After working in the copy room of a law firm, doing customer service for the MBTA, working at the front desks of a company that sells equipment for blood transfusions and another that sells coin op washers and dryers, and working for an eccentric contractor to put in a deck for some guy in Newton Center I have finally made it to the much sought after life of a thousandaire. It wasn't easy, but I did it. I want to thank all the people that supported me along the way, my mom for paying my cell phone bill for a few months, Jeremy for sending me his old video games, Jet Blue for providing a reasonably priced return flight from Oregon and my girlfriend for buying me pizza, sub sandwiches and chicken ceasar wraps on a regular basis.

Now that I am a thousandaire I intend to live the extravagant life that all of this money brings. When I take a lunch break today I will eat at the cafeteria at the Coin-Op Washing machine company, where I am willing to spend up to 7 dollars. Yesterday, I purchased Boat Shoes. They are shoes that you can wear on a boat (even if you don't have one). They cost me 50 dollars but I don't mind because I will save on socks (you don't wear socks with boat shoes). I purchased hummus from Trader Joe's last week, also, pita chips to eat the hummus with. I will no longer be using left over hot dog and hamburger buns to eat hummus from Shaw's Star Mart.

My luxurious life may not last forever, I have decided to not only pay my sallie mae student loan payment of 140 dollars for this month but next month for a total of 280 dollars. I also am looking to have the tires on the 4 Runner rotated so the car doesn't wobble when I try to go faster than 55 miles an hour. These expenses may cost me my thousandaire status but I will not regret my decisions. I know that there is an end to the rat race in site, my random jobs around Boston will soon end as I begin Pharmacy School in less than 3 weeks. Hopefully, if I play my cards right I will at least be a hundredaire when I get that first student loan check 3 weeks into the first term.

Between the months of July and December I was living in Portland at the Dunford house, working back at the ink company and taking two classes at Portland Community College. The classes were Statistics and Micro-biology, I earned an A in both classes. Technically, it was the first time I earned straight A's since the fifth grade, which was when they started giving out letter grades. Actually, now that I think about it, I got a B in something that time too. I only remember because my mom and grandparents told me I could have a rabbit as a pet if I got straight A's and because I earned one B my grandfather told me we were going to chop off 1 ear to make it fair. Don't worry, he didn't really chop off the rabbit's ear. Anyway, I have all the pre-reqs clear for Pharmacy School. Now I just need to get accepted and find 120,000 dollars for 3 more years of college.

While my job, classes and living situation all had interesting moments I don't think there was really anything blog worthy. I was working or in class seven days a week from September 25th to December 12th, there was a day off on the Saturday after thanksgiving. I spent the free day staring at the wall.

Alright, this last week actually had some interesting things. I will attempt to put them in chronological order.

First, we did some pretty serious bonding last week when a guy in our class informed us that a local hippy inn keeper offered to lower his price for Yoga/Thai Chi lessons from 15$ to 3$ for us and give a special class to the EMT students. Six of us went and we did some "hot yoga", it was a good work out and probably the most I have enjoyed myself with a bunch of half naked and sweaty dudes. Actually, maybe it is the only time. Anyway, we did some bonding and we felt so healthy after 2 hours of yoga that we went to the closest bar, ordered a table full of Buffalo wings and pitchers of beer and watched basketball for the next 3 hours. It was a good 5 hours.

Second, we had our Practical exam on saturday, which involved putting to use all of our recent learning. We had to resuscitate a dummy that had a pulse and was breathing like darth vader, we had to interview a pediatric mannequin that was stung by a bee and going into anaphylactic shock (and give it a stab in the leg with an epi pen) as well as put a tension splint on a dummy with a broken femur (we also had to stabilize its spine, treat its major wounds and transport it too a pretend ambulance). For the 18 of us in the class it took about 7 hours, 16 of us passed on the first time and I assume the other kids got a second chance after we all left. We spent so much time waiting around in the halls of the local community college that we learned a new game called the Ninja game. It's the most fun game I have played since elbow tag and it would have been very handy in the DR for the past two years when I had to sit around entertaining a bunch of teenagers/children.

Third, two of the students in the class were getting EMT certified because they are river guides and interested in ski patrol during the winter. They invited all of us to go down to the South Carolina/Georgia border to do some whitewater rafting. Most of the class was going back to their respective states and cities but my friend from Hawaii/Colorado and I were stuck in Asheville for the rest of the weekend (so we took up the offer). The trip, that would have been 150 bucks only cost us 10 bucks because we got the walk on price. The river had some class fives, which is bigger than the Deschutes if I remember correctly. The place where we stayed on saturday night was in the middle of nowhere at some Academy from the 1800's that they turned into a guide outpost. We hung out with the guides at the river, removed a tire from the bank (it was our good deed for the month) and were able to witness the smokiness of the Smoky National forest (a think fog rolled in around 7 or so). The river was actually the river from Deliverance, we tried to keep our banjo jokes to a minimum.

That is the majority of my happenings in the past few days, this is a rushed blog post so I get some leeway when it comes to spelling and grammatical errors. Most of our internet time down here happens in the library, which makes me twice as dorky for blogging.

I wish I had something interesting to say, the course is almost done and we are preparing for the big test at the end. Other than that nothing has really happened. My last clinical shift didn't have anything exciting, it turned out that everyone hurt themselves over memorial day and didn't feel like hurting themselves again. Only two weeks left in North Carolina and then a few days in Tennessee and then I am back in Oregon! I am getting a little anxious.

I finished my first week without any major disasters, or at least any personal disasters. We had our first midterm and I rocked it, which was good because the last midterm I ever took kicked my ass pretty bad (Organometallic synthesis at U of O in 2006). We finished up most of the basic stuff in time to get into the "clinical" part of the program, this is the part where we get to spend a couple shifts in the Emergency rooms and ambulances for the county. The ERs where pretty uneventful, I got to watch some stitches get put in and interview people who had random accidents (one 10 year old rolled his parents golf cart). The nurses don't really like the EMT students that much because they are a bit of a nuisance and always getting in the way (at least that's what a nurse told me) but the Paramedics that took me out on a shift yesterday where all about showing me the ropes. We got to see a bunch of different calls ranging in urgency and quantities of blood. I was glad to discover that I can handle being around needles and blood as long as they are not going into my body and as long as it's not my blood. We even went to get dinner during the shift and they gave us a discount, which was awesome, and to make it even better we got a call in the restaurant and had to leave like we were really important (they boxed up our food to go like it was an emergency, I guess because it was). The whole thing was a lot of fun and this next weekend I get to do my last shift at the facility that works on the Cherokee reservation. Because the facility is federally funded they get all kinds of fancy accommodations like big screen televisions and video games.

Also, having a weekend to hang out, the class has begun to loosen up a bit more and we can joke around instead of acting overly serious (which was getting old). Everyone in the group is from a pretty different background, at least from me. It seems that all of the states that don't send people to the Peace Corps very often somehow sent someone to this course (most of these states border Western North Carolina).

Hey, you probably aren't reading my blog anymore and that's ok. Why should you? I am back in the states and so a blog about the Dominican Republic and the Peace Corps doesn't really have much in common with me at this point. I got back May 7th and spent four days in Portland, 5 days in New York City, 5 days in Boston and 4 days in Buffalo. I saw friends and had quite a few adventures. Each location deserves its own entry but I don't really have the time or an appropriately named blog for my American adventures yet.

I am now in North Carolina in a town so small that the only thing missing is a creepy kid playing the banjo (he is probably around here somewhere). The intensive course I am taking to become an EMT basic and a wilderness EMT is pretty intense, I now understand why they put "intensive" in the name. I should be done in four weeks if everything goes right. There are a couple challenges, it is pretty much in the middle of nowhere and there is barely cell service and no internet (I had to come to the library), I don't have a car and that is a pain (luckily everyone else does), and the living situation would be considered pretty humble by American standards (luckily I was living in a slum for the past couple years and the fact that there is hot water, 24 hour electricity and I don't have to flush the toilet with a bucket means that I think I will be pretty comfortable. Actually, this might be a good intermediate between being back in the comforts of an American home.)

My last two weeks are passing in the site and for some reason I still have work to do. I guess I have left some things to the last minute either intentionally or unintentionally. The latrines are almost done and today we will build our fourth stove, the map murals have been almost done for a couple weeks and every time I go to finish them there always seems to be one more thing that needs to be done.

I recently discovered that building things is much more rewarding than working with youth, I should have known. At the end of the day we have a finished product to look at (most days), which is way easier to appreciate than “planting seeds of knowledge” to be viewed at a much later date. Actually, for a while I was worried about the whole Environmental Education thing; figuring that my job was not really finished, but then I saw that they are now showing Captain Planet on TV down here and decided that a cartoon from the 90’s could probably get the job done in my absence. Building things is also nice because there is a lot more thought involved, at least more of my kind of thought. Each stove that we have built has been a little different than the last and we are improving the initial design that I took from memory from Joel, Ann and various guys named Tim (actually, because I built the first one by memory I think I missed a few details and that is why we have to keep improving the design). We tested the first stove the other day by cooking a dinner on it and I think we kind of freaked out a random family. They didn’t mind us there, and I asked them ahead of time, but one afternoon Kathy, the mason, the JICA volunteer and I just showed up with some food and started cooking. The back burner didn’t heat up as much as we wanted and so we figured out a couple details to make the second one better. At this point I think we got it down, the only problem is that I have had to keep an eye on the mason because he likes to throw the cinder blocks down wherever and not really follow any design. There have also been a few arguments between the Dominicans helping and myself because I feel like I should have the authority on design because of my background in science and they feel they should have the authority because they are Dominican men (also, I lose a lot of credibility when they see that I barely know how to mix cement and it takes me 20 minutes to saw a 2x4). However, I blame the slow sawing on the fact that I had an amoeba for a few weeks and it was causing me a lot of trouble with life in general.

On a related note, I discovered that some of my neighbors really do care about me (and that feels nice). They diagnosed me with an amoeba before the doctors at Peace Corps and prescribed me a cure of mashed garlic and carrot juice. They told me it was going to be gross, but other than the burning of the garlic I kind of liked it, and I got a pretty good nights sleep afterwards. I did however take the Peace Corps’ prescription the next day just to be safe. Also, a couple weeks back when I was gone all day I got a phone call and when I picked up the person on the other end said “Cristofer?!” I responded with “Si” and then they hung up on me. It turned out that because my neighbors didn’t see me leave in the morning they thought that I had passed out or died in the house and where banging on my doors and windows. Someone got the bright idea to call me, when I picked up and said hello they had enough evidence that I was alive and hung up. I don’t blame them for hanging up on me; phone calls are around 20 cents a minute within the country.

There is less than a month left until I go back, the community knows it and I am trying to accept it. It is funny to notice that most of us that are going back in May seem to be more stressed than when arrived. There are lots of things to do before we finish service and even more things to worry about once we get back. I went down to the south with some friends last week. While planning the trip I had not considered that it would be myself and four girls for the majority of the trip. Being the only guy was fun and emasculating, we ate ice cream and listened to Erika Badu. I went to my friend’s batey for a few hours where she was running around with her mom and an Italian guy trying to get children birth certificates and Dominican citizenship, we also played soccer and colored with the children (a group of missionaries was around that morning passing out toys). The batay was a good contrast to the Luxury Resort where I found the girls schmoozing with the Canadian ambassador. He knew one of Claire’s professors in Newfoundland and was considerably younger than our ambassador. He was complaining that a national news program recently called him the son of a whore; he assured us that his mother was not a whore.

The nights in the capital on either end of the trip where a good opportunity for me to wrap up a few loose ends (there are still plenty left to wrap up) such as submitting my video interview, arranging for a flight back to the Portland, obtaining the proper paper work for grant reports and figuring out what vaccinations Lobo needs before he can travel to the US. A group of us spent a few hours out at dinner and we gently bickered like a group of friends at the end of a road trip, but instead of a five-day adventure we were really ending a two-year stint in another country.

I left early with the hopes to get home from the capital with enough time to get some work done in the afternoon. That put me at the foot of the mountain at about 10 AM. There is an unmistakable texture to raw flesh in a burlap sack; it is soft but strangely firm at the same time. My leg pushed up against this texture as the eight of us piled in the bed of the old diesel Toyota. Sometimes you don’t want to put 2 and 2 together and come to a disenchanting conclusion but it happens anyway. I saw the woman loading a severed cow’s head wrapped in plastic into another burlap bag and sling it on top of the pile of luggage about ten minutes before, the bag pressing against my shin with its unmistakable texture had a red patch where something was oozing through. There is still a lot of construction on the road up the mountain and we were stopping frequently. I was in the back corner straddling the tailgate so I would get out to stretch at the stops. At one of the stops the driver decided he wanted to take off quickly and left me behind. After driving 10 yards or so, he slowed down enough that I was able to run behind the truck and jump into the bed, the other people in the back grabbed my arms firmly so I wouldn’t fall out. I realized I was lying across the bags of meat. The sun was getting higher and higher and as we stopped the flies where beginning to take interest in the bags that I was trying not to think about. Luckily, the woman with the two bags got off about half way through the trip. I helped her unload her bags and it felt like she had half of a cow in the mystery bag. We lugged it to the side of the road where she would wait for a motorcycle to come pick her up. A lot of things are changing both in this country and for me, but at least the guagua rides are as ridiculous as ever.

