork in a big pot on top of three rocks with a fire made from sticks. Just like I learned in my sustainable engineering class! Learning is fun.

The End

Disclaimer: I did a lot of science in college. But I did it in a cool way, not in a nerdy way. I was going to take a literature class once but it had too many presentations in the syllabus so I dropped it. So I'm not the most gifted writer. I don't really know anything about writing except that when you try to write in a way that isn't natural to you, you just come off sounding like an idiot. So I'm just going to write this blog the way that seems natural to me which, coincidentally, makes me come off sounding like an idiot. But a really genuine idiot which is the best kind.

I have bad news for me. I won't be staying in a resort in the Dominican Republic. Turns out there are people who live outside the walls of the resorts in the DR. And some of them don't have reasonable access to clean water or proper sanitation. I know, I didn't believe it either but I Googled it and it's true. You'll notice I use DR to say Dominican Republic. Its just a little trick I picked up. But then you probabaly got that right away because you're pretty smart people. (That's not necessarily true but it's a good way to pay everybody a compliment without having to be too specific or thoughtful about it. This part in parentheses will only show up on your screen if you are one of the smart ones.)

So here is what I will actually be doing for the next 27 months of my life. Shit, that's a long time. On Wednesday the 19th I board a train for DC where I spend one day having orientation and meeting all the other volunteers who will be entering the DR Peace Corps at the same time as me. I'm going to wear sunglasses so they all think I'm cool. If that doesn't work, I know how to juggle. The next day we will fly to the Santo Domingo, DR and have a one day “retreat.” I don't know what that means but hopefully it involves trust falls and a high ropes course for team building and comeradery.

Then training starts for three months. Traning consists of intensive language training (French, I think) and technical training. Technical training will focus on my specific job as a water and sanitation engineer. During training I will be living with a host family in Santo Domingo but I'll be traveling throughout the country for much of the time.

After I complete training I'm sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer and I'm shipped off to some rural location to start my two years of actual work. The majority of my work will focus on developing some sort of water governance in the community and designing and constructing a gravity-fed aqueduct system. During and after that project I can also try to implement other water and sanitation projects like sand filters or latrine projects. That will all depend on how motivated I am. For my first three months in my new community I will live with a new host family so that I can better integrate into the community. After three months I can begin to look for a place of my own. I'm thinking seaside, 4 br, 2.5 bath, tennis court, 3 car garage; but I'll just have to wait and see whats available. But seeing as I am going to the community to build an aqueduct system I can be pretty sure I won't have running water.

These two years in the Peace Corps are also part of my Masters program in Environmental Engineering. (http://cee.eng.usf.edu/peacecorps/) While I'm there I'll be conducting research on a topic of my choice to be used for a thesis when I return to the US. I haven't chosen a specific research topic yet but I think it's going to have something to do with renewable energy use in rural areas of the Dominican Republic. Or steroid use among Dominican baseball players.

So that's a very basic overview. And with that I invite you all to join me on this wonderful journey of cultural exchange, self-discovery, and gastrointestinal problems.

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

That quote takes itself a little too seriously maybe but you get the idea. Adventure. Learning. Humans. Etc.

See you all in the Caribbean.

There have been some questions about the member t-shirts that you were all promised. Unfortunately there was a mix up and now I'm stuck with 30 t-shirts that say "I got Crabs at Bill's Crab Shack." Not what I was hoping for, but it'll have to do. You'll be receiving yours in the mail shortly. You are still expected to wear them to the mandatory member meetings on the first tuesday of each month. If you're going to miss one you'll need a note from your mom.

I wonder how many pairs of socks I should pack.

I'm going to the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. I leave Wednesday the 19th of August. I'm going to keep a blog because everybody else is doing it and peer pressure is kind of my thing. Also it's less obnoxious than a mass email because you don't have to read it if you don't want to.

So I haven't read through any of the boring pre-departure crap that they sent me but I think the basic gist of this trip is that the US government is going to put me up in a resort in the Dominican Republic with lots of spending money for two years to try to bolster the Dominican tourism industry. Or something like that. Hey, as long as they aren't sending me to live in poverty and help people with water and sanitation issues then who cares, right?

My attention span just ended. More details to follow.