Parasite pal?

I have been considering my methods for a time now of accepting various glasses of juice in all sorts of different houses without any questions. The problem is that when you go to visit a house here, they offer coffee, soda, or juice to almost any special guest. I don’t drink either of the first two, and already feel difficult enough without any more comments, and so accept the juice. That would be fine, except for the fact that I’ve discovered through my community diagnostic that almost every family drinks not bottled or boiled water, but rainwater. Or “what God sends us,” as most put it.

Which leads to my current situation: I think I’m sick with an amoeba. And everyone that knows about my diarrhea and occasional stomach aches which arrived over a week ago has agreed that I do as well. Luckily I can pretty easily control the symptoms that I just mentioned by a bland diet and not much oil (ok, that’s sort of hard here with my oil-happy family cooking for me). But if I want to know for sure that I do have this parasite and get it out of my system, I have to trek on down to the capital and give a couple poop samples and then wait for them to get analyzed. At the current moment, I prefer trying the home remedy teas and lemon water, and the next time I make it down to the capital I can get it checked out. Yuck. At least I’m never all alone, right?

I’m hoping and wishing and praying with all my might that the camp we’re having next week goes off well. There are about 65 kids signed up. We’ve had our counselor training sessions, and they’re excited and prepared. The only real problem that we are encountering is that I budgeted just a couple pesos per kid per day for water and bread for a little snack, since we’re just meeting in the morning till noon. I’ve gotten lots of little comments about how horrible it is to make the children FAST, but never paid much attention to the comments until Monday when all ten counselors decided that it would not work to just give bread and water, and put a juice-making schedule together. The reason: the kids will not come back after the first day if we don’t give them something better! Then they gave me a Dominican saying that “Comer es primero,” which is roughly in English “Eating comes first.” I never realized it was such a serious situation I’d gotten us into until that moment when the counselors confronted me!

I’m still house-hunting here to hopefully move out in the first part of August. It’s harder than expected! There are quite a few empty houses around, but finding a house with close neighbors, good neighbors, and that isn’t too big or falling apart at the seams is a different question. I have a couple small leads, including a house in the little street right next to the church. Which, although there are always a certain type of crazies associated with any church, being so close could keep away a different type of crazy here in town.

Peaje season

Fundraising for our stolen inversores is under way, with the help of my club of kids who are super interested in computers. They're helping me with my community diagnostics and now with fundraising, and are just the best bunch of high schoolers. I feel bad for them, because they just want to do computer stuff, and we can't yet.

The fundraiser they chose to do was a peaje, which is like the Dominican version of the firefighters holding boots at intersections. We had to jump through a million hoops to get permission to do the peaje to begin with, and then we made some signs telling the cause and got a rope and money pouch together. All Saturday we stood out on the highway that leads into the city at a key shady location, and stopped cars to get them to give us money. I had no idea why the fundraiser sounded so appealing to these kids, but it turned out well, and we made quite a bit of money. One guy even gave us an American dollar :) The trick to the peaje is that you have to put the rope down when motorcycles are coming, because we didn't want to create any injuries, and it took lots of care since the majority of vehicles are motores! The only low point was the dust, that kicked up quite a bit since they're redoing the highway, and when the heavy afternoon rain came and ruined all our signs. The kids had fun, though, and want to do another one soon!

We'll see what surprises are awaiting me when I get back to my home from being in the capital last night and today. Ambrosia and I came in to get prescriptions filled and run other errands, and are headed back soon. But last time we went to the beach, I got back and knew that somebody had slept in my bed. Which is not a big deal, but then when I was putting up my mosquitero later that night, I found under the bed a vasinilla (sp?), or Dominican chamber pot, that was full to the brim of pee. I knew it was my host mom's -- she's the only one that still uses one instead of walking to the bathroom (I know because our walls don't go to the ceilings, and you can hear any little noise from any of the rooms). I was a little grossed out and sort of upset, but decided that I would just laugh it off and sort of smiled and walked out and through the living room past the mom and her son, saying, "I found a surprise under my bed!" The host mom, instead of laughing along with me, tried to say that it was her granddaugher and that she must have done it when she was making the bed (that I had already made?). That was more annoying that she tried to lie to me instead of just mentioning she'd slept in my bed! But only a few more weeks there. . . banking on the hope that I'll find a house soon.

Esta noche de travesura

Just now I am recovering from a week of parties, and here tomorrow is the 4th of July. Obviously not such a widely-celebrated holiday here in the Dominican Republic, but a few of us are getting together a couple of pueblos over to celebrate in some yet-to-be-determined American way. The parties I went to last week varied from a surprise birthday party to an elementary school teacher trip to a big pool in Santiago – complete with water slides! – to the big school year end bash of all the teachers in the district. That party was perhaps the most fun, and it was definitely the most dancing. It ran from before 11 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon, with the dancing beginning before noon. I got complimented on my dancing, even though I dance like a normal person as far as I can tell, and a few people commented that I don’t dance like an American. That’s good, I suppose! Now I just need to brush up on my salsa to add to the merengue and bachata ever present, be it in clubs, colmados, or on the radio. I was reflecting the other day after my run how much I’ve grown to love dancing merengue and bachata for some reason, and how sad it would be if I ever live somewhere that I can’t dance them when I’m old and gray. Probably not the most pressing issue I should be worrying about, but there you have it.

The pigs have done it again. Why is it they are so gross yet so fascinating? Yesterday a neighbor came over, concerned about a missing pig some of our family was keeping an eye out for. He thought it might have fallen down a hole, and the hole turned out to be a huge deep pit behind the pigpen that is the drainage ditch for all the pig waste, and is covered pretty well with wood and sticks. Sure enough, the four-footed escapee had somehow fallen into the pit and was paddling around in the muck. It miraculously hadn’t drowned, and its white eyes looked up at us, wondering what was happening. After we stood around for a while thinking about what to do, the inevitable happened: one of the guys got the ladder out and descended into the pit. Into the muck. The poo. The slime. The disgustingness. He changed right before going down into a newly-made pair of cutoff shorts from pants of a skinnier person, which was fairly hilarious, but I just felt too bad for the guy. All the other men grabbed parts of the rope that David had tied around the pig to pull it out, and on the first try came really close to choking the poor thing. All this time I was thanking the Lord for the inflexible gender roles in this country that dictated that men would fix this horrible situation, and it was completely acceptable for me to be present without helping! The second pull was the charm, and that squealing pig was pulled out with the strength of five men. In my opinion, this happenstance was just one more reason that pigs are not worth the effort and smell.