The days are quickly ticking away, the count is officially at 35 five days but really I will be out of my site for the last week as I take care of business in the capital. I hope to sneak out of town unnoticed partially because I am bad at melodramatic goodbyes but mostly because now that word has gotten out that I am leaving, people who know have attempted to turn my house into a garage sale. People I haven’t seen in months have a strange way of passing by to tell me that I will “hacer falta” (which means “be missed”, but literally translates “to create a lack of”), and in the same breath tell me that I owe it to them to sell various items throughout my house at a buen precio. It has been frustrating but also a good opportunity to tell people how I really feel. My old landlord came and tried to by all my stuff and I essentially told him that I wouldn’t trust him with a bag of my own excrement (excremento is a fun and easy English cognate that makes you sound like more of an adult than saying pupu). I guess I should have been a little nicer to the landlord as he did give me a ride a few months back in his Lexus SUV and let me hold the loaded gun he keeps in between the front seats (however, he did relentlessly hit on my two female friends the whole trip). The landlord offered me 3500 hundred pesos for everything I own. That equals US $97.22; he would raise the price to 100, if I took out the bag of excrement.

So far, the real goods that I have to sell are my table and wood chairs, my stove and gas tank, my bed, plastic chairs and my beauty (I am not referring to my boyish good looks but instead to the awkward Dominican translation for Chest of Drawers). So far I have sold the table, stove and gas tank for 60 dollars and the bed with plastic chairs for 45 dollars. The beauty I am selling to my 24-year-old neighbor for the reasonable exchange of maintaining Lobo while I am out of town, as part of the exchange I also have to keep an eye out for an American husband who can bring her to the states or eventually marry her myself if I can’t find one.

I am constantly feeling like a bit of a jerk as I tell people that I won’t just be giving away my stuff and also won’t sell them stuff until I have the money in my hand (I’ve fallen for the “I’ll pay you next week” enough times). I think that people are getting the impression that I am the cold-hearted American businessman that everyone assumed I was when I got here. I guess I kind of am. Something most Peace Corps volunteers claim when they finish service is that they got really good at saying No to people, it is kind of funny how it works. I, like most of us, came down here to have a warm fuzzy feeling of helping people but in reality we all learn how to be cold and logical about the fact that giving things to people just because they ask isn’t going to solve anything but instead create an even greater problem which is dependence on outside assistance.

Alright, life has slowed down a lot since my dog bit the old lady and the neighbor's gas tank caught fire. I have been doing a lot of manual labor with helping some missionaries build a house for a week and then helping to get the 18 latrines built with the Small Project Assistant Grant that finally came in from USAID. I am wish I could say that I am the guy doing the skilled labor for any of these things but in reality I am just the guy who moves a lot of cinder blocks and concrete, I also get to be the stickler American who is fussy about budgeting the money and getting work done on time... which is awesome. Luckily, there is an NGO down here who knows the latrine building game in and out. Moving all the cinder blocks and concrete fooled the doctor into thinking that I was a runner yesterday when I had my physical, however, the weight loss and diarrhea also fooled the doctor into thinking that I have some kind of intestinal infection (which I don't, but am still being over tested for).

I have also started ending sentences with prepositions because I recently learned that because spoken English was developed as a Germanic language while written English was also influenced by Latin, we have all sorts of crazy rules when we write that we never use when we speak. Also, I can't figure out why so many people are speaking German in the Caribbean.

Today I experienced the most intense moment of my Peace Corps service. I had closed myself in my house after a few niños where pestering me for the plastic bag that came with the cornflakes I had just bought for lunch. I was doing a Kakuro puzzle, which if you haven’t heard of it, is sort of like if Sudoku’s bad ass uncle got busy with a cross word puzzle. I was doing pretty well for myself having almost completed the puzzle, when I suddenly heard screaming outside the front door. At first I couldn’t hear what they were saying but there were a lot of people running away from something directly in front of my house. I listened a little closer thinking it was a fight but then I heard the words “fire” and “gas tank” and my heart started beating really fast. The first thing I did was hide behind the concrete counter in my house for about thirty seconds, but people kept screaming outside. They were yelling for water and I had several buckets in my house. I went to the front door and hesitated for about 30 seconds because I had no idea where the “fire” and the “gas tank” where or what exactly those two words together signified (other than something that causes a lot of panic). I cracked the door open enough to see a crowd of about ten men standing in the doorway and outside of the house in front of mine (the house that you can hit with a broom stick from my front door), I opened the door the rest of the way and poked my head out to see that in the house there was a huge fire consuming the back wall, the stove and about everything else. It looked like someone had left a flamethrower going as the tank sprayed flames across the room. The men kept yelling for water so I passed the buckets of rainwater I had gathered to cook and bathe with for the past couple days (which, for the record, rainwater is not as great to bathe and cook with as Dasani commercials lead you to believe. It’s actually pretty gross when you consider that it has to pass through gutters. Our water hadn’t arrived for a couple days). The men passed the water up to the front and threw it on the fire in vain. It was a gas fire and so the water didn’t help much, other than keeping it from spreading when the water soaked everything in the the house. Because we all ran out of water, the men gave up the house for lost. They then started grabbing things out of the house before they could catch fire: the stove, the refrigerator, an entire bed, tables, chairs and a lot of clothes. A lot of the stuff they passed to me to put into my house. As they handed them to me the items where still hot despite being wet. This process continued for about 10 minutes until things got really crazy.

I am still not sure what exactly happened but the men yelled something to the effect of “run for it and take cover!” All the men ran faster than I had seen any Dominican run in the past two years and the flame coming from the tank went from looking like a flamethrower to looking like some kind of bigger scarier flamethrower. The tank looked like it was going to explode; I assume the Dominican men running for their lives had a similar notion. I ducked for cover behind the front wall of my house with my three-year-old neighbor “Tango” and his 14-year-old aunt who were watching from the front steps. The three of us huddled together in silence but the front door was still wide open and we could hear the tank spouting gas louder than before. As we sat there, Lobo came up to us and wanted to know what all the commotion was about. It only took him a second to see that we weren’t the excitement and the real action was outside. He went up to the open doorway and stood looking across the way. I can’t remember what movie, but I am sure it happens in one of them, where the guy goes to save the dog and he somehow gets killed instead. I played that situation out in my head and thought, sorry Lobo you are literally on your last legs so… I am not going to risk my life to get you off of the front steps. Luckily, Lobo is a good dog (despite what the neighbor ladies say) and when I called him in my “Lobo this is serious voice” he came right up to me and I could grab him buy his collar. We hid behind the wall for another thirty seconds until the tank had completely emptied itself and stopped shooting flames all over the little house. It appeared that something happened to the tank that made gas escape a lot faster and burn out in a matter of seconds versus minutes. Someone yelled “ya” which in most contexts means “it’s done.” I yelled “Ya?” back to be safe and then poked my head out the front door. The gas tank was done and a man yanked it with a wet towel around his hand and put it outside. Someone had the bright idea (which I wish I could say I was that someone) to put a wet towel over the fire and that put out the bulk of the fire pretty quick. I guess it’s easier to put out fires when there is not a gas tank spouting flames all over everything. After the fire was completely out we collected all of the stuff that was strewn in the street and put it in my house. A pretty big crowd was forming and it was encouraging to see how many people where willing to help. People were helping hammer walls back together (a man had broken down a zinc wall to get into the house faster) and clean up all the water that was all over the house. The startled neighbor, whose house was just on fire, was able to go sit down and catch her breath while the rest of us did the clean up. Luckily, the rest of the family went out to the campo for the weekend to relax and didn’t have to deal with the situation.

In the meantime, I had the bright idea to call 911 and I wondered for a second why nobody else had called. It turns out because there is no 911 in Constanza, which may have been lucky for me a couple days ago when Lobo bit that old lady. Someone called the fire department, probably because his or her cousin works as a fireman. They showed up pretty late because at this point people were already cleaning up the mess (it was only two guys that were empty handed. The uniforms looked official though.). Luckily, there was not a lot of damage to the property and because the house is made of oilcans they were not damaged and the fire didn’t really spread beyond the little house. Within an hour of the fire the house looked just like it had before, except everything was soaking wet. After we emptied their things out my house, I went downtown to meet Kathy and Malia at some award ceremony for rich Dominican women, it was a three-hour ceremony and there was a lot of emotional crying (done by rich Dominican women). Contrasted with the ridiculously exciting hour prior, the ceremony may have been the most boring three hours of my life (but I didn’t mind it, as much).

It started in the afternoon, when I was labeling the countries on the map mural. I discovered that I had left out Denmark and made both Myanmar and Thailand part of China. I also painted a couple countries like they were lakes and a couple lakes like countries in Africa. Indonesia and Malaysia were a disaster. I was handling the stress of map-making when a few of the students came up to me. One of them shoved a newspaper in my face and said to have a look. I was happy to see that a 5th grader was reading the newspaper but the news was far from good. They had found the bodies of a man and a prostitute up on the hill outside the barrio. I felt bad for the families and the people who died but that hill was not just any hill either, it was the best hill to take Lobo for walks. Being a fairly rural walk, it cuts down on the number of people telling me that “you’re dog only has three legs” from 25 to about 3 or 4 (which is a big deal on a daily walk). I figured I would be walking Lobo through the barrio from now on but until phase 2 of the bad 24 hours happened.

The next morning I was hanging out in my house with the door open. Lobo wandered over to the neighbors and I followed him to bring him back. He was sitting watching the neighbor cut apart a cow’s head, I stuck around for a little while to touch the brain and tongue and other strange parts but soon lost interest. I would have brought Lobo back but we all decided he was being so good that he could just sit around and eat the scraps that the neighbor didn’t want (parts like the gums and cartilage). I went back to my house to read some book called Life With Jeeves, which is all about some rich English guy without any responsibilities and his genius butler, Jeeves. They are constantly dealing with the stress and delightful problems of being a rich English guy and his butler in the 1920’s. I was halfway through some chapter about the man being reluctantly engaged to some woman who made him learn too much when a neighbor ran over and told me that Lobo had bit someone. I put the book down, despite wanting to know how Jeeves was going to solve the engagement problem, to find that Lobo had bit a relatively sweet old lady (she became much less sweet after he bit her). I was pissed, and not pissed like how a rich English guy means pissed. Lobo had actually broken the skin and the woman was insisting on going to the hospital. I wasn’t going to argue, even though the cut could have been easily covered with a band-aid.

It turned out that Lobo had bit her because he thought she was trying to take the cow’s head meat when she was looking around the room for something, I went into the neighbors house (I don’t know where the neighbor went during all this) and grabbed Lobo and put him back in the house. I sat outside the hospital with her son-in-law until eventually I got impatient and went inside to the emergency room, they had finished putting on the band-aid and were giving her the prescription. I went to the pharmacy to buy the twelve dollars worth of anti-rabies pills (in case Lobo was rabid) and Neosporin, we then went home where the number of people saying “you’re dog only has three legs” went from 25 people to 50 people. The 50 people also pointed out that the three-legged dog bites old ladies.

The whole situation was rummy; and this time I mean rummy like how a rich English guy says rummy. I don’t have a butler to ask for advice so I called Joel. He reminded me that dogs like meat and sometimes get defensive. He also reminded me that sometimes community members get overly dramatic and do things like insist on being taken to the hospital. He pointed out that the whole thing would blow over quickly. I took his advice and hid in my house for a few hours. Sure enough, when I came back out, my neighbor told me that it wasn’t my fault, that dogs like meat and I just need to keep Lobo on a leash or in my house for the next 2 months.

Now that I have been back in site for a couple weeks, things are about the same as before. The Religious curing lady is back again. This time she told a neighbor that her husband who died 2 years ago was trapped in an animal’s body in Haiti and that they needed to move his body from the tomb in the cemetery before the Haitians on the other side of the island could sacrifice him. As if her previous antics were not creepy enough, now there will be digging 2-year-old corpses out of graveyards in the middle of the night (she wanted to do it at 2 AM but the Cemetery’s security insisted that they did it during business hours). Anyway, I don’t know if they actually went through with it, and I think her buzz is starting to fade. Maybe people are finally starting to get it, when the whole situation was explained to me a woman stressed how Haitians are a bunch of crazy fanatics with their religious beliefs. The Haitians were going to sacrifice the animal, which is weird, and moving corpses is pretty normal. She also said that we couldn’t let Haitians come over to this side of the island to receive help after the earthquake. After all, she tells me, the bible does say that we are in “the end of days” and to have them here would only put us in more danger. I don’t know where it says that, I told her, but it did say something about loving your neighbor. She told me that I had heard that passage out of context.

