Fireworks and Hurricanes

Occupy Minivan

2011-12-28T23:54:00.004-04:00

December is a tricky time in the DR. The weather cools to more bearable temperatures, school finishes up and life in general winds down before the holiday season. There is often not much work to be done in December and many PCVs go home for the holidays. Just another perk of being a PCV in the DR – flights to the US couldn’t be much easier.

I would attempt to tell you about how I am spending my time in the USA, but my friend Duncan is a bit more eloquent and much more humorous in doing so. A group of us traveled cross-country while Occupying a Minivan. Read more here:

Duncan Peabloggy

Kite Season

2011-12-02T20:15:00.004-04:00

Easily one of my favorite Dominican Spanish words is chichigua, or kite. Every year around this time the chichiguas come out in full force. In fact, most fads here seem to be seasonal. Through the holiday season kites will be the rage only for the winds to die down in January when the games of cricket will take over the streets, then marbles, hula hoops and whatever else the kids can get their hands on.

While some of these fads come and go, kites are one that seem to happen each and every year. Hula Hoops, for example, might be a passing fad brought on by a group of missionaries bringing dozens of toys to my community. Kites, on the other hand, are made and not received.

Along with the increasing winds that pass through this time of year, the sugar cane also begins to flower. Children go into the cane, cut down this flower and use its stalk to make the base of their kite. They then rummage through their homes or the local garbage heap for plastic bags and some string and voila, a kite is born.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times that the ability of a Dominican child to create and invent with limited resources is truly remarkable. With the most basic of materials they are able to build complex vaina. Whether they are creating a kite from scratch or fixing a broken bicycle, they live the adage that says, “One man’s trash is another muchacho’s treasure”.

As a child, it would have never even occurred to me to make a kite. A kite is something you buy. But here even a 4 year old and scrounge up the necessary materials and creativity to make their very own chichigua. They might not have much but they have that, and that’s something.

Facts, Fun & Firsts

2011-11-09T23:51:00.006-04:00

The Dominican Republic is a country well known for its beautiful white sand beaches. It is also a small country – ensuring that all Dominicans live within a relatively short distance from any number of the aforementioned beautiful white sand beaches. This would lead many to the assumption that all Dominicans have been to the beach. That assumption is, regrettably, incorrect.

Can you imagine living in Florida, Southern California or any of the Hawaiian Islands and having never been to the beach? I cannot. I can hardly imagine being from North Dakota and not having traveled to Florida, Southern California, Hawaii or elsewhere to visit a beach and catch a glimpse of an ocean. Lucky for some Dominicans who have been thus far in their lives deprived of swimming in the large bodies of water that surround their country, we Peace Corps Volunteers have Grant Money and we like the beach.

This past weekend myself and 5 other Youth Volunteers who live in bateys offered their girls volleyball teams a weekend of facts, fun and of firsts.

On Saturday, we 6 Volunteers and the 36 young voleibolistas met at a nearby retreat center for a day of learning. We Volunteers led charlas, games and activities dealing with Good Sportsmanship, HIV/AIDS, Teamwork and Dehydration. Lots of facts. At our last Volleyball tournament two girls fainted due to dehydration so we thought we’d drop some knowledge on the importance of pumping your body full of water.

On Sunday morning we all loaded onto buses and headed to nearby Guayacanes, located along the Eastern coast and home to a beautiful white sand beach. We strung up a net and played volleyball in the baking Caribbean sun all day long. Lots of fun.

For some of the girls, it was their first beach trip. That alone made the day worthwhile. I often feel as a Peace Corps Volunteer that what I really do here is offer opportunities. Opportunities for my community members to meet and know an American. Opportunities for my youth to learn about things they otherwise might never learn about. Or for them travel with me to Camps and Conferences in distant parts of their own country they otherwise would never go. Or to take someone to a beach they live less than 50 miles from but would never have seen had a strange white guy not been sent to live in their community for two years.

The day was nearly perfect. The girls thoroughly enjoyed the surf and the sand. The Volunteers thoroughly sun burned themselves. I say nearly perfect because our beach day was on a Sunday – and Sunday is the day people here tend get drunk – and drunk men on the beach are attracted to 36 volleyball playing teenage girls and their 6 white friends like moths to a flame. We spent large amounts of time chasing away persistent drunk men with a Herman Cain-like tendency to sexually harass any female in sight.

It is incredible to me how comfortable I have become in the past two years at scolding people. From children straight on up to adults. I have no reservations telling someone to get lost or stop being such an ass. Two years ago I didn’t even know how to say such things in Spanish. Now not a day goes by without it. Sadly, being blunt and/or short with people is effective here. If you simply ask the drunk assholes on the beach to “Please, go away. We’re trying to hold an activity. Thank you.” they’re simply going to persist. But if you are to say “Seriously dude, go away! How many times do we have to tell you no?” they might just get the picture and go harass someone else.

As a male Volunteer, my life here is exponentially easier than that of a female Volunteer. Female Volunteers here, and I imagine in many (most?)) other countries, have to deal with copious amounts of sexual harassment each and every day. It’s gotta get exhausting. Not to mention ugly and degrading and gross. I knew it was tough to be a female here but after more than two years in this country, it took me one day at the beach for it to really hit home. Dominican men can be gross. Men can be gross. People can be gross. Why do people insist on being gross?

But side rant on the occasional ways of Dominican men and hardship of female PCVs aside, the event was a major success. Our girls learned, they played, they enjoyed themselves and some of them had a major life experience of seeing/swimming in the ocean for the very first time. That’s big. And it’s all because we offered them a simple little opportunity.

Our Beautiful Court

Lunch Break

Bumping, Setting and Spiking for the Tiguere Spectators

Personal Development

2011-11-03T22:37:00.003-04:00

October 28th marked the official end of my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Or it would have were I not extending my service and sticking around until June. While I and many others from my group have extended and, therefore, treated October 28th as any other day, a number of people did leave. Closing this chapter and moving on to a new, more American one.

I never expected that when November 2011 rolled around I would still find myself here in the DR. I didn’t expect to still be writing these blog posts by candlelight, awaiting the return of the electricity so I can type and upload it to the interwebs. For more than two years now the date, the numbers, 10/28/2011, have been so meaningful. They represented a goal. A milestone. And now it has come and gone with little fanfare.

This fall has been a strange one. September was undoubtedly my most busy and productive month as a PCV. It was followed by a major October slump. All peaks in Peace Corps seem to lead to an inevitable valley. And now November presents itself as another mountain to climb.

Aside from the return of numerous Peace Corps camps, conferences, trainings and more, I’m starting to finally start seriously looking towards my life post-Peace Corps. Attempting to do some personal development on top of the Grassroots development. This includes researching Grad School programs, filling out applications, writing personal statements and deciding where it is I want to live when my time in the Caribbean comes to a close.

America is big. It is home to many good schools. Lots of cool cities. How am I supposed to settle on just one place? Can’t people just commute from Denver to New York? Seattle and the Bay Area look close on a map. In the DR, mountains and cities and beaches and deserts are all just one uncomfortable bus ride away. I’m going from a country roughly the size of New Hampshire to a country in which New Hampshire is among the smallest of 50 fairly large states. America. It’s a daunting place.

An unfortunate accompaniment to applying to Graduate School is the GRE. Yet another godforsaken standardized test in the life of an American student which does nothing to reflect one’s true intelligence/abilities. It costs $200 and requires a fair amount of studying. Trying to study in what is easily one of the world’s loudest countries borders on tortuous. There is literally no where one can go to escape the noise.

I went to a large shopping center called Jumbo (think Latin American Target) last week to sit in the food court and take a GRE practice test. Jumbo is about 30 minutes away in the nearest city. It is glorious there. In the store I mean, not the city. The city, San Pedro de Macoris, is pretty awful. I sat amongst the bustle of people eating, shopping and getting wrapped up into the arms of commerce and even with all the noise and distraction, Jumbo provides a better learning environment than anywhere in my community. It's loud here. It's no wonder schoolchildren in the DR don't learn, they can't hear a god damn thing.

November 2011. Still here. Who woulda thunk it? This country certainly has a strange effect on people. They simply can't leave. And when the finally do, they suffer from chronic hearing loss. Seriously, it's really loud here.

The Homestretch

2011-10-07T17:37:00.001-04:00

The end of September marked the end of my 26th month as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps service is a 27-month commitment. You do the math.

The end is near. Or it would be anyway had I not made the decision to extend my service and stay on the island for another 7 or 8 months. I’ll be continuing work in my community while taking on leadership roles within Peace Corps DR with our Camp Superman and Deportes para la Vida initiatives.

Even as I’m sticking around for a while, the end of October marks a milestone. A number of Volunteers from my group, those who arrived together to the sweltering summer heat of the DR in August 2009, will be heading back to America to begin their lives as ‘Returned’ Peace Corps Volunteers.

The imminent finish line becomes more apparent and more realistic with every passing week. In early September, the 38 who remain from my group attended a 3-day Close of Service Conference intended to give us all the tools necessary to readjust back into American life.

Then a few weeks later the most recent edition of the PCDR Publication ‘Gringo Grita’ came out and featured surveys filled out by the 38 of us entering our final month of service. It is essentially a yearbook full of our funniest and most cherished experiences of the past two years.

Now we’re in October and people are starting to leave the island. Volunteers are hopping into taxis headed for the airport and simply disappearing off the island. The support system and family of Volunteers we have shared the past two years of our lives with are moving on to different and more American things. It is a strange and nostalgia-filled time of service.

How 27 months can pass by so damn fast I will never know. When someone first applies to the Peace Corps, they can’t help but think 27 months seems like a long time. A sizeable time commitment. It’s not. Well, it is, but it’s not.

It feels like just yesterday we stepped off a plane in Santo Domingo and were thrown headfirst into an endless cycle of cultural and linguistic misunderstanding. To sweat, mosquitoes & colmados. To rice, beans & viveres. To Dengue Fever, Intestinal Parasites & Scabies. To meeting Dominicans who treated you like family and to meeting 50 strange Americans who in two years you would recognize as family.

It’s almost impossible to believe that so many of us are now in our 27th and final month of service. It's strange. It's sad. It's exciting. It's unfathomable. It's here. It's now. It's happening.

Where does time go?

4%

2011-09-05T21:23:00.008-04:00

It is September and in some northern parts of the world, summer is turning to fall. Children are back to school. Leafs will soon be changing their color. Weekends will soon be dominated by football.

Here in the DR, fall doesn’t exist. It’s as hot as ever and the Tropical Storms and Hurricanes that keep passing through have allowed mosquitoes to reproduce in alarming, Dengue Fever-inflicting numbers. There unfortunately is no football, though the Dominican Baseball League will start up again in October, which is better than nothing. And children will return to class whenever the hell they feel like it.

Classes were to officially begin nationwide on the 17th of August. That was three weeks ago. But neither the teachers nor the students had any interest in holding class so early in August. It’s hot after all.

The overwhelming majority of children in this country attend public school (if they attend school at all). Public school is held in sessions, or tandas, taking place in the morning from 8-12 or in the afternoon from 2-6. The tanda system lessens the inevitable issue of overcrowded classrooms and the limited number of trained teachers in the country. The tanda system also allows for just 4 hours of class time per day. Of those 4 hours, maybe 2 are actually devoted to education. The other two involve arriving late, leaving early, idly sitting and throwing rocks at one another.

The education system is a problem. A big one. For my money, it is the biggest issue this country faces.

There is a big push here to bump federal spending for K-12 Education up to 4%. Currently, the government devotes just 2.3% of the GDP to K-12 Ed. This is one of the lowest percentages in the Americas and in the world and goes a long way to explain how the school system here can be so abysmal.

For reference: the US gives 5.8%, placing us 37th internationally. Socialist Scandinavia gives the most of all developed countries (naturally) with Denmark giving the most at 8.5%, ranking 8th internationally. Fellow Caribbean nation Cuba gives the most at 18.7%.

With Presidential elections upcoming in 2012, this push for 4% has gained a lot of traction and presidential candidates are hopping on the 4% bandwagon. Meanwhile, the city of Santo Domingo is building a second line on their Subway system, the Metro. Yes, here in a country that suffers from daily power outages and where millions have no access to potable water, there exists a beautiful and well-functioning Subway system in the Capital city. The new line of the Metro is under construction and receiving a whopping 6% of the GDP this year.

6% for one stretch of subway tracks in one city. 2.3% for K-12 Education across the entire country.

I don’t mean to suggest for one second that money is the one single ingredient that makes for a functioning education system. It is one of many factors. But if a country places such little value and such little investment into education and its society’s future, it should expect little results.

I would also argue that the United States should offer a far higher percentage of its GDP to education. The richest, most powerful country on Earth shouldn’t be 37th at anything. Students in Denmark receive free, high level education through college. American students receive an education of varying quality depending on whether they live in a suburb, an inner city or somewhere in between before entering a university system that will leave them under a mountain of debt. The education system in the US has all kinds of problems but looks positively ideal next the DR’s system.

Kids in my community have finally decided it is time to go back to school this week. They have dusted off their uniforms, donned their new backpacks and braved the sun's rays to walk down the dirt road to their modest school. Maybe they'll keep going every day. Maybe they'll learn something. Maybe someday their government will invest as much in their future as it will for one Metro line stretching a few short miles. Maybe.

Off to school

Eliecel heads to his first day of Kindergarten

Melinda & Loren look to beat the heat under the shade of an umbrella

Celebrating Education

2011-08-22T15:21:00.007-04:00

Dominicans generally have little knowledge of the world outside this small island. While I recognize this to be a generalization, after two years here I also recognize it to be accurate. This is especially true for Dominicans living in the more marginalized communities where Peace Corps Volunteers live and work. I obviously don’t expect people in developing countries to jet set across the globe, but I would expect the local education system to offer, well, some basic education. I’ve also been here long enough to know this is too much to ask.

In order to educate our Youth about the world outside the island, some volunteers teach world geography courses. Another way we teach our youth about the world is through annual regional diversity conferences. These conferences take place in the Northern part of the DR (Celebrando el Cibao), the Southern region (Celebrando el Sur), and here in the Eastern region (Celebrando el Este). These conferences bring youth from around the DR together to discuss their diversity, their communities, their country and to learn about important themes like discrimination, immigration, culture and religion in the world.

This year, along with another volunteer, I planned and organized the Celebrando el Este conference. In mid-August, 35 Dominican youth aged 12-20 got together to do a number of activities and learn about the region, the country and the planet they call home.

Like most human beings, Dominican youth learn best by doing. So instead of simply talking at the kids, we got interactive. The kids learned about DR culture and history by playing Jeopardy. They painted a giant map of the world and learned some facts about World Geography. They used that same map to discuss immigration patterns and treatment of immigrants in the world; a very pertinent topic with the DR’s own immigration issues with Haiti.

Learning an Irish Jig as we Dance Around the World

The kids exercised by doing Yoga, learned new dances by ‘Dancing Around the World’ and made Hummus, Pesto & Bruschetta in our ‘Dips Around the World’ activity. They traveled around the globe and ‘visited’ 9 countries, learning about each one and earning a stamp in their Passport. They saw discrimination firsthand in a powerful activity known in the Peace Corps DR World as ‘Archie Bunker’s Neighborhood’.

Enjoying freshly self-prepared Hummus, Pesto and Bruschetta

Celebrando el Este was the most educational Conference I have been part of in Peace Corps. Our kids not only learned a great deal in one weekend, but retained the information as well. The two girls I brought to the Conference couldn’t stop talking about how much they enjoyed themselves and are inspired to paint a World Map Mural in our community. The Conference has also inspired me to teach a Celebrando el Mundo course to my Boys Club.

My girls from Cachena receiving their certificates in front of our beautifully painted World Map

Just as a lack of access to books leads to lower literacy rates, a lack of maps and no knowledge of geography can lead to a lesser curiosity of the world. I hope a large map mural in the community and some educated youngsters will spark the interest of others to learn more about the DR and the world we live in.

Celebrando an Educational Weekend

Emily

2011-08-05T22:34:00.009-04:00

The first Tropical Storm of the season has come and gone. Here in the Eastern region of the DR the storm, named Emily, brought some wind gusts and about 24 hours of rain but nothing too fuerte. My site resembled a lake through Thursday afternoon but now things are drying up and the mosquitoes (and probably the cholera too) are coming out in record numbers.

I’ve been very fortunate in my now two years here in the Caribbean to avoid any major Tropical Storms or Hurricanes. In 2009 there were no notable storms and in 2010 one hurricane passed through but did most of its damage in Haiti, naturally. I think we won’t be so fortunate in 2011. August begins the height of the storm season and already we’ve had a named storm and many more predicted.

I am generally one of those people who kind of enjoys storms. The claps of thunder. The smell of wet grass. And here in the DR, rainy days allow for socially acceptable laziness and exorbitant amounts of sleep and/or good reading. Win Win Win. On rainy days, meetings are cancelled, classes are unattended and humans are indoors. You see, the only things Dominicans like less than direct sunlight (see recent post) is rain and being wet. I am also generally one of those people who like to try everything or experience everything at least once. So part of me wants to be able to say I experienced a hurricane, earthquake or other natural disaster that occasionally wreaks havoc on this part of the planet.

That being said, I am also accustomed to experiencing storms from inside a structurally sound house or even a basement if the occasion calls for it. Here I have neither a structurally sound house nor a basement (nor anything resembling either, for that matter). Even Emily’s modest wind gusts had the zinc roof trembling and the rains leaked through it all day. A mild hurricane could lift my house a la The Wizard of Oz and carry it far from Kansas.

So while I would love to one day say I have lived through a hurricane, I would prefer it happened in a post-Peace Corps stage of my life. Maybe in my retirement years when I live in a beachfront, hurricane-proof fortress. Or when Richard Branson invites me to holiday on his private island; he surely has a storm shelter. Until either of those absurdly unrealistic dreams becomes a reality, I'd prefer the hurricanes keep a safe distance from this island.

The Dream Team

2011-08-02T20:26:00.007-04:00

Barcelona, Spain. 1992. The best basketball team ever and one of the most illustrious collections of talent assembled in the history of international sport wins an Olympic Gold Medal and brings pride to a nation.

Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. 2011. An extremely mediocre group of PCVs competes against a city’s best ballers and brings pride to no one.

A Volunteer friend & fellow Iowan just put on a weeklong basketball tournament in his urban barrio in the city of Puerto Plata, on the DR’s north coast. This past Saturday, a compilation of the best local Dominican players in the tournament was invited to test their skills versus a team of Peace Corps Volunteers. The Peace Corps Dominican Republic Dream Team, if you will. A number of the best players among the Volunteers were unable to make the trip, but we liked our chances nonetheless.

Due to transport issues (read: Santo Domingo traffic), myself and two other Dream Team members arrived late and missed the entire 1st Quarter of the game. After emptying our bladders following the 5-hour car ride and quickly lacing up our sneakers, we erased a 6-20 deficit and took a halftime lead into the nonexistent locker-room. We had averted disaster and a win by the Americans looked inevitable. In the 4th Quarter, the younger Dominicans caught fire, regained the lead and defeated the mighty Americanos.

It was not the Dream Team’s best showing. We won no medals. There was no national anthem. Our pride took a hit. But after the game the Dominican players were taught a few things about HIV/AIDS and were filled with self-confidence and pride of their own after defeating an American Equipo de Sueños. I suppose that's an acceptable consolation prize. And the beer we bought afterwards, used to regenerate our deflated self-esteem, that was a good consolation too.

Hace Calor

2011-07-22T20:02:00.004-04:00

It seems to be hot just about everywhere. A heat wave is devouring North America and pushing thermometers even in northern lands like Minnesota and Ontario well into the 100s. While it’s not that hot down here, each day brings a debilitating temperature consistently in the 90s. This would be easily tolerable if air conditioning was commonplace or even if the electricity was on during daylight hours to power fans. Alas, we sweat.

