The spider was huge!

Half jumping and making little screaming noises, I was carrying out a huge spider from my room on a magazine and passed my host mom sitting on the porch. When she looked at me questioningly, I told her that I had to get it out of my room since it had a huge egg sac underneath it, and I didn't want to kill it. I was searching for the words in Spanish to explain that I didn't want all it's little babies running around my room if I squished the spider and they all came out, but Valeria filled in my words saying, "And every living creature has a right to life." I agreed with her to avoid my squishing explanation and let her think I had more noble reasons for not killing the mother spider.

An accomplishment for the week that made me feel great is that a girl my age called me last night to invite me over to her house this weekend. I may be making friends, however slowly it is taking. I actually met her this weekend when I consented to hang out with a high school student again -- ok, so it was actually really fun, and a bunch of us went to a little river/water hole area to play in the water and we played cards together and made little fruit smoothies. And now all those girls are trying to find a house for me to rent in their neighborhood area! It's funny, because when we were at the river, we had to leave when a couple motorcycles pulled up, as some men were coming to bathe.

Sunday was Mother's Day, and it is a big deal here. I went to a program at the elementary school on Friday afternoon where they had presents and a show for all the mothers, including some poetry and singing and dancing. Very cute. For our family's celebration we gathered at the grandmother's house a few houses down from me, and all of us single females did the cooking and dishwashing. After our big lunch, we headed out into the middle of nowhere to the house that my host mom and all her brothers and sisters grew up in. What a hard life to grow up there, out of the reach of any nearby communities! It was beautiful, though. The rich uncle had just cut a road out to the house so we drove up instead of having to hike through the bush to get there, but I think going on those steep hills in the back of the pickup was a lot scarier than going on foot! I had a plan of action of where to jump if the truck lost control; luckily I didn't have to use it.

And then there were none -- inversores, that is

News flash of the week! On Monday when I was on my way to the high school, some people hanging out at the nearby colmado (general store) told me that there had been a robbery in our school’s computer lab. Sure enough, when I arrived, the director was arriving at the same time with two members of the police department to accompany him. Some ladrones, or thieves, had cut through the fence surrounding the school sometime during Sunday night, we believe. They had wrenched the bars on the computer lab window open far enough for a skinny person to crawl through, and cut through and bent back the slats covering the windows. They took two CPUs and both of our inversores (those would be the battery backup generators that control when the batteries are charging and when they are working). The inversores are a big loss, because they are very expensive and critical to a computer lab here. There is not a whole lot of electricity in this community – maybe around four hours in the morning and a couple in the afternoon and then a few at night, and there is certainly no schedule for the electricity, making inversores a key member of any lab.

The police didn’t find any fingerprints after they looked halfheartedly. Our school had been the last in the area to be robbed; every other school surrounding us with a computer lab had been robbed at some point in the last couple of years. It’s fairly common here since you can sell any of those things for quite a bit of money on the street. So our current plan of action is to put more secure bars on the insides of the windows of the lab as well as install an alarm system, I believe. We’ll see how fast this can all get resolved, because without the inversores, I have very little reason to be here doing the information technology job I’m here to do. Luckily I’m still in the community diagnostic phase of my job. . . we haven’t started classes yet or anything of the sort, and high school classes are coming to an end, making the demands at this time of the year on the lab very few.

My bike arrived last week in a car sent by the Peace Corps, but unfortunately my helmet that I had attached to the bar of the bike did not make it into the car somehow. I thought that perhaps it was the office’s idea of a good joke on Becky, since we can’t ride without our helmets! After thinking about buying a helmet or going to the capital to get mine from the office, some friends down the street suggested the express bus service that can also deliver packages. It’s in the works; I believe the office is sending it today! I will have more freedom and a larger area to explore now.

This weekend I went out for the first time in the city of San Francisco with the girlfriends of my host brothers here as well as the closest volunteer to me, Ambrosia. The brothers all felt compelled to come out and make sure their girlfriends weren’t doing anything naughty. . . which was fine, but I was looking forward to a girls’ night out. Those don’t seem to exist here! Nubia and Anyolina had convinced me to let them paint my nails that afternoon, and I let them, ending up with French-tipped nails with a black little design on my ring finger nail. In the cities, all the women get their nails done at little neighborhood salons and the current fad is exactly what I had. When Ambrosia showed up later, she had matching toenails. We laughed nervously at the fact that our nails had become Dominicanized. What will come next? Perhaps next time I see friends from home I’ll be wearing skin-tight outfits, spending all Saturday straightening my hair with chemicals and rollers, and refusing to wear shorts!

Besides having the lab broken into, things are going better here now than the first couple of weeks. I know more people, am getting invited to eat lunch at different peoples’ houses, and am busier now that Ambrosia and I are planning our day camps for July. I have begun to cart my motor helmet with me whenever I walk anywhere, because so many people offer me bolas (free rides) that it’s only a question of minutes before I zip off on a moto.

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.