Besides the religious banter, there has been a few exciting developments with my project. I finished my finest world map mural yet at the elementary school by my house, it is way bigger than the last one and I am hoping to be able to label all of the countries tonight or tomorrow. I finally received the grant money that I applied for in late October so I can build some latrines for the barrio. I am hoping the latrines will cut down on the number of people using the river behind my house as a very slow flushing toilet. We are also hoping to put a few on Malia’s side of the mountain in some of the rural areas. Also, on the subject of the river behind my house, a big rainstorm came about a week ago and cleared the whole thing out. The air was so fresh I smelled the flowers on the tree behind my house, and then I caught a cold so now I don’t smell anything. A few days after the rainstorm the local government sent in a group of paid staff and volunteers to clean the river. I was suckered into it as well. It was probably one of the more disgusting moments of my life (other than the first time I went to a river clean up in my barrio). Despite the rain doing a pretty good job of removing the bulk, there were still quite a few piles of dirty diapers. The new JICA volunteer impressed me big time, I was using a stick with a nail on it to pick up the soggy diapers one by one and she came up and picked up five at once. With her hands! She had gloves on and so did I, but still. She doesn’t know Karate like Eiji but she gets a black belt in dealing with a bunch of crap (in both diaper form and the local government trying to use us for political gain in the form a river clean ups).

I will never know what it is like to help people and not be recognized for it. Since I have been in the DR I have been able to share my experiences through this blog and other programs like Facebook. I can’t imagine my service without them, even though these things have come about over the past few years and Peace Corps volunteers have been working for more than 40. With that said, I would like to accept that I am being a little bit hypocritical and spend a couple paragraphs complaining about the wonders of information sharing.

As I said, I don’t know what relief work was like before Facebook but I have to imagine there was a lot less photographs of patients with cell phones and iphones. On the second day the director of the project had to tell the staff to stop talking pictures of the Haitian patients out of respect for their privacy and respect for their suffering, he also told us specifically not to upload grotesque pictures of people in pain to Facebook or Picassa. He said he didn’t want to have to tell us twice, I figured it was bad enough that he had to tell us the first time. There were several groups that came through the hospital to pose with the patients (some even posed as if they themselves where doctors) and left immediately after. I couldn’t believe how many people were treating the largest catastrophe to hit the Americas like a tourist destination. By day three, as per the Directors request, I had to password protect the computers in the office because people where spending a significant amount of time blogging and Facebooking (He also insisted that because someone installed Skype on one computer that a virus had damaged the modem, which is ridiculous. I fixed the modem issue by unplugging it for 45 seconds and turning it back on). I wasn’t too bothered by the people in the computer room, except for the guy that loaded all of his pictures into iPhoto on my laptop, now I have a bunch of fairly creepy pictures on my hard drive of some dude and his girlfriend (or maybe daughter, we can’t figure out) back in the states. Anyway, the point is that there were too many people documenting their good deeds and not enough good deeds being done. At some point someone figured out that it is a lot easier to look like a hero on facebook than to actually do something helpful.

So the trip to Jimani had a lot of what I did expect. There were games of telephone in English/Spanish/Creole between patient and doctor, soccer games with refugees, cute children in casts and wheelchairs, moving religious ceremonies in a language I didn’t understand, Red Cross helicopters and a medical staff from everywhere between Barcelona and Los Angeles. There were some amazing people and several very sad moments but because two thirds of us were posing for photos, at times it seemed cliché.

Well, I finally got my chance to help out with Haiti. There is a temporary hospital set up outside of Jimani, which is about 1 hour from Port-Au-Prince on the border. We got here about 5 hours ago and there has been nothing but intensity, I expected to see a lot of people suffering but at this point most of the surgeries have taken place and we are simply dealing with the fairly nasty politics and logistics involved with maintaining a refugee hospital in a country that doesn't really want any more refugees. There are only about 300 people here and it sounds like there is considerably more people in the camps and the clinics on the other side. Money is flowing into Haiti for aid much faster than the Dominican Republic (for good reason), so there is a lot of work to be done simply to keep the project going. As for the medical staff, there are two major groups; a group of doctors and nurses from Vermont and half of a Relief Team from Spain. The Spanish team seems pretty awesome except their accents are whacky and they keep using the word "vosotros." They have quite the command center set up and it looks like something out of a James Bond movie (who knew that they make inflatable satellite dishes for high speed internet?), the volunteers that we are replacing are saying that things have calmed down a lot over the past week. It sounds like things will get interesting again when we lose most of the nursing staff on Tuesday because of a storm in the NE part of the US. Their replacements can't make it down in time, I hope I don't get stuck changing bed pans.

A couple weeks ago I walked past my neighbors house and there was a larger middle-aged woman sitting in their main room talking loudly. I hadn’t seen her before so I poked my head in and said hello. The neighbor invited me in and I sat and listened to the woman for a while and all she seemed to talk about was how she cured some man of his constipation within five minutes of meeting him. I thought to myself, she must be some sort of specialist in home remedies, not that curing constipation has ever been an issue in a country where unwashed lettuce and chickens hanging out in latrines is commonplace. Instead of telling me about how she prescribed him some remedy she simply explained that she cured him with the faith of Christ. Well this is my cue to leave, I thought to myself, but sadly my big fat American ego wouldn’t let me leave without uttering a couple sentences of skepticism. The neighbor dismissed me, apologizing to the Faith Curing Lady for my ignorance. She explained to the Curing Lady that because I was an American I couldn’t understand what they were saying and that I am like a little boy. I was offended by her statement so I repeated everything she had said, explained my opinion over again, told her that I was not a little boy but instead a grown man, and then asked her to do my laundry. A few hours later I left my site for a medical mission and my friend came down from the states, I was out of my site for several days.

When I came back my neighbor had two big stories for the last week. First, the woman was curing the blind, making the lame walk and children who were mute start speaking. He told me that I would have to see it to believe it; I shrugged it off because I have discovered that my neighbors aren’t particularly fond of skeptics. My other neighbor, who is a little more level headed, said there was a lot of Faith Curing Lady hysteria going on right now and that people were lining up in either direction down our little street to see her. The second major event to report was that one of our neighbors had died. I was told that she had an epileptic seizure and that she died almost instantly. It was pretty sad because she had lost her first baby in childbirth last month and both she and her husband where having some trouble coping. Her death came as a huge surprise to everyone because she was only 25 years old, no one mentioned where or when it happened.

I went to the funeral a few days later and in talking to the husband learned that she had been at the house with the Faith Curing Lady when she had the attack. It still sounded like a freak accident, as if she had been struck by lighting; a strange coincidence that she happened to die in the same house where she was supposed to be cured. The whole thing was a little too strange by American terms (but not at all by Dominican terms) and I decided to talk to the most rational Dominican I could find. The lady who I talked to always seems to be in the know about everything, American or Dominican, and this was no exception. She explained to me the situation that every couple years people pass through town “curing” and using the whole show to make a little money. Barrio Las Flores just happens to be the jackpot when it comes to people looking to believe in just about anything. The people that are cured are never really neighbors but instead people who have supposedly traveled great distances to see the miracle worker (so no one ever really knows if the blind person is really blind, or if the lame person can’t actually walk). There is also a trick they use to make people fall over and pass out by shaking their heads and throwing off their equilibrium, they pass it off as the power of Christ, this trick can also cause seizures in people with Epilepsy. At least that is what the hospital staff said in regard to my neighbor’s death, they also said that when she arrived at the hospital she had suffocated on her own saliva and that she could have been saved if she was simply laid on her side. The whole thing made me sick, it also got me thinking about how this situation would be handled if it happened in the U.S. I am sure there would be some kind of investigation and this woman would probably be tried for manslaughter, or at least made to stop what she was doing. Instead, there are still dozens of people lining up each afternoon to receive their miracle cure and blessing.

This happened nearly a month ago, but I still feel it is worth remembering. The 6th of December is known as “kings day” and is reference to when the Three Kings arrived to give Christ his gifts of Gold, frankincense and mur (I don’t know how you spell “mur”). I suppose the Dominicans made a fairly reasonable assumption when they decided that the Kings arrived about 2 weeks late, after all everyone is late in this country. The idea of Kings day is that you are supposed to give your kids the toys that they didn’t get on Christmas. This holiday presented a few problems for me. First, every girl in the neighborhood thought it was clever to ask me “Donde está mis reyes” (where is my Kings), which essentially means where is my gift you owe me. I explained to them that my country does not have this holiday so I am exempt from gift giving. The second, and much greater problem is that the gift of the year, the Dominican Furby and Tickle-me-Elmo, ended up being very lifelike plastic handguns and shotguns. They only fired plastic pellets (in Spanish they are called bolas, balls, instead of balas, bullets) and they only heart a little bit when you end up as collateral damage in one of the many neighborhood muchacho gang wars.

At first, the wars were between the dogs and the children. The children gathered in groups of four or five and shot at the dogs while the dogs barked and nipped at their feet. Nobody was really hurting anyone so the little fights lasted forever, Lobo was a valiant and bravo leader of the pack of dogs in my section of the barrio. A colmado owner recently told a woman that Lobo lost his leg “in the war” and I decided not to correct him.

After about two days the children won the Dog vs. Children war of 2010 and began fighting amongst themselves, which may have been worse. They found a stockpile of toy guns on sale at the marketplace and pooled all their money to buy more weapons at discount prices. There were toy guns everywhere, I felt like I was in a rap video produced by 10 year olds. We, the adults, had to go back inside the house multiple times because stray bolas where flying everywhere. I sat inside wishing they would go back to playing with kites made out of garbage bags and bamboo or spare motorcycle tires and oil jugs.

Luckily, despite the very realistic look of the toy guns, they quickly fell apart until eventually the guns became nothing more than ravaged pieces of plastic to whack your neighbor with. Nearly 4 weeks later and the children are back to playing with garbage until the next major Christian holiday (Semana Santa is at the beginning of March, I think).

I was working at a medical mission near the border last week when the earthquake hit. It felt small and we didn't know if it was anything serious because we were essentially cut off from outside communication. Eventually people started calling the director of the mission checking if their family members were ok, that was our first clue to the severity of the quake. Based on Dominican News and radio broadcasts from the Bahamas we found out that it was a 7.0 and that the capital of Haiti was in ruins. The work we were doing for the sick Dominicans seemed almost irrelevant when we compared assisting someone with back pain and high blood pressure versus the millions of displaced Haitians that were without food, water or a home. Volunteers were practically banging their heads against walls (some harder than others) to find a way to help the people over there, sadly after a couple days and consultation from our director it was clear that there is not a lot that we can do. I was put in the Dominican Republic to do development work, which is very different from relief work in Haiti. I am hoping that in the coming months something will develop and I will have an opportunity to help, but for now I am sitting on my hands.

After Christmas, or any other holiday, I like to hit the road and see the south for a while. It’s a part of the country that is so different from my neck of the woods that it feels like a whole new Peace Corps experience. Getting down there is the biggest cost, about 20 bucks either way, while everything else is dirt-cheap. And dirt is pretty cheap in the south because it never seems to grow anything. Actually that is probably the lack of rain’s fault.

My first stop was a small campo where my good-natured and slightly corny friend Timo lives. I make a point to spend some time with him when I make it to the south because he has the “real” campo experience (i.e. no electricity and lots of rats). We had a good time running around his tropical jungle for a couple days. His town has all the details to give him street credit among the environment volunteers but in reality I compare the town to that of Spectre in the movie Big Fish; everyone loves that you are there and you have to take of your shoes. His biggest complaint is that the town was built by an NGO a decade or so ago and when they built the little village they put a lot of people together that shouldn’t be together. His town is divided amongst the Evangelical Christian families and the more naughty families. First we went to the gallera, the make shift cock fighting arena that is run by the Naughty families. We had an early lunch of pork and boiled bananas and hung out with the group of old men who hang out there on Saturdays. They offered us a drink, and Timo informed me that it was his first mixed drink he had ever drank in his site (Timo is a little better behaved than I). The mixed drink was beer and Haitian Moonshine, we had about a cup of it before we had to leave. Off we went to the Evangelicals, smelling a little like cheap alcohol, to play some dominos and hit the river to do some crabbing. We played the typical, US vs. DR game of dominos and tied at one game apiece. We then wandered around a river for 2.5 hours while Tim and his Dominican friend stuck their arms down holes in the river bed. The friend dug up 9 or 10 large crabs, Timo did not have much luck and my job was to follow behind holding a bag to put them in, I’m from the city and delicate. I couldn’t help but be blown away by the fact that we were going to eat something from the river by his house, I compared it to the river of black water in my site that I am afraid to stand close to for fear that I will inhale a neighbor’s shit. It felt good. We came home and had plenty of time to play a couple games of chess and some connect four (Tim and I are evenly matched at chess, but I kicked his ass at Connect Four. I give credit for Connect Four to Vermont Hills Daycare ages 3 through 11) while the neighbors cooked the crab. It was good stuff except it is the Dominican custom to eat anything on the crab you can chew, I looked like a sissy as I picked it apart delicately with the one fork his neighbors had available, no wonder they had me carrying the bag all day.

