To catch up, finally, on what I have been doing this summer, here is the most recent post of my time in Guatemala:After a couple of weeks of living like a homeless person on a volcano and carrying around my life in a backpack I arrived in Quetzaltenango “Xela”, Guatemala. I arrived by bus, passing through El Salvador and Honduras, stopping for a day in Honduras to visit a friend working as a Health Volunteer for Peace Corps. All in all, the trip took about 5 days and I arrived supremely exhausted, not wanting to see another bus ever again in my life. I was very happy to arrive at my host-family and meet some extremely nice people that I immediately got along with. I spent the next couple weeks with another NGO working in the field of ecological and appropriate technology, AIDG (Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group). Upon arriving at AIDG I knew it was different from most NGOs I had visited, and from most NGOs working in the general area of appropriate technology for development. They have tried to come at the issue from a business perspective. Instead of finding communities in need and directly working with them on projects, the traditional approach, they have tried to form a more pragmatic model.They have positioned themselves as an incubator for various business ventures including a local renewable energy workshop, Xelateco.

Xelateco has local employees and works in many areas of renewable energy and appropriate technology such as water filters and ram pumps, improved cook stoves, biodiesel, bio-digesters, solar water heaters, solar panel installations, and small-scale hydroelectricity generation. For their small workshop with the most basic set of tools they have impressive capabilities. They produce biodiesel from used cooking oil with a homemade reactor, some old 50-gallon tanks, some piping and small motors. The process takes about a week and produces 70 gallons of biodiesel in total. They have a work truck that runs on biodiesel and sell some to local businesses when approached. The workshop is riddled with pieces of this and that, experiments of technologies toyed with in the past and some they are still working with, such as their improved wood-efficient cook stoves. One of the most impressive operations they have managed to develop is the casting of bronze pelton wheel cups. Pelton wheel cups are the paddles that form a turbine used for high-head hydroelectric projects. They have developed a home-made furnace, fueled by used car oil and an air blower. The furnace is used to melt the bronze used in the casting process. They are also equipped with casting sand and have successfully developed a system for producing the pelton cups for repairs and installations of hydro systems. It is quite impressive. To date Xelateco has won contracts for repairs and installations of a handful of small hydroelectric systems in the area. They have also completed some small ram-pump installations for delivery of potable water to communities in need. AIDG and Xelateco work together on projects, with funding coming partially from the communities they service as well as from large donor organizations such as the United Nations Development Program. The goal is that Xelateco will eventually get off the ground and be a local source of appropriate technology owned and operated by locals.

Aside from the appropriate technology workshop AIDG also funds business plan competitions for local entrepreneurs called “Guateverde”, a meld of Guatemala and verde, or green in English.The competition has three main categories- renewable energy, sanitation, and water. They are currently coming to the end of the submission period of their second competition, and have received around 40 submissions so far. This is a huge improvement over their first competition, last year, which received around 18 submissions. The winner receives $10,000 USD for startup costs of equipment, legalization, etc. and up to $40,000 USD of low-interest loans from AIDG, in addition to business, technical, and logistical assistance for a period of two years. This is one of the freshest, most obvious, but not often employed tactic to achieve sustainable development.Ask the people here what they would do to solve their own problems! They are given the chance to really make a difference in their own lives, but they must prove that they are capable of doing so and that it will be a profitable or at least self-sustaining business. The technical abilities that AIDG brings to the table help the businesses get off the ground and provide key inputs to the mix, but the first push comes from locals here in Quetzaltenango- and that is the reason I love it.

My time here has been sporadically mixed between a lot of things. I spent some time helping the improved cook stoves team perform surveys in homes around the area to get a better idea of how energy is used in the home. It covered not just cooking, but lighting, bathing, etc. The idea was to understand how energy was used in households around the area, on a macro scale. The surveys were initially very long and hard to perform, but were subsequently scaled down and streamlined after a couple trial runs. Some days it was very difficult as we arrived in communities that spoke little Spanish. Mom, one of the indigenous languages of the area was spoken by almost everyone in some communities, forcing us to pick and choose who was to be interviewed simply by their ability to understand us. It was, once again(not a new thing in my life, ha), a humbling experience and reminded me of how difficult it is to deal with the diversity that exists in the world. The simple act of communication in an area like this would require proficiency in around 5 languages, some of them little spoken and little taught. It is not easy…

I have also spent some time around the office getting to know what AIDG does and how they do it, what the employees are working on, and getting invited to go see this and that. One trip was to a local Geothermal Power Plant, including a tour and explanation of the facility by the local engineer. Although it has been a long time since I took classes on heat transfer and thermodynamics, it was interesting to hear some of those terms like the Rankine Cycle and Degrees Kelvin flying at me in Spanish form the mouth of a Guatemalan engineer. It was kind-of exciting to understand what he was saying and feel somewhat comfortable with the idea. The plant provided around 15 MW of power that was then sent on through the ridiculously complicated electricity delivery system that exists in Guatemala. The engineer explained that the electricity was all sent to Guatemala City where it was then distributed back to the regions is served, losing a lot of potential along the way. He also explained that during earthquakes or other emergencies the plant had a system set up to shut it down completely. If the emergency was large enough to shut down other power plants in the region they could be waiting for quite some time, as they would need outside power to start the plant up again. They do not have a backup system to start up their plant after it shut down. The engineers kind-of laughed at us and shrugged, as if to say, “Who knows, we didn’t design it, we just operate it.” Nonetheless it was very cool see a plant of that sort in action, and HEAR the generators pumping out electricity to the population. Yet another way to quench our thirst for electricity… All in all AIDG seems to have a great idea, and I hope they find a way to take it off the ground, expand it, and reach their goal of truly SUSTAINABLE development.

Like I said, I am a thinker. I think too much sometimes. I am also a planner, although I like to think that I am not. Funny, right? So about a week ago while I was thinking and planning, I decided I should just write something down so I wouldn’t forget. This is what came out. What do I really want out of LIFE?To be used in a way that is beneficial to those people and aspects of the world that are most in needTo wake up every day happy to be doing what I am doing, because I know WHY and HOW to do it, and I am confident that I am working in the right directionTo end the day physically and mentally tired, but satisfiedTo have a loving family that I love, and be able to provide for their needs, so they may explore and find what it is that they really want out of lifeTo laugh deeply, every dayTo die without major "what-ifs"Now if I could just whittle this list down to one bullet point, maybe, just maybe, I could go after it. But that would be too easy wouldn't it. It wouldn't be LIFE.

Today was a day of thinking. To some this may come as no surprise, and to my good friends it may possibly be a huge surprise that I do actually think. It was a day where I questioned what I am doing, why I am doing it, why I think it is important, among other things. So when dinner time came around and I was sitting at the dinner table with my host-dad, I let him have it. I opened up one box of worms after another. First I told him how I was not raised with any specific religion, then about how religion was explained to me by my father- (as a fence on a cliff top of a mountain on a deserted island, that some feel better with, and some are annoyed that people keep trying to put up fences for them, they just want to look down and see what there is to see, but there is no shame in wanting or not wanting the fence)(my interpretation of Dad’s description, don’t sue me!), then we talked about some semi-religious experiences (for you fencers) or coincidences (for you non-fencers) I have had, then we talked about the universe and the unknown, and we finally landed on my inability to find a way back to the feeling of satisfaction I vividly remember from the end of long days as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Although the specific stories I told him, and he told me, are interesting and worthy of a blog post (but let’s be honest, if I got a bad infection I’d think it was cool enough for a blog entry), they are not what I came out of dinner thinking about. It is the fact that the whole conversation, the whole heart-to-heart, the connection we made, it was all done in Spanish. It is not important that it was done in specifically Spanish either, because it is just another way to put thoughts together. What I realized is that this other language was like a mask to me. Sometimes in English it is hard to show your face, your true colors, to even people that you know extremely well. It is a language we all know and use every day, so if we do not express what we are thinking correctly it is out of laziness, or even worse, lack of intellectual capacity. Sometimes it just sounds silly or absurd to hear our thoughts so starkly in a language we use all the time. Therefore a lot of times we keep quiet even when we have something we really want to question or mention or simply chat about. The fear of failure to express your thoughts or be judged or considered different keeps us in line, in check, and under wraps. But in Spanish it is like I am wearing a mask. I am not supposed to know exactly how to express every single thought I have with the most versatile word structure, I just need to communicate. The words that I use and the way that I say them- they are my mask. The way my eyes connect with theirs and the way I look down when something really makes me think- that all shapes the mask as well. I put on this mask and they see me. I can really reach across boundaries with the mask. It is something that transcends religion and language and culture. I grew up in a suburb of Connecticut in a fairly comfortable lifestyle and economic bracket. My host-mother here grew up in a campo like the one I served in while in the DR, and my host-father was a crazy young kid in the city who changed from a heavy drinker and revolutionary who watched many friends die in wars to an architect and highly religious and insightful human being. Somehow, by way of una otra lengua, we completely understood each other tonight. I realized that moments like these are what make me keep searching for ways to return to the Peace Corps lifestyle. That real connection that happens when you put on your mask and finally someone can really see you, it is priceless. The fact that you know that your words weren’t the only reason that they saw you is indescribable. They saw you because of everything you did and said and acted but also because they were looking for you. They were searching for you, had their hands on your face with their eyes closed, feeling around and trying to make out the bends, corners, ins and outs of your mask. When they finally see it, see you, and appreciate you for sharing with them who you are, en otra lengua, it cannot be beat. That is the joy that speaking in another language brings to me, if only rarely, and is part of the reason I keep coming back to places like this.

After leaving Blue Energy I headed back to the west half of Nicaragua, to the edge of a volcano where I had helped to design and install a community water pumping system over 3 years ago.The community, El Porvenir, is made up of 59 families from very mixed backgrounds. As Nicaraguan history has shown, this is a nation of very distinct ideological groups. The Contra War of the 70’s divided the country and led to immense amounts of bloodshed, mostly in the northern mountain region. El Porvenir is proof that organization can lead to peace, as the community is comprised of Contras, Sandinistas, past military advisors, and political officials. They have formed a communal cooperative and live mostly on the profits from bi-annual coffee harvests.Through connections with an NGO in Managua, they have achieved fair-trade organic, rustic shade grown coffee status. They export their coffee to another NGO and roaster based in Pittsburgh (yes, Pittsburgh!) called Building New Hope. All hours worked by cooperative members are counted and then directly translate into an equivalent share of profits from sales.

Over three years ago as an undergraduate student I was looking for a senior design project that would have some MEANING and would be really VALUABLE to someone. Through connections with the service-learning office at Bucknell University I, and three other fellow students, designed a project to provide water to El Porvenir. At that time the cooperative’s only water source was a fresh-water well at the base of the volcano they are perched on, 1200 feet and 5 Km. below. The well, over 400 feet deep was fitted with a deep-well pump and powered by a diesel generator. The pump delivered the water to a steel water tank near the well, still at the bottom of the volcano. The cooperative also has three very large storage tanks up in their community, and catch rainwater whenever possible to satisfy all of their needs for water. In the approximately six-month “dry season” when rain was not consistent, they were forced to get water from the well at the bottom of the mountain. This meant they relied on their ancient Ford 500 diesel farm tractor to drive the 45 minute trip down the hill, fill up as many water jugs as possible, and then head back up the hill. Multiple trips were made every day to ensure that every person in the community was allowed at least two gallons of water every day. Six hours of work and 1,085 Córdoba (~$43 USD) was spent on gas and workers every day. It was not an easy life. My team and I designed and installed a water pumping system that took water from the tank at the bottom of the mountain all 5 Km. up to the storage tanks in the community. The pump was run by an electric motor, with power from the same diesel generator already in use.

This summer I wanted to come back and see how everything was doing and, for the first time, speak with the men I had sweat with in construction over three years ago. Now I speak Spanish, and back in my university days all I could generate was a simple “hola”. To make the trip even more special, I was driven up the mountain by members of the Alumni Trip of the Bucknell Brigade, the service-learning trip at Bucknell that first exposed me to Nicaragua. We arrived at the top of the mountain after some slipping and sliding on the muddy trail uphill, and I immediately recognized a boy standing there watching these gringos drive up to their home. I asked him name, and he told me it was Alexander. I distinctly remembered him from a picture I have from my trip three years ago. The picture was of me chasing him around his school, much smaller, smiling ear-to-ear. He is the boy on the right. It was surreal to see him again, all grown up. I snapped a quick picture with him, and just kinda chuckled to myself. This world is crazy.

All in all I spent a week up in El Porvenir, sleeping in a hammock on the community center porch overlooking Nicaraguas valleys and volcanos, and waking up to the sunrise early in the morning(sometimes, haha). It was great to see people collecting water from the tanks at the top of the mountain, even though I was there during the rainy season and the pump was not being used. The galvanized steel pipe that entered the tank made the project very real. I was not involved in the installation of the pipeline, as that occurred well after the pump house construction which I worked on, so it was extremely satisfying seeing the project FINISHED. I spent the days talking with people about the system, walking every inch of the pipeline, turning on the pumps and see the system work, and interviewing/auditing the water committee. All in all I am proud to say that the system looks to be pretty sustainable, overall. In terms of saving time and money to the community, the system is doing great. Before its installation I calculated that every home was receiving 10 gallons of water, and to provide these 10 gallons per house the cooperative was expending 3 hours of work and $542 Córdoba. Now that the system is installed I have calculated that each house is receiving at least 20 gallons. As a comparison to the previous system, to provide each 10 gallons per house, I calculated that the cooperative is expending about 15 minutes of work and $213 Córdoba. They are saving about 2 hours and 45 minutes of work as well as $329 Cordoba ($15 USD) for each 10 gallons of water they receive, and they have also at least doubled their water availability in the dry season. The system seems to be in good working condition and, in this first year of operation with many quick repairs and fixes, the cooperative handled all hurdles that came their way.

All in all, I feel extremely lucky to have been given the chance to go back and see, talk to, and get to know the people of El Porvenir. And I have to say, it was great to see how satisfied the whole community was with the project, and proud they were to finally have a constant water source year round. I even had a chance to chow down on some forest iguana-doesn’t look as cute all skinned does it?