Guineos Galore

Yes, guineos are indeed bananas. But what I didn't realize until just a couple weeks ago is that they can also refer to platanos, or plantains. Which is the main staple of what my family here eats for breakfast and dinner. They are definitely not my favorite food when they are just boiled, which is the normal way to make them, so I've tried to just eat one a day and find other food around. There's a saying here about platanos and how eating too many of them makes one. . . slow. . .

More importantly, I got quite the surprise yesterday when my doña showed me the big bottle of water that she had bought for me to eat. I was under the impression that I had been drinking bottled water in my first visit here, especially since I specifically asked three different people. Turns out the water had run out and I had been drinking water from a pozo, or well, just like the family. I´m in utter amazement that I did not get sick. Time to be more careful!

My group reunited in the capital for our swearing-in ceremony and settling in workshop, and of course a little bit of dancing all night and going to a beach the next day. Nobody in our group has quit so far, amazingly enough! We all have cell phones now, too. If anybody wants to text message me, they can from the www.orange.com website for free. My number is 1-829-979-9038 for anybody interested!

I rode on my first motorscooter today when a high school girl came to pick me up and take me to her house, showing me around her community. My helmet is quite the fashion statement! I still prefer going in the backs of trucks; it feels even more free and open!

So my job for the next few months is to do a community diagnostic of the area, talking to people first then interviewing them about what they like and what they want to change, and fitting my project to their needs and wants. To gain confianza, I´m the new stranger in town and I talk to anybody who talks to me or even looks my way, and haven´t had any doors shut in my face yet :) Hope my luck continues!

I survived my first week there

After my first week in my site, I’m relieved to come back to Santo Domingo for a week more of orientation and planning, and being with friends who are just now becoming good friends instead of acquaintances. It’s stressful to be in a new community all by yourself but never alone, meeting everyone important and in the neighborhood and trying to figure out how you’re going to have a life for two whole years in this new place. Overwhelming! And then to have to adjust to yet another host family that you’re paying your rent and food money to and counting on for help in integration to the community – it was a hard week. At least I wasn’t in a parade and didn’t have everybody in the community at a big reception for me on the day I arrived like some of my friends had happen!

It all began on Project Partner Day last Tuesday, when we all brought our luggage and spent a half a day getting to know our project partners through group activities. I noticed my partner was not the norm for here when I offered for him to sit and he didn’t want to. No Dominican ever chooses to stand over sitting! He is a ball of energy in the world of school principals, and had a lot of connections with the other school directors that were there that day. He walks fast and can talk forever, and everybody knows him. He’s a nice guy, and is looking forward to his retirement in a couple years.

We got to my site pretty early, since it’s only a couple hours away from the capital. We’re fairly close to the big city of San Francisco de Macorís. La Joya is my campo (country) site that is pretty beautiful. There are trees and shade and flowers everywhere, and in my community, cacao is the predominant crop along with plátanos. My new host family that I’ll be living with for my first three months there is really nice. The people living in the house are the doña (VERY Catholic) and her three sons still in the country, as well as a granddaughter whose parents are in the US. Then there is a woman Cecilia who comes over every day to help cook and clean, and her three little kids are fun and cute. There are also about ten guys who came over to work cutting down the cacao all week and taking the seeds out to dry. The husband of Cecilia fell off a horse while transporting some cacao on Friday and was bleeding from his lower back badly on Friday night, so my host brother ran him to the hospital in the city. It ended up being fine, but makes you think about the lack of insurance and job-related injuries here. My family also has a bunch of chickens – one of which I found sitting on my pillow on my bed the other day and shooed out – a pig that we feed all the food scraps to that smells pretty bad, and a big dog that’s mean because it stays in its little cage most of the day. Sometimes there’s a horse around too.

I spent the week visiting the high school, meeting the teachers, the students (introducing myself to every single class), and checking out the computer lab. I also visited the elementary school as well as the high and elementary schools in the next community over, and went to an inauguration of a university library close by one morning. In the libraries here there are never that many books, though. I can maybe see how elementary and high school students get by without resources of books, but can’t fathom university without any. The priest is maybe the most important person I met all week. The whole community loves him, and he’s perhaps the most active organizer around. He has a long grey beard and cropped hair, is a vegetarian and a big advocate of organic gardening, goes around promoting non-chemical pesticides to farmers and discourages burning of trash, encourages walking by the older people around especially, and has the youth very active and involved in the community. I think he’s my new partner for any activity outside of computer stuff from here on out. Good news is that he wants to help organize a camp this summer J He was a big promoter of the day of clean air this last Sunday, that the community tried to celebrate with less driving.

My biggest problems this week were that I got bored a couple times and felt very out-of-place and directionless. I think that will not be such the case in the future when I figure out more of a schedule for myself and get a BIKE. I also question the need for a volunteer in this community that seems to have its act together a lot more than other places I’ve seen. I suppose that there is always more to be done and I shouldn’t make any judgments quite yet, though. One thing that is great is that there are lots of places to run around there, including the big hill we live right by. That will help me stay sane as I learn how to effectively use my time and get to know everybody and turn down offers of pop and coffee at every house I visit!