The next day we went to visit Tim’s girlfriend Kim, and yes, they get a lot of crap for their names rhyming. Her host family cooked us some lunch. It was delicious, and free. I ate until I almost exploded. We then went to a tiny “luxury” resort that was rumored to have hosted the Dominican actress who flies the helicopter in that Avatar movie who none of us can ever remember her name. Apparently she pushed someone into the pool, in a playful manner. At least that’s what someone told me the tabloids said, but people talk out of their ass a lot down here (myself included) so that could be completely untrue. We met up with another volunteer who was showing some friends around the country. The other volunteer is one of the “Batey Girls,” a group that gets the most Street Credit among volunteers because a Batey is essentially a Haitian slum in the middle of a sugar cane field in the middle of nowhere. She described my site to her friend as “really nice.” I tagged along to see the Batey and was amazed to see the Peace Corps experience I had always imagined. It looked like Africa, or one of the villages from the beginning of City of God. They spoke both Spanish and French Creole. The two foreign languages made an American twice as easy to make fun of, and I am pretty sure I was made fun of; I just wish I knew for what. All her site was missing was a river of black water, but that is only because the site was missing a river. She was living a more luxurious life than most because she actually had a latrine; most people just used the cane fields. I used the latrine, it was not a classy sit-down latrine like in Joel’s site; it was a “hike the football stance” type like in Michal’s site. Next time I am just going to hold it. I left the Batey half wishing that I could have been put in a site like that and half wondering if I could have survived it. My site being described as “really nice” struck a chord for me. I guess my consolation is knowing that we all have our different challenges, currently mine is my neighbor blaring some sort of Spanish cover to the Pretender’s “Back on the Chain Gang” at 10 PM as I write this. I probably couldn’t handle learning Creole and being crawled on by rats, but maybe she couldn’t handle Latin American artists butchering some of the 80’s greatest hits on a nightly basis.

The Batey was my last stop in the south, from there I returned to the capital and headed back up north to celebrate New Years with a bunch of volunteers in a tourist town outside of Puerta Plata. It was lovely, there were fire works.

Yeah, so last year I was bracing for a rough Christmas eve but Kathy showed up at the last minute. This year, both Kathy and Malia were in the states so I knew that I would be alone on the mountain for sure. The majority of the celebrating happens on Christmas eve, noche beuna . My noche buena should really translate to night where everyone in the neighborhood drinks whiskey in a run down house with the radio rotating Julio Iglesias, Enrique Iglesias and random salsa music. It wasn't even Julio or Enrique's Christmas albums, I felt like I was sitting at a party where my high school Spanish Teacher was the DJ. I originally thought that children drinking was something peculiar that I should be offended by. Christmas eve showed me that the week before was just the tip of the iceburg. Earlier in the evening I was in my house reading and a band of muchachos rolled up with a bottle of wine. They asked me if I wanted some, I sat and thought about it for a second. First of all, since when are minors contributing alcohol to adults, it was all backwards; I was sitting in my house reading a book about witches and talking polar bears and these kids roll up trying to give me booz. After noting that it was rediculous, I said "yeah, give me that wine." I figured that it is illegal to give alcohol to children but not take it from them, so if I had the biggest swig of the cheap wine that I could I would actually be helping them by leaving them less booz to get drunk with. After that I went over to my neighbor's house who's wife and kids went down the mountain to be with the rest of the family. We sat around drinking beer. He was telling me how much he loved having kids and how much he missed his, I was telling him about how much I hate being around kids but missed being one. Other than that, the conversation revolved around how much people owed us in the barrio and merengue artists. At one point I remember thinking, is this getting more fun or am I just getting more drunk? I think the answer was the latter becuase after a couple hours I didn't feel that well. Too much beer and cheap whiskey not enough mashed potatos and gravy. Luckily, the next day had plenty of both mashed potatos and gravy. I went to a volunteer's house outside of Santiago and enjoyed a Christmas dinner with six other volunteers. It was very wholesome and we played Catchphrase for about an hour longer than we should have. It was more of the Christmas I was hoping for.

I have been trying to be more cool lately when I am around my neighbors. I have taught a few of them some cuss words and keep telling them I am going to drink with them. The big night is supposed to be Christmas eve but they wanted to get started a little earlier and were drinking in the afternoon yesterday. They wanted me to hang out but I had some things to do. Instead I showed up a few hours later when it was dark and I figured I would have a drink with them. When I got to the colmado everyone there was practically on the floor drunk and it was extremely uncomfortable. I was handed a cup of something to "drink" and it was a plastic cup filled with cheap rum, this is not anything different than usual. The real intense thing that happened was one of the little muchachos wandered up completely intoxicated and barely able to stand. He was drooling, crying and almost falling down as he stood there. I immediately put down my drink of straight rum and started the interrogation. "Who gave this to you?" I asked him. He responded with "some guy." I was blown away with the fact that this 6 year old not only was willing to take candy from strangers but also cups of rum. After further interrogation it came out that he had drank two cups of rum and was ready to vomit (of course). I didn't look very "cool" to the neighbors because I grabbed him by his right arm (a la Joel Alex) and started carrying him back to his house. He was crying saying that he didn't want to go back to his house because his mom was going to be mad. I told him that it didn't really matter to me, he shouldn't be drinking and it gives developing minds brain damage (which I don't think registered for him or anyone else I told that night, but I was pissed because that drinking probably undid the last two weeks I have spent trying to teach him the damn alphabet). I ran into his 13 year old cousin and told her to bring him to his mom. I went back to the colmado to try to explain why I flipped out about there being a drunk child hanging out with them but before I could the little kid wandered back to the colmado. I grabbed him again and brought him back. That was the end of my night at the colmado, I went in and sat down with my two friends who I was relieved to see were completely sober. I was also relieved to find out that they agreed with me that it is completely inappropriate for a child to be in that condition. I was even impressed that my friend told me that he knew in the states a child would be removed from a family where this type of thing happened. Yeah, that and about 25 other things that we see on a daily basis. The kid ended up wandering into the house where we were watching Animal Planet or Discovery channel (yes my barrio gets the Premium package for cable) and started babbling about who gave him the rum. My neighbors told me they were going to talk to the guy who did it, I guess that's about all that can be done I thought. We sat and talked about the situation and how bad it is that the police never come into the barrio to actually punish the guys doing this. That's life, the neighbor told me, some people get it all and some don't, and we are on the end that don't (when he said "we" I am pretty sure he was not including me, I am pretty sure I am considered one of the people who gets it all). In the mean time the kid threw up on himself so the other neighbor kids took him outside to bathe him, which he was not excited about, because its about 55 degrees outside and the water is pretty cold this time of year. The cold shower (or bucket of water poured on him) didn't really sober him up like we had hoped, instead there was a wet drunk naked child wandering around the barrio babbling about God knows what in Spanish. Eventually his mom put him to bed.

I saw him this morning and he was as chipper as ever. Apparently six-year-olds don't get hangovers like 26 year-olds. I tried to scold him again this morning but he wasn't in the mood to listen, at least some of the older neighbors that were drunk last night showed some remorse.

Last week I brought three of my best (or as some volunteers decided; least evil) muchachos to the Brigada Verde conference. They were all either 11 or 12 years old and had never really traveled outside of the barrio or Constanza. It didn’t really hit me how different our worlds are until we met up with the other volunteers participating in the conference at a mall in Santiago. The kids I brought had never been in a mall and very clearly had never seen an escalator before. This was made clear by the fact that as the other kids sat patiently at the tables in the food court my muchachos were doing laps on the escalators. I limited them to five laps because anything more than that I consider excessive. They were full of questions as we walked through the mall; they asked me if this mall was what America was like. I told them, yeah, pretty much.

When we got to the site I realized that this was the first time the muchachos had been away from home and their families for more than a few hours. By the time we got to the camp they had each told me to call their mom and to tell them they were ok and see how the family was. I tried calling each of the three moms but none of the phone calls went through. I am pretty sure the moms just made up phone numbers to call. It also must have been one of the first times these kids had been in an “all you can eat” type of setting because the three of them ate more than their 15 and 16 year old counterparts by a couple of plates each meal. At one point one of the other volunteers asked me, “those kids are eating so much, do you not feed these children?” I responded by reminding her that they are not my children and actually they usually end up eating half my food anyway (which makes you feel warm and fuzzy the first 10 times but after a while gets pretty annoying. Last night I was eating an egg and a knock-off croissant (they call it “shrimp bread”) for dinner and one of the muchachos climbed up to my window to yell “Cristofer comparte!” Which translates to “Christopher, share!” It was the Naked Kid and I told him a few days ago that I am not going to share with him anymore because when I gave him a cup of soda he didn’t share any of it with his older brother like I told him, so let me eat my “shrimp bread” and egg in peace).

As for other firsts, I think they discovered girls at the conference because Joel caught them trying to spy on the girl’s cabin through the keyhole. He put them in “time out” probably for the first time in their lives (versus being hit with a shoe, known as the pow pow) and we discussed who was going to be the bad cop. I, for the first time, didn’t have to be bad cop and the muchachos were lectured briefly why they have to respect other people’s privacy. After sitting in time out for twenty minutes I told them that they could go to bed, at about 10 PM, which was probably a first because they usually stay up playing outside until about 11 PM, in front of my house.

On the way back we got a free ride from a Peace Corps vehicle and were sitting in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser that had the cool military style seating where we face each other and sit along the sides. Because the trip back home was a bit of a trek we left fairly early (around 11 AM) and because we paid for lunch breakfast and a snack for Sunday, the kids were given all three of these meals before 11 AM. The road back was curvy and the driver was speeding like he was in a hurry. 2 of my three muchachos threw up and 1 of Malia’s two muchachos threw up. Her kid filled a shopping bag. Being around vomit in a tightly packed van on a 5 hour road trip, not a first.

I was watching Stars Wars Episode 4 yesterday afternoon and when the part came on where they get trapped in the trash compactor on the Death Star and Han Solo complains about the smell I didn’t feel bad for him. They were in a trash compactor filled with metal and stuff like that; I am still living next to a trash chute filled with diapers. Maybe if there were babies on the Death Star I would have some pity, but everyone knows that Storm Troopers are clones of Jenga Fett and never have to go through the potty training process. Anyway, on the subject of smells, I started running the past few days with a neighbor. The first few days he bluffed and said he would wake me up at six in the morning and didn’t, but eventually he did and we went for a run to Las Escalones. Escala is the Spanish word for stair; Escalon is the Spanish word for Big Stair. Apparently, there are some big stairs outside of town that people like to run to at six AM. When we first went two days ago I thought we would be the only ones out there but instead there was a small parade of middle age men and women walking and running to the Big Stairs. I thought it was interesting because this culture doesn’t seem particularly fit and so I assumed they would not be running and walking that early, but they were, so good for them.

We ran all the way there and I was pretty impressed because I almost died trying to run a 6.5K on Thanksgiving (when Malia kicked my ass at running and Kathy beat me at the bachata competition (but for the record, I could outrun Kathy easy and out-dance Malia with a broken foot… actually I could probably outrun Kathy with a broken foot too)) and the run to Las Escalones is supposed to be between 3 and 4 K. I realized it could be the 30-degree temperature difference between Constanza at 6 AM (probably 60 degrees or less) and the capital at 9 AM (probably 90 degrees or more), either way I made it to the big stairs. As it turns out, the big stairs are attached to a hydroelectric dam as a maintenance walkway, and were not originally designed to be climbed by people who just ran 3-4 kilometers. They were about the width of my shoulders, there was no railing and plenty of rebar sticking out. The stairs deserved the name “big stairs” and were extremely steep and the last 100 or so I used my hands to climb because they were literally within arms length from my upper body as I was standing. The stairs were tough but then we climbed a wonky rebar ladder to the small reservoir at the top. Normally when I think of reservoirs I think of the nice one in downtown Portland in Washington Park, this one however was about a 100th the size and smelled vile. “What is that smell?” I asked my neighbor. He told me that the water used for the dam comes from the Rio Pantufla (i.e. the very same river that my dirty diaper and black water canal leads into). The water was actually black. He also pointed out to me that the slaughterhouse that was about 20 yards away also produced a big stink. I thought the Slaughter house was closed months ago because of a meeting I went to in the little town where all the neighbors were trying to get it closed because of the stink and the waste that they were leaving outside but my theory was quickly abandoned as we heard the unmistakable sound of a pig being slaughtered (which is a sound equally awful to the smell of a reservoir of black water). Who is slaughtering a pig at 6:45 in the morning anyway? We walked back up the hill to leave with our sleeves over our faces trying to catch our breath from the stairs. When we made it to the top of the hill we ran back to the barrio and I was so impressed with myself that I did they same thing when he knocked on my door yesterday at 6 AM. My neighbor told me that the first two days where always the hardest, maybe that’s because he didn’t wake me up this morning for day 3 and didn’t get up when I knocked on his door. I did the run by myself this morning and realized as I passed a couple people who were walking by themselves that they were carrying baseball bats. Apparently when you don’t have a friend to go with you, you are supposed to bring a baseball bat as en escort. I brought my iPod instead, oops. I ran into one of the garbage men I know from the trash clean ups and walked most of the way back from the Big Stairs with him, not because I was scared but because he owes me fifteen bucks and I was hoping he would mention it… which he didn’t. Instead he talked about how I should be careful about who I trust in the country because people are always trying to take your money, yeah no kidding GUY WHO OWES ME 500 PESOS.

