The Continuing Adventures of Chris Ward

The life of a Thousandaire

2011-08-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-01-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

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

2010-06-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-31T16:55:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Things are changing, some things are not changing.

2010-04-10T12:20:00.000-07:00

There is less than a month left until I go back, the community knows it and I am trying to accept it. It is funny to notice that most of us that are going back in May seem to be more stressed than when arrived. There are lots of things to do before we finish service and even more things to worry about once we get back. I went down to the south with some friends last week. While planning the trip I had not considered that it would be myself and four girls for the majority of the trip. Being the only guy was fun and emasculating, we ate ice cream and listened to Erika Badu. I went to my friend’s batey for a few hours where she was running around with her mom and an Italian guy trying to get children birth certificates and Dominican citizenship, we also played soccer and colored with the children (a group of missionaries was around that morning passing out toys). The batay was a good contrast to the Luxury Resort where I found the girls schmoozing with the Canadian ambassador. He knew one of Claire’s professors in Newfoundland and was considerably younger than our ambassador. He was complaining that a national news program recently called him the son of a whore; he assured us that his mother was not a whore.

The nights in the capital on either end of the trip where a good opportunity for me to wrap up a few loose ends (there are still plenty left to wrap up) such as submitting my video interview, arranging for a flight back to the Portland, obtaining the proper paper work for grant reports and figuring out what vaccinations Lobo needs before he can travel to the US. A group of us spent a few hours out at dinner and we gently bickered like a group of friends at the end of a road trip, but instead of a five-day adventure we were really ending a two-year stint in another country.

I left early with the hopes to get home from the capital with enough time to get some work done in the afternoon. That put me at the foot of the mountain at about 10 AM. There is an unmistakable texture to raw flesh in a burlap sack; it is soft but strangely firm at the same time. My leg pushed up against this texture as the eight of us piled in the bed of the old diesel Toyota. Sometimes you don’t want to put 2 and 2 together and come to a disenchanting conclusion but it happens anyway. I saw the woman loading a severed cow’s head wrapped in plastic into another burlap bag and sling it on top of the pile of luggage about ten minutes before, the bag pressing against my shin with its unmistakable texture had a red patch where something was oozing through. There is still a lot of construction on the road up the mountain and we were stopping frequently. I was in the back corner straddling the tailgate so I would get out to stretch at the stops. At one of the stops the driver decided he wanted to take off quickly and left me behind. After driving 10 yards or so, he slowed down enough that I was able to run behind the truck and jump into the bed, the other people in the back grabbed my arms firmly so I wouldn’t fall out. I realized I was lying across the bags of meat. The sun was getting higher and higher and as we stopped the flies where beginning to take interest in the bags that I was trying not to think about. Luckily, the woman with the two bags got off about half way through the trip. I helped her unload her bags and it felt like she had half of a cow in the mystery bag. We lugged it to the side of the road where she would wait for a motorcycle to come pick her up. A lot of things are changing both in this country and for me, but at least the guagua rides are as ridiculous as ever.

Things that you can’t take with you

2010-04-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

The days are quickly ticking away, the count is officially at 35 five days but really I will be out of my site for the last week as I take care of business in the capital. I hope to sneak out of town unnoticed partially because I am bad at melodramatic goodbyes but mostly because now that word has gotten out that I am leaving, people who know have attempted to turn my house into a garage sale. People I haven’t seen in months have a strange way of passing by to tell me that I will “hacer falta” (which means “be missed”, but literally translates “to create a lack of”), and in the same breath tell me that I owe it to them to sell various items throughout my house at a buen precio. It has been frustrating but also a good opportunity to tell people how I really feel. My old landlord came and tried to by all my stuff and I essentially told him that I wouldn’t trust him with a bag of my own excrement (excremento is a fun and easy English cognate that makes you sound like more of an adult than saying pupu). I guess I should have been a little nicer to the landlord as he did give me a ride a few months back in his Lexus SUV and let me hold the loaded gun he keeps in between the front seats (however, he did relentlessly hit on my two female friends the whole trip). The landlord offered me 3500 hundred pesos for everything I own. That equals US $97.22; he would raise the price to 100, if I took out the bag of excrement.

So far, the real goods that I have to sell are my table and wood chairs, my stove and gas tank, my bed, plastic chairs and my beauty (I am not referring to my boyish good looks but instead to the awkward Dominican translation for Chest of Drawers). So far I have sold the table, stove and gas tank for 60 dollars and the bed with plastic chairs for 45 dollars. The beauty I am selling to my 24-year-old neighbor for the reasonable exchange of maintaining Lobo while I am out of town, as part of the exchange I also have to keep an eye out for an American husband who can bring her to the states or eventually marry her myself if I can’t find one.

I am constantly feeling like a bit of a jerk as I tell people that I won’t just be giving away my stuff and also won’t sell them stuff until I have the money in my hand (I’ve fallen for the “I’ll pay you next week” enough times). I think that people are getting the impression that I am the cold-hearted American businessman that everyone assumed I was when I got here. I guess I kind of am. Something most Peace Corps volunteers claim when they finish service is that they got really good at saying No to people, it is kind of funny how it works. I, like most of us, came down here to have a warm fuzzy feeling of helping people but in reality we all learn how to be cold and logical about the fact that giving things to people just because they ask isn’t going to solve anything but instead create an even greater problem which is dependence on outside assistance.

A couple weeks have gone by

2010-03-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

Alright, life has slowed down a lot since my dog bit the old lady and the neighbor's gas tank caught fire. I have been doing a lot of manual labor with helping some missionaries build a house for a week and then helping to get the 18 latrines built with the Small Project Assistant Grant that finally came in from USAID. I am wish I could say that I am the guy doing the skilled labor for any of these things but in reality I am just the guy who moves a lot of cinder blocks and concrete, I also get to be the stickler American who is fussy about budgeting the money and getting work done on time... which is awesome. Luckily, there is an NGO down here who knows the latrine building game in and out. Moving all the cinder blocks and concrete fooled the doctor into thinking that I was a runner yesterday when I had my physical, however, the weight loss and diarrhea also fooled the doctor into thinking that I have some kind of intestinal infection (which I don't, but am still being over tested for).

I have also started ending sentences with prepositions because I recently learned that because spoken English was developed as a Germanic language while written English was also influenced by Latin, we have all sorts of crazy rules when we write that we never use when we speak. Also, I can't figure out why so many people are speaking German in the Caribbean.

