The life of a Thousandaire

After working in the copy room of a law firm, doing customer service for the MBTA, working at the front desks of a company that sells equipment for blood transfusions and another that sells coin op washers and dryers, and working for an eccentric contractor to put in a deck for some guy in Newton Center I have finally made it to the much sought after life of a thousandaire. It wasn't easy, but I did it. I want to thank all the people that supported me along the way, my mom for paying my cell phone bill for a few months, Jeremy for sending me his old video games, Jet Blue for providing a reasonably priced return flight from Oregon and my girlfriend for buying me pizza, sub sandwiches and chicken ceasar wraps on a regular basis.

Now that I am a thousandaire I intend to live the extravagant life that all of this money brings. When I take a lunch break today I will eat at the cafeteria at the Coin-Op Washing machine company, where I am willing to spend up to 7 dollars. Yesterday, I purchased Boat Shoes. They are shoes that you can wear on a boat (even if you don't have one). They cost me 50 dollars but I don't mind because I will save on socks (you don't wear socks with boat shoes). I purchased hummus from Trader Joe's last week, also, pita chips to eat the hummus with. I will no longer be using left over hot dog and hamburger buns to eat hummus from Shaw's Star Mart. With all this money, I am planning to fill my gas tank this week instead of putting 10 dollars of gas in every 3 days.

My luxurious life may not last forever, I have decided to not only pay my sallie mae student loan payment of 140 dollars for this month but next month for a total of 280 dollars. I also am looking to have the tires on the 4 Runner rotated so the car doesn't wobble when I try to go faster than 55 miles an hour. These expenses may cost me my thousandaire status but I will not regret my decisions. I know that there is an end to the rat race in site, my random jobs around Boston will soon end as I begin Pharmacy School in less than 3 weeks. Hopefully, if I play my cards right I will at least be a hundredaire when I get that first student loan check 3 weeks into the first term.

Six months in two paragraphs

Between the months of July and December I was living in Portland at the Dunford house, working back at the ink company and taking two classes at Portland Community College. The classes were Statistics and Micro-biology, I earned an A in both classes. Technically, it was the first time I earned straight A's since the fifth grade, which was when they started giving out letter grades. Actually, now that I think about it, I got a B in something that time too. I only remember because my mom and grandparents told me I could have a rabbit as a pet if I got straight A's and because I earned one B my grandfather told me we were going to chop off 1 ear to make it fair. Don't worry, he didn't really chop off the rabbit's ear. Anyway, I have all the pre-reqs clear for Pharmacy School. Now I just need to get accepted and find 120,000 dollars for 3 more years of college.

While my job, classes and living situation all had interesting moments I don't think there was really anything blog worthy. I was working or in class seven days a week from September 25th to December 12th, there was a day off on the Saturday after thanksgiving. I spent the free day staring at the wall.

Yoga, Finishing the 3 in a 3+1 Course, the Chattooga

Alright, this last week actually had some interesting things. I will attempt to put them in chronological order.

First, we did some pretty serious bonding last week when a guy in our class informed us that a local hippy inn keeper offered to lower his price for Yoga/Thai Chi lessons from 15$ to 3$ for us and give a special class to the EMT students. Six of us went and we did some "hot yoga", it was a good work out and probably the most I have enjoyed myself with a bunch of half naked and sweaty dudes. Actually, maybe it is the only time. Anyway, we did some bonding and we felt so healthy after 2 hours of yoga that we went to the closest bar, ordered a table full of Buffalo wings and pitchers of beer and watched basketball for the next 3 hours. It was a good 5 hours.

Second, we had our Practical exam on saturday, which involved putting to use all of our recent learning. We had to resuscitate a dummy that had a pulse and was breathing like darth vader, we had to interview a pediatric mannequin that was stung by a bee and going into anaphylactic shock (and give it a stab in the leg with an epi pen) as well as put a tension splint on a dummy with a broken femur (we also had to stabilize its spine, treat its major wounds and transport it too a pretend ambulance). For the 18 of us in the class it took about 7 hours, 16 of us passed on the first time and I assume the other kids got a second chance after we all left. We spent so much time waiting around in the halls of the local community college that we learned a new game called the Ninja game. It's the most fun game I have played since elbow tag and it would have been very handy in the DR for the past two years when I had to sit around entertaining a bunch of teenagers/children.

Third, two of the students in the class were getting EMT certified because they are river guides and interested in ski patrol during the winter. They invited all of us to go down to the South Carolina/Georgia border to do some whitewater rafting. Most of the class was going back to their respective states and cities but my friend from Hawaii/Colorado and I were stuck in Asheville for the rest of the weekend (so we took up the offer). The trip, that would have been 150 bucks only cost us 10 bucks because we got the walk on price. The river had some class fives, which is bigger than the Deschutes if I remember correctly. The place where we stayed on saturday night was in the middle of nowhere at some Academy from the 1800's that they turned into a guide outpost. We hung out with the guides at the river, removed a tire from the bank (it was our good deed for the month) and were able to witness the smokiness of the Smoky National forest (a think fog rolled in around 7 or so). The river was actually the river from Deliverance, we tried to keep our banjo jokes to a minimum.

That is the majority of my happenings in the past few days, this is a rushed blog post so I get some leeway when it comes to spelling and grammatical errors. Most of our internet time down here happens in the library, which makes me twice as dorky for blogging.

Almost Done with training

I wish I had something interesting to say, the course is almost done and we are preparing for the big test at the end. Other than that nothing has really happened. My last clinical shift didn't have anything exciting, it turned out that everyone hurt themselves over memorial day and didn't feel like hurting themselves again. Only two weeks left in North Carolina and then a few days in Tennessee and then I am back in Oregon! I am getting a little anxious.