Dominicans, for being a Caribbean people, are not fond of the sun. They avoid sun as fervently as American children avoid broccoli. They are professionals at seeking out even the smallest slivers of shade. They do everything in their power to avoid making their skin color darker. If they get too dark, people might think they are Haitian and being a Haitian is not a popular thing here in the DR. Being racist against Haitians is a popular thing though.

Dominicans’ reasons for avoiding el sol are not simply racial but also very practical. Not surprisingly, it is quite a bit cooler in the shade. When it is too hot to be indoors and AC is decades (maybe longer) away from being a household staple, the shade is a good place to be. I suspect shade-sitting is a sort of national pastime in many developing nations.

Shade-sitting. A national pastime.

My daily uniform while here in my community usually consists of khaki shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops. Not exactly the business casual ensembles other Americans my age sport to their day jobs. But the current heat wave here has downgraded my uniform to basketball shorts, a sleeveless t-shirt and occasional barefootedness. Part of me thinks this is lazy. Another part of me thinks I am really beginning to dress like a local.

Sometimes it rains in the afternoon and the heat takes a break from its onslaught. Then the rain stops and the humidity sweeps in like a wet blanket, making people long for the unrelenting dry(er) heat of the mornings.

I suppose heat is preferable to the hurricanes predicted on the horizon. August and September mark the high point of hurricane season. People educated in the way weather works say this will be a highly active hurricane season. Hopefully the people who predict weather patterns are as incorrect about this as they are about most everything else.

Easily one of the things I dislike most about living in the DR is the lack of seasons. I want four distinct seasons in my life. I want to wake up, feel the early morning temperature and be able to judge, by that alone, what month it is. With the exception of the few months in late spring when the rainy season is upon us, it is always summer. An endless summer. Many Americans probably think that sounds great. But I want seasons. Four of them. Changing leaves, mounds of snow, rainy springs and hot summers is the climate for me.

Hang in there America. Soon enough it will be fall and you will be able to slip on a light jacket and watch the leaves change. Or spend a crisp Saturday afternoon tailgating at a football game, letting cold beer keep you body warm. Our summer never ends. The heat wave lasts 12 months, and then it starts all over again.

Camp Superman

2011-07-17T21:27:00.002-04:00

The first week in July, PCVs in the DR attempted something previously undone in PCDR history. A 5-day Camp for Dominican muchachos aged 10-14. This marked the third summer in which Volunteers here in the DR have put on Camp Superman. The first camp in 2009 took place over three days, 2010’s camp stretched to four days and this year we upped the ante to five. More days, more activities, more fun and more knowledge dropped.

Along with two fellow volunteers, I helped plan, organize and coordinate the camp beginning back in February and saw it through its fifth and final day last week. It required much work but ended as an epic, muddy success.

On July 6^th, 16 Peace Corps Volunteers left their respective communities throughout the country and made for the idyllic mountain town of Los Bueyes for the 3^rd Annual Camp Superman. As in all Camp Supermans, the idea is to teach young boys how to become young men. To reach young boys in their more formative years before they reach the vulnerable ages in which far too many young Dominican males succumb to delinquency or premature fatherhood. The Camp offers the boys a chance to meet boys from other parts of the country and the unique opportunity to camp in tents, go on hikes, eat s’mores and simply enjoy the great outdoors.

Through various educational activities revolving around themes such as Gender, Nutrition, HIV/AIDS Prevention and more, the boys learned valuable information to take home with them to their respective communities. There is also much time allotted for sports, arts & crafts, science experiments, swimming in a beautiful river and doing other fun activities synonymous with Summer Camp.

On the Saturday of Camp, we had spent the morning hiking to a beautiful waterfall and were on the homestretch of five days when the skies opened up and the rains fell hard. Our initial reaction was to play. Some boys played dominoes and board games under cover from the rain. Others joined a large game of mud soccer and got dirty. Boys and Volunteers alike were covered head to toe in mud and loving every second of it. Then the flash flood warnings came, tents got flooded, clothes got wet and things almost hit the fan. Fortunately, Peace Corps Volunteers are a resourceful bunch. 16 people worked together to clean tents, hang dry clothes, build a super tent where all 42 boys had a slumber party and saved the day. There are few other people I would want on my side during a torrential Caribbean downpour while caring for 42 muchachos than PCVs.

Camp Superman 2011 was an enormous success for both Dominican boys and PCVs alike. The boys were able to enjoy a unique life experience and Volunteers were able to watch the young boys they work with day in and day out in their communities grow and mature before their eyes.

In just 5 days, an ordinary boy can learn to become Super.

*Pictures forthcoming. Si dios quiere.

Mira Mi Pinta

2011-06-30T15:01:00.007-04:00

My Escojo Mi Vida youth group graduated from my Sex Ed / Life Skills course in late May. With the course finished and the summer months ahead, we arranged to do 3 community service projects. One in June, another in July and a third in August.

Project #1 – A Community Mural

Among the first sights one takes in upon entering Batey Cachena is a large wall on the side of a row house barrack that is peeling away multiple layers of decades old political campaign ads. The wall is ugly. So we painted it.

My youth came up with a design that offers a welcome to and description of the community. The wall includes baseball players, sugar cane cutters, a school and an open bible featuring a verse chosen by one of my Christian youth. Each of these are accompanied by the words: Land of Baseball Players, Land of Hard Workers, Land of Professionals and Holy Land (a bit much).

We are not nor do we pretend to be proper artists. For that reason the final product was a little lackluster and nothing resembling a work of artistic genius. But my kids did the work themselves and the townspeople seem to like it. Success.

Artists at work.

Welcome to Cachena. The finished product.

Oz

2011-06-21T13:45:00.009-04:00

I'm back to the noise and unrelenting heat of the DR after 2 weeks Down Under. Australia was a great time but it was somewhat of a tease to be in such a large country for such a small period of time. Can't wait for a return trip to visit other great cities and the bush. That said, experiencing Sydney, diving in the Great Barrier Reef and cuddling koalas with the fam isn't a bad way to spend a vacation.

Sydney Opera House

Sydney Harbor Bridge. We climbed to the top!

Giraffes, Zebras and a skyline view at Sydney's Taronga Zoo

SCUBA Diving in the Great Barrier Reef

Hand Feeding Kangaroos

'Cuddling' Koalas

The Day that Wasn't

2011-06-04T03:39:00.002-04:00

We left Los Angeles on June 2. We arrived in Sydney on June 4. And June 3? It would seem to have not existed for myself and the other 200+ people on our massive Airbus. For the first time in my life, an entire day has escaped me. Bill Bryson, Iowa’s greatest author, is able to put it more poignantly than I:

“Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the International Date Line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of the earth, it appears I had no being.” – Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

Off to See the Wizard

2011-05-31T09:04:00.002-04:00

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

On Thursday June 2, I will board a plane in Santo Domingo and on Saturday June 4, I will land in Sydney, Australia.

My youngest sister has been studying abroad Down Under since February and the rest of the fam is going to join her for 2 weeks Aussie greatness. The journey to the world’s largest island, the only island that doubles as a continent and an overall desirable vacation destination will be a long one. But the ends will most surely justify the means.

Escojo Graduation

2011-05-30T22:31:00.004-04:00

My Escojo Mi Vida group celebrated their graduation last night. Escojo is a Peace Corps initiative in which we volunteers teach Dominican youth about sexual health and life skills. Over the course of the past 3 months, I have met weekly with my Escojo group to discuss themes ranging from decision-making, HIV/AIDS, discrimination, STIs, the human reproductive system and more.

The HIV rate in the DR is (arguably) between 1-2% and higher still in batey communities like my own. The teenage pregnancy rate is also high and a large part of the problem is lack of education and lack of easy access to condoms and other birth control methods. The goal of Escojo is to educate youth in volunteer's communities to make good life decisions and to educate themselves about sex and HIV/AIDS.

Eleven youth aged 13-20 graduated on Monday. Looking ahead, we hope to do a number of community service projects over the summer. A strong youth group has been lacking here in Cachena for some time and we hope to change that with Escojo.

Sirve Con Fuerza

2011-05-26T00:08:00.006-04:00

10 teams. 60 girls. 4 days. 1 camp/volleyball tournament. Sirve Con Fuerza.

Sirve Con Fuerza is Peace Corps’ national volleyball tournament. Teams from Volunteer’s sites all over the country come together to test their talents, practice, play, learn and meet new people.

I am far from a volleyball coach. I do live in a site where most everyone, male or female, enjoys playing sports. The boys are constantly playing baseball and hoping to be the next local phenomenon to get a Major League contract. The girls focus their attention not on the baseball diamond but the volleyball court. In November the women in my site erected two large poles into a patch of dirt, wrapped a snow fence across the poles and a volleyball court was born. Since then there has been scarcely a single day in which the girls and women of Cachena have not played volleyball.

While I’m not a coach and have been hesitant to take on a more formal role with the local players, I wanted to reward my girls for their hard work and persistent practice by bringing them to Sirve Con Fuerza. Since February I have been teaching a course for young girls called Chicas Brillantes. My Chicas group is made up of 16 girls ages 9-16. Each week we talk about a subject involving gender, gender empowerment and showing young girls what they can achieve in this machismo, male-dominated culture. A number of my older Chicas Brillantes are volleyball players and were invited to compete against young girls from all over the DR.

The tournament/camp was a great success. The teams were placed into two separate brackets based on talent levels and played lots of volleyball over the course of 4 days. My girls turned out to be one of the better teams and took home the award for Good Sportsmanship. While the girls obviously want to win, a volunteer is likely to be more pleased that their team won a Sportsmanship award than a Championship. The girls also learned about Gender, Nutrition, HIV/AIDS and more.

Since arriving back in Cachena after the camp, my girls have been playing lots of volleyball. The entire community was impressed with how much they improved in such a short time and many people made a point to come to my house and tell me how well the girls are playing now. All the boys are now begging for a Basketball Camp where they can improve their skills.

I recently received a grant to work on sports, and specifically girls volleyball, in my site and hope to keep working with these girls in the future. They will definitely be a favorite to win Sirve Con Fuerza in 2012.

The volleyball court in Batey Cachena.

Sirve Con Fuerza. Cachena were in the orange t-shirts on the far side of the court.

Ranidaphobia

2011-05-20T21:58:00.006-04:00

The Dominicans in my site are incredibly resilient people. They unflinchingly face the hardships thrown at them by everyday life and have almost no fear. They regularly deal with fist-size cockroaches, rats the size of kittens and mangy street dogs. They don’t flinch at the sight of a tarantula or snake. They are unimpressed by the constant onslaught of bugs and creepy crawlers endlessly invading their lives. What does scare a Dominican you might ask? Frogs.

It is entirely inexplicable to me. Not the mice. Not the rats. Not the snakes. Frogs. A large, fat toad will give them a start, but a small frog that an American child might keep as a pet in a terrarium is enough to set off a small heart attack in my doña.

On Friday night I was laying in bed reading and waiting for the electricity to kick on when screams came emanating from the next room. My doña and two host nieces were beside themselves and asking my assistance to kill a frog that at this point had only been heard and not yet seen. We regularly sit and watch rats large enough to abduct small children run freely in the rafters without giving them a second thought. But the possibility of a frog in the house was enough to set everyone into hysterics. They say it is because frogs jump that they are scared. Well tarantulas jump. And bite. And kill. But no one seems to be afraid of that fuzzy ball of death. The ‘they jump’ argument doesn’t hold water for me.

Rats carry diseases. The most common rat-borne disease in the DR is leptospirosis. This can be spread through rat urine and result in liver and kidney damage. Rats are known to carry over 70 diseases ranging from typhus to Hantavirus to the bubonic plague. THE BUBONIC FUCKING PLAGUE! That doesn’t worry anyone here. Only Kermit must be killed.

So on Friday night as I come out of my room, using the light from my headlamp to guide myself, I see a 5 year-old, a 9 year-old and a 42 year-old standing on the couch (The couch where mice so often like to call home). They are begging me to exterminate a frog that may exist. Using said headlamp, I eventually make out the form a frog no larger than a golf ball sat idly under a table, undoubtedly wondering what the commotion is all about. They want me to kill it. I want to name it and give it a jar full of flies.

My hesitance leads to them calling for the nearest muchacho to come take my job as exterminator. Muchachos can do anything and do it for free. Want to buy something at the store? Send a muchacho. Need to send a message to the lady down the street? Send it with a muchacho. Need to kill a 1-inch tall tree frog? Call a muchacho. They do it all.

The muchacho who relieved me of my position missed with a couple whacks of a broomstick and the frog hopped away to temporary safety. My doña was disappointed and fears its imminent return. Meanwhile mice are pooping everywhere and eating my clothes and no one bats an eyelash.

This is just another example of how strange and oftentimes irrational phobias can be. We as humans are faced with myriad threats every day and it is clowns (coulrophobia), constipation (coprastasophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia) and other random things that make people’s blood run cold. Humans are weird.

The escapee frog’s name is Arbolito. A jar of flies awaits his return. Or swift death if a Dominican finds him first.

The hunt is on.

Muchacho with machete. Dangerously effective combination.

Supermuchachos

2011-05-19T16:57:00.005-04:00

Throughout my Peace Corps experience and especially in the 2011 calendar year, I have become a semi-professional camp counselor. I’ve had the good fortune to take many young Dominicans from my communities to a number of fun and educational camps, conferences, trainings and more. These camps offer much to our youth including, but not limited to, seeing other parts of their own country, meeting youth from other communities and regions of the DR and learning valuable life skills.

In a volunteer’s first year, these camps are often something you simply attend and bring youth to. In a volunteer’s second year, these camps are planned, organized and facilitated by us veterans. In April, I co-coordinated my first camp.

For the past 2 summers, Peace Corps has offered Camp Superman, a camp for boys aged 11-13, in which boys camp outdoors, play and learn to be a man. Delinquency and tigueraje are all too common options for young men in the DR and through Camp Superman and boys clubs in our communities, we volunteers attempt to educate young boys about being respectful, educated, mannerly young men.

As more and more volunteers begin boys groups in their sites, the Camp Superman model is starting to take off and this year, for the first time, we held a Regional Camp Superman in my very own beloved eastern region of the DR. Two fellow youth volunteers and I did the coordinating and logistical work to make the camp happen.

Thirteen Peace Corps Volunteers and 32 Dominican muchachos went to a beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sánchez to spend three fun and educational days in the wilderness. We played games. We slept in tents. We ate s’mores by a campfire. We hiked to a waterfall. We made superhero masks and capes. We discussed gender and what it means to be a man. We gazed at the stars. We swam in the river. We taught about HIV/AIDS and how it can be prevented. We had a great weekend in which everyone, volunteers and boys alike, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

The Regional Camp was a success and did much to prepare us for the upcoming 5-day National Camp in July. My life as a semi-professional camp counselor continues into the summer and my life as a camp planner and coordinator is about to kick into high gear in the months ahead.

The muchachos of Cachena

Team Green

Camp Photo with T-Shirts, Capes & Masks

Zafra

2011-05-14T11:46:00.005-04:00

It's harvest season. La zafra. Sugar cane fields throughout the eastern region of the DR are being set ablaze and backbreaking manual labor is all the rage.

For the past few months I’ve been able to look across the endless, llano plains covered in cane and see orange glows in the distance. Faraway cane fields being burned. The glow is actually quite breathtaking. The deeper into harvest season we get, the more glows that can be seen each night. I am staring at one right now that is at least one mile away but seems to be engulfing the entire batey. The ash falls like a light snow and leaves everything covered in a layer of cachispa that the children catch like snowflakes and shove into their mouth (claiming it tastes like boiled eggs).

The cane is lit on fire to burn away any dead or excess leaves and to scare away any critters, vermin or snakes calling the cane fields home. After being burned, the cane is manually cut by able-bodied men (primarily Haitian immigrants) wielding machetes, collected into large trucks and driven to the nearest processing plant.

In the past week I’ve gotten to see the cane cutting first hand. The sugar cane around Cachena was burned and the picadores got to work. The cutters often work shifts of 12+ hours (in the baking Caribbean sun) and are able to cut between 3-4 tons each day. At the moment, they are paid approximately 150 pesos ($3.80) per ton. Somewhere around 13 dollars a day for impossibly difficult physical labor. Meanwhile the sugar cane companies make bank by exploiting people living in abject poverty. A large number of bateyes are owned by the sugar cane companies themselves and only cane cutters and their families are allowed to live there. It is the closest example to indentured servitude I know of.

The landscape looks much different when not covered by seas of 10-foot tall sugar cane. Nearby communities are visible for the first time in a year and mountains can be seen in the distance. It’s an interesting time to be in the batey.

Already, new sugar cane is growing like a weed where it was harvested just weeks ago. The cycles begin again. One of the growing and harvesting of a crop. One of human rights violations. Both of which will continue long into the foreseeable future.

Flames rising over rooftops.

Taking in the show.

Graduation Day

2011-04-24T20:58:00.007-04:00

Saturday was Graduation Day for my Engineers Club. We started meeting back in January, doing a different science activity/experiment each week and I told them way back when that we would graduate in 12 weeks. They didn't forget.

In Dominican culture it is very important to have these graduations, ceremonies, etc, to recognize the work one does. There must always be an end goal. Very little doing something for something's sake. So although we still have many experiments left to do and will continue meeting weekly, a graduation was to be had.

In was a simple ceremony in which we discussed the work we have done. My boys who went to Engineers Camp talked about their experience in the mountains of Jarabacoa. We did an example of an experiment (Lava Lamps) for the audience of invited parents, siblings and random community members. Certificates were given to the graduates and we had the obligatory brindis, which is a small snack (in this case soda and cookies) for all attendees.

It was a fun day and the boys enjoyed being recognized for their work (and the cookies).

The graduates and invited guests.

A select few showing off multi-colored 'Lava Lamps'

With their certificates.

International Women's Day

2011-04-15T13:51:00.005-04:00

March 8^th marked the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In recognition of that milestone, volunteers around the DR put together numerous activities to celebrate the big day.

Here in the Eastern region of the DR, we waited until the 28^th of March to celebrate but better late than never. Two female volunteers organized an extremely interesting event in which girls from 7 different volunteer’s communities would take photos of women in their lives and put them on display.

Our youth rarely get the opportunity to express themselves in an artistic manner and have certainly never been to a museum, art gallery or art exhibit of any kind. The photos the girls took were hung on display in a community center, along with a caption explaining the photo, for all to see and enjoy.

Along with the photo exhibit, volunteers facilitated a writing workshop in which the girls learned about prose, poetry and letter writing. The girls wrote their own original pieces and shared their writing and/or their photos with the group.

This is not an easy country in which to be a woman. No country is I suppose. If it were easy we wouldn’t need days like International Women’s Day in order to recognize the achievements of women and examine the gender inequality that continues to exist in the world. That said, the DR is tough for females. It is always very encouraging and empowering to see young girls come together in this country and get the opportunity to have fun, be unique, learn new skills and do the things we so take for granted in the US of A.

This was one of the encouraging and empowering days.

The Cachena group doing the Aplauso del Pelotero

Prose Writing Activity

My Girls with their Photos

Soy Ingeniero

2011-04-05T10:38:00.000-04:00

I just made it back from a 4-day camp with 3 muchachos from my Engineering Club. Twelve volunteers and 32 boys aged 11-14ish spent a Thursday to Sunday high up in the mountains teaching, learning, swimming, playing and feeling colder than any of these boys had in their entire life.

The Engineers Camp, Soy Ingeniero, was held in Armando Bermudez National Park in La Cienaga, Jarabacoa. La Cienaga is among the highest towns in the Dominincan Republic (and the Caribbean) and the primary set off point for hikers heading to Pico Duarte, the highest mountain in the Caribbean. It is an entirely different world than what most of our kids are used to with thick, green forests, ice cold rivers and very chilly nights.

We spent the week doing interesting science experiments like building mousetrap cars, building boats of recycled materials, doing density and chemistry experiments, learning about robotics and more. They also did numerous teambuilding activities including having to climb a 10-foot wall as a team and pass through a “spider web” that volunteers put together in trees. There were campfires with s’mores, dips in an ice-cold river, HIV/AIDS activities and intense competition amongst the 4 teams of boys.