Most intense moment (that nobody got hurt)

2010-03-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

Today I experienced the most intense moment of my Peace Corps service. I had closed myself in my house after a few niños where pestering me for the plastic bag that came with the cornflakes I had just bought for lunch. I was doing a Kakuro puzzle, which if you haven’t heard of it, is sort of like if Sudoku’s bad ass uncle got busy with a cross word puzzle. I was doing pretty well for myself having almost completed the puzzle, when I suddenly heard screaming outside the front door. At first I couldn’t hear what they were saying but there were a lot of people running away from something directly in front of my house. I listened a little closer thinking it was a fight but then I heard the words “fire” and “gas tank” and my heart started beating really fast. The first thing I did was hide behind the concrete counter in my house for about thirty seconds, but people kept screaming outside. They were yelling for water and I had several buckets in my house. I went to the front door and hesitated for about 30 seconds because I had no idea where the “fire” and the “gas tank” where or what exactly those two words together signified (other than something that causes a lot of panic). I cracked the door open enough to see a crowd of about ten men standing in the doorway and outside of the house in front of mine (the house that you can hit with a broom stick from my front door), I opened the door the rest of the way and poked my head out to see that in the house there was a huge fire consuming the back wall, the stove and about everything else. It looked like someone had left a flamethrower going as the tank sprayed flames across the room. The men kept yelling for water so I passed the buckets of rainwater I had gathered to cook and bathe with for the past couple days (which, for the record, rainwater is not as great to bathe and cook with as Dasani commercials lead you to believe. It’s actually pretty gross when you consider that it has to pass through gutters. Our water hadn’t arrived for a couple days). The men passed the water up to the front and threw it on the fire in vain. It was a gas fire and so the water didn’t help much, other than keeping it from spreading when the water soaked everything in the the house. Because we all ran out of water, the men gave up the house for lost. They then started grabbing things out of the house before they could catch fire: the stove, the refrigerator, an entire bed, tables, chairs and a lot of clothes. A lot of the stuff they passed to me to put into my house. As they handed them to me the items where still hot despite being wet. This process continued for about 10 minutes until things got really crazy.

I am still not sure what exactly happened but the men yelled something to the effect of “run for it and take cover!” All the men ran faster than I had seen any Dominican run in the past two years and the flame coming from the tank went from looking like a flamethrower to looking like some kind of bigger scarier flamethrower. The tank looked like it was going to explode; I assume the Dominican men running for their lives had a similar notion. I ducked for cover behind the front wall of my house with my three-year-old neighbor “Tango” and his 14-year-old aunt who were watching from the front steps. The three of us huddled together in silence but the front door was still wide open and we could hear the tank spouting gas louder than before. As we sat there, Lobo came up to us and wanted to know what all the commotion was about. It only took him a second to see that we weren’t the excitement and the real action was outside. He went up to the open doorway and stood looking across the way. I can’t remember what movie, but I am sure it happens in one of them, where the guy goes to save the dog and he somehow gets killed instead. I played that situation out in my head and thought, sorry Lobo you are literally on your last legs so… I am not going to risk my life to get you off of the front steps. Luckily, Lobo is a good dog (despite what the neighbor ladies say) and when I called him in my “Lobo this is serious voice” he came right up to me and I could grab him buy his collar. We hid behind the wall for another thirty seconds until the tank had completely emptied itself and stopped shooting flames all over the little house. It appeared that something happened to the tank that made gas escape a lot faster and burn out in a matter of seconds versus minutes. Someone yelled “ya” which in most contexts means “it’s done.” I yelled “Ya?” back to be safe and then poked my head out the front door. The gas tank was done and a man yanked it with a wet towel around his hand and put it outside. Someone had the bright idea (which I wish I could say I was that someone) to put a wet towel over the fire and that put out the bulk of the fire pretty quick. I guess it’s easier to put out fires when there is not a gas tank spouting flames all over everything. After the fire was completely out we collected all of the stuff that was strewn in the street and put it in my house. A pretty big crowd was forming and it was encouraging to see how many people where willing to help. People were helping hammer walls back together (a man had broken down a zinc wall to get into the house faster) and clean up all the water that was all over the house. The startled neighbor, whose house was just on fire, was able to go sit down and catch her breath while the rest of us did the clean up. Luckily, the rest of the family went out to the campo for the weekend to relax and didn’t have to deal with the situation.

In the meantime, I had the bright idea to call 911 and I wondered for a second why nobody else had called. It turns out because there is no 911 in Constanza, which may have been lucky for me a couple days ago when Lobo bit that old lady. Someone called the fire department, probably because his or her cousin works as a fireman. They showed up pretty late because at this point people were already cleaning up the mess (it was only two guys that were empty handed. The uniforms looked official though.). Luckily, there was not a lot of damage to the property and because the house is made of oilcans they were not damaged and the fire didn’t really spread beyond the little house. Within an hour of the fire the house looked just like it had before, except everything was soaking wet. After we emptied their things out my house, I went downtown to meet Kathy and Malia at some award ceremony for rich Dominican women, it was a three-hour ceremony and there was a lot of emotional crying (done by rich Dominican women). Contrasted with the ridiculously exciting hour prior, the ceremony may have been the most boring three hours of my life (but I didn’t mind it, as much).

A bad 24 hours

2010-03-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

It started in the afternoon, when I was labeling the countries on the map mural. I discovered that I had left out Denmark and made both Myanmar and Thailand part of China. I also painted a couple countries like they were lakes and a couple lakes like countries in Africa. Indonesia and Malaysia were a disaster. I was handling the stress of map-making when a few of the students came up to me. One of them shoved a newspaper in my face and said to have a look. I was happy to see that a 5th grader was reading the newspaper but the news was far from good. They had found the bodies of a man and a prostitute up on the hill outside the barrio. I felt bad for the families and the people who died but that hill was not just any hill either, it was the best hill to take Lobo for walks. Being a fairly rural walk, it cuts down on the number of people telling me that “you’re dog only has three legs” from 25 to about 3 or 4 (which is a big deal on a daily walk). I figured I would be walking Lobo through the barrio from now on but until phase 2 of the bad 24 hours happened.

The next morning I was hanging out in my house with the door open. Lobo wandered over to the neighbors and I followed him to bring him back. He was sitting watching the neighbor cut apart a cow’s head, I stuck around for a little while to touch the brain and tongue and other strange parts but soon lost interest. I would have brought Lobo back but we all decided he was being so good that he could just sit around and eat the scraps that the neighbor didn’t want (parts like the gums and cartilage). I went back to my house to read some book called Life With Jeeves, which is all about some rich English guy without any responsibilities and his genius butler, Jeeves. They are constantly dealing with the stress and delightful problems of being a rich English guy and his butler in the 1920’s. I was halfway through some chapter about the man being reluctantly engaged to some woman who made him learn too much when a neighbor ran over and told me that Lobo had bit someone. I put the book down, despite wanting to know how Jeeves was going to solve the engagement problem, to find that Lobo had bit a relatively sweet old lady (she became much less sweet after he bit her). I was pissed, and not pissed like how a rich English guy means pissed. Lobo had actually broken the skin and the woman was insisting on going to the hospital. I wasn’t going to argue, even though the cut could have been easily covered with a band-aid.