Yesterday I was sitting in front of my neighbor's house with a couple of the other neighbors and this old guy who lives a couple houses down sits across from me. We all talk for a while and I get distracted thinking about something else (in the English speaking world) and when I come back to the Spanish conversation the old man is telling some elaborate story that I can't seem to understand. All I could get out of the story were the sound effects. "Bwoop! Pang! Pow!" were a few of his fun sounds. As he finished the story (which I still didn't understand), he mimicked someone in a silly voice and went "Weep, thwap!" With all of his motions and sound effects I couldn't help but laugh for few seconds when he finished. I kept smiling as all my neighbors looked at me with disappointed faces. Apparently the story was about how he recently killed a dog... my friend broke the awkward silence by saying "you can't just kill animals. That's wrong to do." Immediately after he stated the obvious I realized what the old man was talking about and agreed with my friend (and stopped smiling). Next an older lady (who just fed Lobo some rice and beans as he sat next to me) says to the group "Dog's are like angels sent from heaven to be our friends."

"yeah, I get it." I thought to myself "Give me a break, I am sitting here petting my three legged dog. I love animals as much as the next guy, hell, I probably love animals more than the next guy. (Even when they shit* on my back, see the last blog entry)"

Anyway, I think they figured out that I just wasn't really aware of what was going on. The old man was telling a terrible story with fun and silly sound effects, of course the American is going to laugh. For the record, they all laugh at violent Quentin Terentino movies (and not just the funny parts either)

*I apologize that I used it again but don't worry I won't make a habit of using the word "shit" in my blog.

First of all, excuse my language but I felt that I needed to use the actual statement to preserve the moment. I was in the Peace Corps office the day after thanksgiving and I was looking about as sharp as I could for a friday night. I Put on my duffel bag and was waiting with my friend Claire. We were standing around trying to get everyone to hit the road to the hostel but I kept getting distracted because something really smelled bad. I couldn't put my finger on the source but it seemed to be following me. I flipped my duffel bag around and checked to see if it was coming from inside my bag (sometimes wet clothing can stink after a few days in the humidity) but there was no sign of stink. As I looked at the bag one of the new volunteers said "hey man, I don't know if you knew this but... I think there's shit on your back." I took off my shirt and had a look. Sure enough, from shoulder to shoulder I was smeared with excrement. "God Damn it!" I was pretty upset. It wasn't normal dog poop either, it was the really smeary kind that stinks extra. The washing machine was full so I washed the shirt by hand (with detergent, thank you) in the sink at the office. I then traced the poop back to my bag and sure enough a dog (there had been multiple in the office) had crapped on my bag. You know, I always thought it was cruel and dangerous to put out rat poison in the office... now I think it is slightly less cruel and dangerous.

The other day I was leaving my house with Kathy and as I stepped outside Kathy pointed out that the Naked Kid had a knife. I looked over and sure enough he was holding a knife about as long as his forearm that was missing its handle. It looked like either somebody threw the knife out into the street because they didn’t want it or the Naked Kid had found it in somebody’s house and taken it out to play. Seeing this I said to the Naked Kid, “Hey, listen! You should not have a knife. Go put it away” Instead of listening or doing anything I asked him the little kid just looked at me for a minute and kept playing. I thought to myself, well you can’t change the world in a day, and I turned around to start leaving. All of the sudden Kathy gasps and says, “Oh my God he almost hit that little girl!” I looked over and sure enough the Naked Kid was swinging the knife around and had almost cut the little girl. “Do something!” Kathy tells me. “Hey, do something!” I yell at one of the older little kids and one of them comes over and grabs the knife out of the Naked Kid’s hand and puts it on a shelf in one of the houses where he couldn’t reach it. We gave him a quick lecture about playing with knives but something tells me the Naked Kid will stop playing with sharp objects around the same time he finally starts to wear clothes (i.e. when he turns 16).

I was telling this to Joel a couple nights ago and he told me about a time in his site when he had a similar problem. He said there were two little kids playing outside his house and when he looked out he saw that one had the other pinned on the ground and was attempting to stab them. The pinned child was holding the knife back just a couple inches from its body. Maybe because the moment was more intense than my own, or maybe because he is more heroic, Joel grabbed the little kid with the knife, picked him up with one arm and took the knife out of his hand with the other. Holding the child a few feet of the ground by its arm Joel proceeded to walk down the street angrily yelling, “where is this child’s mother?” He said that people where coming out of their houses with surprised/frightened looks on their faces, pointing the direction to the child’s house.

Children with weapons seems like something ridiculous that would not happen in any country but the reality is that most of the time the kids in this country are wandering around unsupervised for hours at a time. Swinging a knife around is pretty scary but to me, something even worse is that none of these kids end up going to school, learning how to read or even add.

The words to earn and to win are the same in Spanish, the verb ganar. Often, people ask me how much I earn/win each month and I have to be a careful about what I tell them. The reality is that I earn/win about 3.5 times as much as most of the people living around me and so by their point of view I am making the equivalent of a six figure income (really it’s only a five but most people are only earning a four figure income of about 3000 pesos per month, 90 dollars). A six-figure income in the barrio officially constitutes me as hood rich and now I am, more often, squandering my Peace Corps allowance on 2 dollar chicken sandwiches and 1.50 milkshakes instead of 36 cent spaghetti and water that I buy for 90 cents per 5 gallons. Life is good but somewhat strange because in one country (The DR) I am spending money like a Rap artist and the other (The United States) I am a broke volunteer living off peanuts (not really, Peanuts are expensive and salty).

I owe my buddy Blake 80 bucks and had been thinking of a good way to get the money back to him while I am still in this country. I could have used my money from savings in the states but that money is precious to the Peace Corps volunteer because we all know that once money leaves your US account it never goes back… never. I remember the first couple hundred dollars I took out, thinking that I could pay it back when I was reimbursed for whatever activity I was spending it on. After about six weeks I received my reimbursement and instead of treating the money like something I had at one point ganado (earned) I treated it more like money I had recently ganado (won) and before the end of the month I had found various expenses down here to put my savings money into (A new bucket, some chairs, a trip to the capital, beer, parmesan cheese, Peanut butter, etc.). As I didn’t want to lose another 80 dollars from the US savings account I came up with a plan. I would use my Dominican Hood Richness to pay off Blake and simply live my life as a person who is only twice as rich as his neighbors, I took out 2900 pesos from the bank and bought two stamps 26 pesos and sent it off to the states. I labeled the envelope (in Spanish) as:

Christopher Ward

Church of the Peace Corps

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Father Blake Wehling, Bryant Royal and Sister Ashley Bloom

Portland, Oregon

My plan was essentially fool proof. I label the envelope as if they are priests and nuns and that I work for a church. That way the Dominican Postal service is less likely to take the money out (who is going to steal from a church?), also don’t judge me, I am still waiting on my mail from the states from 6 months back, sometimes you have to take extra precautions. I was still a little worried that the money wouldn’t make it but last night when I was camping on a hill outside my site I received 3 voicemails from Blake (which I got the next morning).

Message 1: God Damn it Chris, how am I supposed to change this play money into U.S. dollars? Now I have to find a bank to change it…

Message 2: God Damn it Chris, I just talked to the ONLY branch in town that will change it and they said that after fees the 80 dollars you sent me will only be worth 51 dollars…

Message 3: God Damn it Chris, answer your phone…

I couldn’t help laugh a little bit because Blake was cursing a lot for a guy who I labeled as a priest. I guess it turns out that you can’t just change over money in the US like you can down here. I suppose American money is more or less accepted all around the world so it easier to convert to Pesos in the Dominican Republic. Oops. I called Blake later and tried to explain to him the novelty of 80 US Dollars worth of Domincan Pesos. I told him that he could carry them around in his wallet and look cool, or he could play monopoly with them. He still wasn’t thrilled.

Also, I still have been living the life of a millionaire because last week a group of doctors came down and need some translators. I ended up staying at their hotel just outside of Constanza, which had hot water, the Internet and we got 2 and a half meals a day (and not the usual rice and beans, we were getting fried eggplant, fried cheese, fried chicken and all sorts of other delicious things that you can fit into a frying pan). They also left me fancy Gillette shaving cream, some antiperspirant and an industrial size bottle of hand sanitizer. I was without water for a couple days this weekend and instead of going day 3 without showering I seriously considered Hand-Sanitizing my whole body. Luckily with a little patience the water came back and I was able to bathe, and flush the toilet.

On a work related note, I am still waiting on a grant for building latrines in the community, I started another HIV/AIDS education youth group in a small village outside of town and we are organizing a conference for Brigada Verde for the northern region in 3 weeks. I am also supposed to be going to the school this week to give some lectures on the environment, but high schools are scary places and Dominican teachers have a bad habit of abandoning gringos in classrooms of 50 kids.

As time goes on down here, we end up learning to be a little more confident than we need to be. Or maybe I shouldn’t say than we “need” to be, but at least more than we used to be. So often as Americans we are treated like fools and ripped off by vendors and service staff that we have all developed a new defense mechanism that involves yelling a lot and being persistent in getting your way. Most of the time it works, even when it shouldn’t.

On Tuesday morning I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled (not because I had a new cavity but because I chipped away an old filling) and when I got to the dentist’s and told the secretary that I was there to see Dr. Read she looked at me a little funny. She told me that Dr. Read doesn’t work on Tuesdays and he wasn’t even in the office. When I heard this I flipped out. I was especially angry because I received a phone call the day before to “confirm” my dentist appointment for Tuesday afternoon when I had scheduled it for Monday. I was pissed off because I wouldn’t be able to catch my bus back to site if I went to the Dentist at 4 in the afternoon so she re-scheduled me for 11:30 AM on Tuesday. I stood at the front desk, irate because they changed my Monday appointment to Tuesday (a day when the Dentist wasn’t even in the office). I stared down each of the secretaries, and demanded to know which one of them changed my appointment to today but no one would come forward. They knew I was angry so they promised me they would see what they could do.

I sat in the waiting room for about fifteen minutes trying to stay as angry as I could when one of the Dental assistants came up and told me to go back to the x-ray room. The dentist didn’t know how the mix-up happened but he was going to head over from his other office to do my filling because he had finished all his other work for the morning. I felt a little better and sat around on the couch for about a half our (he got there at about 11:30, which was when I was going to have my appointment anyway). He came in and was apologetic about the whole thing and I told him it was no big deal and thanked him for coming over and doing the filling. It took about 20 minutes and after he finished he even offered me a ride back to the Peace Corps office. I thanked him but as it turned out I was done just in time to catch the 12 o’clock bus back to my site.

I don’t have any service on the way home so my phone was off, but when I got home I saw I had a message. The message was from a dentist’s office saying that I never showed up for my appointment… it turned out that I had actually made the appointment with the wrong dentist’s office on accident. Whoops.

I guess that means that this morning I walked into a random dental office, angrily insisted on having an appointment with a dentist that was not working and had him drive across town to spend 20 minutes putting in a filling. “Boy, I sure feel like an asshole” I later told Joel. He gave me some consolation by reminding me “we’re American’s; being assholes is what we do best.”

As a Peace Corps Volunteer people always seem to assume that I am some kind of overly compassionate human being who runs around hugging orphans. Last week I was pretty close to the opposite of that.

Recently the children that play outside my house have become more bothersome. I put a light out in front of my house to scare off the criminals during the night but it has ended up creating a well-lit playground for the kids who play around screaming until about 10:30 each night. I consulted a neighbor who never seems to have a problem with the muchachos. He told me that his solution is to take a bucket of water and throw it out his front door every morning to scare off the kids, a little water never hurt anybody but staying dry is enough incentive for the kids to give him his space. I thought that would be a good idea but only in case of an emergency (or when they don’t listen to me the first five times).

There is particular 3 years old, that Kathy, Malia and I have dubbed the “naked kid” because he never wears clothes. Three weeks ago he discovered he could climb over the dog gate that I have in my front door (with the intention to keep Lobo in and the muchachos out). He climbs about half way and I tell him to stop and get out, but he just looks at me for a minute and continues to climb over. I don’t really like to host children, especially naked children, so the solution usually ends up with me picking him up and putting him on the other side of the dog gate. I then close the door and he goes away.

