Coffee, cake, and camp

I’ve started to drink coffee. I’m not completely sure how it happened, but one day instead of refusing it, I decided to try the miniature cup somebody handed me. And I liked it. Here people serve the coffee with sugar – a lot – with no milk, and in very small amounts. So that’s the new change in my life!

On my birthday, I thought nothing out of the ordinary would happen. However, I got lots of good phone calls and messages from all of my friends! In church in the morning, the announcements person had everyone clap for my birthday: a little embarrassing. Even more embarrassing was when the priest talked about what a good person I was for a couple minutes. In the evening, one of my high school kids from the computer club had me come over to borrow my camera, and he’d arranged a surprise party for me with the high school kids from the area! My first surprise party! There was dancing, good music, a fun game, and an awesome cake. And people my own age showed up too, which was fun. What started out as a rainy and inside kind of day turned out to be just wonderful.

Computer camp is in full swing in La Joya. I decided that the kids in my computer club hadn’t gotten the whole summer on the computers, and since we aren’t opening up the center til mid-September, I wanted to give them sort of an intense and fun intro to computers. Each day we have a different theme, such as games, or networking, or PowerPoint, or Photoshop. It’s very fun, and every day last week when we ended at noon we played Capture the Flag in the high school grounds. Hembras vs. Varones (Girls vs. Boys). It’s turned into a huge competition, with a little bit of trickery going on. At least I can be satisfied that if I never make any other differences here in the DR, I will have introduced an awesome game to a good set of people to pass it on :)

Movin' on out

This past week was our three-month IST, or in-service training. Which meant almost a whole week in the capital (not my favorite spot for the heat, trash, size, and expensiveness). And it meant that we spent three of those days with project partners that we invited to the training, to help us present our community diagnostics and to collaborate to make a year plan. I got pretty enthused about our year plan, and now all we need is for the electricity to be able to enter our center. I thought everything had been resolved when the guys put the inversor in our lab, but it turned out the electricity is entering the liceo (high school) too strongly, and so it's too dangerous to use the inversor or computers still. So we're still immobilized, and have to be patient and wait for it to get taken care of. Waiting is a fact of life here!

My most exciting news from the past couple of weeks is that I think I've found a house. Rather, the priest has found it for me. It's an old casa de campo that people built to get out of the city and hang out with family for a while, and the priest is always over at the neighbor's house who owns it. It's very cute and just needs some things to be taken care of, such as adding a couple doors, repairing one, hooking up the light, and fixing the water situation so that I don't have to haul it (lucky me!). If everything goes even slowly, I could be moving in at the end of this month or the beginning of September. And the two older women who live right next door are sisters who have a great big organic garden, along with the rest of their land. They do have pigs, but I've decided it's my fate to live by those horrible animals. Oh, and one lady is going to give me one of her kittens instead of drowning it, so I'll have a friend and something to eat the mice! Which will be good: right now where I'm living there's a mouse living in my room, I'm pretty sure. Because whenever I wake up in the morning, there's always mouse poop on top of my mosquitero -- at least it's not scampering all over my body while I'm sleeping, though.

While we were in the capital, some of us girls went shopping the last afternoon, and I ended up getting a second pair of Dominican jeans. This means that the jeans are not only not baggy like so many American jeans are, but you have to really work to get them on. With these and all my other pants and skirts that I had to get majorly taken in, I feel like I have a whole new wardrobe! Let's just hope that avacado season right now doesn't engordarme (fatten me up) too much so that I can continue to fit into all of my smaller clothes now. . . I so far have not gained anything and eat lots of avacado every night for dinner: think an entire small one. Some avacados from our trees are HUGE, almost as big as a child's head! It's even better than mango season, I think.

Dirty Dancing

Camp is all over, and was a huge success! Around 70 kids came each day. We had environmental education activities that were especially successful in small groups, and did other fun activities like sports, big races, a camp game of Capture the Flag, and a Casino Night. We ended the camp with a dance, and after a rousing round of limbo, we asked the kids if they wanted to have a dance competition. Everyone did, and started chanting, “Reggae, reggae, reggae!” which is the affectionate name here for reggaeton music. We gave in and the kids danced off to reggaeton for about three minutes, until the dancing got too provocative for their young eyes and bodies, and we switched to good healthy merengue.

The helpers were amazing counselors. Everyone here is used to entertaining kids from birth, so they were all naturals with their groups of muchachos. The only problems we had were: 1. Older kids tried to sneak into the camp halfway through each day. 2. After making skits about saving the environment and the negative effects of throwing trash anywhere, the kids threw their popsicle wrappers all over the ground. 3. On Thursday about five counselors just didn’t show up for various reasons; out of ten counselors, that’s a lot! Luckily we had a couple extra helpers come that day, so things worked out just fine. All the kids wanted the camp to be a month long, but I told them we couldn’t do that with volunteer counselors. However, maybe next summer we can start a camp where the counselors actually get paid, and have it be longer. The lesson we did learn from doing the camp is that there is a need for organized activities for kids here. The only organized activities here are for teenagers in the church youth groups. Other than that, there is nothing – no sports, no hang out spots, no scout troops, etc.

Good news is that the secretary of education actually looked for and found a used inversor for our computer lab that they installed yesterday. So I’ll actually have a job when my community diagnostic time ends, which is good for everyone. My stomach is also much better for some unknown reason, although I may still get a stool sample! We (Ambrosia and I) made it to the beach this weekend up north in Cabarete to get together with a group of environmental volunteers there. Cabarete was much farther than expected, and I’m not sure if it was worth the trip: four hours each way in different guaguas. It was supposed to have a great nightlife, but was just full of sunburned tourists who weren’t dancing except to some bad techno music. It’s the windsurfing beach of the island, and it was cool to see all the windsurfers during the day, but definitely wasn’t the most beautiful beach at all!

I had a moment of vergüenza (embarrassment) the other day when I was talking to my camp counselors. It was raining and the sun was out, and a counselor commented that “Se está casando una bruja,” or that a witch is getting married. I wanted to say that we say in English sometimes that the devil is beating his wife (thanks, Dad, for passing down that wonderful saying) but what came out of my mouth was not the word golpeando, or beating, but “Decimos allá que el Diablo está pegando a su esposa,” which can be interpreted as something entirely different than beating. Just use your imaginations if you don’t speak Spanish!