It turned out that Lobo had bit her because he thought she was trying to take the cow’s head meat when she was looking around the room for something, I went into the neighbors house (I don’t know where the neighbor went during all this) and grabbed Lobo and put him back in the house. I sat outside the hospital with her son-in-law until eventually I got impatient and went inside to the emergency room, they had finished putting on the band-aid and were giving her the prescription. I went to the pharmacy to buy the twelve dollars worth of anti-rabies pills (in case Lobo was rabid) and Neosporin, we then went home where the number of people saying “you’re dog only has three legs” went from 25 people to 50 people. The 50 people also pointed out that the three-legged dog bites old ladies.

The whole situation was rummy; and this time I mean rummy like how a rich English guy says rummy. I don’t have a butler to ask for advice so I called Joel. He reminded me that dogs like meat and sometimes get defensive. He also reminded me that sometimes community members get overly dramatic and do things like insist on being taken to the hospital. He pointed out that the whole thing would blow over quickly. I took his advice and hid in my house for a few hours. Sure enough, when I came back out, my neighbor told me that it wasn’t my fault, that dogs like meat and I just need to keep Lobo on a leash or in my house for the next 2 months.

River and Cemetery Clean ups

2010-03-02T07:16:00.001-08:00

Now that I have been back in site for a couple weeks, things are about the same as before. The Religious curing lady is back again. This time she told a neighbor that her husband who died 2 years ago was trapped in an animal’s body in Haiti and that they needed to move his body from the tomb in the cemetery before the Haitians on the other side of the island could sacrifice him. As if her previous antics were not creepy enough, now there will be digging 2-year-old corpses out of graveyards in the middle of the night (she wanted to do it at 2 AM but the Cemetery’s security insisted that they did it during business hours). Anyway, I don’t know if they actually went through with it, and I think her buzz is starting to fade. Maybe people are finally starting to get it, when the whole situation was explained to me a woman stressed how Haitians are a bunch of crazy fanatics with their religious beliefs. The Haitians were going to sacrifice the animal, which is weird, and moving corpses is pretty normal. She also said that we couldn’t let Haitians come over to this side of the island to receive help after the earthquake. After all, she tells me, the bible does say that we are in “the end of days” and to have them here would only put us in more danger. I don’t know where it says that, I told her, but it did say something about loving your neighbor. She told me that I had heard that passage out of context.

Besides the religious banter, there has been a few exciting developments with my project. I finished my finest world map mural yet at the elementary school by my house, it is way bigger than the last one and I am hoping to be able to label all of the countries tonight or tomorrow. I finally received the grant money that I applied for in late October so I can build some latrines for the barrio. I am hoping the latrines will cut down on the number of people using the river behind my house as a very slow flushing toilet. We are also hoping to put a few on Malia’s side of the mountain in some of the rural areas. Also, on the subject of the river behind my house, a big rainstorm came about a week ago and cleared the whole thing out. The air was so fresh I smelled the flowers on the tree behind my house, and then I caught a cold so now I don’t smell anything. A few days after the rainstorm the local government sent in a group of paid staff and volunteers to clean the river. I was suckered into it as well. It was probably one of the more disgusting moments of my life (other than the first time I went to a river clean up in my barrio). Despite the rain doing a pretty good job of removing the bulk, there were still quite a few piles of dirty diapers. The new JICA volunteer impressed me big time, I was using a stick with a nail on it to pick up the soggy diapers one by one and she came up and picked up five at once. With her hands! She had gloves on and so did I, but still. She doesn’t know Karate like Eiji but she gets a black belt in dealing with a bunch of crap (in both diaper form and the local government trying to use us for political gain in the form a river clean ups).

Relief work in the age of Facebook

2010-02-22T16:04:00.000-08:00

I will never know what it is like to help people and not be recognized for it. Since I have been in the DR I have been able to share my experiences through this blog and other programs like Facebook. I can’t imagine my service without them, even though these things have come about over the past few years and Peace Corps volunteers have been working for more than 40. With that said, I would like to accept that I am being a little bit hypocritical and spend a couple paragraphs complaining about the wonders of information sharing.

As I said, I don’t know what relief work was like before Facebook but I have to imagine there was a lot less photographs of patients with cell phones and iphones. On the second day the director of the project had to tell the staff to stop talking pictures of the Haitian patients out of respect for their privacy and respect for their suffering, he also told us specifically not to upload grotesque pictures of people in pain to Facebook or Picassa. He said he didn’t want to have to tell us twice, I figured it was bad enough that he had to tell us the first time. There were several groups that came through the hospital to pose with the patients (some even posed as if they themselves where doctors) and left immediately after. I couldn’t believe how many people were treating the largest catastrophe to hit the Americas like a tourist destination. By day three, as per the Directors request, I had to password protect the computers in the office because people where spending a significant amount of time blogging and Facebooking (He also insisted that because someone installed Skype on one computer that a virus had damaged the modem, which is ridiculous. I fixed the modem issue by unplugging it for 45 seconds and turning it back on). I wasn’t too bothered by the people in the computer room, except for the guy that loaded all of his pictures into iPhoto on my laptop, now I have a bunch of fairly creepy pictures on my hard drive of some dude and his girlfriend (or maybe daughter, we can’t figure out) back in the states. Anyway, the point is that there were too many people documenting their good deeds and not enough good deeds being done. At some point someone figured out that it is a lot easier to look like a hero on facebook than to actually do something helpful.

So the trip to Jimani had a lot of what I did expect. There were games of telephone in English/Spanish/Creole between patient and doctor, soccer games with refugees, cute children in casts and wheelchairs, moving religious ceremonies in a language I didn’t understand, Red Cross helicopters and a medical staff from everywhere between Barcelona and Los Angeles. There were some amazing people and several very sad moments but because two thirds of us were posing for photos it seemed to detract from both the work and the experience.

Out of the frying pan...

