30 March 2006

motoconcho fiesta

Motoconcho craziness that I´ve seen recently (those are the motorbikes that take people around wherever they need to go): 1. Passenger with a huge leg cast sticking straight out to the left like a turn signal. Cast was glistening white in the sun. Crutches were crammed in between her, her friend, and the driver. 2. In front of the elementary school, a group of 5 people on the same motorbike. That included the driver, the dad, the mom, and two kids in their uniforms. Nobody fell off as far as I could see. 3. In front of our house puttered by one the other day with an older lady on the back, not holding onto the driver or her seat under her, but with a goat laying across her lap. Its legs were tied together and it was most definitely dead and headed for the cooking pot. . . mmmm, chivo.

25 March 2006

yolas and mud pies

I was under the impression that the beach we visited last weekend was close to perfect. The only problem I could see is that for surfers out there, the waves are wimpy. However, in a discussion this week, I discovered that the beach we went to is on the top 10 list in the world of human trafficking takeoff points. Along with that statistic is the fact that it's also a prime drug trafficking departure spot. Apparently, many people fly into Santo Domingo and after landing go straight to Miches (in addition to the people from the DR). From there, they take off in yolas, or little made-on-location boats to Puerto Rico. I've been able to talk to a few guys who have made the trip in yolas to Puerto Rico and to the US by plane after that, and it's a tough process. And usually more expensive than the money immigrants from south of the border have to spend to get into the country. People can die fairly easily even though it's a short trip, and there's always the threat of getting caught in the ocean or on land, and deported. Pretty crazy emigration situation. . .

To get to the beach, you do have to drive (or walk) down a long winding dirt road through palm trees and rice paddies, with no signs to direct anyone to the beach; it is super isolated. Our friend who drove us lost his keys while we were there for a few hours, and I'm glad we didn't have to end up spending the night there! We only found them buried deep in the sand after half-heartedly helping him look a few times.

On a lighter note, there were a couple little pigs who came to visit while we were there. And I´m not referring to the pasty and heavy Europeans there on vaction :)

This week was just a normal week here in El Seibo: we have internships at our various computer centers, Spanish classes, and other sessions, along with family and neighbor time outside of classes. The classes that my partner and I help teach have kids ages 10 through 21 in the same class, which makes things interesting. Jenny and I continue to have our runs through the cow pastures at the edge of our neighborhood, and sometimes we get scared because we accidentally make the cows run away from us. We run pretty close to them, but it's wonderful to get out of the town and into the open. The baseball field boys that we have to run past at the beginning yell Jennifer Lopez and I love you when we go past to get into the open fields.

I usually walk the same way to my Spanish class at my friend´s house, and there are always people out staring at me as I walk -- gringos in the country here are always a source of interest. And staring or yelling comments is completely ordinary. This week there were four little kids gathered who lined up when they saw me coming down their dirt street, and I heard them saying, "Uno, dos, tres" and then I here a chorus of "Good morning!" directed at me. They´d been preparing to say hi to me! I stopped and chatted for a little bit, and now I have some new friends to wave to on my way to class.

21 March 2006

picture link

Until I get enough time online to figure out how to add this as a sidebar link, here is a link to the pictures that I have online so far. . . I forgot to mention in my last blog that we went to the most beautiful beach ever on Saturday! http://www.flickr.com/photos/50909747@N00/

19 March 2006

encounters with a slingshot

Here we are in El Seybo, on the dryer and hotter side of the island but much closer to inspiring hills that are almost as big as mountains! This week has been a little on the stressful side because of the move: it's hard to get used to moving in with another new family. Although I should not be complaining about my new family at all: it's a house mostly of women who are all really fun. I have three sisters, and two have older boyfriends (think 21/30 and 17/34!!!). My mom has a clothing store that she runs out of a room in the house, so there's always all sorts of people coming in and out, and it's never dull. One of them just got a new baby puppy that is really cute but pees everywhere. We also have a 6 year old boy in the house who is somebody's son, and a 6 month old baby, one of the sister's. The little boy has a neighbor friend who is 6 and sticks to my side like glue. She wants to go running with me and says she can run for 30 minutes. They brought out a towel and copied me when I was doing yoga the other day! The little girl can border on very annoying, especially when she touches me so much and continues to honk my nose, even after I've asked her why she does it: maybe because it's red and grabbable?

On Thursday, the first bought of sickness really hit our group: three of our group of 8 were really sick. The worst part is that some of them don't have running water, so every time they would get sick, they would have to go outside, fill a bucket, and lug it inside to manually flush the toilet! I'm still hoping nothing happens to me anytime soon. . .