I have now been to around 10 youth camps and conferences and Soy Ingeniero definitely stands out above the rest. The boys were able to experience a place they never have before and, for many of them, a place they’ll never experience again. The boys were well behaved and engaged in the activities before them. The volunteers facilitated fun and interesting activities and the kids ate up the material.

It was among the few camps in which at the end of the weekend, the boys are sad to be going home and the volunteers aren’t burnt out and ready leave. Everything went well and my 3 Engineers are eager to share the new experiments with the club.

*Pictures forthcoming

Congressional Delegation

2011-03-29T22:33:00.003-04:00

A kind of big thing happened last week. A congressional delegation visited a neighboring batey and the community of a Super Volunteer friend of mine.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Peace Corps. As part of the commemoration of that milestone, a congressional delegation, led by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, visited the DR to learn more about Peace Corps and the work we do here. Other members of the delegation included Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Representative Peter Welch of Vermont and Representative Xavier Becerra of California. The senators and congressmen were accompanied by their spouses, assistants, security teams and the entourage one would expect of such a visit. The delegation was also accompanied by Aaron Williams, the International Director of Peace Corps (and a former PCV in the DR) and the US Ambassador to the DR, Raúl Yzaguirre. A fairly distinguished group of people to say the least.

Immediately after their plane landed, the delegation was driven to Batey Experimental (10km down the road from me) in order to visit a Peace Corps community and learn about a volunteer project. Peace Corps Volunteers from each Senator or Congressman’s home state accompanied them on the bus ride to the batey and talked all things Peace Corps.

Upon arrival in Experimental, the delegation was met by members of the community and Peace Corps personnel, myself included, and sat for a short presentation led by the Volunteer who lives in the batey, Kerri. Kerri, her host mom/community leader Victoria and USAID reps spoke briefly about their work in the batey. Then a number of Kerri’s youth participated in a Deportes para la Vida activity against volunteers from the delegation. Senators Leahy, Conrad & Hagan, Director Williams and others joined the Dominican youth in playing a game called Encuentre la Pelota (Find the Ball), which teaches that you can’t tell simply by looking at someone if they have HIV/AIDS. The members of the delegation seemed to really enjoy the game and participating alongside young Dominicans.

After some gift giving to local youth and obligatory photo ops, the delegation went for a tour around the batey to see first-hand the living conditions of the local people and to also see the living conditions of the volunteer, who lives in her own house. We volunteers translated for the members of the delegation as they asked questions to the people of Experimental and answered questions about the daily life of a PCV. As the batey is quite small, population 350ish, the tour was short-lived and the delegation hopped on buses to Santo Domingo where they had an evening reception at the US Embassy with invited Peace Corps Volunteers and other Peace Corps personnel. The following day the delegation visited Haiti before returning to the US of A.

It was an extremely unique opportunity to see a congressional delegation visit a neighboring batey and to meet the Senators, Congressmen, Director, Ambassador, etc. A very small number of volunteers were able to participate in the day’s events, making it a cool honor to be able to participate. It was also very humbling to see such distinguished individuals sincerely interested in the work that we do here.

As some of you may know, national service organizations like Peace Corps and Americorps have taken a hit in their funding since the new congress took over. Americorps faces huge cuts and possible extinction. The Peace Corps, which received a large funding increase in 2009 following Obama’s election, has also had their funding cut. These visits by congressional delegations hopefully show to the powers that be how valuable these service organizations can be. If we can pay billions of dollars to bomb countries like Libya and trillions to fight wars in the Middle East, we can certainly afford to fund Peace Corps, Americorps, Teach for America and similar organizations and try to make America and the world a better place.

Official Peace Corps News Release of the Visit

Video of the Visit Produced by Senator Leahy's 'People'

Save Americorps

Medical Mission

2011-03-23T22:40:00.007-04:00

From time to time teams of medical professionals come from the US to the DR to offer their services free of charge to Dominicans in need. From time to time these teams of medical professionals ask for Peace Corps Volunteers to assist them as translators. A few weeks back I was on of those volunteers.

A group of surgeons, nurses and OR technicians from Albany, New York, make the trip to the DR once each year and offer numerous types of plastic surgery. They aim to do work on children with cleft lips, cleft palates or other deformities. I, along with 3 other Peace Corps volunteers, assisted them with their mission in early March.

For the past few years (and this year too) the group has done their work at the Hospital Dr. Antonio Musa in San Pedro de Macoris. The Musa, as it is known, is located just 20km down the road from my site and is where people from my own site go when they are ill. The doctors arrived from snowy Albany on a Saturday and on Sunday we did intake for potential patients. Scores of people showed up with afflictions ranging from full body scars to small, almost unnoticeable scars and everything in between. There were fewer children and less cleft lips or palates than the doctors were accustomed to seeing, but a lot of people in need. Surgeries and operations were scheduled for the week and began on Monday.

From Monday to Thursday, more than 40 patients were worked on. Our primary role as volunteers was to translate for the doctors and to chat with patients and try to put them a bit more at ease before surgery. We got to meet a lot of interesting Dominicans and a number of patients were from communities near to my own. It was great to be able to make a personal connection, as small as it might have been, with someone living in a batey just up the road or in a nearby city. The small bits of familiarity went a long way to the Dominicans surrounded by strange white people.

Translating brought us into the OR itself as we talked patients through the anesthesia process. After they were asleep, we became spectators in the arena that is the OR. It was a mildly intimidating place at first. No one wanted to be the asshole American kid who passed out at the first sight of blood and then needed surgery himself. After seeing a thumb reconstruction on Monday morning, I had no fear and loved being in the OR and in the thick of it whenever possible.

The patients we saw came from all walks of life. There were children born wither proper fingers or toes. Adults who had scars from acid burns. An infant born without an opening to her vagina. Three different people who had had their ears bitten off (Tyson/Holyfield-style) in fights. People with scars from machete fights. And much, much more.

I had never realized before the medical mission that throwing battery acid on another human being is a common form of vengeance here in the DR. Machete fights yes, malicious acid attacks no. We saw multiple cases of people covered by large scars from acid thrown on them by angry friends of jealous lovers. We also saw a man whose wife, after learning of her husband’s infidelity, doused him in gasoline and threw a match. His entire upper body was covered in scars and the skin of his forearm and bicep had fused together. The doctors unattached it so that he had further arm motion.

The team from Albany Plasticare was great to work with. They did a lot of incredible work in a very short time period. When not at the hospital we got to know the doctors and nurses at the hotel we all shared. It was interesting and inspiring to see the work they did. As a PCV, so much of my work is educating youth and preparing them to make healthy decisions in the future. We very rarely see the immediate impact of our work and often struggle to quantify the work we do. The doctors on the other hand could change lives for the better in a matter of hours. They could see the benefits of their work in no time whatsoever.

Being part of a medical mission and spending time in an actual operating room was certainly a highlight of my Peace Corps service.

Best looking fake doctors in the DR

Voluntourism

2011-03-04T22:30:00.005-04:00

My batey and others like it throughout the Dominican Republic are well accustomed to having groups of foreigners (almost exclusively Americans and Canadians) drop in for visits. It is almost always a Christian group on a service trip or from time to time a group taking a day trip from their all-inclusive Caribbean vacation to see how the other half lives. The visitors usually make a loop around the batey, snap a few pictures with children, hand out some new toys or used clothes and promptly return to their beachfront hotel feeling very good about themselves and the momentary impact they have made on people living in poverty.

I have very mixed feelings on these frequent visits. While these visits can potentially be positive cultural exchanges, there is rarely an actual exchange that takes place. The visitors rarely speak Spanish. They are only here for an hour or two, an insufficient amount of time to exchange names and phone numbers, let alone culture. The visits often amount to nothing more than a group of white people dumping off loads of used stuff and coming dangerously close to what I would define as exploitation.

A good (and admittedly cliché) way to look at Peace Corps service and an overused Chinese Proverb says:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,

Teach a man to fish and you teach him for a lifetime.”

I have two years of Peace Corps service in which to share some culture, drop some knowledge and, with some luck, make an impact on a number or individuals or (with lots of luck) an entire community. Whether it is through basic literacy, sex education, gender empowerment, volleyball skills, proper marshmallow roasting or English language curse words, I’m trying to teach something and create sustainable projects and knowledge that will continue long after I’m gone.

Few things can be more undermining to that process than for a busload of Americans to pull into my site every two weeks and hand out free fish of all shapes, sizes and shiny colors. I can’t compete with that. I have no fish to give away. And I don’t blame the people here for preferring free fish to the hard earned kind. Life is already hard. Why complicate it by learning new skills when someone is going to give you what you need? After tourism, the second highest form of income in the Dominican Republic is receiving remittances from friends, family and myriad baseball players in the U.S. and other countries. This is a culture well accustomed to and very comfortable with waiting for help from outside and not always willing to fix problems from within.

This past Friday I had a chance to host and plan a productive visit in my community with a group of study abroad students from Virginia Tech. The students are spending the semester in the DR and, as part of a course on agriculture and economics, they wanted to visit a batey / small agricultural community and see and hear first hand how difficult the life of a cane cutter or of people living in bateyes can be.

Having an opportunity to actually plan the activities and arrange for community members with intimate knowledge of local agriculture and cane cutting to lead and participate in activities made for an excellent opportunity for experiential learning. My superstar youth and community leaders gave a tour of the batey while I translated. We visited a nearby parcel of land where the community members communally grow all different kinds of crops and food. We walked through sugar cane and later had a productive discussion about the life of a cane cutter, life in the batey and life in America. Later that afternoon the students visited the batey of a neighboring volunteer and learned even more.

It was an extremely positive experience and showed me how productive these visits by gringos can be under the right set of circumstances and with some guidance. It hurts to know that after this productive visit, it is just a matter of weeks before a new group of white people shows up and puts us a step back after a large step forward. So it goes.

Peace Corps as an organization has 3 simple goals:

Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

The visit by the Virginia Tech students succeeded in fulfilling both Goals 2 & 3. All in all a successful day in the life of a Volunteer.

Tour of Batey Cachena

Community leader Wilfrido showing off guandules (pigeon peas) and discussing local agriculture.

Carnaval

2011-02-28T10:46:00.004-04:00

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

2011-02-24T23:08:00.007-04:00

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.

2011-02-20T20:28:00.002-04:00

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

2011-02-02T20:24:00.010-04:00

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.

To the Batcave

2011-01-26T21:20:00.003-04:00

Last weekend I made a quick trip into the mountains here in the eastern region to scout out a site where we would like to hold a boy’s camp. While I live in the sugar cane-covered plains, the mountains are but a bus ride away. Just ninety minutes on the guagua brought me to the beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sanchez.

Pedro Sanchez from the Loma

My primary objective of the trip was to scout out the sight for the camp but I had the good fortune of tagging along on a bit of an excursion as well. The local guides group was climbing up a loma to some caves in order to clean up the trails and clean up garbage in the caves themselves. The guides group has had a Peace Corps volunteer working with them for the past few years and currently have a new volunteer as they try to attract tourists to their beautiful mountain setting.

I gladly tagged along on the trip and quickly learned how out of shape I am after a lazy holiday season and some time spent stuffing my face in the US of A. After struggling to the top of the loma, and a nice long descanso, it was time to dive into some caves.

We went into three caves in total and each subsequent cave was deeper, darker and home to more murciélagos, or bats. In America, if you are visiting caves as a tourist you will most likely be walking along carefully manicured and well-lit walkways ensuring one’s safety. In the DR there is none of the above. We climbed down rocks and boulders in the dark with only a few headlamps to lead the way. The deeper we got, the darker it got. The darker it got, the more bats there were. The more bats there were, the more guano there was to trudge through.

It was fascinating to watch the young Dominicans who had been visiting these caves since their childhood run and jump through the dark with ease without a single misstep. It is akin to the Dominican children who live near the beach that have the ability to climb a palm tree, knock down a coconut and climb back down in 8 seconds flat or the kids from my site who can cut down a stalk of sugar cane and tear it apart with their bare teeth without a second thought. Dominican kids develop some fun abilities.

The bats were at both times cool and eerie. They could be heard but not seen, without the flash of a camera that is. They would begin to stir each time we approached and the entire cave would echo with their movements. The third and final cave we visited is home to an estimated half million bats.

Entering the 3rd Cave

The ground in the cave was covered with guano that locals collect to use as fertilizer and that gringos like me inadvertently slip-n-slide through. All the Dominicans had huge rubber boots with great traction and I was roller-skating around with sad excuses for hiking shoes.

By the time we had gotten in and out of the second cave most everyone was completely covered in bat poo. The guides and locals were covered because they had a bat poo fight the way Iowans would have a snowball fight. I was covered because I slipped and fell a dozen times. So it goes. Thankfully Dominican doñas can rid of any stain and have no problems with poop.

It was a fun excursion and succeeded in physically kicking my ass. I learned that I will need to work out a bit before finally deciding to tackle Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the DR and all of the Caribbean, which is a volunteer rite of passage to climb during their service.

Murciélagos

Las Estrellas Orientales

2011-01-24T23:52:00.008-04:00

The Dominican Winter Baseball League takes place each year between October and January, when the Major Leagues are in off-season. The league consists of just 6 teams. A number of Major League players and up-and-coming farm team prospects participate in the Winter League to hone their skills for the upcoming MLB season.

The team nearest to my site is the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. As I live nearby (about 15 miles), I have deemed myself an Estrellas fan based solely on proximity. They play in San Pedro de Macoris, the mecca of Dominican baseball, where many of the great Dominican peloteros call home. This year marked the 100^th anniversary of the franchise. In all of those 100 years, the Estrellas have won just 3 titles. In a league of just 6 teams.

The Estrellas are the (not so) lovable losers of the DR league. The Dominican equivalent of the Chicago Cubs. Due again to proximity and a lack of a professional team in Iowa, I regard myself as a Cubs fan. Both teams have a tendency experience long spells of losing seasons followed by teams with great promise who choke and leave their fans again disappointed. The Estrellas last title was in 1968.

One difference between the Cubs and Estrellas is that the Cubs inability to win the big game has become somewhat of an endearing trait. They have one of the country’s largest fan bases. Many, myself included, can’t help but fall for the lovable losers from the North side. Fans stay loyal and each October dutifully utter the words, “maybe next year.” The Estrellas fans don’t find the losing reputation to be quite so endearing. Many have given up entirely and taken to cheering for one of the other 5 teams that win from time to time.

This year the Estrellas made it to the league championship against the fellow team from the eastern region, the Toros of La Romana. It would have been fitting for the Estrellas to end their 42-year title drought in the 100^th year of the franchise. But in true Estrellas form they lost a best-of-9 series 5 games to zero. The whole San Pedro area was abuzz only to see their team break their hearts once again in a rather embarrassing 5 games to 0 fashion. I’ve yet to hear anyone suggest “maybe next year.”

The Estrellas playing Escogido in the Capital

For more on the Eastern Stars and an interesting read check out this book, Eastern Stars, that is making the rounds amongst volunteers living in and around San Pedro.

Experimentation

2011-01-18T19:55:00.012-04:00

After spending Christmas in the States, I arrived back in the DR with gifts in tow. I could not possibly have come back empty handed to a chorus of Dominicans asking, ¿Que me trajiste? (What did you bring me?). This is a phrase we volunteers hear more often than we would like. Sometimes after just a quick trip to the Capital for a meeting the local children will ask what we’ve brought back for them. A trip to the giant mall of a country that is the US would surely attract much ¿Que me trajiste?.

I obviously couldn’t bring something for everyone and focused my give-giving solely on my host family. I found many trinkets and toys in the US that would be perfect to momentarily peak the interest of local children with short attention spans while also buying things with few parts and little monetary value for when they were inevitably broken. I found crayons, kaleidoscopes, baseballs, candy, etc. And I bought some Christmas stockings for my host family in hopes of sharing some American customs and culture.

Since Dominicans do not traditionally exchange gifts on Christmas but on Three Kings or Epiphany Day (January 6^th), I was able to partake in the gift giving in both the US and the DR.

My most daring purchase was something I planned to buy long before heading back Stateside. Quite often groups of American missionaries pass through my community and other area bateyes and almost literally dump gifts into the hands of Dominican children. (This creates a dependency and makes our job harder - but that rant is for another time.) The most prevalent of these gifts are knock-off Barbie dolls that little girls cling to. They spend hours on end combing Barbie’s bleach blonde locks until the have removed each and every hair on the doll’s head and lose interest. Not even batey children want a bald Barbie. The doll is always the same: white skinned with blonde hair and impossible measurements.

The gift I planned to buy each of my 3 young host nieces (ages 8, 6 and 5) was meant to be somewhat of a social experiment. I bought each of them their very own Barbie or baby doll, but each of the dolls had black skin, just like my nieces themselves. I knew that one of two things would occur.

1) The girls would love their dolls and relish the fact that the dolls ‘looked like them’ in some way.

2) The girls would be quick to label the dolls as ‘ugly’ or in some way inferior to the cheap white Barbies they have grown accustomed to.

I once watched a video in a college class dealing with this exact issue. When given a choice between white and black dolls, both white American and African American children overwhelming choose the white doll. They say it’s better, it’s prettier, it's nicer and generally preferable to the other. I was interested to know that while this may hold true in a multi-racial United States of America, would it also ring true in a developing nation of dark-skinned people?

While I had obviously hoped for scenario 1 to take place, I knew that the more likely reaction was that of scenario 2. And, lamentably, scenario 2 is exactly what unfolded. The 8 and 6 year-old nieces feigned interest in their Disney Princess Barbie for a moment before quickly moving on to the white Barbie knock-off their parents had gifted them. The 5 year-old wasted not a second to label her doll as fea (ugly) and has never touched it since. Experiment failed.

Unwanted dolls aside, my host family generally enjoyed their gifts and a successful holiday was had by all.

Un Año Nuevo

2011-01-12T15:58:00.002-04:00

How it can possibly be the year 2011 right now I really don’t know. Upon joining Peace Corps many future volunteers, myself included, look ahead thinking two years is such a long time and here I am with 10 months left to go not knowing where the time went. This experience is passing by at warp speed.

The past month has only accelerated the feeling that life is passing by too quickly. I spent some time in the US for the holidays. I just couldn’t go one more year without a White Christmas or knowing what it felt like to be cold. It was great to see the snow and feel the cold and even greater to leave knowing I wouldn’t have to drive in it and deal with it for the next 3 months.

After some very welcome R&R in the States, my younger sister came and visited me here in the DR for a couple weeks. We traveled around the entire country, jumped off waterfalls, hung out in bateyes, hit the beach, camped in the clouds, celebrated a New Year and her 20^th birthday. It was a whirlwind of a trip and a great way to kick off 2011.

Now it’s back to the grind and trying to get as much as possible accomplished before these last 10 months disappear as quickly as the first 17 did.

I'm usually not one to make New Year's Resolutions, but this year it seems almost necessary as my time here ticks away.

One thing I really hope to do is the write and blog more often so as to better document this experience and share my life here with people back home. This is a resolution I am pretty confident I can do.

Another is to start weaning myself off of meat. I am far too weak to become a full-fledged vegetarian, but I would certainly like to start eating less meat before my impending arrival back in the US of A. I'll start out as a weekday (okay, maybe 4 days a week) vegetarian and go from there. This resolution may be harder to uphold.

I would resolve (as most everyone does) to exercise more but I know myself too well for that. Playing basketball and volleyball in the batey will just have to be enough.

And lastly I intend to spend more time in my site and focus on the community and the things we are trying to achieve. I've had some great fun in this country and traveled a lot. In the next 10 months I want to focus more on work and less on play.