2010-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally got my chance to help out with Haiti. There is a temporary hospital set up outside of Jimani, which is about 1 hour from Port-Au-Prince on the border. We got here about 5 hours ago and there has been nothing but intensity, I expected to see a lot of people suffering but at this point most of the surgeries have taken place and we are simply dealing with the fairly nasty politics and logistics involved with maintaining a refugee hospital in a country that doesn't really want any more refugees. There are only about 300 people here and it sounds like there is considerably more people in the camps and the clinics on the other side. Money is flowing into Haiti for aid much faster than the Dominican Republic (for good reason), so there is a lot of work to be done simply to keep the project going. As for the medical staff, there are two major groups; a group of doctors and nurses from Vermont and half of a Relief Team from Spain. The Spanish team seems pretty awesome except their accents are whacky and they keep using the word "vosotros." They have quite the command center set up and it looks like something out of a James Bond movie (who knew that they make inflatable satellite dishes for high speed internet?), the volunteers that we are replacing are saying that things have calmed down a lot over the past week. It sounds like things will get interesting again when we lose most of the nursing staff on Tuesday because of a storm in the NE part of the US. Their replacements can't make it down in time, I hope I don't get stuck changing bed pans.

Strange Happenings

2010-02-12T19:08:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I walked past my neighbors house and there was a larger middle-aged woman sitting in their main room talking loudly. I hadn’t seen her before so I poked my head in and said hello. The neighbor invited me in and I sat and listened to the woman for a while and all she seemed to talk about was how she cured some man of his constipation within five minutes of meeting him. I thought to myself, she must be some sort of specialist in home remedies, not that curing constipation has ever been an issue in a country where unwashed lettuce and chickens hanging out in latrines is commonplace. Instead of telling me about how she prescribed him some remedy she simply explained that she cured him with the faith of Christ. Well this is my cue to leave, I thought to myself, but sadly my big fat American ego wouldn’t let me leave without uttering a couple sentences of skepticism. The neighbor dismissed me, apologizing to the Faith Curing Lady for my ignorance. She explained to the Curing Lady that because I was an American I couldn’t understand what they were saying and that I am like a little boy. I was offended by her statement so I repeated everything she had said, explained my opinion over again, told her that I was not a little boy but instead a grown man, and then asked her to do my laundry. A few hours later I left my site for a medical mission and my friend came down from the states, I was out of my site for several days.

When I came back my neighbor had two big stories for the last week. First, the woman was curing the blind, making the lame walk and children who were mute start speaking. He told me that I would have to see it to believe it; I shrugged it off because I have discovered that my neighbors aren’t particularly fond of skeptics. My other neighbor, who is a little more level headed, said there was a lot of Faith Curing Lady hysteria going on right now and that people were lining up in either direction down our little street to see her. The second major event to report was that one of our neighbors had died. I was told that she had an epileptic seizure and that she died almost instantly. It was pretty sad because she had lost her first baby in childbirth last month and both she and her husband where having some trouble coping. Her death came as a huge surprise to everyone because she was only 25 years old, no one mentioned where or when it happened.

I went to the funeral a few days later and in talking to the husband learned that she had been at the house with the Faith Curing Lady when she had the attack. It still sounded like a freak accident, as if she had been struck by lighting; a strange coincidence that she happened to die in the same house where she was supposed to be cured. The whole thing was a little too strange by American terms (but not at all by Dominican terms) and I decided to talk to the most rational Dominican I could find. The lady who I talked to always seems to be in the know about everything, American or Dominican, and this was no exception. She explained to me the situation that every couple years people pass through town “curing” and using the whole show to make a little money. Barrio Las Flores just happens to be the jackpot when it comes to people looking to believe in just about anything. The people that are cured are never really neighbors but instead people who have supposedly traveled great distances to see the miracle worker (so no one ever really knows if the blind person is really blind, or if the lame person can’t actually walk). There is also a trick they use to make people fall over and pass out by shaking their heads and throwing off their equilibrium, they pass it off as the power of Christ, this trick can also cause seizures in people with Epilepsy. At least that is what the hospital staff said in regard to my neighbor’s death, they also said that when she arrived at the hospital she had suffocated on her own saliva and that she could have been saved if she was simply laid on her side. The whole thing made me sick, it also got me thinking about how this situation would be handled if it happened in the U.S. I am sure there would be some kind of investigation and this woman would probably be tried for manslaughter, or at least made to stop what she was doing. Instead, there are still dozens of people lining up each afternoon to receive their miracle cure and blessing.

The Kings brought Guns

2010-02-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

This happened nearly a month ago, but I still feel it is worth remembering. The 6th of December is known as “kings day” and is reference to when the Three Kings arrived to give Christ his gifts of Gold, frankincense and mur (I don’t know how you spell “mur”). I suppose the Dominicans made a fairly reasonable assumption when they decided that the Kings arrived about 2 weeks late, after all everyone is late in this country. The idea of Kings day is that you are supposed to give your kids the toys that they didn’t get on Christmas. This holiday presented a few problems for me. First, every girl in the neighborhood thought it was clever to ask me “Donde está mis reyes” (where is my Kings), which essentially means where is my gift you owe me. I explained to them that my country does not have this holiday so I am exempt from gift giving. The second, and much greater problem is that the gift of the year, the Dominican Furby and Tickle-me-Elmo, ended up being very lifelike plastic handguns and shotguns. They only fired plastic pellets (in Spanish they are called bolas, balls, instead of balas, bullets) and they only heart a little bit when you end up as collateral damage in one of the many neighborhood muchacho gang wars.
At first, the wars were between the dogs and the children. The children gathered in groups of four or five and shot at the dogs while the dogs barked and nipped at their feet. Nobody was really hurting anyone so the little fights lasted forever, Lobo was a valiant and bravo leader of the pack of dogs in my section of the barrio. A colmado owner recently told a woman that Lobo lost his leg “in the war” and I decided not to correct him.
After about two days the children won the Dog vs. Children war of 2010 and began fighting amongst themselves, which may have been worse. They found a stockpile of toy guns on sale at the marketplace and pooled all their money to buy more weapons at discount prices. There were toy guns everywhere, I felt like I was in a rap video produced by 10 year olds. We, the adults, had to go back inside the house multiple times because stray bolas where flying everywhere. I sat inside wishing they would go back to playing with kites made out of garbage bags and bamboo or spare motorcycle tires and oil jugs.
Luckily, despite the very realistic look of the toy guns, they quickly fell apart until eventually the guns became nothing more than ravaged pieces of plastic to whack your neighbor with. Nearly 4 weeks later and the children are back to playing with garbage until the next major Christian holiday (Semana Santa is at the beginning of March, I think).

Wrong side of the island

2010-01-19T14:07:00.001-08:00

I was working at a medical mission near the border last week when the earthquake hit. It felt small and we didn't know if it was anything serious because we were essentially cut off from outside communication. Eventually people started calling the director of the mission checking if their family members were ok, that was our first clue to the severity of the quake. Based on Dominican News and radio broadcasts from the Bahamas we found out that it was a 7.0 and that the capital of Haiti was in ruins. The work we were doing for the sick Dominicans seemed almost irrelevant when we compared assisting someone with back pain and high blood pressure versus the millions of displaced Haitians that were without food, water or a home. Volunteers were practically banging their heads against walls (some harder than others) to find a way to help the people over there, sadly after a couple days and consultation from our director it was clear that there is not a lot that we can do. I was put in the Dominican Republic to do development work, which is very different from relief work in Haiti. I am hoping that in the coming months something will develop and I will have an opportunity to help, but for now I am sitting on my hands.