My friend Jenny and I have gone running together and found a nice big cow pasture that's been well-traversed and has some foot paths running through it. After a while on our first run, we noticed rocks flying at us and looked up to discover some kids with a slingshot aiming at us! I yelled at them to not throw rocks, and we kept running. On our way back they decided to be more daring and ran after us with the slingshot. All I could think of were the headlines: Stupid Runner's Body Found in Cow Pasture. We decided to confront them, and had a little conversation with the group of three boys who were surprised we would come and talk to them victory? Later on in that run and in runs afterward, various groups of boys have started to run with us if we happen to pass them, always kids who get tired pretty quickly. They do have feet of steel, though, running through hay like it doesn't hurt their sandaled feet and paying no attention to the cow patties dotting the fields!

Friday night I got a new sharer of my house: my friend Jenny, who needed to move. Her house was under construction and had a Se vende sign painted on the front (for sale). She kept interrupting her family's prayer time (some type of Evangelist) which seemed to be all the time. And there were no doors or curtains on the bedrooms or bathroom, which was a small problem when she was bathing. There was a little chalkboard to put in front of the bathroom door, that we've decided is to announce the presence of someone in the bathroom!

My personal success of the week: mastering the bucket shower. In Santo Domingo, I got lucky my family there has a tinaco (water tank) on the roof, and the little pipe goes into the bathroom window so that when there's no water (most of the time there), you just take a sort of pipe shower, turning the water on as you need it. Here there's running water but no shower head, so I take a bucket instead. Definitely not as hard as I expected. And so far I haven't seen many floaties in the big water bucket that other people have talked about: so far, so good!

11 March 2006

cock fighting and dulces

This was our last week at the training center here in Santo Domingo before we split up for technical training in different regions around the country. My group of information technology is going to El Seybo in the east of the country, which is full of sugarcane fields. It looks like my host family there is going to have a lot of people living in the house, including a six month old baby. FYI my address will stay the same.

I’m curious what it will be like to be in a school type of setting. After visiting a couple schools here and talking with volunteers about schools, the word frustrating arises most often. It really is amazing to see how different the schools are here from the US: school tandas, or sessions, only last four hours. The schools offer a morning and afternoon tanda, and some offer a night one as well (but each kid only goes to one). Oh, and each public school class can have 50 or 60 kids in it. The tandas never start on time, they have a recess that is at least 20 minutes in the middle, and everyone almost always gets out early -- it just depends how much. So kids here are looking at around 3 contact hours of class a day, and so far I have yet to see how they learn everything with the teacher writing something on the board for them to copy or the kids just running around. Also, if the teachers have a meeting during the school day or need to run out and get groceries or anything, they just leave their class to go wild. It looks like permanent summer vacation. The teachers have little motivation because they almost can’t ever get fired (until after elections when power changes hands in the government), and only get hired because of their political affiliations anyway. Obviously, there are good and bad teachers everywhere, but this is on a completely different level.

This week we had a potluck lunch where each language class was assigned a couple dishes to bring that are typical here, and my partner and I ended up with dulce de coco con batata. It sounded a little sketch, since it’s supposed to be a dessert and it’s primary two ingredients are coconut and batata, which is sort of similar to a sweet potato. My partner Adam and I took longer than 3 hours to make this dessert, it was so labor-intensive! My host dad helped by machete-ing the coconut shell off, but then we still had to grate them, cook the batatas and coco forever, and make a caramel mixture to coat them. My neighbor Ariani ended up saving us by helping out on the complicated parts, and it turned out pretty well in the end, receiving the most compliments from the Dominicans that work at the training center. It was amazing to see how much sugar went into this dish: I think by the end we had added two whole pounds. It was good that we made more than we needed, though, because as the word spread, a steady trickle of extended family that lives around here came to have some!

When we went together to the market to shop for our ingredients, our language teacher Danny took us to his house, where he showed us all his 17 cocks that he raises and fights occasionally. His little 5 year old son helped show us, and we all held one of them that was missing an eye from a fight a few weeks ago. He let a couple people swing two back and forth at each other and let them fight a little bit, which was wild! Their neck feathers ruffle up like dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and they don’t just sit around; they go at each other viciously! Earlier in the week, he had been robbed of one of his hens that produces good fighters, along with her two chicks. By some sort of coincidence, his friend is a police officer and bought them back from some guy in the street for only 60 pesos. When their stories coincided, Danny got his missing hens back! Apparently the criminal didn’t know the hen was worth a lot of money. . .