It has been a while since I added an update- and a lot has happened!

First, I spent a month on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua learning from a small NGO called Blue Energy. Blue Energy works to provide basic services to remote villages on the east coast of Nicaragua. They maintain offices in Bluefields-Nicaragua, San Francisco-California, and Paris-France. The Bluefields office is where all of the action happens. For the past 6 years Blue Energy has been working to provide basic services, focusing on electricity, to the small remote villages along the coast. It has not been easy. First of all, transportation to these communities is only possibly by boat. Some of them have a rudimentary public “panga” transportation system comprised of small motorboats, but some of them have no public transport whatsoever. No roads exist, and locals only come and go with their personal motorboats (if they are wealthy enough) or by hitching rides with fisherman as they come and go. This makes project planning, coordination, community interaction, and continual project oversight very difficult.

Blue Energy has been struggling to deal with these problems, on top of the inherent difficulty of engineering design and technology transfer. They have implemented mostly hybrid wind-solar electricity systems within the communities they work with. The wind turbines are manufactured in Bluefields by Blue Energy volunteers (mostly international) and employees (mostly local Nicaraguans) in a workshop donated for Blue Energy use by the local technical college, INATEC.The design is based on a low-cost wind turbine developed by Hugh Pigott of Scoraigwind.com.Copper coil stators, hand-cut steel rotors mounted with high-power magnets, hand-carved wooden turbine blades, the supporting steel framework, and galvanized steel support towers are all manufactured in house from readily available materials found in hardware stores. Over the years, design and fabrication improvements have made the process more streamlined, although much is still done completely by hand with the “measure twice, cut once” mentality.In communities they have worked with the wind turbines are paired with a small solar array. Together, the two provide power to a bank of batteries, used to power a local community center or small health clinic. The idea is very powerful, and very attractive. But many problems have caused setbacks to this idealistic bunch of young employees and volunteers. First of all, the problem was defined as an engineering one from the get-go: how to provide electricity with wind and sun in the difficult conditions of the Caribbean coast. Blue Energy has realized that possibly the most important piece of the puzzle is community integration and understanding, as poorly maintained batteries, increasing maintenance costs, and less than ideal wind conditions have caused them to reconsider the use of wind turbines in every community. Two local women and a small team of volunteers head up the “Community” team and have tried to maintain better relations with the local energy committees, helped them organize and raise funds, and tried to help the technical team guide their designs in a more appropriate direction. Although the community team has obviously made huge strides, the results are mixed. The decision has been made to remove the turbines from various communities, leaving the solar array as their source of electricity. Also, lack of communication with the local government has led to the arrival of mini-grids of electricity in communities with BE energy systems, making them all-but obsolete. On the short team, the Renewable Energy system is more economical than the grid as no fees are needed to provide electricity, but on the long term the sky-high prices of deep-cycle batteries will ultimately render the systems cost-prohibitive, that is, unless the community organizes a fairly hefty battery-replacement savings account. Many problems are left to be solved. .Blue Energy is also attempting to branch into areas of other basic services such as potable water and economic development. They have developed their own bio-sand water filter construction system and have placed more than 20 filters in communities, some purchased and some donated. Still, lack of sufficient funding seems to be hamstringing their operations. They are coming to the end of a large grant that has covered most funding over the past year or so and are waiting for hopeful approval of more, larger grants. Sadly, the grant approval process seems to have no definite time schedule and in the mean time people are waiting… Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to visit some communities with Blue Energy systems, help with some wind turbine tweaking, climb up a turbine tower and help lower it for maintenance, as well as observe BE volunteers in action fixing damaged systems, installing new batteries, and training locals in system maintenance. Blue Energy is up against it, but one can only hope that with every day they will learn more and develop a model for rural development that will benefit their communities in a environmentally, economically, and most importantly socially sustainable manner.

How is it that while working in another latin country after two semesters back at university in the states that the DR still hits me in the chest?? Just sitting here with my mosquito net in Bluefields, Nicaragua, I put on some Aventura and begin editing the Fulbright essays I am writing. Although I am writing about Peru, the music brings me back to the campo of the DR. I miss the people, the culture, the tools I used ever day, and the men I worked with. Then I get a message from a friend who is still working in the DR, that she was in a town near my village the other day and a guy came up to her and told her, "Oh, that Roberto. He brought water to a community. Tell him I said hi." Can't help it. It hits me. Is it possible that one period of your life can be so rich and heavy with emotion that for the rest of your life a simple reminder of it puts you right back in? I love the feeling, but it hurts. Those two years seem to be untouchable and unforgettable. I left the DR 10 months ago. How far I have come is amazing but it pales in comparison to how far I have left to go.How do I go forward when the biggest smile I have ever had was 1.5 years ago... Remembering is not enough.

I am officially back in the saddle, and it feels good(haven't lost the butt groove or anything!). The last couple of weeks I have been absolutely thrown into the world of small-scale hydroelectric projects in the northern region of Nicaragua. I spent the first week accompanying a Villanova University service trip to help them design a community-based micro-hydro system, then spent a week on my own talking to the Ministry of Energy, the Municipal Engineer, local engineers who are incredible entrepreneurs and have perfected the art of extracting energy from water, community-based energy committees, carpenters who now have electric tools, and lots of communities including some with damaged or completely broken systems. It has been overwhelming, but invigorating! Feels great.

One interesting feedback loop that stuck in my head:

The small community of Acote Tumba is situated up in the municipality of Waslala, about an hour into the hills from the town center. The village consisted of only 12 homes five years ago and they were selected by the municipality to receive a hydroelectric project. The surveying was done, and as the designs were being made and the community was being groomed to organize themselves and form their 'comite', more people moved into the village. By the time construction started a year later the village had swelled to around 20 homes! Construction began and more and more people kept moving in, so by the the time they were ready to finally install the turbine and generator, they all knew that it wouldn't provide enough electricity for everyone. They submitted a request to the municipality to have the generator upgraded to a higher capacity, and it was approved. Well, by approved I mean that the municipality said that if they fundraised enough money to offset most of the cost difference then they would have no problem installing a larger system. The first problem is that the penstock was sized for a smaller system and was already installed. Fine, so construction continued and concluded successfully.

They hooked up the lights of the 20-some homes and everyone clapped. Yay! A year later the village had exploded and it now had around 44 homes! The word was out! Acote Tumba had electricity and everyone wanted in. As more people moved in, mostly farmers, they bought up land in the surrounding area. As more and more people came to this small valley, tracts of land further and further up the hill began to sell. Eventually farms were being sold above the water source that had powered the electrification and subsequent expansion of the community. Now, four years after the completion of the project, the energy committee president told me that he thought the stream had about half of the flow that it did back then. People had deforested the watershed of the stream and it no longer flowed with the same amount of water, for the same period of time. Now the community is involved in a project to reforest some of the area above the water source, as are many communities in the area that have realized that environmental conservation is not a game with hydroelectric projects. The development that the hydro project spurred has come around and threatened the viability of the hydro resources in the area. What do you do? Hydro projects are typically over sized to account for community expansion, but in these rural areas they become extremely expensive. Costs are cut and system designs are sometimes scaled back. You cannot always provide enough supply to meet the every-expanding demand, and the environment cannot handle it either. There is a give and take and a balance must be struck in the middle.

It isn't easy to make technology work in this kind of environment. I also am pretty sure its not easy for the politicians and other government employees to keep their sticky fingers off of the funds that have come pouring into this country for hydro projects. It doesn't add up, when a million dollars is spent to give basic electricity to a couple hundred people.

I also had the pleasure of accompanying a local engineering, machinist, entrepreneur, you name it and he has probably done it as far as small hydro goes- a man by the name of George Op Den Bosch. He lives and works here in Matagalpa building custom hydroelectric systems. This morning he took me around a project of his that is under construction on the nearby hacienda of a wealthy Frenchman. Over the land area of the very large farm, George will capture nearly all of the water potential, a total of 3 MW, with a system of seven smaller turbines that work in parallel and in series. Water is piped down to the maximum penstock pressures that can be managed with local pipe materials, and the discharge flows of the turbine are then directed into yet another penstock and energy is extracted again at a lower elevation. Using staged and parallel systems of this form, George has managed to piece together previous hydro systems and virtually all of the water resources of the area to produce 3 MW of renewable energy that has been approved to be sold back to the Nicaraguan electricity utility, a first for the area. He expects his customer to be very happy as he has estimated the project to make upwards of a half of a million DOLLARS every year in profit simply from selling electricity to the grid.

Now the big question right?! Not an original one of my own- How do you get the skill and efficiency of George(the private sector) to provide services to some of the poorest and most marginalized people of this country, without creating an environment where being poor makes them less desirable customers???

If you have an answer, let me know.

I am back off to the capital in a couple days, and then am heading to Bluefields to learn with Blue Energy Group about the next set of technologies available for electrification of isolated communities.

The saddle feels good - and what do you know, a year spent back in school and I still know how to ride!

I have officially completed my first year here at Pitt and feel incredibly grateful to have made it. Gradschool 10 days after Peace Corps is not a good idea-and I now know they tell you that for a reason! If your head is still swimming it is hard to concentrate! But I made it in one piece, with a couple of changes over the past month.

I have removed myself from my fellowship and the PhD program all together. I had been trying to make it work but in the end this just wasn't the program for me. I am still going to finish my M.S in Civil & Environmental Engineering, and do it the way I want. This summer I will be conducting field research in Nicaragua and Guatemala on rural electrification and next year I'll finish up my thesis on the Sustainability of Rural Electrification projects. Also, I have been picked up by the department as a Teaching Assistant for next year to help develop their first course on Engineering for Developing Communities. So next year will definitely allow me to focus on engineering in the developing world, the real reason I am back in school.

After that, I am not quite sure I am thinking that a degree in International Development might be in my future. We will see. For now I am focusing on doing some valuable research this summer and getting back to school in the fall excited to be back and studying exactly what I wanted!

Its funny how things tend to work out if you just follow your gut...

So, it has been a while since my last post. I have successfully finished a semester in Graduate School with the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering. I have to say that it has been tough! The transition from Peace Corps and living in MY hills with MY people has not been that easy. Although I know that education is key to having an impact, I am going through 'immediate satisfaction withdrawal'. I love the word USEFUL. I just miss that. I miss feeling wholly useful on a daily basis. But I am slowly and painfully getting through the transition, now much less painfully than four months ago!

Anyways, one good thing about the withdrawal is that I constantly am looking for eye-opening and worthwhile experiences. Last semester I spoke at the first University of Pittsburgh TEDx event, organized by a friend and fellow student at Pitt. My talk was titled In search of a good use of our time: The struggle of a privileged generation. I told my personal story of world discovery, realization that science and engineering was such a small part of the problem-solving process, and my frustrations in trying to fit into the educational molds laid out by universities. It was great, and it reminded me of why I came back to school. I am not here to become a world class scientist, nor a world-class policy maker or even a development expert. I am here to get a little bit of it all and hopefully find at the intersection some hints towards what Sustainability really entails.

With that in mind I spent much of last semester, and this semester so far, applying for international experiences and opportunities along those lines. And I have had luck! I was selected as a student delegate of a course here at Pitt called Global Engineering Technology. Part of the course is participation in an international conference called INNOVATE 2010. The conference is held for 5 days in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and 5 days in Taipei, Taiwan. It is a collaboration of the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Tulsa, and Rice University, and delegates from around six other national and international universities will be attending. The themes are globalization and the interplay of technology, outsourcing, and international competition. The course has been a weekly web-cast connecting the students here at Pitt with those of Tulsa and Rice. It is an interesting way to bring diverse backgrounds together and learn about the world. So in about two weeks I will be headed off to Vietnam and then soon after to Taiwan. I am excited!

I also spent a lot of time last semester looking for funding opportunities for international research for this coming summer. I found a summer study abroad scholarship, designed my own independent research project, got department approval and course credit, and finally turned in the hulking beast of an application this January. Guess what-I won! My research project titled Success in implementation of clean energy and water projects was awarded the Mcgunagle Memorial Award, the largest award offered by the Nationality Rooms program at Pitt! I was surprised and flattered, not to mention pumped(come on, lets be honest, I am more pumped than anything else)! So this summer starting in mid May I will be visiting three NGOs to learn about their successes and failures in attempting rural electrification projects and potable water provision projects. The three main stops will be Blue Energy, the municpality of Waslala, and AIDG(the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group). The first two are in Nicaragua and the last stop is in Guatemala. I will also spend a week up at El Porvenir visiting the coffee cooperative for whom I helped implement a water pumping system. I am excited to go back to a place I spent so much time thinking about and finally SPEAK to them! Last time I was there I didn't speak any Spanish. It should be very cool.

So that is my life right now. In between the INNOVATE conference and the summer research I will be taking the PhD qualifying exams in my department: Sustainability and Green Design. It is going to be a crazy spring and summer, but I am glad it will be worthwhile! Even though it was and still sometimes is hard to be back, my desire to be useful is what has pushed me to seek out all of these opportunities, and for that I have Peace Corps to thank! Even though it has made this re-introduction to the states like a dip in an ice bath I guess I can be very grateful that it has kept me focused on WHY I came back to school and WHAT I want to get out of it. Like my Uncle John once told me-there are only three real questions. What do you got? What do you want? And how are you gonna get it? I am still working on all of them, but I think I am heading in the right direction...