Tour de Sur 2

2010-01-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

After Christmas, or any other holiday, I like to hit the road and see the south for a while. It’s a part of the country that is so different from my neck of the woods that it feels like a whole new Peace Corps experience. Getting down there is the biggest cost, about 20 bucks either way, while everything else is dirt-cheap. And dirt is pretty cheap in the south because it never seems to grow anything. Actually that is probably the lack of rain’s fault.

My first stop was a small campo where my good-natured and slightly corny friend Timo lives. I make a point to spend some time with him when I make it to the south because he has the “real” campo experience (i.e. no electricity and lots of rats). We had a good time running around his tropical jungle for a couple days. His town has all the details to give him street credit among the environment volunteers but in reality I compare the town to that of Spectre in the movie Big Fish; everyone loves that you are there and you have to take of your shoes. His biggest complaint is that the town was built by an NGO a decade or so ago and when they built the little village they put a lot of people together that shouldn’t be together. His town is divided amongst the Evangelical Christian families and the more naughty families. First we went to the gallera, the make shift cock fighting arena that is run by the Naughty families. We had an early lunch of pork and boiled bananas and hung out with the group of old men who hang out there on Saturdays. They offered us a drink, and Timo informed me that it was his first mixed drink he had ever drank in his site (Timo is a little better behaved than I). The mixed drink was beer and Haitian Moonshine, we had about a cup of it before we had to leave. Off we went to the Evangelicals, smelling a little like cheap alcohol, to play some dominos and hit the river to do some crabbing. We played the typical, US vs. DR game of dominos and tied at one game apiece. We then wandered around a river for 2.5 hours while Tim and his Dominican friend stuck their arms down holes in the river bed. The friend dug up 9 or 10 large crabs, Timo did not have much luck and my job was to follow behind holding a bag to put them in, I’m from the city and delicate. I couldn’t help but be blown away by the fact that we were going to eat something from the river by his house, I compared it to the river of black water in my site that I am afraid to stand close to for fear that I will inhale a neighbor’s shit. It felt good. We came home and had plenty of time to play a couple games of chess and some connect four (Tim and I are evenly matched at chess, but I kicked his ass at Connect Four. I give credit for Connect Four to Vermont Hills Daycare ages 3 through 11) while the neighbors cooked the crab. It was good stuff except it is the Dominican custom to eat anything on the crab you can chew, I looked like a sissy as I picked it apart delicately with the one fork his neighbors had available, no wonder they had me carrying the bag all day.
The next day we went to visit Tim’s girlfriend Kim, and yes, they get a lot of crap for their names rhyming. Her host family cooked us some lunch. It was delicious, and free. I ate until I almost exploded. We then went to a tiny “luxury” resort that was rumored to have hosted the Dominican actress who flies the helicopter in that Avatar movie who none of us can ever remember her name. Apparently she pushed someone into the pool, in a playful manner. At least that’s what someone told me the tabloids said, but people talk out of their ass a lot down here (myself included) so that could be completely untrue. We met up with another volunteer who was showing some friends around the country. The other volunteer is one of the “Batey Girls,” a group that gets the most Street Credit among volunteers because a Batey is essentially a Haitian slum in the middle of a sugar cane field in the middle of nowhere. She described my site to her friend as “really nice.” I tagged along to see the Batey and was amazed to see the Peace Corps experience I had always imagined. It looked like Africa, or one of the villages from the beginning of City of God. They spoke both Spanish and French Creole. The two foreign languages made an American twice as easy to make fun of, and I am pretty sure I was made fun of; I just wish I knew for what. All her site was missing was a river of black water, but that is only because the site was missing a river. She was living a more luxurious life than most because she actually had a latrine; most people just used the cane fields. I used the latrine, it was not a classy sit-down latrine like in Joel’s site; it was a “hike the football stance” type like in Michal’s site. Next time I am just going to hold it. I left the Batey half wishing that I could have been put in a site like that and half wondering if I could have survived it. My site being described as “really nice” struck a chord for me. I guess my consolation is knowing that we all have our different challenges, currently mine is my neighbor blaring some sort of Spanish cover to the Pretender’s “Back on the Chain Gang” at 10 PM as I write this. I probably couldn’t handle learning Creole and being crawled on by rats, but maybe she couldn’t handle Latin American artists butchering some of the 80’s greatest hits on a nightly basis.

The Batey was my last stop in the south, from there I returned to the capital and headed back up north to celebrate New Years with a bunch of volunteers in a tourist town outside of Puerta Plata. It was lovely, there were fire works.

Christmas Eve translates to Good Night. I disagree.

2009-12-29T07:17:00.001-08:00

Yeah, so last year I was bracing for a rough Christmas eve but Kathy showed up at the last minute. This year, both Kathy and Malia were in the states so I knew that I would be alone on the mountain for sure. The majority of the celebrating happens on Christmas eve, noche beuna . My noche buena should really translate to night where everyone in the neighborhood drinks whiskey in a run down house with the radio rotating Julio Iglesias, Enrique Iglesias and random salsa music. It wasn't even Julio or Enrique's Christmas albums, I felt like I was sitting at a party where my high school Spanish Teacher was the DJ. I originally thought that children drinking was something peculiar that I should be offended by. Christmas eve showed me that the week before was just the tip of the iceburg. Earlier in the evening I was in my house reading and a band of muchachos rolled up with a bottle of wine. They asked me if I wanted some, I sat and thought about it for a second. First of all, since when are minors contributing alcohol to adults, it was all backwards; I was sitting in my house reading a book about witches and talking polar bears and these kids roll up trying to give me booz. After noting that it was rediculous, I said "yeah, give me that wine." I figured that it is illegal to give alcohol to children but not take it from them, so if I had the biggest swig of the cheap wine that I could I would actually be helping them by leaving them less booz to get drunk with. After that I went over to my neighbor's house who's wife and kids went down the mountain to be with the rest of the family. We sat around drinking beer. He was telling me how much he loved having kids and how much he missed his, I was telling him about how much I hate being around kids but missed being one. Other than that, the conversation revolved around how much people owed us in the barrio and merengue artists. At one point I remember thinking, is this getting more fun or am I just getting more drunk? I think the answer was the latter becuase after a couple hours I didn't feel that well. Too much beer and cheap whiskey not enough mashed potatos and gravy. Luckily, the next day had plenty of both mashed potatos and gravy. I went to a volunteer's house outside of Santiago and enjoyed a Christmas dinner with six other volunteers. It was very wholesome and we played Catchphrase for about an hour longer than we should have. It was more of the Christmas I was hoping for.