Last night I threw a party for everyone in our training group, since it was the last time we’ll be together for a long time. We have the perfect patio in back, surrounded by a bunch of our families houses, and plastic chairs appeared like magic as people showed up. By the end of the party later, the ratio had changed from mostly Americans to mostly Dominicans, and there was much more merengue dancing than earlier! The 50 something year old in our group, Ed, was voted most likely to become a tigre and marry a Dominican woman -- tigre being either somebody really good at something, like “He’s a tigre at playing the guitar” or tigre referring to good-for-nothings who like to steal and hang out on corners drinking. I was voted most likely to become Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (the person from the group that stays for a third year to be in charge of a program or two) -- which I have no desire to do; I think it came about after I made the comment over lunch that I was born to be a camp counselor :)

Stay tuned for new adventures from the east side!

07 March 2006

Another venture into the wild

My assignment this weekend: go visit my assigned real life Peace Corps Volunteer in her own community. Get there on my own with no assistance from anybody, explore her community with her, and get to know the real side of the PC story.

Mission completed. . . with a fun twist!

Step one -- the first leg of the journey: I made it to Esperanza to visit my volunteer on Thursday afternoon as planned, after a couple packed guaguas and a pretty normal bus for US standards. Esperanza was a dusty town about the size of my hometown Topeka in the middle of the Cibao, or breadbasket region of the country surrounded by mountain vistas. This volunteer’s computer lab at the school has internet, which we new volunteers probably are not going to have in our labs that we’re assigned to this round. After a couple days there, we worked on our weekend plans and got invited to a little volunteer despedida, or goodbye sort of party for a couple people finishing up their couple years. I decided to go and meet some more people even though my volunteer couldn’t (she was waiting for her fiance to visit her).

Step two -- the journey gets exciting: I took off early Saturday morning to another volunteer’s community about an hour away, and from there we traveled together a couple hours to a place called Loma de Cabrera, which is an absolutely gorgeous mountain pueblo in the Northwest, close to the Hatian border. To get to our final destination (Rio Limpio) we paid a pickup truck to take us the last hour and a half of unpaved mountain roads to the ecotourism center where everyone else already was. This truck ride was wild! There were 12 people crammed into half the bed of the pickup; the other half was full of goods and bags of stuff like rice. A little girl fell asleep crouched down on my foot, which promptly fell asleep for the 40 minutes she stayed there. We drove through the most beautiful part of this country I’ve seen so far, full of dwellings speckled around the mountains, all sorts of little streams and rivers, and much more. We saw lots of baby goats, had to wait for a woman to walk her pig across the road, accidentally caused a mini stampede of some cows being herded along the road, and drove by lots of naked kids playing by their houses. All the while hoping the truck wouldn’t pitch anyone off the side by accident.

Step three -- ecotourism: Got to meet a bunch of volunteers, some of them with their visiting trainees. We were paying 100 pesos a night to bunk at this campy sort of lodge, which is around 3 US dollars if you convert. The weather and situation were both really cool, and after exploring a little bit, we had a fun dinner with ended in dancing with a bunch of people to a typical merengue/bachata band that showed up. For my friends from Hawaii this summer, IDC (Interpretive Dance Challenge) was played and loved. The stars: so bright! I would love to be placed in the mountains, even if the people there don’t have electricity or other stuff. We’ll see, though; with IT, sites could be lacking there.

Step four -- the journey home: Sunday was a rainy day after the clouds moved in onto us, and so our back-of-the-pickup ride back to Loma was not an especially happy one as we got soaked and cold. We did get to see a huge rainbow, though. All in all, this weekend was a breath of fresh air after living in the barrios of Santo Domingo. Did we really have to come back?

Funny times: Sunday morning, a couple random Dominican men were in our cabin to use our bathrooms, and it turns out they had stayed in the locked room that was in our cabin without our knowing. We had just figured that the mattress that disappeared before we went to bed was removed by the staff for some unknown reason. . .

The weather: So many of you have been asking about the weather, and I keep forgetting to write about it. I personally think it’s perfect. I don’t know the exact temps, but I’d say the days are hot (mid or low 80s) and usually sunny, and the nights are still warm enough to sleep with only a sheet and a fan going. When I run, it’s either early morning or at 6:00 when it’s cooler (sun sets around 7:00). When we were in the mountains just now, the temps were cold -- probably low 60s at night, and mid 70s in the day. And as for the beach that I’ve been to, it was nice and clear blue with lots of palm trees, but not many waves at all. And my friends dragged me out of the water as they kept getting bit by little things in the water that I wasn’t getting bit by and none of us could see. I still think it was in their imagination!

