Carnaval

February 27th is a very busy day in the Dominican Republic. It is both the Dominican Independence Day and the height of Carnaval.

Carnaval is best spent here in the city of La Vega, where parades of masked and costumed persons and thousands of onlookers fill the streets to partake in all kinds of debauchery. Innocent bystanders are routinely pummeled in the ass with inflated pig bladders. So it goes.

Traditional La Vega Carnaval Masks and Costumes

I am disappointed to announce that I did not make it to La Vega for the second year in a row. I instead was in my site where, due to an ever-increasing number of Christians living in my community, they no longer celebrate Carnaval. Christians here are not allowed to participate in the drinking, dancing and other devilish components that make up Carnaval.

Some of the non-Christian children did get into the spirit and painted their faces. A far cry from the shenanigans in La Vega, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.

Mama with face paint and pelo loco

Gone Retro

My Engineers Club has now completed half of the 12-week course we set out to do in January. This week we did what was easily my favorite, and most of the boys’ favorite, experiment to date. We went retro and made lava lamps.

I went through a phase in junior high in which my bedroom walls were covered with black light posters. Long, fluorescent beads hung from my doorway. A black light illuminated the many posters while a strobe light simultaneously flickered in the background. I also had a lava lamp. The only thing missing was Grateful Dead music and illegal substances. Those came in a later stage of life.

The Soy Ingeniero manual a fellow volunteer put together has instructions for doing a great number of scientific experiments and activities. Lava Lamps are one of them. With a 2-liter bottle, some cooking oil, water, food coloring and Alka-Seltzer tablets, you have a homemade lava lamp. Granted, these do not plug into the wall and bubble for hours, but we rarely have electricity anyway so there’s no need. The boy’s loved making the ‘lava’ bubble and I felt like a giddy 13-year old as I watched the Alka-Seltzer do its thing.

As a celebration for completing half of the Engineering course, I put on a movie night for the boys. Popcorn, soda, Valentine’s candy from the US of A (thanks Mom!) and my laptop and we were set. We watched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (or Lluvia de Hamburguesas in Spanish). It is a pretty stellar animated film that incited a lot of discussion amongst the boys about science, invention, right vs. wrong and other topics. It was great to see that even while full of caffeine and sugar the boys were able to have a discussion about the movie before going home and bouncing off their parents’ walls.

Movie Night

Cupcakes!!

P.E.

I'm kind of a P.E. teacher.

For the past 3 weeks (and the next few months) two of my superstar youth and I have been spending Wednesdays in the local school teaching Deportes para la Vida (Sports for Life).

Deportes para la Vida (DPV) is the program I received training for in December. It’s a really great program that uses sports and games to teach kids about HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy and other problems facing Dominican youth.

In our local school there is an hour set aside for P.E. every Wednesday and Friday. But as there is neither a P.E. teacher nor any athletic equipment or guidance whatsoever, P.E. hour is spent sitting in the shade and/or throwing rocks at one another. I don’t blame the teachers for wanting an hour of rest since students here have the ability to drive one completely insane, but that P.E. hour could be put to much better use. Enter Deportes para la Vida.

So far we have worked with 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade students, as those are the kids best able to grasp what HIV/AIDS is and the ones most likely to have hormones in overdrive and/or be sexually active. The kids have been really responsive to the program and we can see instant results in their knowledge about HIV/AIDS after each activity. The students might be little monsters in the classroom but, for whatever reason, they have been really attentive and engaged when given the chance to run, play, compete and learn outdoors.

So it seems that for the spring semester, I am more or less a P.E. teacher. The great thing about the DPV program is that what I am actually teaching is Sex Ed and Life Skills but the kids feel like they’re in P.E. A nice head fake to trick the kids into learning.

Ingenieros Dominicanos

Easily my favorite ongoing project and looking forward a true passion project of mine in the year to come is my Boys Club. A group of 15 muchachos aged 10-14 who meet weekly to work, play, learn and experiment. We have recently starting working with a fellow volunteer’s Ingenieros Dominicanos, Dominican Engineers, manual. The manual is full of interesting activities dealing with science and engineering and, so far, the boy’s are eating it up.

Last week we did an exchange with another volunteer’s boys group in a nearby batey, which was a huge success. We spent the morning doing fun and educational activities and the boys got to leave their communities and meet new muchachos.

The boys of Cachena and Experimental at the intercambio.

This week in our Engineering Club we made volcanoes, a science experiment each and every American has done but that my kids could have never fathomed before today. They might still have trouble explaining what a chemical reaction is but they relished the opportunity to make their own volcanoes and especially enjoyed making them erupt.

Showing off an erupted volcano.

Raudy getting his hands (and no doubt his school uniform) dirty.

With the leftover flour all the boys made a giant pot of bollo, a typical local dish consisting of little more than flour and water that migratory workers from the lower Antilles brought to the DR and is especially popular in the bateyes in the east.

The boys preparing bollo.

Enjoying the finished product with salami.