Happy New Year - Feliz Año Nuevo - Welcome 2011

Deportes Para la Vida

2010-12-22T16:46:00.001-04:00

My last big hurrah before heading home for the holidays was a 5-day camp/training to learn all about Deportes Para la Vida (Sports for Life). Deportes Para la Vida (DPV) is a Dominican offspring of Grassroot Soccer, an American NGO that “uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV.” Grassroot Soccer uses soccer and athletics to educate about HIV/AIDS in the developing world, primarily in Africa.

Deportes Para la Vida works towards the same goal in the DR. As soccer takes a backseat to baseball and is not embraced by Dominicans as in most all other countries, DPV is working to educate using a number of different sports including baseball, basketball and volleyball.

The training was the longest I have participated in as a volunteer. Each of the 8 or so volunteers brought 2-3 youth leaders from our communities to receive the training along with us. The goal was to train the DPV curriculum to Volunteers and our youth so that we can return to our communities and multiply the information to our youth.

DPV consists of many fun and educational activities and will be a really fun course to do with Dominican youth. Along with the two youth from my site who attended the training with me, we plan on teaching the course during P.E. each week in our local school and drop some HIV knowledge while having some fun.

Chicas Brillantes

2010-12-01T09:50:00.003-04:00

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to attend an intercambio with 24 young Dominican chicas aged 11-18. I was the only male at the event along with the 24 girls and 4 female volunteers.

The intercambio was for Chicas Brillantes, a Peace Corps initiative for young Dominican girls. The overnight intercambio featured sessions about the female body, art activities, volleyball games and much more.

Chicas Brillantes is a girls club that many volunteers do that covers topics about adolescence and young womanhood and includes many interesting activities and opportunities for young Dominican girls. The girls clubs work year round in anticipation of their seminal event, Camp G.L.O.W. (Girls Leading Our World), which takes place each summer.

Verdict is still out as to whether I will be starting my very own girls group in the months to come. The intercambio reinforced the importance of working with girls in this machismo culture but also how many headaches may come with working with girls aged 11-14. Vamos a ver.

Ants Marching

2010-11-18T15:38:00.008-04:00

Last February, a barancon housing more than 40 people burned down here in my site. All of those 40+ people were displaced and a 2-year-old girl died of smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire was a candle, being used during one of many daily power outages, that tipped over and eventually reached the highly flammable zinc roof. The displaced were forced to move into already overcrowded homes with extended family and neighbors and have lived in these uncomfortable conditions for the past 9 months.

A barancon is a barrack commonly found in Dominican bateyes. The barracks were built for the migratory Haitian sugar cane workers and are simply a long concrete buildings divided into several individual housing units. Many units are nothing more than one 10x12 room where entire families live. The vast majority of people in my community live in barracks.

In response to the burned barrack, the community began to construct a new one in August, with economic backing from USAID and Save the Children, to help ease the overcrowding that was going on in homes since the fire.

After months of construction followed by weeks of institutional bureaucracy, people here were able to move into their new homes this week. Watching the move was like watching ants march. The entire community got involved and were carrying suitcases, tables, chairs, mattresses, televisions, etc, in an endless flow until all people and their belongings had been moved and situated in their new homes.

While overcrowding is still a problem, it is much less of a problem this week and a number of families are happy to be in new homes.

People moving into the new barancon as seen from my porch

Eliecel moving into his new casa.

Mwen Pale Kreyól

2010-11-11T09:08:00.001-04:00

It has been a long, educational and stormy couple of weeks. After days spent despedir-ing a group of good friends (Felicidades 517-08-02), learning all about the ugliness of cholera and celebrating Halloween and one year as a Peace Corps Volunteer (Felicidades 517-09-02) in a beautiful beach house, I learned a new language in 3½ days. Mwen te aprann pale Kreyól.

Twice each year Peace Corps DR offers a weeklong Haitian Creole course for volunteers living in bateyes, near the border or in communities with a large Haitian/Creole-speaking population. As a volunteer now living in a batey, I got the opportunity to participate.

The training is traditionally held in a batey in the southern part of the country but due to the imminent wrath of Hurricane Tomás, this year we were sequestered to a neighborhood of Santo Domingo for the week. After the initial frustration and disappointment of having Creole training in the Capital and not in a batey full of Creole speakers, training got underway as Hurricane Tomás arrived.

Creole is a very basic language and in less than 4 days I feel like I got a firm grasp on the grammatical structure and some basic vocab. I have already sought out two Creole speakers in my community, ages 6 and 7, to practice with on a regular basis until I get brave enough chat with adults.

As Creole training ended, the brunt of Tomás, the first hurricane to make landfall on the island in my time here, was arriving in the DR. All volunteers living in various high-risk areas of the country, including the Capital where I was, were consolidated to hotels for safety and security reasons.

While hurricanes are not something volunteers look forward to, consolidation due to hurricanes is something all volunteers dream of. Air-conditioned hotel rooms with endless hot water, flushing toilets and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Magical. The amount of weight gained by volunteers during consolidation must be an astonishingly high number. It was a very relaxing couple of days spent with good friends before returning to volunteer reality.

God Hates Haiti

2010-11-02T22:55:00.001-04:00

As anyone who owns a computer, television or reads a newspaper well knows, cholera has come to Haiti. This ugly bacterium has arrived on the island of Hispaniola and is wreaking havoc on those living across the border and still displaced by last winter’s earthquake. As if living in makeshift shantytowns wasn’t trouble enough, Haitians now must concern themselves with the threat of fatal, white diarrhea. Can these people ever catch a break?

As we share an island with Haiti, all Peace Corps volunteers in the DR were brought to the capital last week to have a crash course training on avoiding cholera when it eventually and inevitably makes its way across the fronterra and into la República Dominicana. Hay que prepararse.

As if an earthquake, cholera and a long history of colonialism, slavery, dictatorship and abject poverty weren’t enough, a potential hurricane moving across the Caribbean has changed course and has aimed its ugly head directly for Port-au-Prince. The lack of proper shelter will make for a serious disaster if and when the storm strikes areas of the country already devastated by the earthquake and currently suffering from a cholera outbreak. Dios odia a Haiti.

How the Galleta Crumbles

2010-10-21T19:58:00.005-04:00

When I initially began this blog, I thought of it as a way to document my Peace Corps experience, update friends, family and interested parties back in the States and, in doing so, give some insight into the life of a Volunteer. I have admittedly failed miserably in Year One to do this.

Like all volunteers, my service to this point has been a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs, highs and lows, peaks and valleys. Things in my first site left much to be desired and my lukewarm feelings towards that site and my work there certainly made for a lack of blog material.

Now I am about to complete my first calendar year as a Volunteer, am living in a new site and ready to give this blog thing another go. I’ll try to be frequent and substantive in my entries in the weeks and months to come.

So without further ado, here is my week in volunteerism in the DR...

After a nearly a month of getting to know my new community, learning names and faces and completing the second community diagnostic of my service, I was finally ready to get some classes and projects underway here in my new site. We had planned to start with English classes as, naturally, that is what the youth in the community seem to be clamoring over above all else. (Translation: Sex Ed and basic literacy can wait…I want to know what Vin Diesel is talking about in all those Fast and Furious movies)

I had spent this past weekend in the Southern region of the DR at a despedida for a volunteer friend who, along with an entire group of volunteers, are about to finish their service and return to the US of A. (Congrats y Suerte 517-08-02) I passed on a scenic brunch and free ziplining on Sunday to ensure that I would be back in my site and well-prepared for Day 1 of English class on Monday. This is where volunteer reality set in and things slowly began to unravel.

As I awoke and got ready to head to the local community center to give class, I was informed that there were a group of doctors in the community center giving free AIDS tests all day. Class canceled. So it goes. Doctors administering AIDS tests to the community for free is exponentially more valuable than my teaching basic English and playing games with Dominican youth.

No sweat. We’ll start Tuesday. Unless the key to the community center has been lost that is.

The key is typically kept in the colmado across the street. On Tuesday the colmado does not have the key. The president of the Junta de Vecinos does not have the key. Nobody seems to have the key. Class canceled. Again.

Key eventually turns up, as expected, and class begins Wednesday.

Had this series of events happened last December, a month after beginning my service in my first site, I would have been frustrated and concerned that this would be a recurring theme in the weeks and months ahead. Now, after having a year’s worth of experiences in the DR, the frustration never comes. I know for a fact that this will recur in the weeks and months to come. Shit like this happens here. Así es la vida.

As a volunteer, you are to plan for each class, practice, charla, etc, while knowing that things will never go exactly as planned. Something always comes up. Doctors come. Keys are lost. It rains. Students show up 50 minutes late (or not at all). Sometimes that's just the way the galleta crumbles.

Escout

2010-10-08T13:41:00.004-04:00

The Major League Baseball regular season may have just ended on Sunday, but teams are wasting no time looking ahead to the future. A scout from the Chicago Cubs stopped by yesterday to check out some of the local talent. A team from here in Cachena took the field against a team from the nearby pueblo of Consuelo as the escout looked on with interest. The visit seemed very informal and was more observational than anything else, but I would selfishly love it if a member of my community someday played for either the I-Cubs or Chicago Cubs. I foresee nights spent in sports bars bragging of knowing the Cubs' starting shortstop when he was still a shoeless, underfed Dominican kid playing stickball in the cane fields.

Just two days earlier a caravan of locals in a rundown guagua traveled to the airport to greet Pedro Ciriaco, Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop and Cachena native who is back here in his home community during the offseason. Tis’ the season when the big leaguers and minor leaguers make their way back here to the batey and abandon the American lifestyle, American food and indoor plumbing for a couple months.

While I knew that mine was a baseball community, I did not realize just how deep the talent pool might go. Most every male aged 16-24 seems to be an above average pelotero and at any given moment, there are 8-10 youngsters hoping to be signed and swept away to the Land of Plenty. In a community of approximately 300, having even 1, let alone 10-15 players with big league potential is pretty amazing.

Cachena

2010-09-29T21:16:00.002-04:00

Integrating into a new community is certainly easier when you understand what people are saying and why they are doing the strange things they do. Having a grasp on the language and culture of the DR has made for a smooth transition into my new community, Batey Cachena.

Cachena is a small community of approximately 250 people set in the sugar cane-filled plains of the eastern Dominican Republic. The entire community consists of one dirt road lined on both sides by barracks constructed decades ago for migratory sugar cane workers. The migratory workers no longer migrate nor work in the cane fields. They have made a permanent home of Cachena.

Two things stand out as interesting:

Whereas most of the migratory workers brought to the DR to harvest sugar cane came from Haiti and many bateyes have a majority Haitian or Dominican-Haitian population, the workers in my community were brought from the lesser Antilles island of Anguilla. Rather than Creole, some of the immigrants here speak Caribbean English comparative to that of Jamaica. Unfortunately, very few people here still speak this English and the younger generations born here speak only Spanish.

My site is about 15km from San Pedro de Macoris, the Mecca of Dominican baseball where superstars like Sammy Sosa and big league shortstops galore call home. Baseball here is the escape that basketball is in many American inner cities. To many, it is the only perceptible means of escaping an impoverished life. People live, eat and breathe baseball with the hopes of being seen by a scout and whisked away to the US of A. From my small community alone, there is one major league player, three minor leaguers, multiple teens waiting to be called up and a handful of adults who spent a short time playing in the States before seeing their life-long dream disappear far too early.

I am still in the initial stages of getting to know everyone and spending endless hours sitting on porches and complaining about the heat, a volunteer rite of passage. Remembering names and faces, playing Uno with the local kids, daily basketball games with the local dudes and waiting for the electricity to come back on takes up most of my day at the moment. The transition from one site to the next was far easier than expected and I most certainly made the right choice in changing sites.

*Pictures forthcoming.

Moving Day

2010-09-19T18:15:00.003-04:00

After two long months of being stranded in limbo between two places, I am moving to my new site on Monday. The past two months have easily been the most mentally and emotionally difficult of my service. Now I get to tackle the mental and emotional stress of integrating into a new community and starting all over again.

While my new site is very much different than my old site, it is just one hour down the road and not a huge adjustment geographically. I will still be in the same eastern region of the country and can even take the same bus to and from the capital. The way of life will take some getting used to though as I am moving from a pueblo with good infrastructure, 24-hour electricity, indoor plumbing and many ‘modern’ amenities to a batey with poor infrastructure, sporadic electricity, latrines and a complete lack of ‘modern’ amenities.

Bateys are communities found here in the Dominican Republic created years ago by sugar cane conglomerates. The bateys are situated in and around sugar cane fields and in the past were populated by migrant workers, brought primarily from Haiti, to harvest the sugar cane for extremely low wages. Over time, many migrant workers have stayed in the DR and began families and lives here. Bateys often have large Haitian populations and are among the poorest and most underdeveloped communities in the DR.

The physical layout of my community is strangely familiar. Situated in the eastern plains of this country and surrounded on all sides by sugar cane fields, the views from my community very much resembles the small towns situated in the cornfields of Iowa. The similarities end there.

I’m looking forward to meeting my new community and getting back to work after many idle summer months.

Agosto

2010-08-26T22:54:00.002-04:00

August can be pretty brutal here in the DR. The heat is relentless. The sweat is endless. Energy and ambition are hard to come by. No es facil.

This past week marked my 1-year anniversary since arriving in the DR. It is impossible to believe that an entire year has passed. Sometimes it feels like just yesterday we arrived, other days it feels like years. A new group of trainees has arrived in country and we are slowly becoming the wily veterans on the island. Just a year ago, I was stumbling off a plane, wide-eyed and melting in the Caribbean heat. I’m still melting, but most everything else about life here has become much more simplified.

While I should feel like a veteran and be moving into a new stage of my service, lots of changes are happening in my volunteer life at the moment. After months of stagnation and agonizing debate over what is best for both myself and my service, it has been decided that a site change is in my best interest. I will be leaving my current urban site for a much different, much smaller site. The process leading up to this decision has easily been the most difficult aspect of my service to this point.

I will be moving in the weeks to come and in many ways will be starting my service anew. It is an exciting transition and I know it will be best for me moving forward. I’ll be sure to document the move, introduce my new site, explain what a ‘batey’ is and all that fun stuff over the course of the next month.

Camp Superman

2010-07-16T22:28:00.002-04:00

Almost one week later, I feel as though I’m still recovering from the exhaustion that comes with spending 4 days with 30+ muchachos in the Dominican wilderness. Last week was the second annual Campamento Superman, where young boys aged 10-14 from all over the DR come to camp, play and learn how to be Supermen.

The trip from my site to the beautiful mountain site of Los Bueyes was long. Really long. Eight hours on 4 buses long. That might be tolerable to you or I, but to my two 11 year-olds who have rarely been outside of the barrio, we may as well have been traveling to Asia. Add to the trip that one of my boys struggles with carsickness and the travel days become even longer.

But we made it and the weekend was full of activities both physical and educational. The boys slept in tents and lived life in the great outdoors. We bathed and spent many hours splashing around in the crystal clear river. We played all sorts of camp games like tug-o-war, had slip-n-slide relays and went wild in alka seltzer tag, a twist on tag where each person is given an alka seltzer tablet to wear around their neck and a bag full of water to splash each person’s tablet. The last ones standing with an intact alka seltzer tablet win. We also put on a science fair, talked about gender and what it means to be ‘men’ and painted Superman plaques. The Dominican boy scouts were on hand to teach wilderness survival tactics and local guides led a nature hike. A Dominican group called Futbol para la Vida came to teach about HIV/AIDS awareness and let the kids and volunteers act out their World Cup aspirations on the soccer field. All in all it was 4 days full of activities for muchachos and volunteers alike.

I was concerned that the boys might get brave and venture out on their own from time to time, especially at night. But fortunately for us, most all of the boys had seen the Dominican horror movie Andrea that takes place in the same region of the country we were camping. Any thoughts the boys had of wandering alone in the wilderness were immediately erased by thoughts of monster lady Andrea lurking around. Any late night noises or bad nights sleep were attributed to Andrea. This fictional character helped keep the boys in check.

Each night we sat around a campfire and made s’mores. I think volunteers missing the simple pleasures of camping and the great outdoors in summertime back home enjoyed these moments even more than the boys.

My two muchachos were a handful to say the least. They were among the, shall we say, least well behaved campers (understatement). But they had a blast and in the end I’m glad it was them that participated. It will be months before their doñas will be able to pry the Campamento Superman t-shirts from their bodies.

Las Galeras

2010-07-12T22:11:00.009-04:00

Photos of Las Galeras, Samaná, and an epic 4th of July weekend.

La Playita near our beachfront Villa

Beachfront Villa with Pool (on the right) = Greatest Idea Ever

Beach Football on Playa Rincón

Patriotism on Rincón

Paradise

4th

2010-07-06T14:10:00.002-04:00

What a glorious 4th of July that was. A massive crew of volunteers and many visitors from the States overtook a beautiful beach town on the Dominican peninsula of Samaná. We rented a number of houses all over town and I found myself with 15 good friends in a beachfront villa with a pool. Not a bad way to celebrate our independence.

The beaches were amazing, the games of American football on the beach were intense, the company of so many PCVs was great and the stories unforgettable. A 4^th of July pageant, multiple renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and various other patriotic tunes, plus a surprise 30^th birthday party for a fellow volunteer only added to the fun.

Now it’s back to reality (sort of). This week is Camp Superman, a boys camp put on by volunteers that began last summer. A group of volunteers, myself included, will be taking 2 muchachos each from our communities to a beautiful mountain site where we will camp out and put on a 4-day summer camp. More on that (with photos) to come next week.

Costa Esmeralda

2010-06-28T20:13:00.002-04:00

This past weekend, a group of us finally made the trip to Michés and Costa Esmeralda. Michés is a seaside town 90 minutes north of my city of El Seibo. The coast that begins in Michés and moves east along the Bay of Samaná and the Atlantic Ocean is known as the Emerald Coast and is one that is undeveloped and absurdly beautiful. People in and around my site have ranted and raved about this, the nearest beach to my site, since day one and I finally took the opportunity to see what all the hype is about.

The trip was almost scrapped at the last second due to the unrelenting rains that have dictated life here in the DR for the past few weeks. But some bravery and a propensity to roll the dice and trust that all things will fall together got us on the bus north. The bus ride from El Seibo to Michés is worth the trip itself. The climb up into the Cordillera Oriental passes through lush green mountains, by large waterfalls and to the northern coast. It was something straight out of Jurassic Park.

The beach at the city of Michés leaves much to be desired but a 3-hour walk along the coast will lead to Playa Esmeralda, a hidden gem and one of the DR’s most beautiful beaches. The long walk flies by as you cross rivers, climb drooping palm trees and stop periodically to cool off in the calm waters. In the 8 hours we were away, we never saw so much as one human being (almost). The rains stayed away. The beach was ours.

I would love to post photos that show just how beautiful the Emerald Coast is, but on our walk back to the city to catch the USA/Ghana match, we finally ran into 2 human beings, 20 minutes from our destination. These human beings decided to rob us. My camera with the day’s photos was taken by two ladrónes with broken bottles and bad attitudes. Michés has a reputation for being a bit caliente, so we knew not to bring much cash or valuables. Our cameras and small amounts of pesos were all they got away with. In the end, we walked away unscathed aside from some pretty serious sunburn, annoyed about being robbed by 2 tigueres with broken bottles.

While my first experience as the victim of a crime in the DR put a blight on the trip, the deserted beach, the impeccable weather and the 6 hour walk through Caribbean beauty was fantastic. Playa Esmeralda is, to the point, the most beautiful beach I’ve seen in the Dominican.

Nueba Yol

2010-06-25T12:47:00.002-04:00

I have survived my first trip home to the States during my service and am now slowly readjusting to life back here in the DR. Being in America after a 10-month stay in the Caribbean was interesting. Not nearly as strange as I thought it might be but a change of pace to be sure.

Only after removing myself from the rat race that is American life was I truly able to see it for what it is. It makes me more thankful for the tranquility of life here in the DR even while knowing that when my time here is up, I will reenter said rat race without missing a step. Inevitable. Until that day, I have much time to cogerlo suave aquí.