Last week one morning I was washing my socks and underwear in the front room and the Naked Kid came over and stood at the front door. I was shocked to see that he was actually wearing clothes this time. I complimented him on his pants and shirt. He began climbing over the gate and I told him to stay outside, as usual he stared at me a moment from on top of the gate and said, no. He entered; I picked him up and put him outside. He entered again; I put him outside again. He entered a third time and I told him that if he climbs over the gate one more time I am going to sick Lobo on him. He called my bluff (everybody knows Lobo doesn’t bite people) and climbed over. That’s it, I told him, I am going to throw water on you. He shook his head and said no again, as if he didn’t believe me. I said ok, and picked up the nearest bucket of water. He shook his head no again, I told him to get out again but he didn’t. All right then, I told him, and splashed about a quarter of the bucket of water on him.

The water was enough to make him scream and start crying loudly, we do have pretty cold water up here in the mountains. I asked him “what did I tell you? I told you to get out and you didn’t listen, this is your fault.” But he could not be reasoned with. “mama juevos” he told me, which can either translate to “mother eggs” or “suck balls.” I’m pretty sure he meant the latter. I then solicited the help of his older brother who is 8 years old. “How many times did I tell him?” I asked. The brother responded with 10 times. At least he understood where I was coming from.

I picked up the screaming child and put him on the other side of the gate and told his brother to take him to his mom, who lives two houses down. When I put the kid down I realized that the bucket I had splashed on him was what I had been using to wash my socks and underwear and, like any rational human being, I had put some bleach in it. I immediately felt awful that I ruined this impoverished child’s only shirt, but also relieved that none of the water hit his face or bare skin, and yelled at him “quitate las ropas! Ahora, hay cloro en este agua” which means “take of your clothes there is bleach in this water.” He just looked up at me confused, I don’t think he understands what bleach is and couldn’t figure out why I wanted him to take of his clothes. I told his brother to get the shirt off of him and have his mom soak it so it didn’t get ruined but he looked about as confused as his brother. Screw it, I thought, “vayanse a su casa” I told them, go to your house. They left and I didn’t see the naked kid for the rest of the morning. He came back that afternoon and was back to normal, naked and trying to climb over the dog gate. It looks like if I taught him a lesson it wasn’t the right one because he still keeps coming back but I haven’t seen him wear clothing since. Regardless, the only 3 year old I have been throwing water on lately has been Lobo, and that’s only because he has a bad habit of peeing on his own leg.

Also, I don’t think the shirt was ruined because his mom hasn’t said anything about it. Just to be safe though I gave away about a third of my wardrobe last week when I found a dead rat in my suitcase (I told all the moms to wash the close first). Now all the kids in the neighborhood are wearing my t-shirts and business casual clothing that I brought to country and never wore.

Pig intestine, it’s a delicacy down here for some reason and until tonight I had been able to avoid it without any problems. My friend came over to play cards and I was eating pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese like I always do. I asked him if he wanted some and he said yes because he never had eaten Spaghettis like that before. I gave him half the bowl and he returned 15 minutes later with something his wife had cooked that I had never tried before. Mondongo is the name for pig intestine, he didn’t tell me what it was until after I had my first bite. It was chewy. I gave him half of my spaghettis so naturally he gave me half of the intestine dish. I ate it all and it was considerably better than the pig snout that I had eaten six months back, I think because cartilage is really gross to chew while intestine is just kind of spongy. It also looked a lot different than I thought; it was braided together as if the butcher who prepared it was a 5-year-old girl. I suppose it was more visually pleasing that way, when it was all knotted up it was less like an intestine and more of a bite of some mystery organ. I still don’t know how they can clean out the inside of the intestines before preparing it; I think they gave us a hepatitis A vaccination during training so I should be ok either way. And by ok I mean only suffering violent spells of diarrhea for 24 to 72 hours.

About 3 days ago I played guitar for about 20 minutes with a guy who opened with a group for CSN about 30 years ago. By my calculations I played indirectly with CSN for about .0055 seconds (20 minutes ÷ 3 Days ÷ 20 years ÷ 4 Band members = .0055 Seconds), so that makes me kind of a big deal. We switched off playing songs for the group and then the giant Dominican speakers came out blasting Merengue Tipico for the next couple hours and my moment of glory was over. I was up in a campo for the past week working at a free clinic that a group of doctors from the states puts on every few months, it was a very rural area but people were coming from miles around to get the free medical coverage. I was translating in pediatrics and the doctor was so friendly that she let me tag along and explained everything she was doing. She let me hang out for the lab stuff too; we looked at poop from a diaper under a microscope to look for worms. Even though there were no worms to be found it was still pretty cool, though stinky. The campo was beautiful and I felt bad being a Peace Corps volunteer that was getting the nicest place to stay of everyone, but not that bad. I had one hot shower (and several cold ones), a toilet and Internet access while the Doctors and translators where using latrines in houses without electricity. I was essentially living the campo life of a millionaire.

The night before the clinic started I stayed with a couple volunteers in Santiago at a cheap hotel that over the past few months has become considerably cheaper, and not in price. I had never really seen a transvestite hooker up close before and last Saturday night I saw enough to last me a lifetime. I am not sure if the bar across the street from the hotel was having a special Transvestite hooker night or if it was just becoming a fad in Santiago that I had not known about, either way there was a lot of them coming outside and standing around. I am not usually quick to call every transvestite I see a prostitute but in this case it was clear because they were going up to cars and entering the hotel accompanied by men with poor vision. The female volunteer who was with me noted that she was probably the only girl in the hotel who was paying to sleep instead of being paid. I wondered if she was the only girl in the hotel who wasn’t a boy. Transvestite hookers or not, the hotel had free wi-fi in the lobby so I can’t complain, especially because it was only four dollars per person for the night.

I was out of my site for four days, which would normally stress me out because I would have to leave Lobo and my house to the punk kid who always takes my things and doesn’t really take care of Lobo, but this time, thanks to Chris, Charlotte and my mom I had some bargaining tools to arrange something better. They all gave me their old cell phones from the states that are pretty much worthless up there, but down here are worth hundreds (of pesos). So I traded my mom’s old cell phone with my neighbor in exchange for him watching Lobo. He lives tucked away from the street so we could set up Lobo and his cage outside (He promised to take care of Lobo as he would his own son and if it rained he would bring him in and feed him rice and beans, after all, it was a Motorola Razor Phone). It’s funny because he uses my mom’s old phone (which don’t worry I deleted all the contacts) but hasn’t changed the background picture of Tye and Newton (our old Dogs). I think he has mistaken them for small lions or bears. Having him watch Lobo was awesome because when I came home this time there was no pee in the house (sadly, about an hour later Lobo marked the kitchen as his territory all over again) and nobody took any of my stuff. I think the rats are dead, I put the poison out and I think they took the bait.

And I’m back to hand washing my socks and underwear and having hungry children watch me eat my rice and beans. I am back to choosing which glass of water is safe to drink and having middle aged woman touch my sun burn because they have never seen skin get so red. They say it takes a couple of days to get back in the groove of things but I may be prolonging the effect by hiding in my house and listening to the Allman brothers, pretending that I am still back in the states. In Lobo’s and my absence the rats have taken over the house and now they think they own the place. I almost caught one as it ran across the floor two nights ago but it was too fast and good at hiding. As I chased it with a broom I felt like Tom from Tom & Jerry, except maybe a little angrier because my mouse had the nerve to leave droppings all over my bed, in all of my drawers and on the kitchen counter. I have marks on my torso that itch, I can’t decide if it is because I was bit several times by something, the humidity is giving me a skin rash or if it is related to the fact that I slept in a bed that was covered in rat droppings (I had them washed the next day, and I brushed them off the night of). I suppose the few days of getting back in the groove really means a few days getting back to the point where you are not ridiculously uncomfortable. I cleaned up the house, wrote a PEPFAR proposal (where we try to incorporate HIV/AIDS education into environmental education) and am trying now to take care of Jerry with various methods (sticky paper, tying a cheerio to a mouse trap and putting a stick of dynamite in the mouse hole.)

Getting Lobo back into Constanza was much easier than getting him out. There was considerably less vomiting and because we rode in the back of a truck on the way up the mountain no one really cared if he got sick anyway. We were more afraid for our lives, as the truck had 10 people in the back along with 17 people’s luggage (which included my dog in his dog cage.) I was straddling Lobo’s cage when the driver picked up the four additional passengers (that brought the count in the back from 6 to 10 people) and was blown away by a man’s willingness to stand on the tail gate of the truck and use Lobo’s cage as his only support. I asked them if they were getting a free ride because I would never pay for such a precarious seat in a guagua. The man and his friend said they paid and quickly changed the subject to the fact that my dog is missing a leg. “Three feet. Your dog only has three feet.” He informed me. The other 8 people in the back repeated his observation “three feet!” I smiled and told him that he was good at counting and asked him where he learned to count so well. Prison, he told me, he had been there for the past three years. The other nine people repeated his statement “three years!” Oops, I thought to myself, I guess I shouldn’t tease the ex-convict about his ability to count. I asked him what part of Constanza he lived in and he told me barrio Las Flores. That’s where I live. “What part of Las Flores do you live in?” I asked him. He told me arriba, which means the upper part (I never know if I live in the upper part or lower part). Either way, we decided to be buddies for the ride up and he helped me take Lobo out of the back when we got to the neighborhood.

Do I still write about things if I am not in the DR? The blog is called the DR and The Cuerpo de Paz and my trip to New York didn’t really have anything to do with either. I guess I can keep it short.

I got there on Tuesday and was a little worried because everyone tells me that people in New York are a bunch of assholes and that the city is huge and impossible to navigate, but really the subway isn’t that bad and the only assholes are the bus drivers (one left me behind on my way to the airport after I ran half a block with all my stuff. There were people at the bus stop yelling for him to stop and I even was able to knock on the front door to the bus as he pulled away, leaving me 15 blocks deep in this place called “Harlem.” As I stood there this half drunk lady told me “you gotta say F that ‘N word’ and get on the 15X bus uptown to catch a different bus. I’ll take good care of you baby, c’mon” Needless to say I waited the extra 15 minutes for the next bus and did not say F that N word or get on any 15X bus, it was weird though because I am used to half drunk people at 10 AM talking to me in Spanish not English.) As for all the nice people, some lady gave me a three-day metro pass so I didn’t have to pay for any public transportation until the last day. People kept giving me directions and showing an interest in what I had to say, it was like the opposite of Los Angeles, California.

My friend Joel has begun pointing out how ridiculous we always end up looking in front of Dominicans. He referenced the fact that we are always reading at the beach, which to an average Dominican is completely ridiculous. When we are hanging out there is usually some kind of strange activity that takes place that leaves many Dominicans asking what the hell is wrong with white people? Recently, at the annual diversity camp in Jarabacoa the volunteers ended up dancing because none of the youth would. The second night, after the talent show, during a Reggaeton song (Reggaeton is Caribbean Rap music) I was drawn to the dance floor by some unidentifiable force. I began dancing the steps to some dance that I thought was a new Caribbean phenomena, it took me a couple minutes to learn but then after a couple repetitions I had it down. I thought to myself, a dance so easy that a white person can learn it in 30 seconds? Wait a minute, then I had a flash back to Church Camp in 5th grade when the made us learn the electric slide. I realized that a Dominican was not leading the dancing but instead a volunteer. So there I was, dancing the electric slide with 15 other white people and a few Dominicans to a rap song in Spanish, in front of the rest of the camp. I shook my head as I danced and looked up to see Joel who asked me: why are white people always dancing in a line? Good question. I wish I had the answer.

As I said in the other blog entry, it had been a while since we got some rain. I was getting a little tired of the awful smell and the other problems that a lack of water falling from the sky can cause for Constanza. Luckily, last Thursday we got some rain. It started pouring down when we were having a “field day” as part of an intercambio with another Escojo group that was visiting from somewhere 6 hours away that I can’t remember the name of. I brought Lobo up the hill to play with us and the other dog that the volunteer before me had. We were up on the hill outside of town for about an hour and then the rain started, we decided to take off and head back to our houses but on the walk back we ended up getting soaked and the rills where the water normally runs off was turned into creeks and of course that spawned a mud and dirty water fight. I tried my best not to be involved but Lobo seemed to be enjoying himself. We started heading back to the house but in all the excitement Lobo had tired himself out and couldn’t really walk much farther, I kept pulling him with the leash but he wouldn’t budge. I ended up having to pick him up (he was soaked and muddy) and carrying him back through the barrio to get out of the rain in a timely manner. I got a few looks from people but I think they understood. Also, during the intercambio I went to the capital for a night because I had a meeting in the afternoon at the office. When I was gone the kids had a party in my house, without asking me, or telling me afterwards. I talked to the neighbors when I saw pieces of spaghetti on my table and an extra pot on my stove. They told me that yes, in fact, there was a party at my house and that the kids started it at about 11 o’clock last night and were loud and obnoxious. They told me that they had been playing the guitar and singing loudly and running around outside. The next day when I went to the charlas that they were presenting to each other a girl showed up in a University of Oregon sweatshirt. Hmm, I thought to myself, that looks exactly like the sweatshirt that my aunt Sherry gave me for Christmas in 2004. I was very reserved when I approached her and said “That’s my sweatshirt, did you take that from my house?” The girl gave a little laugh and pretended not to understand me. God damn it… I am so happy to be working with these youth again.

