Schooltime Serenading

Some events and reflexions on the past week:

1. I followed a group of boys including my host brother to the rooster house where they keep their fighting cocks, and was amazed to see how they spend a lot of their time with them: giving them baths. Yes, bathing roosters! Which they say also massages the animal. To prepare it to fight better.

2. I’ve decided that I will only be killing cockroaches from here on out, because the other creepy crawlies around here aren’t too annoying and do some sort of good – the spiders may be big, but they eat other insects; the lizards eat a bunch of flies and maybe mosquitoes too; the frogs make good music even if it drowns out the other person you may be talking to in the room; and finally, the ants are way too numerous to do anything to!

3. I’m still puzzled how and when the kids here learn anything in school. While observing some classes in the high school last week, I witnessed a few interesting things. The kids got out of class two hours early (and it only goes from 2-6 anyway) a couple days last week, mainly because it had started to rain. In the classes themselves, one class I sat in on recited their homework student by student for points, which was exactly as they had copied it from the board to memorize at home. While one student was reciting, the class was abuzz with all the other students murmuring their piece to better memorize it. I observed an art class that started out with homework stuff in a similar manner, and then because it was a Friday and I was observing, the teacher sang me two songs. This was followed by the students singing me a reggaeton song. I do like the teachers a lot, though – they’re a very friendly bunch.

4. I have gone to two hora santas in the last week here and one in Santo Domingo the week before, which is in English a holy hour. When people die here, their families and friends get together and pray for an hour for the week or so following their death, and then once a month for the first few months, and then once a year for something like seven years. After the prayers, people are still gathered and the family then comes around to all the guests and hands out treats: usually juice, some sort of cupcake or snack like arroz con leche, and a couple pieces of candy. It feels so strange to me to go immediately from the mother or sister or wife or daughter wailing to eating some sweets and hanging out like at a little party.

5. I got invited to go with the sophomore that had me over to her house the other day to go out on Sunday night. That’s the going out night here more than any other night of the week. I couldn’t think of what to tell her, but couldn’t imagine a night hanging out at the park with all the teenagers running around socializing, so said that I couldn’t. I think all the high school students think that I’m their age and am there to be their best friend. . . don’t quite know what I’m going to do about that yet, but I have some time to think about it.

6. A typical day so far while I prepare to do my community diagnostic in these first three months to figure out what the community needs/wants. I wake up and exercise or run, shower or bucket bath depending on how much water there is, and try to motivate myself to get out the door by 9 or 9:30. At this time everybody in the community is doing work like normal people, either at their job or around the house, but my job right now is to get to know people in the community so they trust me by the time I do interviews with them. I walk around, down the street, trying to go a different route each day, and hoping that somebody outside will say hi. Usually if I ask them how they are, they invite me in to the front porch to chat for a little bit. Sometimes we have a great conversation, especially if there are lots of family members around or if there’s a big talker among them. Other times the conversation lulls and we just sort of look around and sit a little bit longer. I eat at home the big meal of the day, and when we can’t move from eating so many rice, beans, and veggies (in my case), we sit around and listen to a radio program at 1:00 that has dramatic voices and is called something like Rabiosa Santa Maria. I then set out in the afternoon for either the high school or one of the elementary schools around to check things out and do a little chatting with the teachers or checking out of the computer lab or whatever happens to come up. In the night we usually hang out on the front porch chatting or reading; it’s much quieter here in the country than in the city!

7. Better than Slimfast? Almost every volunteer here has lost some weight, ranging from one or two pounds to more than 20! From the first two and a half months, I know that I personally had somehow lost more than 10. How, I have no idea. Every day at lunch, like I mentioned, I eat more than I can believe! Not only that, but I am definitely eating more oil than ever before in my life – everybody adds quite a bit to even the rice, and all of us have acquired a taste for fried foods such as tostones (fried plantains) and arepitas (fried cassava or corn flour mixture). One theory is that we don’t eat any processed food, really. And I know that I for one hate the taste of all the cheese here, so I never eat anything with cheese in it and very rarely anything with milk. Another interesting thing is that the IT group lost more weight than the other groups, beating out even agroforestry, I believe. Of course, they were building muscles out there in the fields while we were just strengthening our finger muscles. . . We’ll see if my weight holds steady here in the campo with my host mom always pushing me to eat more even after I’ve eaten more than my fill. Fortunately, I have a will of steel when I need to.