America is a pretty wild and incredible place. A land of consumerism and hot water on demand. Of personal motor vehicles and freaky fast internet. Wild and incredible.

Now I’m back and it’s summer, aka Hurricane Season. The rain is even worse than it was when I left (which I didn’t believe possible). Most days seem to be spent indoors waiting for the rains to pass. Thank Dios for podcasts and books. School is out and daily schedules have changed completely. I feel like I am having to learn the daily life of my community all over again.

So I’m readjusting back to Dominican life and summer schedules, starting to use Spanish again after a 2-week hiatus and waiting for the first of many hurricanes predicted to pummel the Caribbean. It’s going to be an interesting summer.

Moho

2010-06-03T01:32:00.002-04:00

The rainy season may have just begun, but it is already kicking my ass. The constant rain keeps everyone indoors and makes holding regularly scheduled classes and/or meetings a near impossibility. The constant rain has also turned my small apartment into a breeding ground for moho, or mold.

I don’t have a back door to help air pass through my place and have persiana windows that do not let in large amounts of sunlight. Those things coupled with the rains have made things good and damp in my apartment for the past few weeks. The dampness and humidity have led to lots of moho. I am fortunate that my apartment itself is made of bloc and not wood, but all of my furniture is wooden and currently black, blue and fuzzy. The mold on my dresser has spread to clothes and the mold on shelves has spread to books and papers. Lots of stuff had to be thrown out.

The past few days have been full of scrubbing everything with bleach and asking neighbors and businesses where one can buy a dehumidifier, which has led to blank stares and mistranslations. Apparently they are far from common down here. So for now it is just bleach baths for all of my belongings and hoping that my black fuzzy roommate has gone away for good. Vamos a ver.

Llegó la Lluvia

2010-05-28T23:30:00.002-04:00

The rainy season has officially arrived. After watching much of April and May pass by in relative dryness, it has been raining for almost a solid week and with no end in sight. The showers have even been accompanied by the only thunder and/or lightning I have witnessed in this country. While I normally would be looking forward to the next thundershower and the lazy day that accompanies it, rain (and lots of it) completely alters the pace of everyday life here in the DR. Dirt roads become mud holes, rivers rise, tin roofs leak and daily life becomes more complicated. All those things together make for extremely slow days when people rarely leave the house and work and school become optional. I’m enjoying the down time and there are few things better than sitting on the porch with a book while the rain falls, but I really hope the rains leave with the month of May. That said, hurricane season opens in June and all predictions say that this season will be active, so the rain is likely here to stay.

As the rainy season begins, the election season has come to an end. ¡Por fin! Election campaigns have been in full swing since the fall and are possibly more obnoxious than U.S. elections, if you can believe that. Politicians and politics in general are equally ridiculous and corrupt here as they are in the States, but here the ridiculousness is far more overt. Political favors are done in the open rather than under the table.

The senatorial race in my province was especially bizarre in this cycle. I won’t bore you with the details, but at the end of the day an aging man with zero political experience won in a landslide over the incumbent. Only after it was determined that the aging man’s popular young son was constitutionally unable to run for office in this province did ‘Papá’ get named as his replacement. Like in America, politics is a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ game. And the ruling Purple Party has paved roads, erected buildings and paid straight cash in exchange for votes. With a résumé like that, there was never any doubt they would win and win big. 31 of 32 Senate seats big. Talk about a supermajority.

Politics have been at the forefront since I arrived in DR last August, but the months of being inundated with all things electoral are over. The trucks carrying banks of blaring speakers and caravans holding up traffic are gone. The television and radio ads have ceased. The political favors have been put on hold for another 2 years, when presidential elections set the events of political lunacy into motion once again.

So for now it’s less bulla and more lluvia. Lots and lots of lluvia.

Celebrando el Este

2010-05-12T01:05:00.003-04:00

This past weekend I went to another weekend-long camp called Celebrando el Este (Celebrating the East). This youth conference/camp is designed to be a celebration of the eastern region the DR, the DR itself and the entire globe. Over the course of 3 days we touched on issues of diversity, geography, history, world cultures and more.

All volunteers living in the eastern region were invited to attend and bring 2 youth along to participate. Fortunately for my youth and I, the conference was held just down the road from my site at Rancho Don Fernandez, a ranch founded by former gold glove-winning shortstop Tony Fernandez, who is from nearby San Pedro de Marcoris.

The Dominican educational system is, well, shit. Therefore, topics of history, geography and all things having to do with life off of this island are rarely taught and seldom learned. For example, most Dominicans think New York City and the United States are the same thing. Almost no Dominicans can find the DR on a map and few have knowledge of other cultures and religions that exist in the world.

Along with our group of Peace Corps Volunteers of many cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds sharing stories and culture, we invited volunteers from both the Korean and German equivalents of Peace Corps to share their cultures as well. The Korean volunteers did a tae kwon do lesson, which the kids ate up. We also presented info on 9 other countries around the world and give the kids passports and stamps for ‘visiting’ each of these countries. And we tie-dyed t-shirts, which was a first for our youth.

It was a fun weekend and provided valuable info to the kids. Discrimination and racism are serious problems here in the DR and any chance for youth to compartir with people of different backgrounds and educate themselves is a good thing.

Korean volunteer and youth practicing tae kwon do.

Tie-dying shirts.

With my 2 youth.

The youth with their certificates.

Patronales

2010-05-07T00:13:00.003-04:00

Every town or city in the Dominican Republic has an annual celebration in honor of its Patron Saint called Patronales. Patronales here in El Seibo is the first week of May and is highlighted by the only bullfights left in the Dominican Republic. Yes. That’s right. Bullfights.

A group of 4 volunteers and I hitch hiked from another city in the east to my site on Sunday afternoon to see this for ourselves. Bullfights are one thing. Bullfights in the Dominican are a very scary prospect. The ring is erected for this week only and is located on the western edge of town. Right beside it is the shadiest looking carnival imaginable. The ferris wheel and handful of other rides were clearly first used in 1950’s America and made their way down here after being deemed unsafe for human usage circa 1975.

There are no bleachers or spectator seating set up around the bullring. Instead, there is some plywood placed upon ancient scaffolding that one can stand on for the price of 50pesos ($1.40). Once we secured our vantage point and enough rum to make us forget about our personal safety atop the scaffolding, we patiently waited for the toros to arrive. Random Dominicans entertained the crowd by riding horses, playing stickball and plugging their favorite politician (Elections are May 16^th).

About one hour after they were due (or right on time in the DR), the 5 bulls arrived and everyone got ready for the madness. This isn’t Spain and the fights are to be humane. The matadors evade the bull using a cape but do not kill it. That said, humane treatment of animals doesn’t really exist here.

The first bull charged its way into the ring and the 3 Dominican matadors in full costume (plus baseball cleats) got to work. The matadors walked away unscathed and the toro seemed to lose interest quickly, spending most of his time staring at the positively suicidal spectators lining the inside, yes inside, of the ring. In time, men on horseback entered the ring, roped the bull and drug it away.

This pattern continued more or less with each passing bull. The bulls did get the best of the matadors occasionally, taking them to the ground and giving the crowd something to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ about. The one glaring difference was that with each subsequent bull, more and more drunken Dominicans would enter the ring to taunt the toro and try to play matador. Using the shirt off their back or a political poster, they would provoke the bulls and risk their lives.

By the 5^th and final bull, at least 60 Dominicans charged a 2,000 pound animal, pulled its tail, jumped on its back and tackled it to the ground. Pure insanity. One swift kick of the leg or thrust with the horns could have produced serious injuries. In fact, one man died earlier in the week. That death did nothing to deter the locals from risking more death and/or bodily mutilation by playing with dangerous animals.

While this Dominican shitshow was disturbing, it was most definitely entertaining The makeshift ring, the creepy carnival, sketchy scaffolding, the drunk Dominicans. It was a unique cultural experience that only takes place here in my site. That said, I did not make a return trip later in the week. Once was more than enough. I can handle waiting 365 days until the nextPatronales to put myself through that again.

Escojo

2010-04-28T13:33:00.011-04:00

Escojo Mi Vida is a Peace Corps initiative aimed at tackling the issues of HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy that exist here in the DR. Along with these topics, we volunteers teach youth about values, self-esteem, racism, drug and alcohol abuse, abstinence, birth control and other topics directed towards adolescents and young adults. In the past 3 weeks I have begun an Escojo group with twelve youth in my community aged 14-19.

This past weekend was the Escojo Regional Conference for those of us fortunate enough to live in the beautiful eastern region of the DR. The annual conference offers volunteers the opportunity to bring 2 youth to Santo Domingo and further their knowledge about Escojo. It also offers youth an opportunity to travel and see parts of the country they might otherwise never see. The Conference took place at a Catholic retreat center located right along the Caribbean Sea and was a great success.

It was great to see 40+ youth work together and become fast friends. It was also great to see a development program work the right way and move towards true sustainability. Many of the speakers at the Conference were Dominicans who have graduated from the Escojo program and have now become leaders themselves. It’s always great to see Dominicans taking the development into their own hands and not rely solely on the presence of a Volunteer.

We offered many charlas and activities focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and teenage pregnancy awareness. There existed a less than small amount of irony talking sex and giving condoms to teens in a Catholic center, but what are you going to do? Hay que protegerse. All of the youth had to take care of an egg in pairs for the weekend as if it were a baby. It was never to leave their sight and more than a few babies died along the way. We had a bonfire with smores and an overall great time.

My two youth, Robinson and Elizabeth, were really empowered by the Conference and are already planning community service activities and fundraisers for our group. I couldn’t be happier to see 17 year olds taking the initiative and already becoming the peer educators Escojo is designed for.

My jóvenes Robinson and Elizabeth

Roasting marshmallows at la fogata.

The group with their Certificates.

Peluquería

2010-04-15T12:07:00.004-04:00

The year: 2004. The City: New Orleans.

It was 20 months before Katrina would devastate and Bourbon Street was buzzing in the days leading up to the Sugar Bowl. I was there for the game, though I had no dog in the fight. What I had was a ticket, a desire to see one of America’s most unique cities and a mop of hair on my head.

Being 19 at the time made for a somewhat anticlimactic stroll down Bourbon, the city’s center of tourism and debauchery. The Tiger and Sooner fans were out en masse and the infamous beads were flying. Maneuvering through the crowded streets while underage and unable to actively partake in the festivities was akin to walking through Caesar’s unable to lay down a bet. A royal frustration. A test of self-restraint.

I was not allowed to so much as enter most of the street’s establishments. One of the few that would have me was a barbershop. A proper barbershop. A throwback with the red, white & blue pole. The elderly barber seemed interesting enough and, no doubt, full of great stories. Most barbers are after all. So barbers on Bourbon must be master storytellers.

The worst haircut I have ever received soon followed. It was difficult to determine whether the old man suffered from Parkinson’s or was simply inebriated, but he was in rough shape. His hand moved in a perpetual ‘jabbing’ motion. Not a problem under normal circumstances, but a problem when scissors and my face are involved. In the approximately 15 minutes I spent in this quirky old man’s chair, I blocked out a doubtlessly fascinating story and managed only to perspire straight through my own clothes and the barber cape. Though it was unseasonably warm for January, it was not the heat but fear for my wellbeing that sent my sweat glands into overdrive. I walked away physically unscathed, but it was some time before I sat for a haircut again free of apprehension.

To this day this remains my most vivid memory of my time in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Not the National Championship game nor the French colonial architecture but some ridiculous story of a ridiculous, had-to-be-there, experience in a Bourbon Street barbershop.

The year: 2010. The city: El Seibo, DR.

My barber’s name is Denny. His peluqería is a one-room building just up the street from my host family’s home and not far from my apartment. Denny is a nice guy. His accent is thick. He talks fast, but he’s nice. Denny drinks. Denny cuts hair while he drinks. Denny is a nicer guy.

The peluqería is a fountain of chisme. Chisme is gossip. Old men come here to get haircuts and gossip. Not unlike in the States. If you speak elderly man Dominican Spanish, you could learn a lot of interesting things about your community here. Unfortunately, I am less than fluent in elderly man Dominican Spanish and learn nothing. I smile awkwardly and nod while waiting my turn in blissful ignorance of all the latest chisme.

In my first visit I explained to Denny how I like my hair cut. He heard nothing. The bachatta was blaring on the stereo and he was focusing hard on his Presidente. I can hardly blame the man for shoddy work. I am most likely his first non-Dominican customer and my hair type is not what he is accustomed to working with. Denny doesn’t use scissors. Just clippers. He has been known to spontaneously shave my beard without warning. He charges an extra 50pesos for these sneak attacks.

As my hairline continues to prematurely recede, I need haircuts at less and less frequent intervals. But each time I’m due, I approach the peluquería with trepidation, never quite sure what to expect. A genial Dominican who talks too fast? A tipsy guy prone to sneak attack shaves? After 5 months and 4 visits, I still don’t know. I’m not sure I ever will. Denny keeps me guessing. He keeps things interesting. He forces me to relive my day on Bourbon Street here in the DR. He’s a nice guy.

Flying Solo

2010-04-03T01:01:00.008-04:00

I have been moved into my own apartment and living solo for about three weeks now. After 6 months living with 3 host families, it is a great feeling to have a space that is entirely your own. Most Dominicans find the desire to live by oneself as odd. It’s simply not the custom here. I am asked by all my new neighbors where my wife/girlfriend is as they crane their neck to get a glimpse inside the gringo’s casa. They peek in with wonder as if they are getting a glimpse into Area 51 and not into the roach-infested studio apartment of a twentysomething living on a volunteer’s salary.

It’s small and cheap and perfect for a volunteer living more or less out of a suitcase for the next 20 months. I pay the equivalent of about $70/month. Pretty insane to think a place this size would cost upwards of $1,000 in cities like New York or DC. I’ve got a great view from my porch of the mountains to the north and very tranquilo neighbors, which are definite pluses. Plus my host aunt lives right behind me, meaning anytime I feel like mooching I need only walk 10 feet to a hot meal or fresh squeezed juice.

Having full control of my diet and not devouring daily heaps of viveres has been life changing. I no longer spend my days suffering from or trying to avoid gastrointestinal issues. I can eat what I want, when I want. I can play my own music. I can read at all hours free of guilt. I am no longer inundated with the bulla that comes with living in a Dominican household. It’s nice. The beginning of yet another new chapter of service.

I have made a few observations since moving into my own Dominican casa.

1) Window screens work - My host family had screens on their windows and I had almost no problems with bugs for my entire stay there. Within days in my new place I was bitten to hell and came down with Dengue fever. Not the greatest week of my service.

2) Ants are the bane of my existence – They are everywhere. I was okay with them going after the sugar. I let it slide when they got into my cereal. But when they tainted my peanut butter they crossed the line. I quickly learned to stash all food not sealed in plastic into my dorm-sized mini-fridge. Ants own me.

3) Dominicans are loud – This I’ve known since Week 1 in country. But living alone has reinforced just how much yelling, loud radios/TVs and general bulla there is in the typical household. There is still bulla, it is the Dominican after all, but it is now taking place exclusively outdoors.

4) “Water sucks, it really, really sucks” – I was spoiled rotten in my host family’s house in that we had a tanaco (a water tank that stored water daily and pretty much ensured that we would have water 24 hours/day). Now I live like a more average Dominican in that I receive water to my place twice daily for a total of about 4-6 hours/day. It’s a whole new ballgame organizing meals, showers and bowel movements around the time the water comes. If it comes at all.

5) Elvis had the right idea - Peanut butter and banana sandwiches are as good as it gets. They have replaced rice as the primary ingredient in my diet. I haven't gone so far as to grill them (Elvis-style) but will give it a go in due time. I could eat one each day for the next 20 months and not even begin to tire of them.

I got plenty more observations but don’t wanna fill this up with complaints. I’m ecstatic to be living solo and no amount of ant armies or leaky pipes can bring me down.

La Vista

The Grita

2010-03-11T14:38:00.002-04:00

Here in Peace Corps DR we are fortunate to have ourselves a wonderful little Volunteer-run publication called the Gringo Grita. The Grita is made by volunteers, for volunteers and is an outlet for we vols to share our success stories, lack of success stories, poetry, campo recipes, witticisms and more. Each of the biannual issues features profiles of volunteers closing their service in which they share their experiences and words of wisdom. I can’t imagine that many other Peace Corps countries have such similar publications so it is something to aprovechar. Yet another perk of serving in the DR.

I recently decided to put some of my infinitesimal free time towards writing something to submit to the Grita. I have no idea whether what I wrote will be accepted and printed so I figured I could at least share it here.

Keep in mind that this is written for PC volunteers who are oftentimes out of the loop as to cultural and/or political happenings back in the States. It is also written towards an audience of Spanglish speakers, which explains the occasional italicized insertions of Spanish.

Teabagging is All the Rage

Upon applying to the Peace Corps, I had developed a romanticized vision of living high atop a mountain in the Andes. Or maybe in a mud hut on an African savannah. Perhaps in a Mongolian yurt. Asia’s tepee.

Wherever I ended up, I fully expected to forego all forms modern technology. Spend two years of my life unconnected. Offline. Completely off the proverbial grid. This expectation left me feeling equal parts liberated and terrified. Giving up the rat race, turning off the cell phone, shutting down the computer and leaving the 24 Hour News Cycle behind sounded like an incredibly cleansing experience. That being true, I have friends that gave up Facebook for Lent and suffered withdrawals over the course of just 40 days. Could I really make it 2 years?

As we all know, being placed in the DR doesn’t leave us wholly isolated from technology unless we put ourselves in self-imposed exile from all modern devices. We are given cell phones. Internet exists for many. While we live in the developing world, we can choose at our own discretion to cross that invisible threshold, log onto the internet and step, ever so briefly, into the developed world.

While I had that romanticized view of life offline, I have no complaints about occasional access to the glorious interweb. It suits me, as I am somewhat of a news junkie. I like knowing what Obama is doing. What congress is not. Where in the world Osama Bin Laden isn’t. Which movies I missed. Who is leading the medal count at the Winter Olympics and all else going down in the Great Wide World. But while sometimes it is nice to be informed, other times the information is just too much and makes me further embrace the relative simplicity of our lives aquí and being away from the insanity allá.

Case in point: Did you know the biggest current political fad in the States is Teabagging? You heard me. And this is not just happening in frat houses across the country but everywhere. In Red states and in Blue. White people all over the U.S. have gone crazy for Teabagging and have adopted Sarah Palin as their leader.

I am being serious in that there exist an ever-growing number of politically motivated groups referring to themselves as Tea Party Patriots. These Patriots have spawned an entire coalition of offshoot groups known as the Friends for Liberty. They are upset with the current political and economic situation in the US of A and are dead set on reclaiming their freedom by means of public rallies, the blogosphere and the airwaves of Fox News as Glenn Beck lends his voice and infinite wisdom to the cause when not too busy crying on national television. Some of them have even foreseen the possibility of “another civil war” on the horizon.

The name is derived from the “No Taxation Sin Representation” colonists of 1773 and their raucous Tea Party of the Century in Boston. Unfortunately, the modern day Teabaggers did not hire a youth consultant before adopting a name now synonymous with clandestinely inserting one’s testicles into an unsuspecting mouth. One simple Google search and the angry activist Teabaggers would have been led directly to Urban Dictionary and quickly learned why Americans under the age of 30 can’t help but snicker at their ill-monikered “movement”.

In all seriousness, and, scrotal humor aside for the moment, the Tea Party movement seems to be gaining traction. It was a driving force in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat going to a relatively unknown former-nude-male-model-of-a-Republican and causing the Democrats to lose a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate and, along with that, any realistic chance of passing a meaningful piece of legislation relating to universal health care.

What once seemed to be a movement of bat-shit crazy right-wingers wielding firearms at Obama rallies is now catching on with independents and libertarians from coast to coast. The bat-shit crazies are still there and answering to the gruesome twosome of Beck and Palin but an ever-growing number of angry Americans are latching on in order to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement”. What began as some loonies questioning Obama’s citizenship and/or religious affiliation has spawned into something bigger, creepier and with potential political power in an election year.