Have I already complained about getting your hair here? I probably have, and if I haven't I should have. They just don't know how to cut pelo rubio and always end up giving me a fade. I look like an elderly member of new kids on the block. He tried to leave my bangs super long at first so I looked like the guy from Doom after he gets shot too much, luckily I took care of the haircut issue three weeks before heading to the states so I have time to let it grow back in place.

The guy cutting my hair used the Dominican version of the "F" word (Joder - To "F") a lot as he cut my hair. He said "you are the guy who lives in barrio Las Flores right?" I told him I was and that I wasn't that worried about the delinquency that exists there. He said "yeah, of course you don't. People know who to F with and no one is going to F with you because if they F with an American there will be a problem. The American has an army that will F you up." Yeah, I guess. Really I wasn't worried about people F-ing me up in the barrio as much as I was worried about him F-ing up my hair and looking like an F-ing idiot for the next two weeks.

Over the past couple months a few factors have created the perfect storm of drama between several of the youth I work with and myself. The first, being the river clean ups that I have supported, participated in and helped organize with the local government and community. The youth are insistent that they will not work with the local government because they believe everything the local government does is for political gain, which may be true, but the local government is in control of nearly all of the available resources and therefore, in order to create progress (the recent summer camp was almost completely funded by the local government) I have been actively working with a few groups that they do not support. The second, because Escojo (HIV/AIDS education) participation has been growing rapidly on a national level, there is less funding for the desired activities in the group and the youth are taking the lack of financial support personally. Third, as the youth become adults (many of them graduated this year) several of them have moved or attempted to move to larger cities with colleges and better job markets. Most of them where unsuccessful and returned frustrated, however, in the migration we lost one of our key members who helped us break some of the tension. Over the past month we had gotten to the point of being “strictly business” instead of hanging out and being buddies like before. I am just as stubborn as any 18-year-old machismo Dominican Youth and therefore we cut out the weekly English classes and Domino/Uno sessions. I was bummed to have the situation get so ugly that Dominoes was almost completely cut out of my life.

The weeks passed and over the weekend last week I ran into the key youth that had moved away. He was back in town because his dad had died that morning; he told me that the funeral would be 8 days later (this last Sunday). Despite being on “strictly business” terms with the kids I felt that the funeral was an activity bigger than our drama. I made it clear to the boys that I would be going with them to the funeral and we all went together. I learned quickly that Dominican funerals where not like American funerals. There was a huge crowd outside the boy’s father’s house and they were playing Dominoes and having a good time. There were no speeches given and it was more a time to remember the dead by sitting outside their house and being happy (there was also an altar inside if you wanted to pay your respects), the longer I sat there the more sense it made. There was food provided for everyone at noon (the funeral was from 10 to 4) and everyone was in good spirits. It ended up being the opportunity that the youth and I needed to reconnect; we made plans for starting the English class back up and the tension between the youth and I has started to dissipate. Also, the man who died had 20 kids. I wouldn’t have believed it but they were all there (or at least I lost count after 12 or 13).

Rain is kind of like nature’s shower and Constanza is getting a bit ripe, especially when you consider the fact that I live in its ass crack. The cañada behind my house is now filled with garbage and excrement; usually it rains at least a couple times a week to wash the waste to some other poor town a couple miles down the river but as it has not rained in a few weeks the piles are getting high. I suppose in some perverse way I should be happy that we are all suffering in the barrio from the stink and increase rat and roach problem (I got my first mice a week ago) because it shows the people of the barrio how problematic it can be to toss trash in the river. The reality however, is that I too am praying for some rain to get the trash and smell out of here just like everyone else.

I can no longer open my bedroom window to sleep at night because the smell wafts in with the breeze. This means I have to keep the window closed and deal with the smell of my feet, which may be worse. I am no longer angry at Lobo when he pees in the house because I know that all of the walls outside have been marked by other dogs and there has been no rain to wash it off, now he is merely making the inside of the house more like the outside. I can no longer eat food after it has been left out for a few hours because I have mice and the nurse during training said that mouse pee on food can make you die. I have begun looking for excuses to walk across town to the well-to-do neighborhoods where they have proper garbage disposal to catch my breath.

Last week I was hanging out in my site trying to take advantage of the high voltage electricity that I have not been getting recently (I need 100 - 240 Volts to charge and operate a computer and I was trying to put together all of our charlas as one big manual for Brigada Verde). Our electricity comes back around 5 pm but doesn't get above 75 volts until after 8 or 9 at night. The rough thing about me needing high voltage to do work is that the loud speakers for the parties need High Voltage too. So while I am working the party gets started and after about an hour my female neighbor comes over and says she is selling tickets to the Discoteca tomorrow night and that "they" are going. She invites me and I say sure. I figured it would be a good bonding experience especially because the last time I went I didn't dance with any of them and now had to show the barrio that I'm not a square. She took my message of a yes and told the other neighbors that were dancing next door, I kept working and told her I will buy the ticket tomorrow.

The next day they all tell me that I am talking my other female neighbor out on a date and I find out that no one else is going. The neighbor girl already bought the ticket and so I couldn't back out (25 pesos was on the line). As it turns out, the neighbor, despite being great and all, is married to my other neighbor who happens to be one of my better friends in the barrio.

After I figured out the situation I went over to the neighbors house and said "I can't take you out on a date. My friend is your husband and I don't want to die" (I have seen his machete). She laughed and said "no es nada" but I was not convinced that it was nada. Later she brought her husband/my buddy over by the hand and told him to inform me that the date was no big thing. He told me himself that he would go himself but someone has to watch the kids. Alright, I told him, but I was sure that there would be all kinds of awkwardness. And there was.

I picked her up prom style at 9pm (when the good electricity was finaly back and I should have been working) and sat with her husband for a few minutes while she got ready, then off we went arm in arm. The discoteca is about a ten-minute walk from my house (you would be amazed at where they stick dance clubs in the developing world) and consists of dark room with mirrors and a discoball.

It was my neighbors first time to the discoteca and my second time. Neither of us knew the appropriate time to get there, 9:10pm was not the appropriate time. It was near empty and the patrons that actually had shown up looked like they were in middle school. This is awkward, I thought, I am one of two people over age 25 in this building and the other person is my friends wife... who I am on a date with. We remedied the awkwardness with some dancing merengue and bachata as the discoteca slowly filled up. After a while the music stopped. A man got on the loudspeaker and announced that there would be (another) Michael Jackson dance competition. We were all forced to get off the dance floor and a guy dressed like Michael Jackon got on stage. He danced horribly for about 15 minutes to a techno version of all the old Michael Jackson songs and the crowd looked at him with disappointed faces. He kept dancing and dancing and no one could look away, it was like a wierd techno car accident. I turned to the neighbor’s wife and said, "well, at least I'm not that guy" (In english).

I was in the back of a pick up truck the other day on my way from Jarabacoa to Constanza. It was late in the afternoon and I had been waiting for about 2 hours for the guagua to leave. For a majority of the trip I was stuck on the side of the truck bed hanging on for dear life while the old lady next to me kept adjusting a box of vegetables and raw meat against my leg. I was uncomfortable and tired. I decided to put on my new (ancient 5 year old) ipod that Jeremy gave me when he came down last month. I was enjoying the music and the scenery along one of the country’s most beautiful (and poorly maintained) highways when the majority of the passengers in the bed of the pick up got out and left only myself and a Haitian guy who had just hopped on a few miles back. He sat next to me against the cab of the truck and I noticed his 2pac shirt that was quite gangster. I said “2 Pac, el es bueno!” The Haitian guy responded politely with a “Si, 2pac bueno.” We sat in the back for a while and I kept listening to my ipod. I was listening to something not very gangster, like Iron & Wine, and the picture of 2pac’s face on the Haitian’s shirt was staring right at me. I asked myself, is this whole Peace Corps gig turning me into a softy?

As I contemplated, the Haitian tapped me and asked if the ipod was a radio. I told him si, más o menos. Then he asked me if it was a phone too. I told him no, this one just played music. After a moment it became clear that he had not seen an ipod up close before so I thought I would give him one of the earpieces to listen also. Before I passed it over I realized that The Old Crow Medicine Show was probably not the music he wanted to be hearing. “Te gusta 2pac?” I asked him again. He told me yeah, but really I don’t think he had ever heard the music before. Lucky for the Haitian and me, Jeremy had a copy of All Eyes on Me on the ipod and so I put on 2pac. As the Gangster beats were dropped my new friend started nodding his head and smiling. He looked so content that after one song I offered him the other earpiece so he could have the stereo experience. I wanted to explain to him that he almost had the whole Gangsta look down but he had to stop smiling. We sat in the back of the truck for the next hour with him listening to the ipod and I was beside myself the whole way. I laughed at myself for feeling so good about doing something as silly as introducing Gangsta rap to a Haitian who probably had no idea who the guy on his T-shirt was in the first place. I had worked so hard the week before to run the summer camp for the poor kids of the barrio but this little experience left me feeling warmer and fuzzier. A lot of the rewarding things that we do down here can’t really be put on a resume, I guess “keeping it real” would be a good example of this.

Last year about this time I wrote about a 400 kid summer camp that tested my will to live. This year the local government gave Kathy and I the opportunity to plan a week long camp. Needless to say we went for quality over quantity and cut down the number of kids to 42. We also got the help of Malia (the new volunteer in the next town over) and our friend Renata. The camp focused on art, environment and self-esteem, meaning we are doing a lot of hiking and a lot of painting and drawing. There is also a lot of talking about feelings, I let Kathy and Malia take on that part. It has ended up being better that I would have imagined, the kids from my barrio that were supposed to be a bunch of trouble makers ended up being a bunch of little angels that do everything you ask them too. It has really come to my advantage because I am getting to know the neighbors better (36 of the 42 kids are from Barrio Las Flores) and I also have a small army of children that can go fetch things from the colmado for me. I just give them the money and they go get it. Its like that homegrocer.com thing that they had a couple of years ago (that I think went out of bussiness) except I don´t have use the internet and it only costs me about 3 cents per purchase (I give the kids a peso to go get the stuff), I also can pay them in rubber bands, which go 10 for a peso. There is a rubber band gambling ring amongst the 5 to 17 year old population in the barrio, I upped my street cred by teaching them how to play black jack. The concept of an Ace being 1 and 11 has baffled some of the younger participants and I have had to resolve a couple issues. People get pretty fiesty when rubber bands are on the line.

This week Lobo and I both got sick from eating or drinking something, I am not sure what because I am not eating any of his dog food and I don’t give him to much “people food.” I suppose getting sick with a buddy can be a good bonding experience. The problem is that when the two people getting sick are of different species it can be a little hard to compromise on the most comfortable set up. For example, Lobo does not use a toilet and I almost exclusively use a toilet for going to the bathroom. This became a problem when he wanted to go outside so he could be sick and I wanted to lie around in the house all day to be sick. The compromise was that I stumbled around the neighborhood with him for 5 minutes every hour or so and he limited his vomiting in the house to 3 times. I think that vomit karma had come into play again because a university student from the states passed by my house taking surveys of water quality and she asked my if I had suffered from diarrhea or vomiting in the past month and I told her yes, when really it had been more like two months. Within 10 hours of giving her slightly false information I was cursed with the pain of intestinal parasites, as I lay awake all night in agony I took consolation in the fact that at least now I wasn’t a liar. On a slightly related note, the neighbor’s rooster was retrieved from the latrine without problems.

Also, the other night I went down to the park to try and enjoy a little Spanish Karaoke with a friend of mine, which is pretty fun because you can make up the words in English and nobody knows if you are wrong. At one point several months back I sang the first two lines of “Hey Jude” for 90% of the song and thoroughly impressed the patrons of the little pub in Constanza. Interestingly enough, immediately after I sang “Nights in White Satin” almost dead on and was cut off from karaoke by the crowd I was with. I guess the Moody Blues hasn’t quite hit the Constanza region yet, or anywhere. Anyway, the place ended up not offering Karaoke anymore because they lost some cable that they needed to hook up to the TV, I was upset by Constanza’s loss of its only Karaoke bar and went to the park to lament. When we got there, we saw there was a candle light vigil being held in someone’s memory. I thought to myself, with my new knowledge of catholocism: “those Catholics sure love their candles.” We watched the ceremony from about 50 yards away but it was hard to tell what exactly was going on because the crowd was so huge. At one point the mayor showed up with his entourage and made a few comments to the crowd. At this point I knew it was a big deal, and I began to get offended that people kept playing “Thriller” and “Billie Jean” from their car stereos, the music was overwhelming the procession and I was starting to get a little tired of hearing “Michelle” (yeah, the call him Michelle not Michael) Jackson on the radio all the time. It made me realize how little respect people had for the dead, until I got a closer look of the whole show and discovered (because a man in the center was holding a giant framed portrait) that the whole candle light vigil was dedicated to Michael Jackson. I looked around and realized that everyone was dressed in suave Michael Jackson-esque suits and white gloves (on the left hand only of course), and I was forced to ask myself “Where the hell am I?” There were probably 150 people in the park and after about 10 minutes of realizing the circumstances of the event the parade started. People began dancing as if they were in Thriller following a truck that was blasting Michael Jackson tunes. So Thursday night at 9 PM there was quite a procession in memory of MJ. I had to laugh, sit back and enjoy some pop from the eighties.