I am now a student. I am not a Peace Corps volunteer any longer. I am a student in graduate school, and a TA that has lots of homework to grade, tutorials to prepare, and organization to do just to make sure I get enough sleep every night. It is Friday at 9 PM and I have a lot to do so I am still in school and I am grading homeworks. Who interrupts my work, making me take off my headphones injecting classical music and hopefully concentration into my brain? Chulo, the owner of the colmado from Agua Larga! I recognize his number immediately and answer by saying Chulo! He responds half laughing, half trying to be serious, "Oh, you know me?!" I can picture his face smiling and making it hard for him to talk, like a little kid with a lollipop. He has this slippery-slope of a face. When he is serious, most of the time, his face is just flat and when he talks his lips barely move. He is quiet, reserved, and respected. When he smiles he gets this smile that goes from ear to ear and his lips don't know how to cope so any attempt at speaking fails miserably. So anyway, the connection is bad and i have to ask him to repeat himself many times, and then the call drops. I figure thats it because i know how much international calls cost and how expensive this is for them. But he calls back! I answer and the call drops. I try calling him and get his voicemail about 4 times. Then he calls back again-same result-drops. He calls back a fourth time! And I pick up and it stays! He asks me how I am doing and how the states are treating me. I get a warm feeling. He tells me that the school that was promised to the community and was set to be built next to my family’s home is almost done-just missing the roof! I get emotional. He tells me my host dad has almost finished his new house right next to the community center we built together. I’m holding back tears. He says that the new Peace Corps volunteer in the community two hours past theirs, that I helped to identify as lacking water, has just arrived. I start crying. He says that he came through on a motorcycle on the way up to the community. When I was there the only way up was to ride a horse or walk for about 2.5 hours back my village! He says the mayor came through, has fixed the roads enough to get cars all the way into the next village! I am just stunned, jaw on the floor. He says they are getting a new school built as well and that it is almost done! I just can't believe it. So much good news and so quickly. Then we get into my question and answer session. I ask him about things, then he puts his wife on, Pelua, and we go back and forth for a little bit. She tells me that the (writing this right now my face just flipped out and my emotions make me stop typing for a minute) little kid next door, that i watched grow up from 2 to 4, who used to always yell my name, that he always asks where I am and when I am coming back. It’s just too much. These people have given me such unconditional love and I just can't take it. I love them. The absolute unfairness of the ease with which I left them back in their mountains and now take the bus to school, swipe a card to enter my office, and spend their monthly income in one night with friends is just too much. I feel unworthy. I didn't do anything special to deserve all this besides being born in Connecticut and not the Dominican Republic. I don't deserve all this. Pelua tells me that her spanish class that she gives every day in the community center has shrunk from 10 to 5 students, but that they are the ones who want to achieve something so she is happy working with them. She then says that she can't talk forever, but that even though we are now far apart from each other that I will always be close to them. She tells me that it is just like this one popular batchata song. "Uno quiere pa' que no quiera..." It’s a song that I actually never really could translate but its message is happy, based in finding the highs in the lows of life, and about finding meaning in things that deceive us. I just laugh and tell her “yea”, sinking right back into my Peace Corps tactics of just playing along sometimes. (On a side note I was just interrupted by loud booms and went outside the engineering building to watch one of the best fireworks displays I have ever seen. Is it Chinese new years or something?) But anyway, these people have connected with me on a level I think I will understand more and more every time I talk to them, as the days and years go by. Who knows when I will go back, but I know that the second I see them, the tough Roberto they knew who led daily work brigades of mountain men will be bawling like a little girl. My life has been blessed by their presence.

It has been a while since my last entry and for good reason. I have moved back to the USA! I closed my term of service on August 20th, after my group’s close of service (COS) conference, and flew back to the motherland. It was a pretty rough transition I have to say.

The last couple of days in my site were almost like a funeral of sorts. People kept stopping by to ‘pay their respects’, asking me if I was really going, and then telling me to have a great trip and popping off. Then there were the people that were really close to me. They just stopped by and stayed a while. The awkwardness of the whole thing is what I miss the most. They are just there to spend time with you. No TV, no radio, nothing but two plastic chairs and a messy house I was trying to clean up. One of my favorite guys, a Haitian from the other side of the river, kept telling me he didn’t think I was really going to leave. He jokingly said, “I am not going to bid you farewell, because then maybe you won’t leave.” On the Saturday before I was to leave site Sunday we had our last water committee meeting. I didn’t plan anything, didn’t expect much from it, and just showed up. I wanted to see if the collapse would start immediately, or not. They completely surprised me with a whole agenda, a plan for having new elections to fill some of the empty spots in the directive, and a detailed sheet outlining all of the expenses that had been paid out from the water committee since July 2007! I was floored. The president, treasurer, secretary, and my host-dad had gotten together and worked out all the expenses with the owner of the colmado. They had heard that people were saying they were stealing funds, and wanted to address it clearly. Everything was accounted for, down to the blocks of ice bought for juice when Builders Beyond Borders was here. When they were done they quietly passed the turn to speak off to me, knowing that it would probably be my last chance at a water committee meeting in Agua Larga. I thought for a little bit, told them how impressed I was and then tried to get a couple words out explaining how grateful I was to have been…that was it. My throat closed up, my cheeks started to spasm, and I looked down trying to compose myself. The next half hour was the best and worst time of my service. Everyone from my host-dad to the water committee president to the beneficiaries at the meeting were in tears sputtering whatever thanks they could to me before they couldn’t talk anymore. I just sat with my head down accepting all of this love for the last time, and in many ways, the first time. Seeing these tough guys that work in the hills with machetes most days balling was really hard. And it didn’t stop.First thing the next day was my host-mom, which triggered me again, which triggered everyone else: the colmado guy, the old guy across the street, the kids. They snapped a photo of me and those who were around, and I left my community on a motorcycle, balling. Agua Larga with their token gringo.And just to give me one last whirl, it rained. Then it stopped, but the damage was done. The motorcycle rounded the corner and we saw a truck that had slid off to the side on the muddy incline. We got off the motorcycle, the driver and I with all my big bags and my cat in a carrier. We then tied a rope to the front of this big truck loaded up with rocks, and proceeded to straighten it out while it spun its wheels. We went from on the road to slipping off the side about five times and then it got traction and started climbing. So now, muddy, sweaty, and much later than planned, I left my site for the last time. I stopped at a high point that overlooks my valley and snapped these two photos, one of my valley and one of my moto-guy, who had come to pick me up for over a year almost without fail.I was no longer a Peace Corps Volunteer. And it felt terrible.

When I got to the capital I was lucky enough to have a bunch of my PC friends around up until the moment I got in my taxi that would take me away to the airport, but that made it tougher. I had a red-eye so I got in the taxi at midnight, gave everyone who was there a hug, then tried not to look at them much and got in. Then the driver started to ask me how long I had been there and what I had been doing. I told him, and then he said, “Oh wow you must have a real connection with the people.” That did it. I was sitting in the back seat with the window open and tears just started pouring, being blown aside by the wind(which I now realize was an amazing temperature). He asked a couple more questions but soon realized there was something wrong with me and it was just better to leave it be. That was just the beginning.

To perfectly cap off the irony that is Peace Corps service in the DR it took me seven hours to get from the hostel where the taxi picked me up to my parents car at JFK, one hour less than it took me to get from my community to the capital, Santo Domingo. That trip was very Dominicanly broken up into segments by me trying to get people to allow my cat on a bus, them kicking me off, and so forth. So when I arrived, saw my parents, tried to act like my head wasn’t spinning, and got in the car so quickly, it just added to the whirlwind that was the last 24 hours. They were asking me questions about this and that and I don’t remember much, but I remember sitting in the back seat feeling as if I wasn’t ready to be there. I was right back where I had left off and the last two years was some kind of dream. I had to concentrate really hard just to take it cool and try to absorb things in stride. Well, my schedule was not a great one. I was going to spend two days at home and then head off to Pittsburgh where I would begin grad school in a week! Those two days I left my home maybe twice. I was not balanced yet. The first thing I noticed waking up on my floor in my room that next day (I don’t know why, I wanted to sleep on the floor) was how quiet it was. It was sadly quiet, made me feel all alone. The first time I went to the bathroom I realized I could get a drink of water from the sink, did so, and lost it. I was balling. My face was not under my control and I had to just ride it out. Then I took my first shower. It was amazing, so much water and so warm. I was doing alright then for some reason a thought of the Haitian guy popped into my head and my face went crazy again. This happened probably about ten times in those two days in my home. Chatting with volunteers online, making a sandwich with food from the fridge, sitting on my couch. I had no control. I literally would not know when it was going to come and then my face would flip out and I had to just ride it out. It was sad, but on a weird level I was happy. I didn’t want to forget, I wanted to keep remembering. I wasn’t ready to let it all go.

So before I knew it I was packing clothes and things, supposedly everything I would need for a year in Pittsburgh-where there is snow! I haven’t seen snow since the winter of ’06-‘07. Needless to say I got very little sleep the night before leaving, and then I set off with my parents in a full car. I still didn’t really know what was happening until two days later, when they left. I was moved in with my Peace Corps buddy, which helped, but I was on my own. I did not feel at home, did not feel comfortable, and I just had to take it like I had taken my first night in my village, two years ago: with a deep breath. I knew I didn’t have to figure everything out right then. I just had to wake up the next day and things would be a little bit better…

The new computer center in the local high schoolUpdate to Builders Beyond Borders and people back at home who donated or fundraised for the "idea" i had of a computer center in the local high school. It is a reality! Over the past five months or so I have worked with an Environmental Awareness volunteer on a project to turn one classroom of the local high school into a Library/Computer Center. Over the past few weeks we have been working on construction in the classroom-reframing a division wall, building a computer bank, fixing locks, building bookshelves etc. Just two days ago I had the same company that helped with my solar projects come up and install constant electricity with a charger/inverter in the classroom. And now the room is now pretty much usable! It was amazing to me to see such a rapid change, being used to projects like my aqueduct and community center! The high school is now equipped with a library stocked with books, a couple big round tables, a couple small kids tables, some chalkboards, a world map, and a computer bank with 8 laptops that will be usable all the time thanks to the inversor! This is literally the biggest computer center around, probably within two hours travelling! The local pueblo has some internet cafes but they all have much older computers and none have as many. So my neck of the woods just got a lot cooler! Computers, internet, and all of that is popular here like it was about 10-15 years ago in the states-everyone loves it and knows it is important but very few know how to do anything with a computer. So now they have a chance. Although I am leaving, the other volunteer still has some time and is excited to try to be a librarian/tech. consultant for the next months in the library she made! Take a look at a couple pictures!On a complete nerd level I feel really lucky to have dealt with so many diverse energy systems in this country. I put a solar panel on my house and got to live with it for the majority of my service, realizing why Renewable Energy isn't always great for everyone, especially in a rainy country with a lot of poverty. I got to design a small solar-powered community center, and then used it to drill holes in steel bars with an electric drill-previously impossibly in my community! I got to design a solar-powered water pump system and see it working, without batteries! I also got to design small solar electrification projects. I got to experiment with small 10 watt panels and tiny batteries to power one lightbulb and also got to install big 55 watt panels with a larger battery and a small inverter to send luz longer distances and power 3-5 lightbulbs. And now I got to work first-hand with the reality of most Dominican households with luz: an inversor and back-up batteries. Even though I didn't get the chance to work with Hydroelectricity in a country where so much is possible, I am really lucky to have had the opportunity to do and see so much. One thing I learned about Energy and Water in a poor country like this: it sucks, simply put. You have to go way above and beyond the effort you might spend in the US to get a service that is far from reliable. But in a country where almost nothing is reliable, it just fades into the background with all of the other development problems. At least I know that my community with have water and light, and the high school with have a very powerful attraction for students.

So after all of my bitching and complaining, loving my site, hating my site, leaving my site, all of that-we had the inauguration and it was great. We inaugurated the aqueduct which gives water to 47 individual tapstands, the solar powered community center which is now host to a spanish and english class multiple times a week, and the solar lightbulb project which lit up the whole road, putting lights in 40 homes. It was an amazing feeling to realize all that we have done. And we spent over a million pesos to do it! It was a great close to my service here, and the small group who really understood my struggle showed their gratitude more than I could have expected. They presented me with two plaques, sent to be engraved over 2 hours away, and after the second plaque presentation they lifted me up on their shoulders! In true Dominican style they didnt take me anywhere though, hah, they just wanted to lift me up for the pictures, then put me right back down. But it was really cool. And I definitely saw some people shedding tears. I think what hit me more than anything was when the motorcycle-taxi guy, who had helped me go back and forth between multiple hardware stores in search of materials, came up to me just balling after seeing the community center. I didn't know him very well, but he is a much more educated Dominican than the majority of my community members, who kind-of understands what Peace Corps is trying to do in poor communities. I just hugged him and he put his head into my shoulder and cried(Dominicans aren't super tall guys). That was enough for me. That made it a good day.

The rest of the day was filled with swimming in the river, frias, and bien frias. And I finally got my revenge on the chicken that has eaten my cat's food for the past year. I cut his head off with a machete and we ate it for dinner! And Llave ate its foot(the delicacy here). I sucked on the foot a little bit, and some buddies also tasted the cooked deliciousness. Then we had some late night dancing, a very late night skinny-dip in the river, and then a nude late-night return to my house. Hey, when you have just finished a nine-month long project and its pitch black outside, you gotta walk right through your village naked. I'm pretty sure it says that somewhere in the Peace Corps manual.(Evan chomping down on the chicken foot)And a bunch of Peace Corps buddies showed up to support me and the project. All in all it was a great day, and it feels great to be done!

So now Im tying up loose ends with other small projects, trying to take advantage of free time to go see and do some things I missed out on, and wrapping my head around the next step in my life-School!

We have made alot of physical progress with our projects.  

Disclaimer: At the time of writing this blog, I am in the city, after flipping out on my neighbors and leaving the community.  I awoke today to people talking badly about me and about the project rules involved with my aqueduct, right in front of my house, at around 6:45 AM.  The rules say that until you have paid everything(1 dollar a month, 15 dollars for the right to your faucet) and worked all the work days(one day per week for the duration of the construction, or 7 dollars for each missed day of work) your faucet stays locked up.  Yesterday we put up around 20 faucets and 18 had locks on them.  What can i say.  People don't pay the 1 dollar a month, people don't come to work, in general everyone wants an aqueduct given to them for free.  They think me doing this work is what they deserve.  It is not that they cannot afford these fees.  They decide to spend their money on the lottery, beer, new clothes almost every month, and many other non-essentials.  Where do these fees go?  To my pocket?  Nope, all those fees go to the water committee bank account that is there as a fund to employ a community member as plumber and any materials he may need to maintain and repair the aqueduct.  Who trained this plumber and organized this whole system?  Roberto.  How much did Roberto get paid for this?  $0  And now that the day has come to pay up, what do they do?  Talk shit about Roberto.  So what did I do-although not proud of it?  I flipped out, told them off, threw some PVC pipe pieces i had in my house outside, and walked out of town.  With that said, I am not in the most verbose of moods, so here is a quick summary of the things we have done recently, with some pictures.  If you think that this is cool or worthwhile, feel free to post a comment.  Give me strength to finish this, when everywhere I look there are reasons to stop.  No one seems to really care about the work I have done here.  They are pissed off at the fact that they owe $2 to their water committee or that all of those weeks missing work-days is coming back to bite them in the butt.  