And so goes my current relationship with technology and the internet. Sometimes I read about Olympic glory, discover new music and Skype good friends. Life is swell. And other times I read about rampant adult teabagging, Tiger Woods’ infidelities and other inanities driving the ever-evolving cultural zeitgeist. ¡QVMV! Sometimes I am upset and utterly perturbed by what it is I am reading and desire a return to my blissful island ignorance. I vow to resist, to lock my laptop away, to use restraint when passing the barrio internet café. But without fail, I inevitably crawl back, at 30 pesos/hour, like a junkie in need of a fix.

Could I have made it 2 years offline? I’ll never know. The Andean mountaintop, African savannah and Asian tepee are but distant, romantic daydreams. Hispaniola is home and technology exists in varying forms. I will never be sure if I could have stuck out two years without the wonderful World Wide Web. But I can be sure that I could have gone my entire life without knowing that grandparents across America are Teabagging en masse.

Carnaval

2010-02-27T19:29:00.005-04:00

February 27th serves double duty in the DR. It is simultaneously Independence Day and Carnaval. There are numerous Carnaval celebrations across the country and my city of El Seibo is no exception.

I didn't know what to expect of the parade and celebration here in El Seibo. The celebrations in other cities, most notably La Vega, are well known and attract visitors from all over the DR and across the globe (I'm already looking forward to visiting La Vega next February 27th). I hadn't been feeling too well on Saturday and had little desire to sit through a noisy parade. I decided that if someone in my host family invited me to go with them, then and only then would I go. Otherwise I was going to chill in bed watching Curb Your Enthusiasm all day. I quickly learned that an invitation from the host family wouldn't come. You see, my host family is Cristiano. Here in the DR being Christian is the equivalent to being evangelical in the U.S. And being Christian in the DR apparently means you are not allowed to have any fun. Anywhere there is dancing or non-Christian music taking place, my host family is not allowed lest they be punished by God. Although, they found a Holy loophole and watched it all on TV.

With my family glued to the TV, I decided fever be damned and made a trip to the city center to see what all the fuss was about. The fuss was noisy. The parade was lined up and down the city's one main thoroughfare. Floats, dance troupes and people in costumes filled the streets. The reoccurring theme was el toro. The eastern DR is known for its bulls. The baseball team in La Romana has the toro as a mascot and each May at the Patronales festival here in El Seibo there are bullfights. Another reoccurring theme was la bulla. The DR is a very noisy country. If it's not the music blaring out of the colmados it is the million motorcycles that fill the streets. During Carnaval it seems to be all of those things at once. I didn't spend much time partaking in the festivities. Just enough to snap a few pics and say that I 'experienced' Carnaval in DR.

Febrero

2010-02-25T21:31:00.002-04:00

The month of February has almost past and it has been quite some time since I updated this bad boy. I'll try to give a quick rundown of the month that was before moving into the hectic month to be.

February began with a 3-month In-Service Training. It was here at a retreat center outside of Santo Domingo that the 13 remaining Youth Volunteers from my group congregated to share the results of our Community Diagnostics and look forward to the future. Our Dominican project partners were able to tag-along for the first two days of the training and aid us in our presentations. After our project partners departed, we volunteers had mountains of information relating to grant writing, potential projects, safety & security and more piled on us. It was a week jam-packed of info and activities and lots of fun too thanks to a pool, basketball court, bunk beds, Catch Phrase and good company. Just being surrounded by fellow Americans, the English language and good food for one week is more than enough to recharge one's batteries before heading back to our sites.

But the week improved as we joined a number of other Volunteers in the Capital for some R&R and the Super Bowl. We had a very un-Peace Corps experience as we watched the game in the Hard Rock Cafe in the heart of the Colonial Zone. Plasma TVs, Budweiser and wings are not things I anticipated seeing during my service, but for about 4 hours that was our (sur)reality. Great fun. The Saints won. And shenanigans were carried out in Parque Colón and in front of the oldest cathedral in the Western World. All in all a fantastic week.

Then it was back to our sites and time to get going on the painstakingly slow process that has been getting projects underway. I'm starting off with some English teaching and a Volleyball team before moving onto bigger things but even classes and sports have seen difficulties in their early stages. This is not abnormal but certainly frustrating. All in time.

My biggest and best (if I do say so myself) news of the month is that I finally, at long last, found myself an apartment (Pictures to come). It is a bit undersized and a tad overpriced but ideal for anyone living more or less out of a suitcase. I have spent much of this past week buying necessities like a bed and stove and hope to fully move myself in by March 1st. I am beyond elated about finally living on my own. While I genuinely like my host family, after four months even my real family can get on my nerves. Four months with one family and 6+ months with multiple host families has taken its toll. The mannerisms that were once entertaining, quirky or simply 'Dominican' are now becoming obnoxious and occasionally driving me towards the brink of my sanity. Por eso, the move is highly anticipated.

I have found the moving process can be difficult for a person without any form of transportation. Lugging things around on foot can get tiresome and paying for moto rides can get costly. But the ends most definitely justify the means and I am days from host family freedom. I'm gonna do myself a Tom Cruise-style Risky Business dance the moment the door closes.

So 3-month training, moving out and project stagnation are my February themes. Plus I hit the Quarter Century mark in age. The verdict is still out on whether this a good thing or a bad thing.

March brings a whole slew of activities both Peace Corps-related and non. I will be hoping to see my projects come into fruition while adding a few others and spending a weekend in the Capital for official PC business. On top of that, a group of 25 new Peace Corps Trainees will be arriving in my site for their month of Community-Based Training. The IT Trainees frequently carry out their training here in my city, my barrio and one lucky future volunteer will even be staying with my host family. Should be a nice jolt of energy to see 25 new bewildered gringos strolling around. I'm looking forward to meeting the new folks and having some fun. Rumor has it they make frequent trips to the playa, so I may have to hop on that bus.

On top of that March is the month of visitors. Many Volunteers have friends and family dropping by this month and I am no exception. My family will be kicking it in Punta Cana for a week, which should be terrific. Punta Cana is supposed to be the top tourist beach in the country and one of the tops in the Caribbean so I am excited to experience it. Plus, real food and unlimited drinks make me happy.

Fin.

Ill

2010-01-25T17:45:00.005-04:00

Sick. Again. For those of you keeping track at home, my ratio of healthy days to sick days in my site is about 1:1. ¡Que Vaina Mi Vida!

I am fortunate to have access to a television during this time I am living with a host family. Especially on sick days. As soon as I move out on my own, my TV in the DR days are numbered. For now I’m able to keep up with some sports (damn Vikings) and see the occasional movie in English. Also, there are 4 American TV dramas televised here that are not dubbed. Alas, only 2 of those 4 are not of the Law & Order franchise. But that does leave me with 2 or 3 hours a week of House. I had never seen the show back home but I am so hungry for English language programming that I would probably watch Fox News if we had it. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Dr. House is a sometimes psychotic, often grumpy, always brilliant diagnostician who, in true TV fashion, solves the strange medical mystery without fail while fighting his own demons. It’s actually a really good show.

Why am I talking about House?

As I lay in bed Tuesday night with a fever and what can only be described as pus balls growing in the back of my throat, I couldn’t help but try my hand at self-diagnosis, Dr. House-style. Is it just another Dominican mystery virus? Dengue Fever? My eyes do hurt. What about strep? I’ve had that before. Oh Shit!! It could be throat cancer! I don’t even smoke!

This went on for some time before a Peace Corps doctor was called to curb my self-diagnosed delusions (It was strep). Luckily, even while living in a developing country, I have some of the best medical care available. Thank You United States Government! If only every American could have health care provided by the government. A quick trip to the capital for some antibiotics and all was well. My Doña thought I might not need to make the trip to the capital. She was going to be more rational and pray the demons out of me. She prayed in her Dominican evangelical way, which is pretty much just yelling and gyrating while occasionally saying Jesus’ name. More praying at me than praying for me. I was a little put off by the whole episode but let her do her thing. While I appreciated her effort, I was pretty certain at that moment it was penicillin I needed, not Jesus.

I almost had a second bout of sickness en route to the capital when a child asleep in his mother’s lap across the aisle from me on the guagua threw up all over himself, his mother and everyone in his general vicinity. I was spared a vomit shower by the kind Dominican soldier sitting next to me. For all I know he was on his way to the border to help with the Haiti situation; and now he would smell like vomit for the 7 hour trip there. ¡Que Vaina Su Vida! As the sight or smell of vomit is almost guaranteed to make me vomit, I sat with my head craned out the window, like a canine with a gag reflex, until the woman and her child got off the bus.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the entire episode. A child projectile vomits on public transportation and passengers are neither alarmed nor upset about being vomited upon. It’s just a seemingly normal part of everyday life. Shit happens, right? In 5 months I am already almost completely desensitized to these crazy daily occurrences. That's acclimation, Homes!

Fish Out of Water

2010-01-21T19:24:00.001-04:00

"There are no foreign lands. It is only the traveler that is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

After a slowdown during the holiday season, life is starting to return to its normal pace (which is still pretty damn slow). Diagnostic work is getting thrown together and prepped for our upcoming 3-month training. Hard to believe we’ve been in our sites for 3 months already. And now 5 months in country?! ¡Diablo!

Aside from the pace of daily life, the pace in which I am devouring books has returned to form. Books have been a constant in my early life in my site. They offer a source of entertainment to fill the void in life sans internet or television. They give me an opportunity to think in English for but a few hours a day and give my brain a break from the cerebral overexertion that comes with living life in a second language. They provide a source of further escapism from the already escapist lifestyle I live down here.

I recently read a wonderful book called Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri that consists of a number of short stories about Indian immigrants living and adjusting to life in America. I’ve found myself reading a lot about the immigrant experience lately. I suppose it’s because in some ways I am living a quasi-immigrant experience myself. I have multiple ‘fish out of water’ experiences in each passing day. I find myself for the first time in my life a member of the minority. In fact, aside from Haitians, I am the only minority and certainly the only gringo in my community. It is a novel and alien feeling to see things from this end of the spectrum.

My life is presently lived in somewhat of a fishbowl. Eventually the novelty of having a local gringo will surely wear off. In time the members of my community will learn how truly uninteresting I am. Sooner or later this world will feel natural while the States become foreign. For now I relish the feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar. Of having an experience comparable to that of Ms. Lahiri’s characters but rather than moving to America, I’ve moved from it. Of feeling and taking in newness everyday. Of learning a new language and way of life. Of being in the classroom of the world.

El Terremoto

2010-01-14T14:28:00.002-04:00

So there was an earthquake this week. You might have heard about it. I think it was on TV. I actually did not even feel the quake out here in the east, which is the opposite side of the island, but it could be felt on most of Hispaniola and the destruction in Haiti is obviously catastrophic. As if the residents of the poorest country on this hemisphere didn’t suffer enough in their daily lives.

I would have gone the better part of a day without even knowing there was a natural disaster just hundreds of miles away were it not for my Doña calling everyone she knows to warn them about the impending tsunami. After quickly confirming I was in the DR and not Southeast Asia, I deduced something had occurred in Haiti. There was no tsunami and life here on 2/3 of Hispaniola goes on in relative normalcy while life on 1/3 of the island falls into complete and utter disarray.

Unfortunately while being so close to the damage there is little one can do from here. Volunteers are not allowed in Haiti and I’m not sure what could be accomplished in the wreckage even if we could go. There are potential opportunities in our communities to collect supplies and non-perishable food items to send across the border but asking the poor to donate to the poorer doesn’t seem to benefit anyone too greatly at the end of the day.

It is obviously a horrible situation. Most all situations in Haiti can be labeled as such. My only hope is that this disaster leads to sustained relief provided by the international community, especially the U.S. It would be very easy for us to drop a billion dollars and three tons of energy bars in Port-au-Prince, pat ourselves on the back and wash our hands clean of the situation. But the problems in Haiti stretch far beyond this natural disaster and we should offer sustained aid and support to a neighboring country. That a place like Haiti can even exist less the 800 miles from the richest, most powerful country on earth boggles the mind.

Whatever anyone back home can do for the Haitian people, do it. My experiences with Haitians since arriving to the island of Hispaniola 5 months ago have been overwhelmingly positive. They are a people that work very hard for very little. Send money; you don’t need your nails done this week. Send old clothes; you know you’ll never wear that ugly shirt again anyway. Educate yourself on Haiti and the difficulties these people face. Read Mountains Beyond Mountains and learn about the efforts of Dr. Paul Farmer. Do something besides gawking at the horrific images on the television only to change the channel. Act.

The Oughts

2009-12-28T11:08:00.001-04:00

Navidad has come and gone. Actually, I’m told Christmas is celebrated up through the New Year so there are still a few more days left. Christmas Eve, Noche Buena, and not Christmas Day is the day with the most significance here. The Dominicans cook a large meal (what would normally serve as a week’s worth of food), spend time with family and walk the streets sporting their Christmas best. They also dip into some traditional alcoholic beverages, which turned the ordinarily pious evangelicals into inexperienced inebriates. Humor ensued. All passed by well and I got to spend part of Christmas Day at the beach with a couple of other volunteers. Not exactly a traditional Christmas, but who could complain about a day at the beach?

With that it is time to usher in the New Year. The new decade. This marks the end of what I consider to be my first complete decade. I lived through the 90’s, but was 4 when they began so I didn’t become mindful and aware of that decade until Grunge was out and Presidential indiscretions were in. With this past decade, which I’m told we are referring to as the Oughts, I was between the ages of 14 and 24. I came of age in the Oughts. These were my most formative years. The years of high school, college and early adulthood. The years that put me on a roundabout path to the DR.

I spent most of the decade in school and since then I have done a lot of wandering; taking one calculated step after the next to see the world while avoiding adulthood. I don’t know whether or not I should be concerned that the wandering will take me into a new decade and my late twenties. I’m comforted by Tolkien, who said, “Not all those who wander are lost”. I’m still wandering in a way, but don’t feel lost. I’m right where I need to be and don’t have to worry about the next step for another 23 months. The ‘Real World’ will catch up with me eventually, and I’ll have some great stories to tell it.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

¡Feliz Navidad!

2009-12-23T14:55:00.002-04:00

The obvious beauty of the Caribbean surrounds me every day. The abundance of fruit trees, the white sand beaches, the dazzling sunsets and natural green everything. If I were here for a short vacation I would take note of each of these things and truly appreciate them. But as I am here every day, I too often fail to see and truly appreciate the physical beauty of my surroundings. On Monday I found myself in the back of my host family’s camióneta riding along the highway between nearby Hato Mayor and El Seibo with the Caribbean breeze in my face and for the first time in country, truly took in the impressive countryside and felt really at peace being here in the Dominican. I watched the clouds form over the mountains to the north and create a mystical haze over the conical lomas and the sun set behind us in an explosion of orange and pink and felt truly contented and at ease for the first time in the company of family and in my site.

We had our Peace Corps Christmas get-together hosted by our Country Director last Friday in the capital. It was a nice little break in a slow December month to meet up with other volunteers and eat some quality food. We had a Chinese dinner, which, while not traditional Christmas fare, was a more than welcome break from platanos y yuca. A small group of volunteers that live in the east made a pit stop in the beach town of Juan Dolio on the way back to our sites. I have been in the DR for 4 months now and had only been to the beach 1 time before this past weekend so I was due for some time at the playa. A day of sunbathing and sunburning was exactly what the doctor ordered after some recent stomach woes and a tranquilo month.

The holiday season feels very much unlike the holiday season. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is still 80 and sunny rather than 30 and snowy. Maybe it’s the lack of Xmas music and movies. Maybe it’s the absence of Salvation Army bell ringers. It’s just not Christmas-y. After all, what is Christmas without 24 hours of A Christmas Story? I’ll be spending Christmas at my site with my host family, seeing how Dominicans celebrate Navidad, eating many apples, which are a holiday season delicacy here, playing Santa Claus for my family and hoping that Home Alone is on TV just once in English.

In the past few years I have spent much time and many holidays away from home but this will be my first Christmas away. Perhaps the most valuable attribute I brought with me into the country is imperviousness to homesickness. Not to say I don’t miss home, I just don’t suffer from homesickness. But even while not homesick, it’s weird to be out of the country and away from family and friends this time of year. It’s certainly helpful to have other volunteers here to share the holidays with and helpful to know that a New Year’s celebration is but a week away.

Happy Holidays!

Diagnostics

2009-12-07T15:27:00.002-04:00

I know some out there are wondering what exactly it is I'm doing down here. I don’t know that I’ve taken much time to clarify. In all honesty, I’m still in the ongoing process of finding out myself. As a Youth, Family and Community Development volunteer my reach is quite broad. The list of potential projects is virtually endless. Right now though I have one specific task to focus much of my efforts on before tackling that endless list of projects.

These initial 3 months of service are dedicated to a Community Diagnostic. This is the time when we integrate into the community, build confianza, continue to improve our Spanish, attempt to meet everyone and work on a large presentation that will be our guide to projects and community needs over the next 2 years.

The diagnostic has many layers. There are interviews to be done with community members. Work to be done with community groups and organizations. Creation of community maps, priority matrices and seasonal calendars. Compiling of data to prepare the presentation and constructing a work plan for my first year of service.

Based on the results of my diagnostic, I will be better able to understand the needs of the community and the resources at my disposal to meet those needs. Doing this work and dedicating time to community integration prevents me from entering my site on Day 1 and thinking I know what is best for the community before I’ve even met with anyone. With the diagnostic I should able to better understand my community after 3 months and they’ll better understand who I am and what my role is as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

While that still doesn’t do much in explaining my role here as a Youth PCV and the types of projects I’ll eventually be doing, it does attempt to explain what it is I am to be doing (and not doing) in these initial months.

Knowing I have the diagnostic to complete is a necessary crutch to lean on. Not having multiple projects going on and having a flojo daily schedule can make one feel like they aren’t getting much accomplished and are doing a disservice to their community. The people here are definitely beginning to wonder when the gringo is gonna start doing stuff. I have to continually remind myself that these initial days and months are dedicated largely to the diagnostic and not get down on myself for not having classes, practices and/or charlas on a daily basis.

With the holiday season in full swing, time seems to be playing tricks. Days crawl by slowly while weeks elapse quickly. It makes little sense. It’s both irritating and delightful. This trend is sure to continue into the New Year.

Día de Pavo

2009-12-01T15:04:00.003-04:00

Thanksgiving weekend has come and gone and I don't even know where to begin in describing how glorious it was. From the Olympic size pool with a high dive, athletic and non-athletic competitions and the greatest meal I have eaten in the Dominican to the talent show in the piano bar, cheeseburgers at the Embassy, sleeping 11-deep in one small hotel room to save pesos and the many shenanigans I will not list here, it was a fantastic weekend to say the least.

It was great to see the volunteers from our training group and great to meet dozens of other volunteers, finally putting some faces to the names I have already heard so much chisme about. Meeting so many other volunteers simply reinforced what I already know about the incredible and inspiring group of PCVs we have down here in the DR. The one downfall of Turkey Day is that it comes but once a year and we must wait 365 days to do it again.

After spending multiple days and far too many pesos in the capital, it is back to my site for the Navidad season, which I'm told has already begun. Christmas here is not a day but a month. An entire season. A time when everything slows to a crawl. Not exactly the ideal time to start many projects but certainly an ideal time to become better integrated into the community and with my host family. Also a good time to start teaching myself to play the guitar I bought before leaving the capital. I've always wanted to learn and there will be no better time period in my life to learn than in these next 2 years.

Between now and Christmas is when I hope to get the bulk of my Community Diagnostic done. There are more than 100 interviews still to be done with community members and community leaders. Plus, I recently fell ass-backwards into a role as basketball coach for a group of local muchachos, so I will thankfully be a bit busier than I was in the initial weeks. While the tiempo libre has been great and these first months are supposed to be tranquilo, I gotta get some volunteering done.