Intense moments on a Saturday night

2009-12-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to be more cool lately when I am around my neighbors. I have taught a few of them some cuss words and keep telling them I am going to drink with them. The big night is supposed to be Christmas eve but they wanted to get started a little earlier and were drinking in the afternoon yesterday. They wanted me to hang out but I had some things to do. Instead I showed up a few hours later when it was dark and I figured I would have a drink with them. When I got to the colmado everyone there was practically on the floor drunk and it was extremely uncomfortable. I was handed a cup of something to "drink" and it was a plastic cup filled with cheap rum, this is not anything different than usual. The real intense thing that happened was one of the little muchachos wandered up completely intoxicated and barely able to stand. He was drooling, crying and almost falling down as he stood there. I immediately put down my drink of straight rum and started the interrogation. "Who gave this to you?" I asked him. He responded with "some guy." I was blown away with the fact that this 6 year old not only was willing to take candy from strangers but also cups of rum. After further interrogation it came out that he had drank two cups of rum and was ready to vomit (of course). I didn't look very "cool" to the neighbors because I grabbed him by his right arm (a la Joel Alex) and started carrying him back to his house. He was crying saying that he didn't want to go back to his house because his mom was going to be mad. I told him that it didn't really matter to me, he shouldn't be drinking and it gives developing minds brain damage (which I don't think registered for him or anyone else I told that night, but I was pissed because that drinking probably undid the last two weeks I have spent trying to teach him the damn alphabet). I ran into his 13 year old cousin and told her to bring him to his mom. I went back to the colmado to try to explain why I flipped out about there being a drunk child hanging out with them but before I could the little kid wandered back to the colmado. I grabbed him again and brought him back. That was the end of my night at the colmado, I went in and sat down with my two friends who I was relieved to see were completely sober. I was also relieved to find out that they agreed with me that it is completely inappropriate for a child to be in that condition. I was even impressed that my friend told me that he knew in the states a child would be removed from a family where this type of thing happened. Yeah, that and about 25 other things that we see on a daily basis. The kid ended up wandering into the house where we were watching Animal Planet or Discovery channel (yes my barrio gets the Premium package for cable) and started babbling about who gave him the rum. My neighbors told me they were going to talk to the guy who did it, I guess that's about all that can be done I thought. We sat and talked about the situation and how bad it is that the police never come into the barrio to actually punish the guys doing this. That's life, the neighbor told me, some people get it all and some don't, and we are on the end that don't (when he said "we" I am pretty sure he was not including me, I am pretty sure I am considered one of the people who gets it all). In the mean time the kid threw up on himself so the other neighbor kids took him outside to bathe him, which he was not excited about, because its about 55 degrees outside and the water is pretty cold this time of year. The cold shower (or bucket of water poured on him) didn't really sober him up like we had hoped, instead there was a wet drunk naked child wandering around the barrio babbling about God knows what in Spanish. Eventually his mom put him to bed.
I saw him this morning and he was as chipper as ever. Apparently six-year-olds don't get hangovers like 26 year-olds. I tried to scold him again this morning but he wasn't in the mood to listen, at least some of the older neighbors that were drunk last night showed some remorse.

Weekend of Firsts

2009-12-17T07:07:00.000-08:00

Last week I brought three of my best (or as some volunteers decided; least evil) muchachos to the Brigada Verde conference. They were all either 11 or 12 years old and had never really traveled outside of the barrio or Constanza. It didn’t really hit me how different our worlds are until we met up with the other volunteers participating in the conference at a mall in Santiago. The kids I brought had never been in a mall and very clearly had never seen an escalator before. This was made clear by the fact that as the other kids sat patiently at the tables in the food court my muchachos were doing laps on the escalators. I limited them to five laps because anything more than that I consider excessive. They were full of questions as we walked through the mall; they asked me if this mall was what America was like. I told them, yeah, pretty much.

When we got to the site I realized that this was the first time the muchachos had been away from home and their families for more than a few hours. By the time we got to the camp they had each told me to call their mom and to tell them they were ok and see how the family was. I tried calling each of the three moms but none of the phone calls went through. I am pretty sure the moms just made up phone numbers to call. It also must have been one of the first times these kids had been in an “all you can eat” type of setting because the three of them ate more than their 15 and 16 year old counterparts by a couple of plates each meal. At one point one of the other volunteers asked me, “those kids are eating so much, do you not feed these children?” I responded by reminding her that they are not my children and actually they usually end up eating half my food anyway (which makes you feel warm and fuzzy the first 10 times but after a while gets pretty annoying. Last night I was eating an egg and a knock-off croissant (they call it “shrimp bread”) for dinner and one of the muchachos climbed up to my window to yell “Cristofer comparte!” Which translates to “Christopher, share!” It was the Naked Kid and I told him a few days ago that I am not going to share with him anymore because when I gave him a cup of soda he didn’t share any of it with his older brother like I told him, so let me eat my “shrimp bread” and egg in peace).

As for other firsts, I think they discovered girls at the conference because Joel caught them trying to spy on the girl’s cabin through the keyhole. He put them in “time out” probably for the first time in their lives (versus being hit with a shoe, known as the pow pow) and we discussed who was going to be the bad cop. I, for the first time, didn’t have to be bad cop and the muchachos were lectured briefly why they have to respect other people’s privacy. After sitting in time out for twenty minutes I told them that they could go to bed, at about 10 PM, which was probably a first because they usually stay up playing outside until about 11 PM, in front of my house.

On the way back we got a free ride from a Peace Corps vehicle and were sitting in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser that had the cool military style seating where we face each other and sit along the sides. Because the trip back home was a bit of a trek we left fairly early (around 11 AM) and because we paid for lunch breakfast and a snack for Sunday, the kids were given all three of these meals before 11 AM. The road back was curvy and the driver was speeding like he was in a hurry. 2 of my three muchachos threw up and 1 of Malia’s two muchachos threw up. Her kid filled a shopping bag. Being around vomit in a tightly packed van on a 5 hour road trip, not a first.