-Finished 1000 gallon ferrocement water tank-Finished 500 gallon concrete block tank-Constructed 45 foot suspended cable bridge for pipeline

-Constructed 82 foot suspended cable bridge for pipeline-Constructed 167 foot suspended cable bridge for pipeline-Constructed 170 foot suspended cable bridge for pipeline-Installed 4-55 Watt solar panels and solar water pump-Pumped water up to upper community and filled 1000 gallon tank-Installed 3-55 Watt solar panels and 4 6 Volt deep-cycle batteries in newly constructed community center

So even though I have very little to do with the project being actually completed-check out the link below.  My senior-design project at Bucknell to get water up a mountain to a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua ended with me installing the pump at the bottom of the hill.  A couple of steps from running water at the top huh?  But luckily Bucknell and the Center For Development In Central America has followed through and kept the project going.  And now it is done!  There is running water at the top of the mountaintop, and the pump that we bought and installed works!  Who woulda thunk?!  I can't wait to get back there soon and see and talk to everyone about it.  For now, this picture of running water from a pipe does me just fine. :)

http://jhc-cdca.blogspot.com/2009/05/water-running-uphill-at-el-porvenir.html

(Above: me with the pump mount I had to fabricate out of stainless steel rod, some piecess from a hardware store, and multiple trips to back-alley garages to get it all welded together.  THAT calls for a cigar.)

I've got more time than usual to post this blog, as I decided to loiter in the wireless-enabled reception area of a hotel for the afternoon.  I think they assume I have a room because I just sad right down, and because im white.  So hopefully this blog will be a little more coherent than the rest.  Maybe not.

First of all, for those that might be following my time here and haven't talked to me in a while-I won a NSF Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh and will be starting classes August 31st!  Yea.  I can't believe it either.  Its still surreal to me.  It is a fellowship for a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Sustainability.  So after all of my negative thoughts on leaving Peace Corps service early, I will be becoming the ultimate hypocrite!  I applied to the fellowship assuming I had no chance at winning it, and was shocked when I did.  So anyway, I am really looking forward/worried about going back to the USA and getting back into classes, more frequent social life, good food, and the general fast pace of things I remember from about two years ago when I left.  I have to say that I am sincerely nervious about this change in my life.  Although it is different from when I left the US for the DR because this time around I know what to expect, the feeling is very similar.  Just like before, I don't know for sure if I have made the right decision, and know I just need to close my eyes and jump.  It'll probably be fine.

So with that said, I am still kicking my butt every day with the big projects we have going.  I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with the aqueduct getting wrapped up.  We have all the tubes in the ground!  Woo!  that feels good to say.  Actually...we are missing about 3 tubes, but those will be put in by the time most people read this blog.  We have recently been working double speed because this past week I hired a local mason from the next-door community to come help.  It doubled the amount of work we did because I could tell him how things should go and leave a group of workers with him while I went off with another group.  So this past week we finished two small tanks, both a part of the solar pump-portion of the aqueduct.  The first tank done was a 1000 gallon ferrocement tank placed about 20 feet above the highest house in the upper community.  The foundation and rebar work took about 4 full days but then the rest went quickly.  It looks great and everyone has told me so.  Feels good.  The second take we just finished yesterday.  It is a small ~500 gallon block tank that will house the submersible solar-pump.  Just this morning I connected the aqueduct to it and filled it with water.  It felt great to have such a key part of the project done, with water in it.  When everything is functioning, water  from the gravity-fed aqueduct will fill this smaller tank.  The tank will be maintained full by a float valve at the tank inlet.  From there the water will be pumped up an elevation of  approximately 120 feet to the ferrocement tank above.  This tank will also be maitained full by an electronic float valve at the tank inlet, which will communicate with the pump to tell it when to pump more water and when to stop pumping due to a full tank.  All that is left to be done now is connect up the solar panels, pump, and controller.  All of this will be coming up this Friday with an installation visit from a Renewable Energy company based in Santiago called RETECSA.  They will be helping us install the pump, bury the cables, install the solar panels and solar controller, install the electronic float valve, as well as set up two ground connections.  As I have spent hours and hours in their store designing the project and talking to them about the struggles, I would almost consider them friends of mine now and it will be cool to show them how my community lives and what I am working for.  They will also be (time-permitting) installing the solar panels on the community center and hooking them up to batteries and an inversor.  And as if that wasn't enough, they are bringing up 9 more solar panels and 9 deep cycle batteries for our solar-lightbulb project.  Phew!  Everybody cross your fingers for me that the road holds up another week.  If all goes to plan I could have water in the upper community by....who knows...Saturday?  We will see.

Ok, concrete and sweat talk apart, I have to admit that all of this hard work has really put a strain on my relationship with my community.  I find myself constantly asking a lot of them, the majority of them not working really hard or bickering about their neighbor working 5 minutes less than them, and it makes me lose motivation.  I get fed up, lose my cool, and finish the day exhausted physically and mentally, thinking I am a fool to work for people who want to work so little.  I recently have had to tell myself to finish the project for me, rather than them.  The reality is if I left all the decisions up to them they would postpone, half-ass, steal, and bicker the project into an incompleted standstill.  It's hard to deal with as a volunteer.  I question whether I am doing the right thing.  Is all of this worthless because when I leave all of the rules and sustainability will fall by the wayside, the infrastructure will degrade or be stolen, and the project will fail?  I hope not, but I see it as a very real possibility.  And now being so exhausted in the last leg of my service I find myself unable or unwilling to be creative to try to keep convincing them of the importance of the aqueduct rules, payment, and water committee meetings.  People have told me that once I am gone no one is going to pay their monthly fee anymore and no will enforce any rules.  I understand but am dissapointed when I hear things like that.  In a country where corruption is the norm and every worker in some postion of power abuses it, I find myself sucumming to this attitude as well.  Just the "whatever, it'll probably fail" type attitude that is the reality of the poor and marginalized.  So with every step towards completion and the satisfaction of finishing another piece of the puzzle there are the questions in the back of my head-Was this all for nothing?  Did they even want this?  Will they appreciate and maintain it?  Big questions.  And there are no answers.  Only time will tell.

But when it all comes to a head, sometimes you just have to laugh at the rediculousness of it all.  As much as the culture here tells me things will get stolen or broken, sometimes you just have to throw it right back in culture's face.  Below, see the finished roof of the small pump tank that will be locked down like a jail cell.  On it's roof I wrote in english, "There's a pump in here.  Just TRY to steal it!"  If anyone wants to learn english, climb up to my mountains, buy a lock cutter, and carry the 30 pound pump back down the mountain, probably all at night,-well, then I guess they will have earned it!  Hey if they learn english I did my job as a development volunteer, right?!

Yesterday I took 5 men from my site, who are in the running to be the plumbers when I leave and be in charge of taking care of the whole aqueduct, to Santiago where I purchased our solar pump.  It was really cool.  We set up some solar panels outside the shop, connected up the pump and the controller, and showed these campesinos how renewable energy works!  We pumped water from one bucket of water to another using no batteries at all!  Oiga!  It was cool, my guys seemed to be pretty comfortable with the idea of working with this pump, and I felt great to finally have the meeting of the solar pump and the people it will benefit-my community members.  Seeing, feeling, and touching such a vital part of the aqueduct was a great feeling.  And the owner of the shop was great, offering all the support my community could need as long as they are in business.  Its all coming together!

So I am short on time again for the post, but we are still working!  We actually are within 2-3 days of finishing all of the aqueduct piping, we are putting the final coats of paint on the community center, we are gettin prepared to install the solar water pump, and the solar panels for the lightbulb project are purchased and on their way!  I am also getting ready to start making the 45 tapstands that will become property of each member of the water project. Things are cranking along...Check out the pictures.  The top pic is of Chelo, a local kid with some mental difficulties, just ecstatic to see all of the faucets lined up and ready to go!(actually I think he was just ecstatic to have his picture taken, but either way its priceless)  Even in the most frustrating of communities, there are always a couple really good reasons to keep on working!

Although it is kind-of sad to see them go, the last Builders Beyond Borders group has come and gone, and now I will be back to the Dominican pace of life.  We had a very succesful 5.5 days of work.  We put around 1400 ft. of pipe in the group, put up the walls of our solar community center, and put the roof on!  I have to say that the community center was the most fun I have had in a while.  It reminded me of my Habitat days in college, measuring wood, cutting, and nailing.  We went with a roof design that was a mezcla of Dominican and American styles.  Half of the roof beams were trusses made to American standards and the other half were just beams coming down from the main roof beam.  Thats how most Dominican houses are made(and the main beam usually bends down, but doesn't fall, and that seems fine to them!)  But when the trusses were up and the roof was on it just made me extremely proud.  I showed them a new way to do things, and they questioned and fought back against me every step of the way.  But in the end they all said it was a pretty design and I "know too much".  Also, on the last day we sent water across my new big bridge and through all of the pipes the kids put in, to the other side of the river.  Everything went to plan and we opened a faucet more than an hour walk from the water source!  It was the first water to ever come out of a faucet on that side of the river, and I was proud that my bridge didn't even seem to budge.  All in all, life is good right now.  I am an extremely lucky human being.  It makes me feel great to be here, alive, and living.  

I just like how my newly built pipeline bridge looks.  Puts a smile on my face.  Who wants to smile...check it out!

So we are still chugging away at laying pipe in the ground and recently we put up the first of our giant river crossings.  It is about 170 ft. across and I was very happy when it did not fall down.  You can do all the engineering and design you want but when you see something that big go up, and not fall down...it just makes you smile!  So I have another group from Builders Beyond Borders coming though in a week and they are going to start digging on the far side of the crossing.  The plan is to send water through the crossing and all of the pipe they manage to put down in 5 days and have another water inauguration, again in a place that has never had water before!  So I'm sure it'll be another sappy occasion where manly Dominicans will start bawling and lead to me being in the same boat!  It should be great.  Also, we have been working our butts off getting the foundation ready for the small solar-powered community center we will be building with the kids.  We have really been under the gun with work ever since late January because of all the planning that goes into a Builders Beyond Borders group.  And thats great!  As much as my life has become a lot less chill, there is nothing like 40 Americans to get some Dominicans in gear!  And I have had to really work on doling out responsibility in all different directions.  I am a camp counselor, a work foreman, and a design engineer in charge of an aqueduct, solar center, and now a solar electrification project!  And...yea, a Peace Corps volunteer that doesn't make any money.  

After the B3 group leaves in two weeks I hope we can finish the aqueduct in about a month or so more of work.  This all really depends on the weather.  If it rains almost no work gets done and sometimes my road disappears.  So if we can stay dry I think we have a good chance.  Lets all cross our fingers.

Here is what was left of my road after 10 days of rain in Jan/February.  It has recently been refilled with more dirt making it passable.  But how long will that last?

So I just finished hosting the second Builders Beyond Borders group, and they did a great job! We installed about 1700 ft. of tubes in the ground, all the tubes needed for the upper portion of my community, and they painted my storage tank! We are now going immediately into construction on the footing of the community center. That all needs to be poured and ready for the group in April, who will then work on putting up the walls, roof, and windows/doors! And on top of that I am going to be used as a translator in a medical mission this week, with American doctors coming to treat patients from the mountains around me. Phew! Life is kind-of crazy now but it feels great. Oh!-a perfect example of that is the fact that I broke my pinky toe yesterday and I am sitting here with it taped to my other good toes/didn't remember to mention that until right now! (don't worry, it has been checked out by a doctor, and this tape job was the treatment) Things are really hectic but I love what I am doing. There are other projects also possibly on the horizon but I don't want to jinx them by mentioning them here. But I will let you all know if they come to fruition!

Just like the last group, we had a little faucet opening ceremony at the end of the 6 day trip. My host dad tried to say a couple words but got too choked up to continue. It was very humbling. I constantly get caught up in the frustrations of coordinating all of this work and forget the basics-we are bringing water to people that have never had it. And those people are now almost family to me. It is an amazing thing. Below are a couple pics from the March group of B3.  PS I have BIG hair, and its not coming off until the aqueduct is done.  

Hey, so sorry I haven't been in internet world for a while. Just to let everyone know- We had a Builders Beyond Borders group in February and it was great. We put in around 1500 ft. of pipeline and at the end I filled up our tank, and sent water down through the pipes they had just layed to a tapstand. We had a little water inauguration where we turned on water from a faucet for the first time ever in my community! Everyone cried, even the macho Dominicans, and it was a thing I won't forget. The whole trip was great. Since then I have been working with the daily work brigade of Dominicans, and have been planning for the next (2) B3B groups. The group in Feb. had such a great time that the company asked to come back again in April! So we have a group of 30 coming in two days to dig and put in pipeline again, and then in April we will have another large group-of 45! This group in April will be working on two projects-1)continuing work on the pipeline and 2)building a small solar-powered community center. So I have been busy working on the design and budget of that recently. We started excavation of the center yesterday and are working on planning for delivery of all the needed materials into my site. Thankfully, the local mayor has finally done some road work and now trucks should be able to get up there. No more hauling all the materials on animals and on peoples backs!(at least until the next big rain that washes out the roads again) So thats where I am at. Im a Peace Corps volunteer and camp counselor/cultural guide for next two months. Ill try to get some pictures up of the youth groups but probably won't get much free time to think until the last group leaves on April 16th! But just as my first 9 months were characterized by slow, grueling searches for funding with little results, it seems like my last 9 months will be filled with projects being completed! I guess sometimes it all comes back to you in the end...