Leonel

2009-11-23T16:03:00.004-04:00

The President of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez, came to my barrio Saturday. He was here for about 53 seconds. Enough time to shake some hands and give a wave. But he was here. I kind of took a picture of him.

I was really impressed when I arrived in my barrio, more than 3 weeks ago now, to find that nearly all of the roads were paved. This is most definitely not the norm in towns and barrios across the country. But I learned Saturday that as recently as August, none of the roads here were paved. In the last 3 months the government has aided my city and a beach town north of here in laying asphalt atop formerly dirt roads. My barrio is pretty big and it is quite a Dominican feat to get such an infrastructural project done in a timely manner.

There was still one road to finish the night before Leonel arrived and the road crew worked late into the night to get it finished. The heavy machinery needed to do the roadwork had sat parked and untouched for more than a week, but with a presidential visit imminent, the road was completed and painted in a matter of hours. What I deduced from this chain of events is that Dominicans should always work as if the president was coming to visit. Much, much more would get done.

So he came to check out the streets his government laid. He swooped into town on a helicopter to get a bird’s eye view of las calles and then hopped into a motorcade of jeepetas to be the first to drive on some of them. Then he was gone.

I’m told with midterm elections in May, his presence will be far more visible in coming months. While he is not up for reelection, he is getting out there to campaign for his Purple Party. The entire country is littered with political signs and billboards and not a day goes by without a camióneta, equipped with speakers in the truck bed, passing by to broadcast the platform for some obscure candidate at an obscene decibel level for all to hear.

Politics are ridiculous here. Politics are ridiculous everywhere.

¿Estás Perdido?

2009-11-09T11:15:00.005-04:00

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world." - Freya Stark

It is a strangely pleasant sensation to wake up here every morning. Now knowing exactly what the day has in store for me. Not yet having a daily agenda to follow. Not knowing if I'll meet dozens of community members of simply read a book from cover to cover. A far cry from the regimented life we lived for 10 weeks of training, where scarcely an hour passed without a training session, charla, language class or scheduled mealtime.

It is a bit unpleasant that everyone thinks I’m lost. Almost daily I’m asked ¿Estas Perdido? They all want to give me directions to the bus station where I can make my way to the nearest beach like all the other gringos. It’s kind of awkward. In fact, most everything about these initial weeks is kind of awkward. Introducing yourself to countless people and misunderstanding countless hours of Spanish conversation. Most everyone not understanding who you are or why you’re here. When I’m not a lost tourist I’m a missionary. Awkward.

All is good though, even while the awkward turtle insists on continuously showing its ugly head. After all, Americans are beginning to thrive on awkward. It’s kind of our thing at the moment. Why else would The Office be so popular? I look humorously upon it. The bright side, right? The Dominicans on the other hand don’t seem to even realize that awkwardness exists in my daily interactions. They don’t even have a proper translation for the word. I’m just the new guy and ya. Nada más. Todo bien.

I’m starting to look down the barrel at post-Thanksgiving to get some projects started. English classes are what the community most wants. So while I don’t want to be the local English teacher for the next 2 years, it’s a good starter project to do for a couple months. I’m also hoping to start a book club and a girl’s volleyball team. All in time.

For the time being until those projects take shape and come into fruition, I foresee more awkward, some quality time with the host fam and more books. Lots of books. Perhaps too many books. My host mom suggests I may get brain cancer from reading too much. Her suggestion to remedy the eyes she thinks I’m damaging and the tumor growing in my noggin? Watch TV. Seriously. Her next suggestion is undoubtedly to talk on a cell phone more often. I do heed her television advice from time to time in that I am fortunate enough to be a PCV with ESPN, meaning I still get a weekly dose of college football (sorry Hawk fans) and my fair share of English language movies. Not the typical Peace Corps experience. But I’m not a complainer.

Tis' the Season

2009-11-05T14:24:00.007-04:00

Shameless as it may be,

I'm a broke PCV

I need lots of supplies,

and other goodies from you guys

So get off you duff,

and send me some stuff!

I'm getting requests for potential Xmas gifts and don't know where to begin. So...I created an Amazon Wishlist for all of you feeling generous out there. I have books and supplies for my kids here in the DR and books and supplies for myself to get through the especially long Caribbean days. Anything and everything is welcome so long as it fits in a padded envelope (no boxes) and is sent via USPS. If anybody has some good teaching materials or some fun items/ideas to use with kids and teens send them on.

Sorry for being so shameless but asking for money/resources is a big part of my life in the coming two years. I might as well get started early.

MY WISHLIST

Sworn-in

2009-11-02T13:54:00.009-04:00

On Wednesday October 28th I became an official Peace Corps Volunteer.

The ceremony took place at the beautiful training center that had served as a home base during our weeks in the capital. The acting ambassador to the DR, as Obama has yet to appoint one, spoke. Our fantastic Country Director spoke. Two of our fellow trainees spoke. A couple of other distinguished guests spoke. Then we took the oath and became Volunteers. The ceremony was great and seemed to pass by just as quickly as the 10 weeks of training.

The only left to do before heading back to our sites to begin our lives as PCVs was to celebrate. We spent a significant chunk of the day Thursday eating cheeseburgers and enjoying the pool at the US Embassy. It was a small taste of all things great about America. (I forgot what a luxury it is to actually flush toilet paper.) Thursday night we crammed into a hotel and celebrated the night away. We Youth Volunteers found our own little Loma in the City and had one last hurrah until the day in just under a month when we reunite to eat turkey, stuffing and pie and swap stories of volunteerism and cultural/linguistic blunders.

As I sat and sunburned beside the Embassy pool on Friday, I couldn't help but feel like I had won the lottery. The Peace Corps lottery. Of the 70+ countries the Peace Corps sends Volunteers, I found myself siting beside a pool on a tropical island that I will call home for the next two years. I could be under feet of snow in Eastern Europe right now or living in a mud hut somewhere, which I was more than willing to do. But here I am in the DR. Like I said, the lottery.

With that we're official. 45 of us from 4 different sectors are the newest additions to the DR team. It really did feel on Friday as we headed back to our respective sites that the training wheels had come off and we were entering into new, exciting and unknown territory.

It's time to see what I learned these past 10 weeks.

Half the Man I Used to Be

2009-10-26T18:44:00.002-04:00

I just got back from a 5-day visit of my site in El Seybo where I will be living for the next 2 years and couldn’t be more ready to get started. After we arrived back in the capital following CBT, we had a quick turnaround before leaving once again. It was great to reunite with the trainees in other sectors who we hadn’t seen in 5 weeks, swap stories and learn where everyone was going to be living for 2 years. It was also good to get back out of the capital where it was too hot, too polluted, too busy and downright depressing compared to our mountain oasis.

On our first day back at the training center in the capital we received our official project plans which contained the information about our sites, communities, host families, project partners and any other pertinent information regarding the life we will be leading in the coming months. We also received long-awaited cell phones, attended our final Spanish class and weighed ourselves for the first time since entering the county. I am already down 22lbs and counting. Apparently the Peace Corps is the world’s greatest diet. Granted, I was sick for a couple weeks but other people lost even more than I did. Between the 15 Youth volunteers we could have created an entire human being with the pounds we dropped. I haven’t been this skinny since I was 16 and my host family in the capital was concerned about how flacito I had gotten. I’m pretty excited but kind of annoyed that my clothes no longer fit.

With project plans in hand and bags re-packed we were ready for Project Partner Day. The day when our project partners, those at our sites who solicited a volunteer, come to the capital to meet us and take us to our site and new homes for a 5-day visit. It was both exciting and awkward to finally meet our partners. Exciting to see who we will be working with in the months and years to come and awkward to make small talk for hours on end in a second language. My Spanish small talk was exhausted in about 8 minutes and I had about 8 more hours to fill with smiles and reassuring nods.

The drive to El Seybo was beautiful. We first drove along the Caribbean Sea before turning north into what looked a lot like Iowa, but the seemingly endless fields were filled with sugar cane rather than corn. When the terrain became a little more mountainous we had arrived in El Seybo and we dar-ed una vuelta of the community. There is one main avenue that passes through the city center and the many barrios jut off each side of the avenue. The specific barrio where I will be living and working is on the north side of the city and has a population of approximately 4,000 people. The entire city is home to about 50,000 depending on who you ask.

One of my project partners works for the international NGO World Vision and another is vice president of the local Sports League. Between the two partners I have a number of potential projects to start thinking about including teaching English, organizing athletic teams and tournaments and creating an after-school program for kids. The wheels are already turning in my head about all the potential projects I would be able to carry out here. There are a number of existing community groups for me to get to know and work with and an excellent community center with a computer lab and space for classes and charlas. Plus, an excellent play (baseball diamond) and the best cancha (basketball court) I have seen in the country. I have really great resources to work with.

My host family is fantastic. I have a Don (host dad) for the first time and baseball is currently our primary source of conversation. I’ll have to think of something else to talk about once October is over. My Doña is the director of a local elementary school and a super-educated Dominican woman. The walls are decorated with her numerous degrees. I also have a 15-year-old host sister and a 14-year-old host brother. The brother reminds me a bit of myself 10 years ago, often skipping dinner because he can’t find a good place to pause his video game. And, amazingly enough, the city has 24-hour luz (electricity), which is virtually unheard of in this country. This will definitely make for a good living arrangement in the next 3 months until I am able to move out on my own.

While the visit was both great and encouraging, it was at the same time very overwhelming. My project partners took me to more than a two-dozen local businesses and organizations and introduced me to countless people. It will take a lot of time to remember all the names and faces. I had been feeling pretty good about my Spanish before this week but had a reality-check on how much further I still have to go before feeling truly comfortable with the language.

With the visit over and done with it is back to the capital for one last week. We have some more training to do before getting sworn-in on the 28th by the ambassador and have a couple days to celebrate before heading back to our sites to begin our 2 years of service. It will be an odd feeling to be separated from the other Americans we have shared the training experience with and to say goodbye to daily usage of the English language we rely so heavily on, but good to get our work, service and path to language fluency started.

Adios Constanza

2009-10-16T21:20:00.007-04:00

CBT is over. We head out at 9am Saturday and will be back in the sweatbox that is the capital until Tuesday when we leave yet again to visit our sites, meet the families we will live with for the next 3 months and get a glimpse into the life we will live for the next 2 years.

Leaving Constanza is easily one of the most bittersweet moments of my life. The past 5 weeks have been some of my greatest to date. I'm gonna miss the hippie lovefests on the loma with my fellow trainees and the community we have called home here. It's been bliss and it will be missed.

Celebrando la Juventud

2009-10-12T19:13:00.005-04:00

We have entered our final week of Community-Based Training here in beautiful Constanza. We leave on Saturday to return to the capital and prepare to swear-in and move to our sites/new homes for the next 2 years.

It is muy agridulce (very bittersweet) to leave our mountain pueblo and the group of fellow Americans we have grown close with over the past month. At the same time it is exciting to reunite with the other trainees, swear-in as volunteers, see our new communities, begin our service and get to work. This past month in the mountains has been somewhat like a study abroad experience. We spend our days in class and our nights hanging out with fellow Americans in a strange, foreign land. Very study abroad. But the work aspect of service is just around the corner.

We are going out in a big way in our final week in Constanza. This is the week of Celebrando la Juventud (Celebrating the Youth). In conjunction with our local youth groups we are putting on a number of fundraising and community clean-up activities. Thus far we have put on a movie for the community, organized a domino tournament and cleaned the streets of two local barrios with more activities to come including a mural painting and basketball tournament. Hopefully some of what we do will have a lasting effect. One of the biggest frustrations of being a Youth volunteer is not being able to see the tangible results of service. Whereas Community Economic Development volunteers can see their business plans put into action and Water volunteers can see their aqueducts flowing, we have little in terms of tangible results. We teach, we educate, we have some fun and hope our efforts have lasting effects on the local youth.

While this week is busy and entertaining, it is also serving as a small glimpse into how difficult and oftentimes random working with Dominicans might be. For example, during the middle of the movie we put on for approximately 50 children and youth, the entire group began cheering and applauding midway through the film (when the Polar Express pulls into the North Pole) and promptly stood up and exited the building. Regardless of the fact that there was still an hour left of the movie, they just got up and left. The first hour of the domino tournament was somewhat of a disorganized shit-show as well with the locals not understanding we had a bracket and a system for who would play and when. They just sat down and went for it. Cultural differences can lead to frustration, but in the end it all worked itself out and was successful. A current volunteer came to visit with us a few weeks back and informed us of the difference between being right and being effective. Even if we don't always think what they are doing is right, we are raising money, cleaning streets and getting things done. Effective.

One of the single greatest accomplishments of my weeks here has been my integration into the language of Spanglish. It is the greatest language ever and seems to be the primary means of communication between volunteers in the DR. It's not quite English but certainly not Spanish either. It's great. In two years I will be more than fluent in Spanglish and foresee having trouble readjusting to life without randomly slipping Spanish vocab into English sentences and adding -ing to the end of Spanish verbs.

It's always hard to leave a place. We say our awkward goodbyes to our host families this week and our see-you-laters to all the fellow Youth volunteers. We've had somewhat of a love fest up here (in a completely platonic way) and have developed really great group cohesion that is hard to let go of but will be very beneficial throughout our service when we need ideas, support, resources, ears to complain to or shoulders to cry on.

Another downside of leaving is a return to life without frequent internet access. My posting will be far less regular in the weeks to come as I swear-in, get settled in my new site and figure out what type of internet access I will have out East. For now, I can prepare to close this first chapter of my Peace Corps days as a trainee and start the next as a volunteer.

Moving East

2009-10-03T19:39:00.010-04:00

It has been a crazy week full of ups and downs.

I had to make an unplanned and unfortunate trip to the capital this past week to spend some quality time with the PC Medical Staff. I came down with a fever on Monday and it was continuing to climb upwards of 103 Tuesday morning when I was directed to head into the capital. I had a number of blood tests done to in order to determine whether I had Dengue, H1N1, Mono or any number of other potential illnesses. Once I was cleared of all these and it was decided that I simply had a nagging virus and was not dying or highly contagious, I was put up in a local pensión that PCVs often call home while in the capital.

My 2.5 days in the pensión were very bittersweet. I was ill and feeling miserable. I was back in the very hot and very humid capital. I was missing all the technical and language training in the mountains. But at the same time I had AC, cable TV and a hot shower. It was hard to feel quite so bad knowing that CNN, Seinfeld or Sportscenter were one click away. Once my fever finally dipped down to around the 100 mark on Thursday, I was able to make the trip back up the mountain to Constanza.

What awaited me in Constanza was a whirlwind 24 hours in which I learned where it is I will be living for the next 2 years. Our boss paid us a visit on Friday morning to give us all the preliminary details of the sites we will be moving to and the projects we will begin working on at the end of the month. The only true nerves/anxiety/shit-my-pants fear I have had in this entire Peace Corps process has been over site placement. Where you go and who you work with can have positive or negative effects on service. Ultimately, as a volunteer, you have to make it work no matter where you are or who you are working with. But having a good site with positive project partners is a big plus.

Our boss went one-by-one through each of our fifteen placements and gave us the basics as to where we're going, what we'll be focusing on, why we were placed there, etc. We then got to see a map of the DR with thumbtacks representing all the Youth volunteers in their respective sites. I'm heading out East and couldn't be more excited about it. I will be living in a barrio in the pueblo of El Seibo. There is another Youth volunteer in the same city and he was instrumental in setting up the site I will be working in. There are 3 others from my training group heading to the east and a handful of current volunteers living there already.

What I know of the east (almost nothing) is that it is fairly flat and agricultural. Not unlike the Midwest but in a tropical way, with sugar cane and pineapple in place of corn and beans. My city has pretty good access to electricity and water, which is a plus. It's about 2.5-3 hours from the capital by bus. It's hot (Naturally). Great beaches and some places as yet untouched by all-inclusive resorts and droves of tourists. And best of all, a great project site with an eager project partner. I can't wait to head out there for my first visit in just under 3 weeks.

It was hard to concentrate on much of anything after the emotional high that was learning of our sites. The anticipation had been building for weeks and then was released with one glimpse of a map. We had to turn around quickly and host a talent show Friday night. It was put on for our host families and community members who have made us feel at home here in our barrio of Constanza for the past 3 weeks. We sang. We danced. There were puppets, bad Spanish jokes and Michael Jackson impersonators involved. The Dominicans loved it. Plus, the baker extraordinaire of our group baked cookies, which was the cherry on top of a long day.

I've had a pretty roller coaster week. They weren't lying when they said the Peace Corps was about peaks and valleys. As usual, everything at the end of the day is fantastic. I know where I'll be living for the next 24 months. I am pretty well back to health. And I still have 2 more weeks to enjoy here in Constanza.

Aguas Blancas

2009-09-27T19:00:00.012-04:00

It is a special week in Constanza. It is Patronales. Each city in the DR has a patron saint and each city has an annual celebration to honor that saint. The celebrations begins as a religious event and over the course of the week becomes a big party. Naturally.

The festivities here in Constanza have consisted of bouncy castles, creepily androgynous clowns (see above right), trinket vendors and food stalls popping up in the parque that marks the city center. That and concerts. On Friday a groups of us Americanos went to a merengue concert downtown. Not yet my kind of music but it will grow on me over time as that and bachata are seemingly the only forms of music played in this country. Oh, and Michael Jackson too. He is something of his own musical genre down here. Despite not loving la música, it was a fun cultural experience. And we got to stand right next to the Síndico (mayor), whose face is plastered all about town on all things ranging from buildings to garbage trucks. A true Constanazan celebrity.

The only other highlight of my Patronales experience was sliding down the fire pole at the local fire station. A couple of the local youth that we work with are part-time bomberos (firemen) and had no reservations about letting us slide down the tubo. In the U.S. there would likely be rules & regs against allowing random foreigners to do such a thing. But here in the DR, most anything goes.

Saturday was a day of team-building activities for the 15 remaining Youth volunteers. We started the morning by reluctantly hopping into another godforsaken camión. The flat bed trucks from hell. Our destination was the beautiful area of Aguas Blancas. This weeks' go round with the camión was exponentially better than last. Less people, more space and a 1-hour trip rather than a 3-hour tour.

Aguas Blancas is an area high up in the mountains that consists of a 100+ foot waterfall cascading into an ice-cold pool. It's pretty to look at and daring to swim in. 2 for 2. Our host families provided us with the cautionary tales about the low water temperature and looked at us crazily when we told them we intended to swim there. No matter, we were jumping off the nearest rocks and into the pool immediately upon arrival. The water was indeed cold. The closest thing to a Polar Bear Club experience I have ever had.

The water truly did take your breath away on first contact. Once you were able to breathe, it hurt to do so and was all-around pretty intense. You got used to the water (more or less) soon thereafter and all was good. Some in the group kept climbing upward to find a higher, more adrenaline-filled spot to jump from. Normally I would have followed suit, but after my skull-crushing Canadian experience with cliff jumping this past summer, I stuck to the less death-defying heights.

The real team building came later that night as a number of us passed up another Dominican concert to partake in my favorite PCT pastime, kicking it on the loma. There is a large hill nearby the neighborhood we all live where we often sneak away to in order to avoid the ever-watchful eyes of the locals, listen to music in English and better get to know the people we will be sharing experiences with in the two years to come. The loma is easily the best part of Constanza.

A close second is the local repostería (bakery). We eat mountains of rice and platanos each day, but comfort food is missing from our diet. This is why when a teacher or current volunteers pay us a visit and happen to have M&Ms or Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in tow, we pounce on them like rabid dogs. Enter the repostería, which can sate my sweet tooth on a daily basis for under $1 US. It makes each plate of rice all the more appetizing to know that cakes and cookies are in the near future.

All is fantastic here. Couldn't be better.