Las Escalones

2009-12-14T06:05:00.000-08:00

I was watching Stars Wars Episode 4 yesterday afternoon and when the part came on where they get trapped in the trash compactor on the Death Star and Han Solo complains about the smell I didn’t feel bad for him. They were in a trash compactor filled with metal and stuff like that; I am still living next to a trash chute filled with diapers. Maybe if there were babies on the Death Star I would have some pity, but everyone knows that Storm Troopers are clones of Jenga Fett and never have to go through the potty training process. Anyway, on the subject of smells, I started running the past few days with a neighbor. The first few days he bluffed and said he would wake me up at six in the morning and didn’t, but eventually he did and we went for a run to Las Escalones. Escala is the Spanish word for stair; Escalon is the Spanish word for Big Stair. Apparently, there are some big stairs outside of town that people like to run to at six AM. When we first went two days ago I thought we would be the only ones out there but instead there was a small parade of middle age men and women walking and running to the Big Stairs. I thought it was interesting because this culture doesn’t seem particularly fit and so I assumed they would not be running and walking that early, but they were, so good for them.
We ran all the way there and I was pretty impressed because I almost died trying to run a 6.5K on Thanksgiving (when Malia kicked my ass at running and Kathy beat me at the bachata competition (but for the record, I could outrun Kathy easy and out-dance Malia with a broken foot… actually I could probably outrun Kathy with a broken foot too)) and the run to Las Escalones is supposed to be between 3 and 4 K. I realized it could be the 30-degree temperature difference between Constanza at 6 AM (probably 60 degrees or less) and the capital at 9 AM (probably 90 degrees or more), either way I made it to the big stairs. As it turns out, the big stairs are attached to a hydroelectric dam as a maintenance walkway, and were not originally designed to be climbed by people who just ran 3-4 kilometers. They were about the width of my shoulders, there was no railing and plenty of rebar sticking out. The stairs deserved the name “big stairs” and were extremely steep and the last 100 or so I used my hands to climb because they were literally within arms length from my upper body as I was standing. The stairs were tough but then we climbed a wonky rebar ladder to the small reservoir at the top. Normally when I think of reservoirs I think of the nice one in downtown Portland in Washington Park, this one however was about a 100th the size and smelled vile. “What is that smell?” I asked my neighbor. He told me that the water used for the dam comes from the Rio Pantufla (i.e. the very same river that my dirty diaper and black water canal leads into). The water was actually black. He also pointed out to me that the slaughterhouse that was about 20 yards away also produced a big stink. I thought the Slaughter house was closed months ago because of a meeting I went to in the little town where all the neighbors were trying to get it closed because of the stink and the waste that they were leaving outside but my theory was quickly abandoned as we heard the unmistakable sound of a pig being slaughtered (which is a sound equally awful to the smell of a reservoir of black water). Who is slaughtering a pig at 6:45 in the morning anyway? We walked back up the hill to leave with our sleeves over our faces trying to catch our breath from the stairs. When we made it to the top of the hill we ran back to the barrio and I was so impressed with myself that I did they same thing when he knocked on my door yesterday at 6 AM. My neighbor told me that the first two days where always the hardest, maybe that’s because he didn’t wake me up this morning for day 3 and didn’t get up when I knocked on his door. I did the run by myself this morning and realized as I passed a couple people who were walking by themselves that they were carrying baseball bats. Apparently when you don’t have a friend to go with you, you are supposed to bring a baseball bat as en escort. I brought my iPod instead, oops. I ran into one of the garbage men I know from the trash clean ups and walked most of the way back from the Big Stairs with him, not because I was scared but because he owes me fifteen bucks and I was hoping he would mention it… which he didn’t. Instead he talked about how I should be careful about who I trust in the country because people are always trying to take your money, yeah no kidding GUY WHO OWES ME 500 PESOS.

Oh, so that wasn't a joke then?

2009-12-03T06:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was sitting in front of my neighbor's house with a couple of the other neighbors and this old guy who lives a couple houses down sits across from me. We all talk for a while and I get distracted thinking about something else (in the English speaking world) and when I come back to the Spanish conversation the old man is telling some elaborate story that I can't seem to understand. All I could get out of the story were the sound effects. "Bwoop! Pang! Pow!" were a few of his fun sounds. As he finished the story (which I still didn't understand), he mimicked someone in a silly voice and went "Weep, thwap!" With all of his motions and sound effects I couldn't help but laugh for few seconds when he finished. I kept smiling as all my neighbors looked at me with disappointed faces. Apparently the story was about how he recently killed a dog... my friend broke the awkward silence by saying "you can't just kill animals. That's wrong to do." Immediately after he stated the obvious I realized what the old man was talking about and agreed with my friend (and stopped smiling). Next an older lady (who just fed Lobo some rice and beans as he sat next to me) says to the group "Dog's are like angels sent from heaven to be our friends."
"yeah, I get it." I thought to myself "Give me a break, I am sitting here petting my three legged dog. I love animals as much as the next guy, hell, I probably love animals more than the next guy. (Even when they shit* on my back, see the last blog entry)"
Anyway, I think they figured out that I just wasn't really aware of what was going on. The old man was telling a terrible story with fun and silly sound effects, of course the American is going to laugh. For the record, they all laugh at violent Quentin Terentino movies (and not just the funny parts either)

*I apologize that I used it again but don't worry I won't make a habit of using the word "shit" in my blog.

I think there's shit on your back.

2009-12-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

First of all, excuse my language but I felt that I needed to use the actual statement to preserve the moment. I was in the Peace Corps office the day after thanksgiving and I was looking about as sharp as I could for a friday night. I Put on my duffel bag and was waiting with my friend Claire. We were standing around trying to get everyone to hit the road to the hostel but I kept getting distracted because something really smelled bad. I couldn't put my finger on the source but it seemed to be following me. I flipped my duffel bag around and checked to see if it was coming from inside my bag (sometimes wet clothing can stink after a few days in the humidity) but there was no sign of stink. As I looked at the bag one of the new volunteers said "hey man, I don't know if you knew this but... I think there's shit on your back." I took off my shirt and had a look. Sure enough, from shoulder to shoulder I was smeared with excrement. "God Damn it!" I was pretty upset. It wasn't normal dog poop either, it was the really smeary kind that stinks extra. The washing machine was full so I washed the shirt by hand (with detergent, thank you) in the sink at the office. I then traced the poop back to my bag and sure enough a dog (there had been multiple in the office) had crapped on my bag. You know, I always thought it was cruel and dangerous to put out rat poison in the office... now I think it is slightly less cruel and dangerous.

Kids with Knives

2009-11-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

The other day I was leaving my house with Kathy and as I stepped outside Kathy pointed out that the Naked Kid had a knife. I looked over and sure enough he was holding a knife about as long as his forearm that was missing its handle. It looked like either somebody threw the knife out into the street because they didn’t want it or the Naked Kid had found it in somebody’s house and taken it out to play. Seeing this I said to the Naked Kid, “Hey, listen! You should not have a knife. Go put it away” Instead of listening or doing anything I that asked him, the little kid just looked at me for a minute and kept playing. I thought to myself, well you can’t change the world in a day, and I turned around to start leaving. All of the sudden Kathy gasps and says, “Oh my God he almost hit that little girl!” I looked over and sure enough the Naked Kid was swinging the knife around and had almost cut the little girl. “Do something!” Kathy tells me. “Hey, do something!” I yell at one of the older little kids and one of them comes over and grabs the knife out of the Naked Kid’s hand and puts it on a shelf in one of the houses where he couldn’t reach it. We gave him a quick lecture about playing with knives but something tells me the Naked Kid will stop playing with sharp objects around the same time he finally starts to wear clothes (i.e. when he turns 16).