So apparently I am a 24 year-old 70-year-old. I have osteo-arthritis in my left ankle. This is not completely surprising because I played soccer for about 13 years and then was a constantly injured pole vaulter and decathlete in college. So all of that beating up on myself finally came back to bite me in the butt. I just spent 10 days in the capital receiving twice daily physical therapy sessions, and the ankle feels much better. I also am now equipped with custom fitted orthopedic foot pads that will correct my crooked, flat feet. I still cannot jog or run, but I am good enough to walk all over the hills of the DR, which is what a water volunteer must do on a daily basis. So I am still chugging along for now, and hopefully I will be able to last long enough to finish my aqueduct and the rest of my piece corps service.(Which only has about nine months left-unbelievable!) And now......I have about 72 hours until a group of 41 high school kids from the states come into my site to help build the aqueduct! It should be really fun and really stressful I am sure. So basically it will be another day in the Peace Corps. But I am completely refreshed and re-motivated to get back into my tiny little village and get busy. Ha, and I will be arriving into my village "a pie"(by foot) now because the recent 8-straight days of rain in the north washed out the majority of my mud-road. So now the previously too-muddy-to-drive-on road is too-washed-out-to-walk-on and I will be taking the longer cable-bridge and mountain path to get in to where I am going. But, call me a crazy PCV, I can't wait! (We will see if my ankle is as excited)

Although a country rich in history, the Dominican Republic is often poor in its grasp of the people that shape its nation. Without anything more than a shallow idea of its significance, many young Dominicans are constrained by prejudice and discrimination and therefore lack access to many aspects of life taken for granted in the United States. Gender inequality is significant, rural public schools are severely underperforming, and a university education is too expensive for most families. Even basic social services are out of reach for many. Although a substantial majority of the population is of African heritage, social constructs within Latin America and the Caribbean have historically marginalized people who have darker skin.

Over the past five years, Peace Corps volunteers have organized a major conference to bring together youth leaders in the Cibao region to discuss discrimination and the importance of cultural diversity. I participated in my first conference last year and was pushed by their enthusiasm to work much more with my youth group. For many of the young participants, the Celebrando Cibao conference is a life-changing experience. During the three-day conference, participants have a safe environment in which to examine their own culture, be introduced to other cultures, and gain the tools to combat discrimination in their communities. We look forward to planning the sixth annual Celebrando Cibao Conference, to be held August 22-24, 2009 and as a vital step in the process we are asking for your help with funding! I know that times are tough in the states, and for that reason I am not asking for anything more than $50 from any one of you, but literally anything you give will go a long way. Thanks again in advance! Follow the link below to donate to the Diversity and Leadership Youth Camp. (The volunteer name listed on the project is Hinojosa L. of CA and the project # is 517-290)

Donate to Dominican Youth!

Check out my older blog "Celebrando...El Cibao! Celebrando...Diversidad!" from September 2008 to see what last year's conference was like.

After 7 days of construction we finished our storage tank!

X-mas and my family came and went, New Years came and went, Bryan came and went, and now we are back into construction! But obviously I can’t skip all that good stuff!

So my parents came in on December 20th to a rainy Dominican Republic, and got to see a lot more of that while they were here! But before the muddy part of the story, we had a couple good days checking out beaches and nice restaurants (an unknown world to me). It was a nice couple of relaxing days. My sister and new brother-in-law Bill got in on New Years Eve and had a much harsher introduction to the country. We came immediately in to my campo using our newly exchanged 4X4, only(due to A/C problems and some other confusions with the first car) it was quickly realized that the car was not in fact a 4X4. We somehow crossed two fairly full rivers and got in to the previously agreed-upon meeting point where my host dad and a couple muchachos had the horses ready, engines running. We all got out of the car and stepped into my world-rainy, muddy, slippy dirt path. One by one everyone got on their horse (except me, because I’m one of them now, not special enough to require a horse) and took off down the dirt path, crossing the third and last river crossing “montado” on their horse. From that point on it was a dark, wet journey into my site. My Dad fell off his horse into the mud two times before giving up and joining me to walk through the fierce mud. The mud was literally up to your knee at some points and it ripped off my Chaco sandals! Finally at around 7 PM we pulled into my village with the heavens beating down on our heads. All of a sudden it was us five white people soaked, muddy, and cramped into my small house. But we had made it! No one was hurt!We got changed and headed down to my host-families house for X-mas Eve dinner. Delicious! I can’t complain about Dominican cooking when they really try! We didn’t waste much time though before heading to the packed colmado and picking a nice seat where we proceeded to enjoy X-mas Eve Dominican Campesino-style. We drank rum and beer and I convinced my mother to dance a little batchata with me!The next day it rained almost the whole time but that didn’t stop us from heading up the mountain to see the work I have already finished. We checked out my spring intake, my stream-crossings, and the pipeline I have already laid. It was raining the whole time but I think everyone still enjoyed seeing what work has been done. When night came back around we headed over to the colmado-owner’s house and had a gourmet prepared Christmas dinner. Turns out the local carpenter, mason, and colmado-owner’s wife had prepared us a full course dinner. So after stuffing ourselves we again headed to the colmado and got our groove on-all of us! I was persuasive enough to get my sister, brother-in-law, both parents, and even the colmado-owner out there on the dance floor. Everyone danced and I think it is fair to say everyone had a great X-mas, although it may have a little different than they were used to!

The next day we headed back out on horses (with the volunteer walking again! Man!)to the car headed back towards paved roads and civilization. But like I said, it had rained a lot while in my village and the roads were super muddy! We almost didn’t get up a steep muddy hill in the rented SUV but with the help of the locals we were pushed up the slippery slope and made our way back to the paved road. Crisis averted, and vacation salvaged!

We were headed to the beach! Over the next three days we got our full of beach and beautiful coastline. We stopped at around 7 or 8 beaches including one that was reached by a short ride on a fishing boat. A picture is worth a thousand words, so I will keep it short: I remembered that I was serving for two years on one of the most beautiful islands in the world. This place really is gorgeous.

We headed back towards the airport and I bid farewell to my family just as quickly as they had come in. I was sad to see them go but at the same time excited and re-invigorated to get going with my projects! But first-New Years!  I headed back to the beach to spend two days on the beach with my fellow volunteers eating all the hamburgers and buffalo wings my heart desired.

Those two days just flew by and before I knew it I was living in 2009 and headed to the airport to wait for my buddy Bryan to step off the plane. Bry told me before many times he was thinking about Peace Corps and by the time he told me he was coming to visit he was pretty sure he wanted to do it. So he didn’t want a typical vacation on the beach. He wanted to see what Peace Corps life can be like-in the campo. He stepped off the plane and into this sunny island world, and just as when Russ visited, it was as if I had seen him yesterday. That’s just how it is with my friends from childhood. I don’t see them for a year at a time but when I do we just fall back into the rhythm. It was great seeing him and we were immediately immersed in the Peace Corps world-walking out to the highway from the airport, fending off motorcycle taxis left and right. I took him back to the beach for a couple hours, knowing that this was probably his only chance to see the beach. We had a week full of aqueduct construction planned!We spent that first night in the city with other volunteers and then headed into my village. Over the next couple days we did a little aqueduct construction, a little improvisational cooking, and a whole lot of playing with kids! Man was Bryan a little-kid magnet, even though he couldn’t speak much to them. He knew how to handle kids, language or not, and we had a lot of time with them over the next 4 days. We had one night where we gave out donated toothbrushes and toothpaste from my Uncle Bernie the Dentist (thanks Bernie!!), we had one movie night in my house with my computer, and every free moment seemed to be filled with little kids. In terms of work, we poured the two bases of an 80 ft. suspended cable river crossing, and laid the pipeline before and after the crossing. It was really interesting seeing the capable engineer student (Bryan) just overwhelmed at the crossing we were building. The thing with engineering is that it is based on so many ideal assumptions that when faced with a very un-ideal situation, a lot of times Bry’s response was just, “You really shouldn’t be building this here.” But not building wasn’t an option. The difficulty of creating a lasting aqueduct in my rolling hills was the exact reason why my community has not had anything built before, why the government has no interest in helping, and why I was here. There are too few people living there, it is much too time-intensive to design, and it is not ideal situations at all. But by the end of the week it was built and we were both confident that nothing short of a landslide would take it down any time soon. I hope Bryan got what he asked for out of his trip. We lived the real life of a Peace Corps volunteer building an aqueduct-long tiring days, mornings that begin at sunrise, and an un-educated community that fights the volunteer every step of the way. He definitely saw me extremely frustrated at the sometimes thoughtless behavior of my villagers as they showed up late to work, and generally tried to dodge work any way possible. But the work was successfully completed and we then left my village for the city again, this time so I could buy materials for more construction to come. We had one last night in the city with volunteers before heading back to the airport. We almost missed his flight due to the typical Dominican lack of timetable on bus transportation, but all worked out. In a flurry I pushed him past customs by telling the guard that he was going to miss his flight, and then gave him a hug and we both just laughed at the ridiculousness of my life before he was off.Then before I knew it I was immediately a volunteer once again. No more car rides. No more beaches. No more English. No more white people accompanying me wherever I went. I was alone again. I had lived 20 days with Americans and then was suddenly left alone. It hit me hard like every other time, but this time it was not a surprise. I was refreshed and ready to get back to it.

So that brings us to construction. New work done since Bryan left:

-Two posts on either side of a big 170 ft. suspended river crossing

-Half of a 3200 gallon water storage tank

-Youth trip with Builders Beyond Borders planned for February and March

We are going to be finishing our storage tank in the coming week and then it is on to getting all accommodations and activities arranged for the 42 high school kids that will be here in about three weeks!

Also-I am currently fundraising for a latrine project that will replace all of the dilapidated and un-healthy latrines in my site with ventilated pit latrines. I will soon be putting a link on this blog asking for donations from any and all of you. If I can get funds together, the latrines will follow immediately after the aqueduct.  I'll keep you posted!

Last weekend I brought two members of my youth group (now officially called JARUF-Jovenes Avanzando Rapido Un Futuro-'Youth Rapidly Improving Their Future') to a Brigada Verde camp.  Brigada Verde is 'Green Brigade' and it is an environmental youth group first started in this country by Peace Corps Volunteers about six years ago.  The goals are obvious: environmental awareness, conservation, and improvement.  The camp was three days long, organized by other volunteer buddies of mine, and I learned a lot!  We had activities on water contamination, different biological ecosystems, waste management, and the flora of the Dominican Republic.  

Of course this was not all that we did at a camp full of 40 high school age youth!  We had somewhere around 7,000 icebreakers, although I wasn't counting.  Ha, we had plenty of social time, because that social time is really where the kids get motivation to keep going.  They talk with others youth from around the country who have similar groups and have completed successful projects, and get excited to keep going.  

It was a great camp and I know now that my kids are going to get started with their first real projects!  We have talked about holding a dance-a-thon in the colmado to raise funds for public trash cans(there is no trash service at all in my village) and have also talked about a small reforestation project above the aqueduct spring to protect the water reserves.  

As with every day, the final day of the camp included a shouting session by our fearless leader volunteer Ryan.  It went like this: -All the kids banging on plastic tables as hard as they could to the rhythm of "We will rock you"-Ryan sreaming "Si se puede!" and the kids responding as loud as they could (translation: Yes you can!)-Ryan screaming "Protege el Medio Ambiente" and the kids responding (translation: Protect the Environment!)-Ryan screaming "Brigada Verde" and the kids yelling it back!

It was an amazing sight.  I learned alot about the environment and a lot more about how to really connect with youth and get them motivated.  I am not saying that I have been changed and will be that shouting volunteer any time soon, but I am saying that I was inspired.  I can only imagine how my kids felt!

So work is just flying right now.  We have worked three weeks straight now with the following progress:

1 partially constructed intake works74 PVC pipes trenched and buried 3 feet deep in the ground~1,460 ft.2 suspended stream crossings5 mainline cleanouts installed8 mainline respirators installed

But we have a long way to go.  The entire project invloves around 14,940 more feet of PVC pipe(about 750 more pipes), three MUCH LARGER suspended river crossings, one of approximately 180 ft., a 4000 gallon storage tank, and 50 separate tapstands.  But things are looking very good right now.  Besides one setback with an airblock that caused us to re-dig the trench in a small area and install another respirator, things have been going to plan.  Generally I think morale is high and everyone is excited to see the water inching closer and closer to their houses every day.  

Also, as you can see on the funding sidebar, we have a couple updates!  We have recieved a check from a Dominican Savings Bank, Banco Ademi, in support of the aqueduct.  This came after a meeting with the 'Jefa' a couple months ago.  I guess the idea was just planted in her head and one day decided she needed to help!  We have also recieved a promise from a company that previously was considered a 'good possibility' to me.  Builders Beyond Borders, an organization based out of Norwalk, CT. that provides service learning trips to high school youth, has chosen my village to visit on two separate occasions in 2009.  Each trip will involve 40 high school students coming and living in my village for a week, working on my aqueduct!  That is a lot of hands!  These two weeks will cut out months of work from the aqueduct schedule and I am tremendously grateful to be recieving their help.  As you can see, they are also committed to monetarily support the project!  Check out their website with the link in the funding sidebar!  It is a very cool thing that they are doing and something that would be great to get my own high school in North Haven involved with!  

So that is the good news with work!  I feel more fulfilled now than any previous moment in my service, mostly become I come home emotionally, and now also physically tired, but in a good way.  I hope everything back home is goin well and I will keep you all updated on our progress.

One happy PCV.

The day came and it has passed!  I ripped off the bandaid in one fell swoop and after being in this country for 1 year, 1 month, and two weeks, Agua Larga began construction on their aqueduct!  Por fin!  It was an extremely nerve racking Sunday night before our Monday work day.  Somehow I managed to sleep a little and I even managed to wake up at 6:30, drink some coffee, and get goin by 7:30.  the day was pretty successful.  A lack or organization was inevitable but I was happy generally with how it went.  And every day since then has been better and better.  We work Monday through Thursday from 8 to 3, and each day went smoother than the previous one.  Overall, the week produced a half-completed water intakes, about 15 PVC pipes(250 feet) buried three feet in the ground, and a very happy(albeit sore) volunteer.  My Monday work brigade is probably the toughest because they all argue and all try to impress everone else with their infinite knowledge on digging trench.  But each day gets more and more humble and by Thursday the workers were all joking with each other and myself.  