One more thing. If anyone sends packages, DO NOT send boxes or anything other than envelopes, because it ends up costing more money for everyone and word on the street is that most boxes don’t even make it.

01 March 2006

The Guaguas and MORE

I have to spend a minute explaining about the guaguas here, which is my favorite way to take public transportation so far. Of course, we’re about to learn how to ride on the back of a motorcycle tomorrow for the times we‘re in the middle of the country with no other transportation options, so my opinions may change soon. My helmet is pretty slick, all beautiful shiny blue with a couple white stripes. I’ll have time this weekend to put up a picture of it :)
The guaguas here are like the regular big busses, but instead of being big and stopping at designated spots, they go on their routes and stop for anyone that is waiting anywhere or for any passenger that wants to get off. They’re like really very long vans, and have usually 4 or 5 seats across, including the one that folds down in the aisle, and around 14 rows. Anyway, they fill up to the brim, and the whole time the cobrador (the guy that hangs out the side calling out the route to the people waiting) keeps track of where every single passenger is going, who still needs to pay and how much, and where everyone is supposed to be sitting depending on their destination. One of the favorite places I’ve ridden is squashed into the front seat with a few others, because you can see exactly where you’re going (and how many near-accidents every car on the road comes close to having!). It’s fairly inexpensive, with the main guaguas going pretty far for 10 to 13 pesos, which is about 30 or 40 cents in US dollars.
A few rides ago, there was a group of around 6 of us on one guagua, and every time we approached people waiting, his cries included “Las Americas!” We thought he was advertising the fact that a bunch of Americans were riding this guagua, since we get quite a bit of attention anywhere we go or any guagua we get on, and were pretty amused to be the freak show of the day. When we asked around later, though, it turns out the route we were on continues onto a hospital that’s called the hospital of the americas, which the cobradores shorten. . . so really we weren’t quite special enough to deserve the strange attention we thought we were attracting!

Enough about guaguas: we had the wildest experience this weekend that was completely unexpected. As planned, I headed to Boca Chica beach this Saturday with a couple girls and a host family of one of them: the little girls were so excited to go. It was a nice beach, but the best part was the beautiful Caribbean water and just being at the beach in February!
While we were at the beach, we made some new friends who we chatted with a good part of the day. They eventually invited us to go with them to celebrate Carnaval on a tour bus sort of thing on Sunday, and we decided to take them up on the offer since it only comes once a year.
The tour left at 8:30 the next morning, and took us to La Vega a couple hours away. Carnaval was madness! Most people on the bus had the loudest plastic horns I’ve ever heard, and so they played those nonstop. Even the rest stop on the way was a huge party, with big drums appearing out of nowhere and a huge dance party forming in the parking lot and inside by the pizza and sandwich sellers. When we actually got there, we danced at different sort of amphitheater places and eventually headed to the main parade. There was music coming from everywhere, and it was so loud that my ears are still ringing three days later! The costumes were amazing, but what we didn’t know is that in these parades, instead of giving out candy like in the US, the people dressed up give out spankings. With what I found out is a pig’s bladder covered in cloth that’s tied to a stick. They strike without warning, and if you try to escape, good luck! It’s actually very painful, and I think I will be bruised on my behind for a while. . .
Monday was Independence Day here, and so nobody had school or work. I went with my host parents to the market in a nearby barrio, and we got all sorts of good fruits and veggies. My least favorite stall was the butcher’s where the huge carcasses hang in the back of the little stall until the customer tells what part they want. The butchers are the same ones who carve the animals up as well as take the money and give change, even with their hands still covered in blood. I’m glad I don’t eat meat, with all the flies hanging around the dead stuff.
We also went to the regular grocery store, where there was actually one whole side of an aisle dedicated to canned meat like tuna and sardines. People here also love to eat salami, especially if it’s fried on top of mashed platanos: I think all the non-vegetarians in our training group eat some form of salami at least once a day!
Later in the day my host parents took me and their 4 year old grandson down to the Malecon (sea walk) to see the end of the military parade and just hang out. We drove by a beautiful park in the city that alone made me change my mind about the level of beauty in the city. The cousin Brian has an endless supply of energy and danced I think almost the entire couple hours we hung out! On the way home, it was only 9:30, so we stopped by Carrefour, which is sort of like a Super Walmart. I had been in Prague, but everyone here seems to be obsessed with it, and my host family really wanted me to see it.
Stay tuned for an update from Mao/La Cruce de Esperanza, where I’m headed on Thursday to visit a current volunteer there!