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.