When they try to get serious and it seems like an argument might break out I butt in with my extremely high class humor.  One worker, who has enough money to possibly pay people to work for him, stated strongly that he would not pay more than 1000 pesos for a worker to work the four days in a month required of him.  This started an argument because construction work is usually valued at 300 pesos a day or 1200 a month if working once a week.  So I told him that if it were me I would need at least 1500 "besos" from him a month, but that either way I thought his lips would be extremely dry by the end of the month.  And he isn't that buenmoso (good-looking) anyway.  "Pesos" are the local form of currency.  "Besos" are kisses.  His face immediately changed from serious to strangely embarrassed and everyone died laughing at the gringo who just made a funny.  I laughed at it too, hell, it was one of the first jokes I made that everyone got right away and put them all in a better mood.  More than anything else that I did in planning the past week of work, that joke made me feel like I am doing what I am here to do.  I am helping them get the aqueduct built.  And as I have learned, the technical facets of the work are not the reason they haven't built one.  It is everything else.  Getting people organized, motivated, and 'de acuerdo' is the much bigger challenge.  I have spent a good amount of time designing and redesigning the aqueduct but I have spent much more time developing rules and regulations for the water comittee that everyone was in agreement with.  So the little joke of mine that kept people working and laughing as opposed to arguing was a big deal for me.  I guess I am finally starting to get a hang of this development thing.  Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is crack a joke so everyone just chills out.  Giving water to people is a serious thing and should be designed and constructed correctly.  But no one said work has to be serious. 

Coming up next week are one or possibly two small river crossings and a couple smaller components of the main line.  And for the first time in a while I have an optimistic outlook and don't dread the little challenges that I know will come along.  I'll just have to have a good joke ready...

My house...the freeway.  A look into the lack of privacy I have gotten used to.My house has constant traffic, both inside and out.  Starting at 5 AM there are chickens waking up and turkeys clucking and roosters crowing, all having a competition to see who can make me wake up the most number of times before I just get up.  Then when I open the door they just walk right through my house, with my cat doing nothing but watching them, apparently waging another competition to see who can get furthest inside my house without me chasing them into the woods, chucking rocks like a crazy man.  There have been weeks when pigs and piglets have gotten loose from the pig pen near my house and have made their rounds on the highway that is my house.  I have had horses, donkeys, and mules just walk up and by my house as if it were perfectly normal.  Then I tell someone that the animals are loose and they usually get taken care of.  Usually.  I have dogs walking around my house all day, probably because of the smell of my cat.  There are a million lizards and spiders and little biting, stinging ants.  Some nights I get visited by tarantulas, and although they are poisonous, I prefer them because they are so much slower and easier to kill with a sandal.  The normal spiders are big and really quick.  Just annoying.  At night my solar powered lights make the inside of my house the highway for moths, bugs, and anything that eats moths and bugs.  So yea, animals live with me pretty much all the time.  And I don’t think I even really need to say the word cockroach.  I could be a millionaire selling those things.  If only a market existed.  The latrine next to my house puts them out like a well-oiled assembly plant.  Its amazing.  But luckily my cat kills most of those that are out in the open. (and eats them, mmm) So that is the animal traffic.  Then there is the human traffic.  Starting at around 6 AM there are people going around my house to the left to bath, feed the pigs, or pick coffee, and going around my house to the right to find firewood ,pick avocados, or dump their night pans into the latrine(which they never seem to really have mastered, leaving friendly splatters here and there).  All day long is fair game for people to go around to the bathroom, and then the afternoon comes and everyone needs to bathe, so they take turns going around my house to the left to the shower area where they bucket bathe themselves less than ten feet from  my door.  When night eventually comes I flip on my lights and, just like the flies and moths, muchachos and muchachitos show up to just look at my house and be bathed in artificial light.  Sometimes they want something or want to do something with me, but the majority of the time they are just passing time in the only lighted house around, with the only white guy around.  They will watch me fold clothes, will look at my pictures on the walls, will check out the DR map I have on the wall and argue over where they are.  They just don’t see houses filled with such ‘weird’ stuff.  Only us gringos  have can openers and paper towels, not to mention all the new cool stuff given to me by a recently ET’d friend: real Heinz ketchup, hand sanitizer, French coffee press, etc.  The kids come to just hang out and then in a bit pass on further down the highway, back out of my house.  There’s a good chance they are headed to the colmado, the only other place that has light bulbs shining with artificial light.  It doesn’t bother me anymore (well, I hate chickens more than any other living thing on this planet), but I am comfortable knowing that everyone knows pretty much everything in my house.  As I write this I have a muchacho sitting next to me on my bed staring at my computer, wondering what it is I am writing.  I guess that’s just how it is when you are living on the ‘pista’ in the middle of the mountains.  But like everything else, I’ll try to make this a little educational.  Let’s see if he can tell me what this word says: YODALI…...(pointing to my screen and asking the kid if he knows whatthe word is)  Yup, he got it!  It’s his name.  Well, good night from the ‘pista’.  Time to eat some dinner and go bucket-bathe myself into a state of semi-cleanliness.  Asi es la vida viviendo en la ‘pista’.  

Well, as my last blog says, I now have some money to start with my aqueduct! That’s the good news. The bad news is that the road into my village has been soaked with constant rains and all-but cut off from the outside world by parts of the road falling away. Sooo, although I bought a whole bunch of materials over a week ago, it has been impossible to have them delivered, and we are still waiting.

So in the mean time, during this difficult period of waiting, I have had the chance to finally put to use a small OLPC laptop that was donated to me earlier this year. I went by the small school that is on the other side of the river from me on a Friday morning, hoping to catch the older students. I had talked to the teacher about doing this small computer class earlier and she thought it was a great idea but reminded me that maybe it would be a good idea to start with the higher grades of the school (grades 4 and 5). So I headed over to the school only to find a class of 5 students. I couldn’t believe it. I asked the teacher why there were so few, and she just said most kids weren’t showing up…yet. Classes started on August 18th, kids slowly start to trickle in over the course of September, and by October most kids are coming to school, at least frequently.

This was back in September that I went to the school for the first time, so the kids were still in the trickle-in phase. It was a reminder to me of how little kids and their parents value education, how poor the education system was, and just how incredibly hard ‘development’ is. When I asked parents why their kids weren’t going to school they responded that the kids didn’t do anything for the first month. And the reality is that the kids don’t really do much ever. The teaching system is not even close to that of the US. And clearly, the teachers don’t try to teach as much or as thoroughly when only 5 students show up. This was a class that should be about 15, mind you. Parents don’t tell their kids to go to school because ‘they don’t learn anything’, the kids don’t go, so the teacher is less motivated to teach, so the kids probably do learn less, and the parents are suddenly correct. But the level of education in general is so low that the parents do not see this cycle. They just think that they are correct and their children shoudn’t bother going to school for a while. This was the reality check that I received, and it really squashed all of my enthusiasm after arriving at the school, sweating, and carrying the laptop.

I walked into this class of five students and had to explain to the teacher again what it was I wanted to do. After I had reminded her and explained that I wanted to take one kid aside at a time to show them how the computer works, she agreed, and I got my first volunteer. It was a kid that lives really close to me, Jodali, and seeing his eyes light up at getting the chance to touch a computer made it all worthwhile. Almost all of the kids in my village of this age have never touched a computer, if they have even seen one up close! I showed him how to open it, and he delicately followed my instructions, making sure he wouldn’t break anything. With my instruction, he then turned on the computer, practiced moving the mouse around and opening up different programs. Moving the mouse was really something that took time. It is just something I take for granted, having grown up with computers, but for him it was like riding a horse for the first time. Once he got the hang of the mouse I then had him open up a memory game that included simple mathematics. He started playing, and the smile just got bigger and bigger on his face, that is when he wasn’t intensely concentrating to make sure he had added 10+8 correctly. I spent about 30 minutes with three of the students, and they all told me they really liked it, at which point the computer battery died. Reality check…there is no electricity. Asi es la vida aqui (Such is life here).I intend to go to the school every Friday and let the kids do whatever it is they want on the computer. I also have started talking to the oldest member of my youth group about him going to another small school on his side of the river and leading the small computer class. He actually tried to go one day. He came and got the laptop, and headed up to the school, but it was raining and the teacher didn’t show up. There’s that reality check again. As much as the constant setbacks to any type of project are frustrating and discouraging, I have to keep thinking of the kids. Every minute of practice they get will help them out in the future. And who knows, maybe next fall they will go to school on the first day of class if the gringo with the computer is going. One can only hope

Just a quick note to all that the aqueduct online grant has been filled!  I still have to wait a couple weeks for the money to get here, but its full!  With this money we will be able to start construction probably early in October!  Thanks to everyone who donated!  More to come...

Ahhhh… Talk about a re-energizing, re-inspiring, fulfilling way to spend three days! Just got back from “Celebrando El Cibao” youth diversity camp and it was amazing! I brought three youth from my campo, ages 16, 19, and 21, all of whom had just finished high school, and I couldn’t be happier with how they came, slowly opened up, and then left camp feeling differently. The camp felt like a lifetime for me and I’m sure the rest of the volunteers, helping to coordinate activities, get kids involved, and take endless pictures of everything, but by the end of the camp it was all worthwhile. The kids had their eyes opened up to real characteristics of leaders by the former Vice President of the DR, Jaime David. They were confronted first hand with the realization of their own country’s racism by a Haitian engineer and his presentation on the beauties and culture of Haiti. They had the chance to learn about other religions of the world and created small skits to show how you might respectfully handle daily problems with difference of religion. They learned about sexual orientation, the importance of respecting and understanding heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals alike. They talked about stereotypes, how they affect the way we treat others, and how hurtful they can be. They experienced firsthand how a disability can make you feel while attempting to eat jello either with no hands, with a blind-fold, or with their non-dominant hand. And we obviously had a whole bunch of ice breakers because Dominicans absolutely love them. They also learned a whole lot about themselves and their confidence after sharing, joking around with, and getting to know sixty other young kids from around the country who were just as open-minded as they are. We had a talent show with some singers and story-tellers, we had a night of dancing and dominoes, and and every day was opened up with yoga to get people going.

It’s a new generation in the DR. The same way it took generations to overcome the racism toward blacks and sexism towards women in the US, the youth in the DR are growing up in a new culture that is slowly trying to change. These young kids come from campos where they are possibly the only people who really know how to read and write proficiently and therefore really are the most capable to affect change. Youth groups in this country have real power because of the up and coming generation that is miles ahead of their parents in terms of education.

All in all I am so happy I got involved in this camp, so happy my kids said they loved it, and really proud to be that much closer to some kids in my community that can help me try to make changes for the year that I have left. Who knows what affect this will make on them 20 years down the road, but just thinking that it will help change the DR the way the US has changed for the better...it makes you feel good. This is a proud Peace Corps volunteer.

I need your help. This is not just something I am asking for. It is becoming more of a reality every day. I have had awful luck with my grants. I have applied for funding from 6 separate organizations within the country and they have all either told us no or told us yes and then failed to come through. I have also written countless letters and project proposals to political figures and companies that have showed interest in our project. Nothing. It is becoming a slight possibility that I will not receive all of the funding I need for this project in time, and the pipelines may not be finished. I cannot let that happen to these people.

I need whatever little support you can give to my project, and I need it now! The link to the right will take you to the Peace Corps site where you can donate to my aqueduct. That money is untouchable for me until all of the $5000 I initially requested is donated. I know that economic times in the states are terrible for some right now, and that donating is the last thing on your mind. Therefore, I am asking for a very small amount of support. According to my website, I have had 74 visitors to this blog from the US. If each of you could spare $50 from your lives to help me and my community build an aqueduct the $3250 I still need could be covered overnight. Save $5 in a jar daily for ten days and then donate that money. It will mean the world to my community. That $5000 dollars will be enough to start work and keep going for a couple months.

Help me get started with the project my community asked me here to do. Help me bring WATER to PEOPLE. This is not a save the children ad. It is not another dime-a-dozen NGO asking for money that may or may not find its way to people. You all know me. Every dime you give will go directly into pipes and cement and rebar. I grew up in the same town as many of you, North Haven, CT. I have been to Thanksgiving family reunions with many of you in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, IA. I went to school with many of you in Lewisburg, PA. Now I am living in a small, poor village in the Dominican Republic, and I am asking you to make sure I get water to these people before my two-year service is up. Im asking for support in ending little girls daily trips to the river with heavy buckets. That is all. Thank you all for contributing in whatever small way you can manage. I understand times are not easy. And believe me, my community understands that times are not easy.

Recently I bought a five pesos bracelet from another volunteer. It was made of the little plastic bags that the local colmados put everything in that they sell. It was very Peace Corps (cheap and made of something local) and I thought it was pretty cool. I got back to my site and the kids kept asking where I got it. I told them, and said we could make them if we want. Since then I spent a couple days with kids in my house ripping up all the plastic bags I have to make bracelets. They took the idea even further though. They went out to my back yard and gathered up the trash that is just sitting around, and brought those bags and wrappers in my house and started making them. It was just a little tiny thing, but it was cool to see them so pumped, not bored, and having them clean up trash without even thinking about it. Anyways, now I am rocking four bracelets, all made from trash bags. I just need a market for these homemade crafts...and some buyers who have the day long attention span off my kids. Ha. First Peace Corps profit generation project...done.