Lately with all the stresses of my site and the outside world I took some advice from my catholic buddy and went to a mass or two and checked out how the whole process went in my town. I was surprised by the tranquility of the whole thing, the service I went to in Tireo before the medical mission seemed really hectic but probably just because the church was packed to welcome the doctors. When I went the past two times in my community it was the first time I sat in a room with 100 Dominicans and every cell phone was silent. There was no yelling or loud music and I had about 45 minutes to relax. The service lasted an hour but I take out 15 minutes for all the mumbling phrases in Spanish that the whole church was doing in unison that I had no idea what they were saying (it kind of stressed me out). It was nice to sit in the back and enjoy the fact, as Joel pointed out to me, that the Catholic mass is about the same all over the world. So really I could have been somewhere in the United States and it would have been exactly the same, except that the phrases would have been mumbled in English (I still would not understand though). Despite not being Catholic, I thought that the mass was a great way to focus and breath for a minute. It was also a way to bond with the community because the Dominican Republic is about 95% Catholic. No one really bothered me before or after the service, I think I confused a lot of the church members because so many people in my town think that I am a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness. One neighbor lady did ask to borrow my digital camera; I told her it was broken, because it is broken.

I thought the Mass was a good way to relax, but I found another great way this week, or more appropriately bettered another way to relax. That would be hanging out with my neighbors. I found recently that the same people I feared upon moving in to my little house are actually the people that are stepping up to protect me and provide me with some friendship during stressful times. The past few nights I have been hanging out playing “casino” with a couple of the guys and it has been pretty great. It’s nice to have people hang out in my house, even if sometimes they smoke cigarettes inside and drink a little of the Haitian moonshine. I don’t mind sweeping ash of the floor and taking drinking advice from 8 year olds; one of the neighbor’s kids told me that I should drink some of the moonshine too because it makes you sleepy but doesn’t hurt your head. Thanks Gregory. I had to ask him how he knows. The highlight of our hanging out was yesterday when we sat around for a little while and tried to figure out how to get his cock-fighting chicken out of the latrine. They kept telling me that it fell down a hole, and jokingly told me that I should go down and get it out. I didn’t realize that other things fall down the hole on a regular basis too. It’s the second time it has fallen in the latrine and one of the neighbor ladies was so bothered that she suggested that this time when they get it out that we should just kill it and eat it.

My mom sent me some stuff in the mail. One of my favorite things was the rich chocolate'y ovaltine. It is good in the states with 2 percent milk but here when you have it mixed in milk that is practically half and half it is delicious. I by milk by the box (at 50 pesos a box) and make about a liter of it at a time. Usually when I make it there is residual ovaltine pockets of dry powder, which are usually deliciosos. Yesterday, I thought I drank an ovaltine pocket of dry powder but it was moving around a little. It didn´t break down so I decided to spit it out. It was a fly. I was pretty grossed out, but the fly was probably having a worse day than I was.

Holy crap.

Jeremy, Will, Blake and or Bryant have been here for a couple weeks now and I am actually more tired than when they got here. I guess hanging out with your best friends for weeks straight is kind of like smoking a pack of cigarrettes all at once. The only difference is that at the end of their vacation I will still be ready for another healthy dose of the amigos in September!

So far we have climbed the highest mountain, have seen the beaches of the south and north and given Will B and opportunitty to show of his world class salsa in some ancient ruins in the capital (where they have live salsa music every sunday). It is hard work to have so much fun and I think I am ready to get myself back to some hard work and impossibly frustrating working circumstances.

This week was a big week because we had our 1 year In Service Training. This means that my group and I are half way through the Peace Corps! Woohoo, we were all excited to celebrate our one year anniversary but also a little scared to realize that we are over-the-hill in Peace Corps standards. I went through a mid-service crisis a couple of months ago but I am doing better now. It was good to have everyone together for the first time in 9 months and to present our work to each other. I was actually very impressed by how much our little group of 20 Volunteers has done over the past year, I guess all our work adds up over 9 months.

After the training a few of us went to the north coast to a town called Monte Cristi (near where Columbus discovered the Americas). We did some snorkeling on a little secluded island that we had to ourselves for the whole day. It was awesome because I got to see all sorts of animals that look cool but can sting you and make you hurt. There were king fish and the black sea anenomies that can put you in the hospital. I was pretty jealous of the Environment volunteer whos job is to monitor the reef around the capital area by scuba diving all the time (he never has trouble soliciting help from other volunteers with his project). A friend got stung on her arm by a jelly fish and she said it was hurting pretty bad, it was confirmed by Peace Corps medical staff a few months back that you are supposed to pee on the sting because the ammonia helps clear out the venom (or whatever it is that makes it hurt). Joel had just peed, the other guys were in the ocean still and the rest of the group was girls so I got recruited to be the designated pee-er. It was a little awkward peeing on my friends arm but she felt better afterwards. That night we went to the Patronales for the town, which is the celebration of the patron saint of Monte Cristi. It was a good time, there were rides like at a county fair except the looked like they were all about to fall over. We took a ride on the sea dragon and the swings that go around in the circle. The swings made me want to throw up. No one wanted to go on the ferris wheel, one broke apart in one of the girl's sites a few months back and nobody felt brave enough to be the guinea pig this time.

I guess Americans are always good targets for anonymous puppy gifting because we are seen as crazy and overly compassionate about taking care of animals. People get the idea that because their dog had puppies and they don’t want to find a family for them that they can just leave them in front of the Peace Corps volunteer’s house in the middle of the night. It has happened to a few of my friends, one girl living in Bonao had two near dead puppies left for her that were too weak to even open their eyes. Another girl rescued a few that were about to be drown in the river by a little boy who was sent out by his parents to get rid of them.

I am not especially friendly to animals in my community but I guess Lobo gave me away as someone who would look after a dog that nobody wants. Maybe for that reason, maybe because the backyard to my house and the downstairs apartment is empty, someone left two puppies that were about 3 weeks old behind my house four or five nights ago. I took them in and washed them because they were filthy and then wrapped them in a towel. The next day I had two puppies in my house and everyone asked why I had two new dogs and I told them that I didn’t actually want them and was trying to find a home for them. Little kids love puppies, they also like to pester Americans, so within 10 minutes of opening my front door there were about 15 offers to take the puppies. I was a little reluctant to give them to little kids because it is really the parents call if they can have one or not. The oldest kid in the group swore to me that he went and asked his parents if he could have it and they said yes. I put some flea medicine on it and gave him half the bag of the puppy chow I bought and he took off. Later that day a vendor who walks through the neighborhood selling snacks said he would take the other one. He said he would pass by later to get it (which ended up being 10 PM that night). I was asleep when he showed up, I will not deny that I go to bed early, and so when I woke up I couldn’t really form sentences in Spanish but gave him the dog, some flea medicine, the milk I had been giving them and the rest of the puppy chow. I figured that my work was done and went to sleep satisfied.

The next morning I woke up and saw that the pregnant dog hanging out behind my house had set up shop and gave birth to 5 more puppies. They were all really tiny except one, I looked at it a little closer and thought: “Huh, that’s funny. The big puppy looks a lot like the one I gave to that little kid yesterday.” I went down to give the mom dog some food and realized that the big puppy was the dog I gave the kid yesterday. It turned out that the little bastard child came back in the middle of the night and didn’t have the nerve to give it back to me and instead just left it with the pregnant dog out back. He also kept the puppy chow (what the hell is he going to do with puppy chow and no puppy). I brought the dog back up to my house and washed it again, at this point it could barely walk because the kid hadn’t fed it. I took care of it for a couple days and convinced a neighbor to take it and give it to her sister in Bonao who is looking for a dog.

At this point, the problem is as solved as I am willing to solve it. Both Lobo and I can rest easier with the puppies out of the house. It was kind of funny; Lobo hated and feared the puppies. He would hide or go to the opposite end of the house and they would sneak up to him slowly until they were right next to him, and then he would get up and leave again. One kicked him out of his doghouse. I can’t blame Lobo for his fear of the young of his species; I am not too keen on baby or child humans myself.

Now there is a dog nursing four new puppies behind my house right now. Three of which are female, which means that if they do survive the same thing will happen again three times over. I am not too disheartened by it, because that is the point of Peace Corps, to do what you can and not get down on yourself when things stay the same.

I was walking home yesterday and I tripped and fell down in front of a bunch of people in my neighborhood. I was walking with my laptop in its bag and I had my sunglasses on so when I fell and my hands hit the ground my glasses were thrown from my face and my laptop bag was thrown over my head and onto the ground in front of me, smashing together my two most expensive pieces of property in the country.

I got up and only had some cuts and a little gravel in my hands. I got up and the people in the colmodos nearby came out to help. One lady went and got some water and alcohol to wash of the cuts. It was very nice of them and I felt loved my community, I also felt like an idiot for tripping over nothing and falling flat on my face.

Coincidentally, tonto, the word for silly or stupid, and how I described myself to the people helping me also means to feel dizzy. So the people helping me got worried that I had passed out from low blood sugar (many of the people in this country suffer from Diabetese, they call it sugar sickness). Today people kept asking me how my dizziness/stupidity was going, I told them I was doing much better.

A few months ago, I moved into my new place and had spent only a couple weeks there before my friend Diego arrived. He came down for ten days and we had a plan to see most of country (which we did) and spend a couple days in my site to see the fun things around Constanza (which we did not do). The problem when he came up to Constanza was that when we went to get Lobo dog food from the vet I did something I don’t usually do; I locked my keys in my house. I can’t remember how it could have happened, I always keep my keys in my pocket, maybe it was because I changed my pants at the last minute for some reason. What I do remember is cursing a lot. I sat there for a few minutes with Diego and Jenna, who was also visiting, and tried to devise a plan.

I had the only keys to the door and all of the windows except the bathroom are persianas (mental vent windows) that you can’t climb through. That meant there were only two ways two get in. The first way was to break the little piece of glass I have in my bathroom window and climb through there, the other option would be to climb up the balcony and go in the back door. I went around and looked at the bathroom window, I realized how impractical it would be to enter this way because the window was so tiny I would barely fit through it. Not to mention it’s about 10 ft. off the ground and I recently hammered a board with some nails sticking up out of it onto the window ledge in the bathroom to act as a security system and soap holder.

That meant that I only had the back door as an option. Because my house is built on a hill, the front door is at ground level and the back is about 12 ft. up. I had to figure out how to get up on the balcony. At first I thought I could try to walk across my neighbors roof, but because it’s a rusted tin roof I opted not to try. Instead I ended up “spider man-ing” between my house and the neighbors house (where you put your left hand and left foot on one wall and your right hand and right foot on the other) and that turned out to be a huge pain in the ass and in the hands.

Once I got up to the balcony I had to break down the door. It was a flimsy door and I had seen it done in movies enough times so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I positioned myself as best I could and rammed the door with my shoulder. The first hit the top latch broke off, only one left. The second one took considerably longer and I think I made a little bit of a scene to the construction crew who was working on a roof across the river. They all stopped working and looked at me funny. I waved and tried to explain with hand signals that I lived in the house I was trying to break into. After a while they lost interest and went back to work. After about five minutes of kicking and ramming the door with my shoulder it finally broke down. I climbed over the door and let Diego and Jenna into the house.

We sat there for a few minutes and tried to decide what to do for the day. The hike up into the hills for the day would have to be cancelled because I didn’t have a back door and didn’t want to leave the house empty and open with all of our stuff inside. Instead, I left Jenna and Diego to watch the house when I tried to find a guy to build me a door. The guy down the street was happy to build it and it would only cost 1500 pesos, which is about 45 bucks. I didn’t have 45 dollars because it was the end of the month and we are spread pretty thin with the Peace Corps pay so Diego said he would pick up the tab.

The guy built the door while we hung out and played cards, Diego introduced us to Kings In the Corner, or Reyes en las Esquinas. The man ended up building a door that was much more sturdy than the original (I don’t think I could break this one down). So in the end I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. Diego likes to give to charity and he considered this one of his contributions for the month. Because he was the largest donor in the Get Chris Ward a New Door fund, he also got a special message put on the door. My door now says on it in big letters donado por M.D. Rail (donated by M.D. Rail) and M. Diego Rail told me if I didn’t write that and make a public display of his generosity he would return in a few months and take the door back.

So, Diego, here is your Public Display of gratitude, please don’t steal my door. Thanks.