Week 1 of EMT training

I finished my first week without any major disasters, or at least any personal disasters. We had our first midterm and I rocked it, which was good because the last midterm I ever took kicked my ass pretty bad (Organometallic synthesis at U of O in 2006). We finished up most of the basic stuff in time to get into the "clinical" part of the program, this is the part where we get to spend a couple shifts in the Emergency rooms and ambulances for the county. The ERs where pretty uneventful, I got to watch some stitches get put in and interview people who had random accidents (one 10 year old rolled his parents golf cart). The nurses don't really like the EMT students that much because they are a bit of a nuisance and always getting in the way (at least that's what a nurse told me) but the Paramedics that took me out on a shift yesterday where all about showing me the ropes. We got to see a bunch of different calls ranging in urgency and quantities of blood. I was glad to discover that I can handle being around needles and blood as long as they are not going into my body and as long as it's not my blood. We even went to get dinner during the shift and they gave us a discount, which was awesome, and to make it even better we got a call in the restaurant and had to leave like we were really important (they boxed up our food to go like it was an emergency, I guess because it was). The whole thing was a lot of fun and this next weekend I get to do my last shift at the facility that works on the Cherokee reservation. Because the facility is federally funded they get all kinds of fancy accommodations like big screen televisions and video games.

Also, having a weekend to hang out, the class has begun to loosen up a bit more and we can joke around instead of acting overly serious (which was getting old). Everyone in the group is from a pretty different background, at least from me. It seems that all of the states that don't send people to the Peace Corps very often somehow sent someone to this course (most of these states border Western North Carolina).

Back in the US

Hey, you probably aren't reading my blog anymore and that's ok. Why should you? I am back in the states and so a blog about the Dominican Republic and the Peace Corps doesn't really have much in common with me at this point. I got back May 7th and spent four days in Portland, 5 days in New York City, 5 days in Boston and 4 days in Buffalo. I saw friends and had quite a few adventures. Each location deserves its own entry but I don't really have the time or an appropriately named blog for my American adventures yet.

I am now in North Carolina in a town so small that the only thing missing is a creepy kid playing the banjo (he is probably around here somewhere). The intensive course I am taking to become an EMT basic and a wilderness EMT is pretty intense, I now understand why they put "intensive" in the name. I should be done in four weeks if everything goes right. There are a couple challenges, it is pretty much in the middle of nowhere and there is barely cell service and no internet (I had to come to the library), I don't have a car and that is a pain (luckily everyone else does), and the living situation would be considered pretty humble by American standards (luckily I was living in a slum for the past couple years and the fact that there is hot water, 24 hour electricity and I don't have to flush the toilet with a bucket means that I think I will be pretty comfortable. Actually, this might be a good intermediate between being back in the comforts of an American home.)

Making stoves is manly, maybe my neighbors do care.

My last two weeks are passing in the site and for some reason I still have work to do. I guess I have left some things to the last minute either intentionally or unintentionally. The latrines are almost done and today we will build our fourth stove, the map murals have been almost done for a couple weeks and every time I go to finish them there always seems to be one more thing that needs to be done.

I recently discovered that building things is much more rewarding than working with youth, I should have known. At the end of the day we have a finished product to look at (most days), which is way easier to appreciate than “planting seeds of knowledge” to be viewed at a much later date. Actually, for a while I was worried about the whole Environmental Education thing; figuring that my job was not really finished, but then I saw that they are now showing Captain Planet on TV down here and decided that a cartoon from the 90’s could probably get the job done in my absence. Building things is also nice because there is a lot more thought involved, at least more of my kind of thought. Each stove that we have built has been a little different than the last and we are improving the initial design that I took from memory from Joel, Ann and various guys named Tim (actually, because I built the first one by memory I think I missed a few details and that is why we have to keep improving the design). We tested the first stove the other day by cooking a dinner on it and I think we kind of freaked out a random family. They didn’t mind us there, and I asked them ahead of time, but one afternoon Kathy, the mason, the JICA volunteer and I just showed up with some food and started cooking. The back burner didn’t heat up as much as we wanted and so we figured out a couple details to make the second one better. At this point I think we got it down, the only problem is that I have had to keep an eye on the mason because he likes to throw the cinder blocks down wherever and not really follow any design. There have also been a few arguments between the Dominicans helping and myself because I feel like I should have the authority on design because of my background in science and they feel they should have the authority because they are Dominican men (also, I lose a lot of credibility when they see that I barely know how to mix cement and it takes me 20 minutes to saw a 2x4). However, I blame the slow sawing on the fact that I had an amoeba for a few weeks and it was causing me a lot of trouble with life in general.

On a related note, I discovered that some of my neighbors really do care about me (and that feels nice). They diagnosed me with an amoeba before the doctors at Peace Corps and prescribed me a cure of mashed garlic and carrot juice. They told me it was going to be gross, but other than the burning of the garlic I kind of liked it, and I got a pretty good nights sleep afterwards. I did however take the Peace Corps’ prescription the next day just to be safe. Also, a couple weeks back when I was gone all day I got a phone call and when I picked up the person on the other end said “Cristofer?!” I responded with “Si” and then they hung up on me. It turned out that because my neighbors didn’t see me leave in the morning they thought that I had passed out or died in the house and where banging on my doors and windows. Someone got the bright idea to call me, when I picked up and said hello they had enough evidence that I was alive and hung up. I don’t blame them for hanging up on me; phone calls are around 20 cents a minute within the country.