Let me just breeeeeeeathe for a second here before writing. This past week I have felt the worst that I can ever remember in my life. I had that aching in the heart pain when I went to sleep and then got it back a couple seconds after waking up. It was horrible. I never want to feel that again. And it was all because of a little multi-colored kitty-kat!(And I thought I was a man…) Let me explain…

A friend of mine, Joanna, took care of my cat while I went back to the states in June, and when she left on the 5th of August, it was my turn. Her cat was coming up from her site on a “bola”, a free ride with the Peace Corps doctor. So before I met the bola car and the doctor at our designated meeting spot at the supermarket parking lot, I made a trip to the hardware store to buy plastic mesh so I could cover the open door where I brush my teeth at night. The idea was basically to make something like those plastic fence things people use for dogs to keep them in one room. That way I could lean out the door and brush my teeth at night without letting the newbie cat out that would be with me. Then I stocked up on two more 3.5 lb bags of cat food. And on top of that I bought a couple snacks I can’t get usually. There I was, sitting with a big roll of plastic mesh, my crutches (yup, still using them), my motorcycle helmet, my backpack, and 3 big bags of cat food and snacks. The car showed up and I threw everything in the car, realizing at that moment that if I had not gotten this bola, I probably would not be able to walk to the sidewalk, let alone get my butt back into my site. So it was good that the ride showed.

The doc told me she was late and had to go to a lunch meeting with some volunteers immediately, and because of that, I was invited. Immediately I felt like saying, “No, I really need to drop the cat off at my house”, but I didn’t. I said OK and she reassured me that it’d be fine. We got there (a place called The 25 Charcos and site a volunteer buddy of mine)and decided we couldn’t leave the cat in the car, and the restaurant was open air and outside, so we brought the cat in its cloth pocketbook/carrier thing that Jo had bought recently.(dumbest looking carrier I’ve ever seen. Maybe just to make me look like I have a pocketbook) It had been in this cloth purse for the past 4 hours so I thought I should take it out for a second. It’s the humane thing to do right?! Well, my great luck continued that day (remember the broken ear, staff infections, amoebas, unknown sicknesses, and now sprained ankle), and when I took the cat out of its carrier it went nuts, scratched the crap out of my hands, and ran off in the woods(did I mention the restaurant was outdoors). ARE YOU JOKING? I just stood there shocked for about five seconds, thinking that must have been a dream, then immediately dropped my crutches and took off running with the other volunteers there with us. The cat ran right into the sugarcane and seemed to have stopped. I sent the muchachos (young guys) and the other guy volunteers under the barbed wire and told them, “We are getting that cat.” I figured they would just go get it and put it back in that stupid pocketbook thing, and this nightmare would be over. Instead, they chased it farther and farther into the cane and the mountains.

A kid came back with an empty pocketbook about two hours later and said that it had gone “lejos.” That is “far” in Spanish. But ‘lejos’ really means that the cat has left the building, it’s not coming back, and you should probably stop looking. That word hit me like a ton of cement block. (We don’t have bricks here) ‘Jesus. That cat was like a daughter to Jo. And now it’s probably going to get killed by a dog or a person in the mountains.’ That was my inner-monolog while I took the purple pocketbook from the muchacho and tried, unsuccessfully, to eat my lunch. How had things gotten so terrible crappy in a matter of hours? I took her out. She was fine for a second. Then she went f-ing nuts and was gone within a matter of seconds! I was floored.

I heard the doctor offer a little kid 100 pesos if they found the cat, saw how quickly he went looking, and quickly chased him down and upped it to 2000. I didn’t want him to just look. Find that thing! I then went around to all the employees and told them that I had lost a cat, it wasn’t mine, the girl would kill me if I didn’t find it, and that if they found it there was 2000 pesos in it for them. So by the end of that day I had about fifty people planning trips to the woods to find this cat. But I knew she would just run away again, and didn’t feel any better. The bola was leaving, and I had to show the doctor my site, so I had to leave with them. I showed them my site and then when they had left proceeded to tell everyone in my site about the cat that got away. They didn’t care, and I felt like shit. I explained to those closest to me how I was responsible and Joanna was going to die when she heard, and that I didn’t know what to do. They all laughed, told me to forget about it, and reminded me that it was just a cat. But they didn’t understand. That night I barely slept. Llave cuddling up next to me reminded me of the lost cat and I felt like absolute crap.

The next morning I got up and caught a bola out back to the charcos. I asked around and still no sign of the cat. I took a motorcycle to the closest town, bought four cans of tuna, and came back. Then I got muchachos to walk around the woods in pairs with an open can of tuna. If anyone saw anything, the one without the can was to run back and get me with the cat bag, and the other was to let the cat eat the tuna, slowly. An hour of that returned no results. I asked my buddy Todd, the PCV who is placed to work at this ‘charcos’ place, if he thought the park guards would be able to help. (The charcos is a set of waterfalls that tourists climb up with the help of guides. It is a well known eco-tourism spot in the DR, and it is enclosed in its own National Park) He said maybe, and ten minutes later the guy showed up. I told him about the whole incident, and immediately he offered to go look with me after lunch. I was still on crutches but said screw it and hiked around the park for about two hours with the ranger. You already know what happened. I found nothing, and my ankle hurt a lot. While I was out in the woods with tuna sprinkled around me, given up the search, and hoping the cat would smell the tuna and just show up, Joanna texted me and seemed angry for my lack of responses. I hadn’t responded to her since the cat ran away. What would I say? I decided to just call her. I called and told her; she cried a lot; I felt like a giant idiot, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t ever talk to me again. I hung up the phone in the woods, feeling just awful, and laid down and cried a little. So that night I stayed with Todd at his place and tried not to think about it. I felt so much better having told Jo, but ‘so much better’ wasn’t great at all. Still felt terrible.

The next morning we headed back to the charcos and there was word that the night guard had seen a cat he didn’t know last night! I thought it might be her but probably not. Still, I kept talking to the park guides and found one who knew how to trap animals. He made me a trap that day, and I took a moto back to the town to get seven cans of tuna. He was going to put tuna in this trap for seven nights in a row. He knew about the cat and the money, and I thought he might get her. I waited all day but no cat, and I had to head back to my site. I went to a meeting for my water committee that night, we planned for my bosses arrival the next day, and once again, felt like crap. The next day came and my boss didn’t. I found out he had an emergency and wasn’t going to make it. So I opened up my computer, made a bilingual missing cat flyer with pictures, and caught another bola out of my site to the charcos. (I had really good bola luck, if nothing else) I went to the computer shop to print the flyers, but it was closed because the whole town had no electricity. This is about an hour out of my site and it was around 4:30 in the afternoon. My motorcycle driver took me to another place he thought might be open but it wasn’t. He yelled across the street to the Doña who had the key, told her that I live far away in the hills, and that I needed to print something now. She called for her daughter, who came over, opened up, turned on their diesel generator, and fired up the computer. (Only in the DR! There is just a level of hospitality with some things that you can’t find anywhere else!) I printed out the flyers as well as some other donation request letters for my upcoming youth camp. I thanked them as much as I could, hopped back on the motorcycle and we headed to the charcos.

Now armed with this flyer with pictures and a reward I had upped to 3000 pesos, I was feeling a little optimistic. When I got to the charcos I was told no one had seen anything else, the trap hadn’t caught anything but ants swarming the tuna, and the night guard wouldn’t be there for another hour. I wanted to show him the picture and find out if it was really her who he saw two days ago. So I sat down and talked with the guides. I found the guy who set the trap and we went and re-placed it, and re-armed it with more tuna. At 6 PM the guard showed up, I showed him the flyer, and he told me that was her. He had seen that cat two nights ago and last night at 3 AM. It was settled. I was staying out all night with him until the cat showed up, I would show her a can of open tuna, and that would be it. So once again, I settled down for a bit of waiting. The guides started drinking at their restaurant bar and started to get a little drunk. I was wondering when they would leave and turn off the music to give the cat a chance to come in. But then at 8 PM a guide ran up to me and said he saw a cat off in the cane. I told him to get the guides I had been talking to earlier and go get her. But he said, “No, shes right at the edge of the restaurant. Just come yourself and bring the tuna.” I walked over slowly and there she was, at the edge of the cane field, meowing at the site of me. But she was scared of the guides and music. So we popped open a can, and I went over, called her name(Kitten), and showed her the tuna. She hesitated for a minute but then just ran right up to me and I picked her up! I couldn’t believe it! My heart was going a million beats a minute! I yelled over that I got her (mistake) and all the drunken guides ran towards me yelling and congratulating me and all that. Of course the cat flipped out, scratched the crap out of my arms again, and wriggled out of my hands. I was literally holding with all my strength but didn’t want to bust her rib cage! Anyway I fell to the ground and luckily sat on her. I had one hand on her back and was sitting on her upper body as she tried to get away again. The guides tried to get her pocketbook that was left in the charcos office, but it was locked! It was after hours! So they got a cardboard box and we threw her in. She still half got out, but then we threw that box in a potato sack, and tied it up!

Ahhhhhhh! All the guides went crazy and I had a kung-fu grip on this potato sack while my newly scratched up arms bled down to my elbows. But all I could do was smile and scream along with them while they all congratulated me on finding the cat. To them it was just another crazy thing us gringos do, caring for animals, and I was happier than ever to be the gringo who found the cat after four days of returning with no progress! One of the guides had a camera and the rest gathered around me while he took a picture of the crazily happy gringo holding a potato sack and bleeding from the arms, and the drunk Dominicans around him who were all so happy, drunk, but extremely happy for me.

I had actually found the cat! I got a moto ride up to Todds house, closed all the windows, locked all the doors, shoved shoes in any possible escape holes, and let the cat out of the box and bag. I had extra tuna cans left over so we both ate tuna that night for dinner, and I couldn’t have been happier. Jo called me, assuming her cat was dead and that I must feel awful, and wanted to tell me it was ok, that it wasn’t my fault. But the first words out of my mouth were, “I found your freakin cat!” She couldn’t believe it and I sat there saying it over again and again a couple times until she was completely relieved. She was in the states on vacation and about to go out with friends. She thanked me a million times and then said she was going out. Right before she hung up I heard her yell to her friends, “Rob f…!” It was cut off, but I knew she was telling everyone that the same guy who was probably described previously as the jack@$$ who lost her precious cat had just found it! I crumpled against the wall with the cat and breathed out for the first time in a while. I really breathed. The deep, let go of stress breath that I thought would never come. I found her freaking cat. Sitting there with that little multicolored thing, the whole thing felt so incredibly silly. It was a little cat! And it had completely ruined my life for four days!

This is like five days after "la mierda choco el abanico" as they say. And just want to have it recorded that I feel great. I recently went to another volunteers site on the beach for our 3 month security meeting, talked to a whole bunch of good people, and got my head back on straight. Then I went to the inauguration of another volunteer's aqueduct yesterday and it reminded me why I am here. Everyone was so thankful and it was just an amazing event. And in the volunteers thank-you speach she made reference to MANNNNNNYYYYY problems in the road to completion. Its not all rosy, but in the end I came here because I WANT TO and CAN and WILL help these people get water in their house. Its pretty simple, when you forget about all the bickering and fights and whatnot. Im here to help them out. And they aren't supposed to understand that as simply as I do. And that makes me happy the simplicity of it. I wanna help!

Also, Im about to go to a meeting for the youth camp that Im part of, Celebrando Cibao. I will have to choose two kids to go with me. And that aint easy! I made up an 'application form' that the kids had to fill out and write some essays for. That way they have to work a little bit, and I don't just pick my best buddies. And I got five applications back! So now I get to pick who did the best job to come with me! And what do you know--the "future goals" of two young guys who applied are to become mechanical engineers so they can help people improve the lives of other people! Ha, literally, writing this my eyes just teared up. Its the youth that really matter, and really get me going! It was just an awesome reminder that some people really do want me here and are enjoying my time. And me too!!!!

Over the past two days I have had basically everyone I thought to be close to me shown in a new light. People seem to joke around with me as the token white guy and very few seem to respect me as the engineer I am. I have had some of those closest to me ask me if THEY had to follow the rules I have put upon the entire community. “But I don’t have to follow the rules, right Roberto?!” Then they have seemed insulted when I informed them that the rules apply to everyone. They seem to have assumed that if they got close to me, the rules wouldn’t apply. Since that moment I have noticed a marked change in attitude, and I have been forced to re-evaluate my relationship with everyone. In a situation like this, the Peace Corps, one finds comfort in thinking that they have at least a few people close to them who understand, at least a little, where they are coming from. And now I am realizing that their friendliness may all have been, to some degree, an act. People may be hospitable to me just because they figure it will make it easier for them down the road. A bunch of village ‘yes-men’ and ‘yes-women’. The fact that I, their rich white person, haven’t gotten together money for the aqueduct, no, haven’t even “started work” as they say, and I have been here nine months, tells them I might not know what I’m doing. My halo is wearing off as I struggle to find the green and people realize that I can’t be bought with friendliness. Now I’m just the young white guy who seems to sit in his house all day (healing my ankle) and doesn’t seem to be giving out favors after all. They say be weary of your first friends because they probably won’t turn out to be the best ones. But who would have figured that they could put on the act for 9 months? Live…and learn.

There are two of my projects up on the Peace Corps website right now and you can donate to them over the internet!

One is my community aqueduct that is desperately in need of money. We have been ready for construction for months, but cannot begin without money! Click the link below or the one on the right sidebar to learn about the project or to donate. I am asking for a small portion of the total project cost, just to get a start!

Donate to my Community Aqueduct!

The second is a youth camp that I am involved with. It is scheduled to take place on August 29-31 but will not happen unless all the money requested on the Peace Corps website is donated in time! Click the link below to learn about the project or to donate.

Only a little over a month left to make sure this camp happens! Help!

Donate to "Celebrando Cibao" Leadership and Youth Camp!

With each of these website donation links, the problem is that we will not receive a dime of this money until the full amount requested has been donated. That is to say, don't be bashful! Don't be shy and think that your contribution won't do enough and you shouldn't even donate. A full day of physical labor in the fields with a machete is valued at just over US$7 in my campo. So literally donating enough for a taxi out to the bar or a footlong sub will be equal to a man chopping and sweating all day. We have it a bit easier in the states, spread the wealth!

Thanks guys. Take this chance to donate some modest amount from your life and directly see and read the results of what you donated right here on this blog!

Dancing and playing music...we're learning!

And...look! He's making a video, come here!