GI Woes

2009-09-23T16:59:00.007-04:00

I speak not of the marines. I speak neither of the old toys nor of the new movie. I speak of a common affliction among Peace Corps Volunteers and, I imagine, all foreigners living in developing countries. That's right, the GI Woes I have experienced this week are of the gastrointestinal variety. If toilet talk is not your thing, avert your eyes now.

We were lectured for hours in our initial weeks of training about how to avoid stomach issues and the Big D (not Dallas). Avoiding the water is the obvious one. Purified only. Steering clear of lettuce, cabbage and other veggies that are water-based is another. Passing up on street food (which is hard being as street food is always the best type). But even while taking all the proper precautions, shit happens (pun intended).

Visits from the GI fairy are never fun. But when living in an environment with no running water, limited & unflushable TP, and paper-thin walls separating you from not just your host families but your neighbors too is a new experience altogether.

While being both bedridden and within close proximity to the baño, I was visited and taken care of by a steady stream of fellow trainees as well as an overbearing Doña who when she hears, "No, I do not want anymore god-awful tasting death tea." she brings it anyway. It fascinates me that while denotatively the word "No" means the exact same thing in both English and Spanish, connotatively it seems to mean something different altogether. No means yes. Yes means yes. There in no No here.

Secrets and/or things on the DL do not exist in the DR. The chisme (gossip) is in full force at all times. Therefore, a sick gringo in one house is first news and then common knowledge to all in the neighborhood. Everyone makes it their business to know how your bowels are moving and offer their advice on a med, soup or herbal death tea that will fix you right up.

Now that the 54-hour parasite has passed and I am positive that no little creature is going to jump through my stomach cavity a la Alien, I can look back with humor. In the end it wasn't all bad. I got some serious reading done. I got caught up on sleep. Watched a couple movies. Lost at least 5 pounds, making an intestinal parasite the most effective diet I have every willingly or unwillingly been on.

I would like to be able to say that after this little run-in I am now better accustomed to the bacteria and microbes living in every glass of water or bite of food here, but who am I kidding? I have the weakest stomach ever. This is the first of many parasites that will make camp inside me and wreak havoc. These will be the tales that add up to my PCV equivalent of war stories. Occupational hazards of life on the front lines. My GI Joe meets GI Woes meets tainted street empanada fables.

Clean-Up Crew

2009-09-20T18:58:00.010-04:00

The past week has been our busiest yet. Our weeks in the capital were spent doing very general and primarily language-based training. Here in Constanza, things are getting far more specific. We are learning the tools we will put into action after swearing-in as volunteers.

After a week of getting to work, a group of us Peace Corps Trainees had a chance to get out of the city and see our youth groups in action. The majority of the youth groups we are working with are Eco-Clubs focused on tackling environmental issues. Saturday was the International Day for Cleaning Coastlines (at least that's what it says on the free hat they gave me). Since there are no coastlines up here in the mountains, we drove into a nearby national park to do some trash pick-up. Sounds cool enough, right? Enter el camión.

The camión is a type of flatbed truck commonly found here in the DR, usually used to transport food. On Saturday, it was used to transport humans. Twenty-five humans to be exact. We, Americans and Dominicans alike, piled into the back of the truck and set off on the most uncomfortable ride I can fathom in a moving vehicle. I now know how livestock feel in semis.

We were initially under the impression that we were heading 45 minutes into the mountains and picking up some trash. That seemed feasible. Discomforting in the back of a camión, but feasible. We should have known better.

Three hours later we had maneuvered through the unpaved mountain passes and arrived at our destination. We spent about 45 minutes picking up the trash that didn't exist because we were in the middle of nowhere and there were no human beings within a 50-mile radius to produce any trash whatsoever. In the 9 hours the trip took, we could have cleaned entire neighborhoods in the city and made an actual difference rather than picking up imaginary trash. Priorities seem to be an issue here.

The whole thing turned out to be somewhat of a publicity stunt, complete with television cameras capturing the picking up of trash. In fact, some of the Dominicans poured out their bags full of trash just so the cameraman could get a shot of them picking it up and putting it in a bag. Pretty random stuff. To boot, the trash we were able to find had to be taken back to the city to be properly disposed of. How was it going to get to the city? With us in the back of the camión of course. What was a cramped ride before had become far worse as we had to share our limited space with garbage bags leaking garbage juice.

I currently look and feel a bit like Quasimodo, with a hump protruding from my back due to being slammed against the railing of the camión time and again. I cannot and will not be able to sit properly for a week due to a bruised tailbone. My ribs are sore. All in all, a fantastic DR experience.

While I sarcastically bitch, the trip actually was very fun and the breathtaking scenery made it all worthwhile. We were literally walking in the clouds we were at such a high altitude. We got to see the monument that marks the exact center point of the country. We got free hats and t-shirts. We got to know one another on a more intimate level due to the close quarters and entangled bodies. It became one of those situations where you just have to laugh because it is so absurd. I expect many more equally absurd experiences in the years to come.

Constanza

2009-09-13T18:43:00.013-04:00

God damn it is beautiful here. Way up in the mountains, far away from the Capital, with fresh air and a cool breeze. Fantastic.

I had heard nothing but great things about the city of Constanza and now I see why. The drive here was full of beautiful scenery and a queasy stomach due to those zigzagging mountain roads, but the end of the road led to this picturesque pueblo. For the next 5 weeks, the 16 aspiring Peace Corps volunteers in the sector of Youth, Family and Community Develop will be calling this place home while we tackle some hands-on training with youth groups from across the city.

Being cooler doesn't mean it's not hot. It is. Just ask my bright red skin. But nothing compared to the sauna that Santo Domingo has been in the past few weeks. I think after a few short weeks in the capital, anywhere would have been a welcome change. Aside from the heat, the traffic and feeling of never being entirely safe turned me off to the capital. The cooler weather means I actually use a blanket at night rather than sleeping in a pool of my own sweat. That said, the early morning bucket baths are far more brisk in the cool weather.

New city means new host family. I was very spoiled in the capital to have such a great host family. They set the bar high. My new family is also great. Many little kids running around keep things interesting. My Dona lives in a modest house with her daughter and three grandsons aged 2, 2 and 4. They are impossibly cute but a bit much from time to time. Can't remember the last time I fell asleep or woke up to the sound of crying children. All is well though. I think it's hard to feel unwelcome by any family here in the DR. The people are overwhelmingly hospitable and seem to enjoy nothing more than overfeeding a gringo.

We arrived on Thursday afternoon and Friday night met the representatives of the youth groups we will be working with in the weeks to come. I was extremely impressed with the leader of the youth group I will be working with. He is creating a youth group from the ground up to offer a positive alternative to the negativity in his barrio. It is an Eco Club that will tackle environmental issues and help clean up the neighborhood and surrounding areas. Anyone who has been to the DR knows that trash in the streets and anywhere and everywhere else is a major problem. More than anything else though, the group serves as an opportunity for local youth to meet up, have some fun and do positive acts for themselves and the community. Inspiring stuff.

On Sunday, leaders and members of the local youth groups took a group of us Americans to the river. It was a 90-minute walk each way to get there, but the scenery was terrific. It's almost difficult to believe that we are in the Caribbean while being surrounded by pine forests. It seems a bit more Colorado than DR. But gorgeous nonetheless. This small country is home to many diverse eco-systems and this mountain valley is just one of them.

The water in the mountain stream was cold and refreshing after sweating through the long trek there. And after a couple of hours of swimming and sunning, the walk back went uphill and included a trip straight up 349 stairs. The views were even better heading back and I can't foresee these mountain views getting old in the next 5 weeks. It's gonna be hard to leave Constanza.

Volunteer Visit

2009-09-07T17:51:00.009-04:00

I am so ready to be a volunteer. After 4 days of staying in the campo with a current volunteer, I cannot wait to have my own place, with my own food and my own time schedule. I learned a lot, got a more realistic view of what life will be like as a Peace Corps Volunteer and, most importantly, had some fun.

I visited a small campo of about 1,500 people that is centrally located between the cities of Santiago, Moca and La Vega. The town was about the exact size I wish to be placed in. Small enough to know most everybody and build great confianza while large enough to have occasional electricity and running water.

I had the opportunity to visit my first Dominican beach during my trip. On Friday, a small group of current and future volunteers made the trip to the northern beach town of Sosua. I got to swim, snorkel and burn crispy over the course of the day. The Caribbean sun is not going to be my best friend in the 2 years to come. The beach was beautiful and not full of tourists, which is batting 2 for 2. And in the Dominican, batting average is of the utmost importance.

I got to experience the slow-paced life to come and see where I stand with my language skills as compared to current volunteers. I also got to hear some of the inside stories shared amongst volunteers that we are not privy to at the training center. After getting to meet a number of volunteers and get a small glimpse into the life of a volunteer, I am most definitely ready to start my service.

In the days to come it is back to being over-fed and overprotected by Donas and long days of language and technical training in the barrios of Santo Domingo. While it is hard not to love the Donas and our training center, I'm ready for a change of pace and a change of scenery.

This coming Thursday we will be leaving the Capital once again, this time for 5 weeks. After a few short days of training we will be breaking up by job sector to begin our Community-Based Training. It will be sad to leave the entire group of people that we are still getting to know, but good to get some practice in the work we will be doing come November. I have heard nothing but great things about the city of Constanza where my training will take place and am ready to head to the mountains for some cooler weather and outdoor activities. Anywhere with less heat, humidity and mosquitoes is most welcome by me.

On a less exciting note, our group of 51 became a group of 49 today. Two trainees decided after their Volunteer Visit that this was not for them. It was strange to watch the first people go and disappointing to realize that this will happen time and again throughout the next 27 months. Every group hopes to pass everyone through, but that's not entirely realistic. Seeing them leave really reinforced the difficult challenges ahead and proves that this is not for everyone.

Inspiration

2009-09-02T17:03:00.002-04:00

We are a lucky group of trainees. On Tuesday we had the great pleasure of being visited by the brand spanking new International Director of the Peace Corps. He's been on the job just a few short weeks and his first stop abroad was right here in the DR.

Director Aaron Williams is himself a former Peace Corps Dominican Republic Volunteer. He served in the late sixties and early seventies alongside Senator Chris Dodd. Other former PCDR Volunteers have gone on to any number of impressive professions, including astronaut. It will certainly be interesting to see where the 50 trainees I currently spend my days with end up in the years and decades to come. Past volunteers have set the bar pretty high by making it to Capitol Hill and Outer Space.

I had absolutely no idea what to expect after being told that the International Director was to visit with us. My natural assumption was that some old, albeit important, man was going to come and share his slightly dated and/or mundane ideas with a group full of twentysomethings. What we got was anything but that. Director Williams, fresh off his appointment by President Obama, was young, engaging and, most of all, inspiring. He took our questions, ate lunch with us and took the time really listen to us and not simply talk at us.

To hear his story as to why he joined the Peace Corps decades ago and how it changed his life for the better very much reinforced the reasons I am here. He has been right here in our shoes as a PCDR trainee and future volunteer. His visit as a real treat and a dose of inspiration to take with us into our service.

Washing Cars

2009-08-31T18:25:00.003-04:00

Things are speeding up a bit. Many hours of Spanish class each day, not including the time spent speaking with host families, bus drivers and people in the street. My brain is working in bilingual overdrive. It's great.

We spent some time this week learning about and getting practice on the public transportation "system" here in Santo Domingo. Public transportation here is nothing more than organized chaos. It is organized, more or less, for those who are familiar with it. And it is chaotic. The buses are jam-packed with people and taxis somehow accommodate seven in decades-old cars. Not unlike clowns in some ways. Although, I think a car full of clowns would get less stares than a car full of gringos. There is a lot of sweaty, uncomfortable lap sitting and some hanging on for dear life near wide open bus doors but it is cheap and surprisingly efficient. Just another daily experience in the DR.

We also had a chance this past week to see the Peace Corps DR office and the clinic in which we will stay if/when we break a leg, come down with Dengue fever or need to have some tests done to discover what type of worms are living in our stomach. Along with that, we had a couple opportunities to check out the Zona Colonial, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and learn a bit about Columbus, the discovery of the Americas and some DR History 101.

There's also been some time for fun in between our busy days of training. As my host family is easily among the coolest here, my front porch has become a hangout for the other gringos in the neighborhood. A place to chill, chat, play dominoes and listen to some non-Latin American music. We've had a chance to check out some local haunts, including the neighborhood car wash. A car wash is just that by day, a car wash. But by night it is where the locals go to dance and let loose. I don't know the origins as to why Dominicans spend their weekends hanging out at a car wash, but it is a pretty fun time.

This coming week we have our first big dose of independence. We will all be spending four days with a current volunteer in our job sector. We'll get a chance to see what volunteers do in the field and see what life will be like once we swear-in come October. I'll be traveling north to the city of Moca. I'm a little nervous about getting there solo on public transportations but excited for what is to come once I arrive.

La Republica Dominicana

2009-08-24T16:09:00.004-04:00

"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." - Rudyard Kipling

It smells really great here.

After one quick day in DC and a flight through Miami, I have arrived in the Dominican. All of us Peace Corps Trainees, of which there are many (and more than a few Iowans), arrived in country on Thursday and everything has gone really fast since then. The first day and night were spent in Santo Domingo in what was referred to as a "retreat." Basically just an orientation to get to know Peace Corps DR Staff, continue to get to know each other and get the first of many, many vaccinations. From there it as on to the outskirts of the city where our daily training will take place and where we will call home for much of the next 10 weeks.

The Training Center is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The trees, flowers, plant life, outdoor classrooms and everything about the place are perfect. Extremely conducive to learning. It is here we are getting our Spanish language training, cultural sensitivity training and much of our introductory Peace Corps training as well.

On Friday we met our host families, whose homes will be our homes for much of the next 10 weeks. Meeting my host family was certainly the most nerve-racking experience thus far. It's impossible not to speculate how they might be, where they might live, how they might react to you, etc. But, of course, there was nothing to worry about. Along with my Dona (host mother), I have 1 host brother, 2 host sisters and one impossibly cute but extremely rambunctious 5-year old grandson. I live in a barrio not far from the training center alongside a number of other trainees.

My Spanish needs a lot of work. It's been almost three years since I studied in Spain and used the language with any frequency. I've obviously forgotten a lot in those three years and need to pick it back up quickly. I have decided that my brain shuts down slowly throughout the course of the day and by dinnertime I understand little and speak less. Fortunately, my host family has accommodated other Peace Corps volunteers in the past and knows how to deal with linguistically challenged gringos.

The first weekend has just finished up. I spent about 8 hours of my Sunday partaking in the Dominican pastime that is Dominoes. My family passes much of its day on the front porch, especially when the electricity is out, and today the porch was used for endless games of dominoes. Multiple aunts, neighbors and fellow PC trainees dropped by and joined in. The front door of the Dominican house may as well be a revolving door because people are constantly dropping in throughout the day to chat, chismear (gossip), simply sit around or meet the new gringo on the street.

Everything has been great so far. The food, the people, the weather, the staff working with us, the hurricane that went the other way. After just a few days I almost don't mind being perpetually sweaty and the cold-water bucket baths the sweat leads to. In a couple weeks it will be second nature. Hot showers, flushing toilets and life sans mosquito net will be a distant memory.

There is most definitely no internet access at my casa and finding time to use the wireless before, during and/or after our busy training schedule isn't easy, but I'll try to update as much as possible in the days to come before heading out to the Campo for some hands-on training in a few short weeks.

Moving Out

2009-08-18T01:06:00.030-04:00

Bags are packed. Only thing left to do is get on the plane. Still a couple days until my actual arrival in the Dominican but the trip starts, with a few stops, today.

I head to DC from DM first thing Wednesday morning. I'll spend a day back in the nation's capital going through the Peace Corps "Staging" process. Don't know exactly what staging entails, but I'm sure there is a lot of paperwork involved. It is my understanding that staging is more or less an orientation that gives us an opportunity to meet the other volunteers heading to the DR, but the Peace Corps hasn't been big thus far in providing details, so I could be completely wrong. I anticipate some awkward introduction exercises and at least a few agonizing team building activities. And paperwork.

After a day in DC it's off to the Dominican where we start things off with a "retreat." Again, don't really know what this means because, again, they're not big on details. And then host families are met and the 10-week Pre-Service Training begins. More on all of this as things happen. Not until the Pre-Service Training is completed will I become an official Peace Corps Volunteer and begin my 24 months of service.

Packing was not as outrageously difficult as I anticipated it might be. The thought of packing for the next 2 years of my life with an 80lb limit seemed to be a tall task, but I finished up with about 15lbs to spare. Don't know whether to pat myself on the back or cram 10 more pounds of shit into my bags.

The act of packing made me feel very fortunate to be serving in a tropical climate. Not just because of the sun and surf, but also because packing for 1 season made things much easier. I cannot imagine having to pack 80lbs of things if cold weather clothing was needed. Although a change in season might be helpful in avoiding the perpetual sunburn that I expect to have over the course of the next two years.

Not really feeling any serious excitement or nerves yet. I think jumping out of a plane last Saturday provided enough of each to last me a while. Not until I meet my host family and start having to use Spanish will the nerves really set in.

For now it's off to DM, then to DC and on to the DR to start life in the Caribbean.

La Semana que Viene

2009-08-12T14:53:00.000-04:00

1 Week. 7 Days. 168 Hours. 10,080 Minutes. 604,800...604,799...604,798 Seconds.

It's about that time and the reality is slowly starting to set in. Throughout the now seven month odyssey that has been joining the Peace Corps, I have been able to wait patiently with each passing stage in the process. Only now with seven days to go is my patience being put to the test. Only now does this experience feel truly imminent.

While those 600,000+ seconds tick away, there is much to pack and many good-byes to be said. I also have an almost uncontrollable urge to do something borderline irresponsible. Jump from a plane perhaps? Something low on sense and high on adrenaline. One last experience at home before 2 years worth of experiences abroad. I think I must.

Bokononism

2009-08-05T23:23:00.000-04:00

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.' - Vonnegut

There are few things worse than "It might have been" moments. Those moments of coulda, shoulda, woulda. Moments of regret. It is my goal to have as few of those moments in the next 27 months as is humanly possible. In fact, it is my goal to have zero it-might-have-been moments, but that's simply unrealistic. I stumbled upon this quote, was reminded of Cat's Cradle and have now adopted these as words to live by (or to avoid?) in my forthcoming service.

I've spent the past few weeks doing my research about the Dominican and, naturally in doing so, have begun to develop expectations of and aspirations for the place I will soon call home. It is only natural and almost wholly inevitable to create these expectations but I have found in past experiences abroad that such expectations can be perilous.

Over time I have become a big believer in simply letting things happen rather than planning, expecting and itinerarizing (not a word). This has happened quite naturally as I have shifted from a shameless tourist to an aspirant traveler. I stated in my Aspiration Statement to the staff at the Dominican Republic Peace Corps office my goal of keeping all expectations and preconceived notions to a minimum. So while I won't stop soaking up some Dominican Culture 101 and will surely continue to cycle through Blogs from PCDR volunteers past, present and soon-to-be, I am going to stop trying to expect what is to come and simply wait for the next two weeks to pass and experience what is to be for myself.

How To Disappear Completely

2009-07-30T01:39:00.000-04:00

The time has come once again to uproot myself and start anew. I have been in one place for far too long a time.

In 3 short weeks I will be in the Dominican Republic to begin my 27 months of Peace Corps service. I have survived the 6+ month application process and have scaled the mountain of paperwork (though I am certain there is much more to come). I am ready to depart.

At this point in time I know that I will be serving in the Dominican Republic and that I will be a Youth Development Promoter. Beyond that, things are still pretty foggy. The fog will remain until I am in Santo Domingo and have begun the 10-week pre-service training and learn a little more about my specific assignment.

In the meantime I'll be passing my final weeks in the States prepping, packing and polishing my Spanish skills on the complimentary Rosetta Stone provided by the Peace Corps.

This will be my primary form of communication for the next 27 months (along with email). Check in to see how go things in the DR and follow along as I disappear completely into volunteerism and Dominican life.