Today I went cell phone fishing like I normally do. I typed up a text message, chose the recipient, then hit send and held it up above my head, hoping the ‘Sin Servicio (No Service)’ would change to ‘Claro (Verizon)’ on the screen of my phone. It’s not a quick thing to get signal on my phone. Usually takes about thirty seconds with the phone in the same place to work. Then if I catch signal I need to keep my hand still for another thirty or more seconds to wait for the message to send. If I am lucky enough for that to happen before the screen goes dark, then I wait another thirty seconds or so hoping to get a delivered message receipt. I did all that earlier today while sitting on my hammock, and I felt like my luck was on the up and up. There are very few places in and around my house that have enough signal to send or receive text messages. So it made me incredibly happy! Good day! But then, when I was planning on napping for a while, all I could think of was-If I put my phone back into signal for a little bit will I get a response?! Did the message really get to its recipient? And if it did had they read it yet? In my life in my house, there is not much more exciting than receiving a text message. It is a message from the outside, in English, and it means someone is still thinking about me. Out here in the campo you start to feel forgotten every once in a while. But every day, at some point, I try and drop my DR bought prepaid phone into the small pond of signal outside my house and hope for a big catch.

Feel free to stock the pond-(809) 857-2216

I miss my first language. Just writing this right now makes me feel better. It is now 10:48 PM and I just finished watching a movie on my laptop. I have done so quite a few times while here in the DR and every time I do I forget where I am at some point in the movie. Then the movie ends and the really good feeling I have after listening to spoken English for two hours is interrupted by the realization that no one around me can speak it. More often than anything else, I have pinpointed this as a factor that makes Peace Corps so hard. I just miss English. All those stupid little things you say back and forth with your buddies, or the little accents you use to add more meaning to a joke, or the pace at which you say certain things, all of that is lost in another language. You learn new little jokes and all in a new language. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t fit as well. Kind of how a new shirt can never replace the old beat up one. It doesn’t feel like home. Ha, as much as I have been a traveler since I left for college, and as much as when I am home for brief periods I think about where I can go and what I can do next…I miss home. I really do. And that does not mean that I want to leave here. But it is a new thought for me. That I could miss all of those little things about English I had previously not paid any attention to. I miss MY way of expressing myself. I miss MY language.

I can’t really describe how much my cat has been to me since I have been back. It really is, in the words of a fellow PCV cat owner, “unhealthy” how much he makes me happy. When I went to the US of A I had no choice but to leave my cat with another volunteer, Jo. Couldn’t take him with me. I also had a week of Spanish class right before my trip, and right when I got back Russ was here and I wasn’t going to be around much, so I didn’t pick him up until Russ was leaving. All in all I had not seen my cat for almost a month! And Jo did a great job, even got pretty attached to my little buddy, but I wanted my cat back! And honestly, my first three days back in site have been so much better just because of that little animal. When he follows me around on my crutches, I love it. When he looks at me from 20 feet away and sees me looking back he comes running and, if I didn’t have a cast, ha, I might run towards him. We might make one of those movie hugs where the two people come running together and jump into each other’s arms after years apart. (I know, definitely unhealthy) When he chases cockroaches or lizards, I just get a really deep smile and feel like a proud parent. I always find myself worrying where he is if he’s not just purring in my lap or waiting for me to pet him. I love that little thing, and I really don’t know what I would do without him. Probably be a little miserable…

There are two of my projects up on the Peace Corps website right now and you can donate to them over the internet!

One is my community aqueduct that is desperately in need of money. We have been ready for construction for months, but cannot begin without money! Click the link below or the one on the right sidebar to learn about the project or to donate.

Donate to my Community Aqueduct!

The second is a youth camp that I am involved with. It is scheduled to take place on August 29-31 but will not happen unless all the money requested on the Peace Corps website is donated in time. Click the link below to learn about the project or to donate.

Donate to "Celebrando Cibao" Leadership and Youth Camp!

With each of these website donation links, the problem is that we will not receive a dime of this money before all of that requested has been donated. That is to say, don't be bashful! Don't be shy and think that your contribution won't do enough and you shouldn't even donate. A full day of physical labor in the fields with a machete is valued at just over US$7 in my campo. So literally donating enough for a taxi out to the bar or a footlong sub will be equal to a man chopping and sweating. We have it a bit easier in the states, spread the wealth!

Thanks guys. Take this chance to donate some modest amount from your life and directly see and read the results of what you donated right here on this blog!

So I had a pretty cushy entrance back into the DR from the US. My best friend since kindergarten (yup, we even failed together at our first attempt to complete the first grade) came in on the same flight as me and I got to show him what Peace Corps DR is like. Well, kinda. He spent 10 days here and only two nights in my campo, the way I live most of the time. But it was a great opportunity for me to enjoy the country and we definitely aprovechar'd every day.

The itinerary was this:

Day 1: We flew in after being lucky enough to get seats standby flight after our original one was cancelled.

Day 2: Headed up to a volunteer's site near me to jump down the '27 Waterfalls', then headed into my campo. Bathed in my river at dusk because we got in late. Then almost made Russ gag with boiled plantanes for dinner.Day 3: My Birthday! Just hung out, hiked around the mountains, and ate a mountain of mangoes. Then got surprised with an amazing prepared birthday dinner at Chulo's house. Rice, beans, chicken, salad, tostones (smashed and fried plantanes), soda, and a piece of cake for each of us. Then a night of rum, coke, batchata, and merengue until 12:30 AM. That is late for the campo! And yup, russ danced. That was a great day.

Day 4: Got up, packed up, and headed out of the campo, on foot, through the rivers. Bathed one last time on the way out. Then we dealt with my lost bag from the flight in that had been dropped off at the local fire department. Finally we headed down to the capital to stay in a hostel for the night, before heading west towards an amazing secluded beach to celebrate the fourth with 74 other PCV's.

Day 5: 7 hours of traveling and we were in the town that is the jumping off point for the beach. Had some pizza and hung out with other volunteers.

Day 6: Fourth of July! Early wakeup to get on the back of a truck and get carted in to where we got on a boat that took all us volunteers to the beach. Approximately 2 hours after arriving I jumped off the pier trying to catch a football and landed on my ankle in a way that led to its current state: in a cast. Ha, this was just another ailment to add to the list and it didnt stop us having a great time lazing around the gorgeous beach all day. Then at night headed back to the town and I had an early night with my newly fat ankle. Russ told me stories of rum and batchata in the park with other volunteers and very friendly Dominican girls. I didn't see any of it, so I can't speak for that night, but sounded like a good time.

Day7: A lazy wakeup and then we all got on a guagua that took us all 7 hours back to the capital. The ride was gorgeous along the coast and completely took my mind off the swelling mass attached to my leg. Once again, we were at the hostel that night. Just hanging out and doing a little resting after days of travel.

Day 8: Got up early and went in to the Peace Corps office to see the doctor that told me I should go to the emergency room and get my ankle checked out. So we went. I had an X-ray. No breaks. But they told me I needed to see the orthopedist the next day. I got an appointment and headed out on my crutches. And we were now really close to the downtown area Russ had wanted to see anyway. We shuffled our way through the streets and street vendors, saw some things, met some Dominicans from CT, had some good 'comida criolla', and just lazed around a little bit. Then that night we headed out with some other volunteers to a 'car wash', which is basically an outdoor dancing/drinking site. During the day these places actually wash cars. At night they are packed with batchata-ing Dominicans. I clearly was not in batchata form so we just enjoyed the music and watched other volunteers pick up Dominican girls for dance partners.

Day 9: Got up early again so I could go figure out some finance things at the Peace Corps office and also get my cat back! It was being watched by another volunteer, Jo, who's cat is my cat's biological sister! She didn't want to give him back, seriously, but I got him back and it was so great to see him. I realllly missed my cat. Thanks for letting me have him back! So then i went to the orthopedist, who promptly decided that I had an overabused ligament in my ankle that needed to be isolated. Before I knew it I was walking out with my left sandle in my hand and a cast on my foot! Ha, only me! So then I headed back to the office and proceeded to have everyone look at me, laugh, then ask "Roooob, what happened now!?" I definitely have garnered the most injured award as far as my Peace Corps group goes. Then we quickly gathered our stuff (well, Russ gathered all the stuff and I got on my crutches) and we got in a taxi towards a bus line to take us up to the city Russ would fly out of the next day. The first bus didn't allow animals so we got another taxi to the second company, and had luck. Well, it wasn't lucky that Llave pee'd himself in his cat box and I tried to clean him and his box in the dirty public stall of the bus station right before it left, but he was allowed on. So that was lucky. Gotta take satisfaction out of the small successes right? So about 2.5 hours later and numerous phonecalls to other PCV's that helped me find a vet that would take Llave for the night, we got off the bus and headed towards another hostel. After about 5 blocks of now-very-sore-armpit-crutch-walking on my part and two-backpack-plus-a-cat-box-in-one-hand walking for Russ, we got to the hostel! And we were greeted with all kinds of jokes/cutdowns/and general comments about my constant injuries and sicknesses from awaiting volunteers. The previous night there had been a party that was supposed to celebrate my birthday as well as all other July birthdays, but obviously I couldnt make it. So most of them stayed! After a little trouble we found a good vet, dropped off Llave, and got pizza for dinner, with a side of homemade guacamole from fresh street-bought avocados. Then, to top off the whole trip, Dave, the owner of the hostel, took us all out in his car to a Monday-night jazz lounge! It was amazing. I felt like I was back in the US and the artists were all really talented. What a way to cap off the trip. We were driven back to the hostel by Dave, and popped in a late-night movie. I went in and out of sleeping on the couch in front of the movie, and then finally sleep got me. Long day, but all went really well!

Day 10: We got up, called a taxi, and drove to the airport. Of course, Russ's flight was delayed 2 hours and he still has an hour to wait more in the aiport at the writing of this blog. But I dropped him off, said I wanted to see him back here again, and he took off into the airport. Thanks for coming buddy. It was coold hanging out after so many years apart. I hope you enjoyed it, learned a little spanish, and maybe got a little travel bug in you. (even though im sure you felt like this kid below)

It was an amazing testament to what can be accomplished in 10 days as long as you stay flexible. You gotta roll with the punches. I, unfortunately, rolled my ankle. Not exactly the same, but now I definitely am rolling with the punches. Ha, all in all, just another day in the DR and the unexpected problems that arise.

I am happy to be back, but feel like I just got here. The first day without Russ feels like the first day here, at least mentally. Im back on my own, and that gives me mixed feelings. Even though my spanish has come along since swearing into the Peace Corps, I know I cannot begin to relate my thoughts and feelings in entirety to the campesinos I live with. Seeing the Dominicans at the jazz lounge made me realize that I am not living like everyone in this country. I am living like the poorest. I guess I never completely thought about that. I knew I was living poor, but never thought about the fact that a lot of people in this country live fairly normal first-world lives. Makes me feel a little offended, as if they might look down on me as the homeless are seen in the states. Its a feeling that is extremely personal, and depressing. But then I realize that I chose to do this and it is just a little experiment for me. I will leave back to 'normal' life in a year and a half. I then feel so much sadder. The people i live with won't ever leave their life here. Most kids in my campo won't have much opportunity to do or be much, just because they were born into it. Its sad. Its depressing. And it makes me extremely scared to be in charge of bringing them water. It makes me question if this idea of 'development' will bring about any real change in their lives. And what difference will piped water really make in the large scheme of things.

And with all these mixed emotions and a fiberglass foot I will ride a motorcycle back into my community this afternoon. With my cat in my hand. And I know from experience that each day will soften my doubts and worries, but still, the doubts and worries are with me. Ha, I guess thats what I signed up for. No verdad?

I have been sending mass emails to about a hundred family and friends for the first nine months that I have been in country, but I finally broke down and made a blog. I have been checking in on other volunteer blogs periodically and was pretty impressed. So now I have one!

Just in case a new reader comes along, or maybe just a refresh for everyone: I am a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic and I have been living in my small village along a river for six months now. My job is "bring water" to these people and improve their basic hygiene . So far I have made a community map, completed a house-by-house census, formed and organized a "Water Committee", completed the technical study portion of the water pipeline I hope to construct with the community, and have sent out numerous grant applications and requests for donations. We haven't had extremely good luck with these grants, and are still waiting for money so we can begin with the construction. I have also received donations and built two VIP pit latrines which replaced the most unsanitary of latrines in my village.

Right now I am back in the United States preparing to return tomorrow back to the land of humidity and batchata. My sister was married last weekend and I was a groomsman in the wedding. I was granted leave for two weeks and itt was an amazing time. I most definitely took advantage of all the amazing food! As weird as it sounds though, I really do miss yuca and fried salami. I guess I am becoming a little Dominican.

I also spent a lot of time in the US driving around and listening to Reggaeton or pretty much any Spanish radio station. I definitely miss Spanish. I definitely miss the heat that I was so eager and excited to leave for a couple weeks. And most of all, I miss the people. My community is full of MY people. I am there to try and help them develop a little over the next two years, but they have made it extremely clear that they are there for me for the rest of my life. I knew that they were being serious, but their promises became a little more real when I was eating pizza at Sally's Apizza (est. 1938-best pizza in America) last week and I received a phone call from Chulo, the manager of my village general store, and quite arguably one of my best friends there. Chulo is around fifty years old but was so excited to get in touch with me and then pass me around to the village carpenter and then my host-Dad from the first three months when I was living with my host-family. All of these men I talked to were at least fifteen years older than me, but it was obvious that they were now my friends. And knowing that they were paying dearly with what little money they had for the phone call, I was not surprised when the call abruptly ended in the middle of a sentence from host-Dad. Their phone card had run out of money. That was when it hit me that they were spending good money just to check in on their "voluntario" in the US, and I was humbled.

As much as I love the United States and my family and friends, the DR is where I need to be right now, and I am excited to head back. I am making another family, in Spanish, and I can't wait to see them all again. I am starting this blog after a lot of the rough times in the Peace Corps where I questioned why I was there and what real good I could do. Therefore, this blog might not give a completely accurate narrative of a full term of service, but it will definitely describe what Peace Corps life can bring if you just stick it out through those first couple difficult months of service.

Enjoy!