I was telling this to Joel a couple nights ago and he told me about a time in his site when he had a similar problem. He said there were two little kids playing outside his house and when he looked out he saw that one had the other pinned on the ground and was attempting to stab them. The pinned child was holding the knife back just a couple inches from its body. Maybe because the moment was more intense than my own, or maybe because he is more heroic, Joel grabbed the little kid with the knife, picked him up with one arm and took the knife out of his hand with the other. Holding the child a few feet of the ground by its arm Joel proceeded to walk down the street angrily yelling, “where is this child’s mother?” He said that people where coming out of their houses with surprised/frightened looks on their faces, pointing the direction to the child’s house.

Children with weapons seems like something ridiculous that would not happen in any country but the reality is that most of the time the kids in this country are wandering around unsupervised for hours at a time. Swinging a knife around is pretty scary but to me, something even worse is that none of these kids end up going to school, learning how to read or even add.

Lifestyles of the Hood Rich and Famous

2009-11-20T09:48:00.001-08:00

The words to earn and to win are the same in Spanish, the verb ganar. Often, people ask me how much I earn/win each month and I have to be a careful about what I tell them. The reality is that I earn/win about 3.5 times as much as most of the people living around me and so by their point of view I am making the equivalent of a six figure income (really it’s only a five but most people are only earning a four figure income of about 3000 pesos per month, 90 dollars). A six-figure income in the barrio officially constitutes me as hood rich and now I am, more often, squandering my Peace Corps allowance on 2 dollar chicken sandwiches and 1.50 milkshakes instead of 36 cent spaghetti and water that I buy for 90 cents per 5 gallons. Life is good but somewhat strange because in one country (The DR) I am spending money like a Rap artist and the other (The United States) I am a broke volunteer living off peanuts (not really, Peanuts are expensive and salty).
I owe my buddy Blake 80 bucks and had been thinking of a good way to get the money back to him while I am still in this country. I could have used my money from savings in the states but that money is precious to the Peace Corps volunteer because we all know that once money leaves your US account it never goes back… never. I remember the first couple hundred dollars I took out, thinking that I could pay it back when I was reimbursed for whatever activity I was spending it on. After about six weeks I received my reimbursement and instead of treating the money like something I had at one point ganado (earned) I treated it more like money I had recently ganado (won) and before the end of the month I had found various expenses down here to put my savings money into (A new bucket, some chairs, a trip to the capital, beer, parmesan cheese, Peanut butter, etc.). As I didn’t want to lose another 80 dollars from the US savings account I came up with a plan. I would use my Dominican Hood Richness to pay off Blake and simply live my life as a person who is only twice as rich as his neighbors, I took out 2900 pesos from the bank and bought two stamps 26 pesos and sent it off to the states. I labeled the envelope (in Spanish) as:

Christopher Ward
Church of the Peace Corps
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Father Blake Wehling, Bryant Royal and Sister Ashley Bloom
Portland, Oregon

My plan was essentially fool proof. I label the envelope as if they are priests and nuns and that I work for a church. That way the Dominican Postal service is less likely to take the money out (who is going to steal from a church?), also don’t judge me, I am still waiting on my mail from the states from 6 months back, sometimes you have to take extra precautions. I was still a little worried that the money wouldn’t make it but last night when I was camping on a hill outside my site I received 3 voicemails from Blake (which I got the next morning).

Message 1: God Damn it Chris, how am I supposed to change this play money into U.S. dollars? Now I have to find a bank to change it…
Message 2: God Damn it Chris, I just talked to the ONLY branch in town that will change it and they said that after fees the 80 dollars you sent me will only be worth 51 dollars…
Message 3: God Damn it Chris, answer your phone…

I couldn’t help laugh a little bit because Blake was cursing a lot for a guy who I labeled as a priest. I guess it turns out that you can’t just change over money in the US like you can down here. I suppose American money is more or less accepted all around the world so it easier to convert to Pesos in the Dominican Republic. Oops. I called Blake later and tried to explain to him the novelty of 80 US Dollars worth of Domincan Pesos. I told him that he could carry them around in his wallet and look cool, or he could play monopoly with them. He still wasn’t thrilled.

Also, I still have been living the life of a millionaire because last week a group of doctors came down and need some translators. I ended up staying at their hotel just outside of Constanza, which had hot water, the Internet and we got 2 and a half meals a day (and not the usual rice and beans, we were getting fried eggplant, fried cheese, fried chicken and all sorts of other delicious things that you can fit into a frying pan). They also left me fancy Gillette shaving cream, some antiperspirant and an industrial size bottle of hand sanitizer. I was without water for a couple days this weekend and instead of going day 3 without showering I seriously considered Hand-Sanitizing my whole body. Luckily with a little patience the water came back and I was able to bathe, and flush the toilet.

On a work related note, I am still waiting on a grant for building latrines in the community, I started another HIV/AIDS education youth group in a small village outside of town and we are organizing a conference for Brigada Verde for the northern region in 3 weeks. I am also supposed to be going to the school this week to give some lectures on the environment, but high schools are scary places and Dominican teachers have a bad habit of abandoning gringos in classrooms of 50 kids.

Right when you're wrong

2009-10-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

As time goes on down here, we end up learning to be a little more confident than we need to be. Or maybe I shouldn’t say than we “need” to be, but at least more than we used to be. So often as Americans we are treated like fools and ripped off by vendors and service staff that we have all developed a new defense mechanism that involves yelling a lot and being persistent in getting your way. Most of the time it works, even when it shouldn’t.

On Tuesday morning I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled (not because I had a new cavity but because I chipped away an old filling) and when I got to the dentist’s and told the secretary that I was there to see Dr. Read she looked at me a little funny. She told me that Dr. Read doesn’t work on Tuesdays and he wasn’t even in the office. When I heard this I flipped out. I was especially angry because I received a phone call the day before to “confirm” my dentist appointment for Tuesday afternoon when I had scheduled it for Monday. I was pissed off because I wouldn’t be able to catch my bus back to site if I went to the Dentist at 4 in the afternoon so she re-scheduled me for 11:30 AM on Tuesday. I stood at the front desk, irate because they changed my Monday appointment to Tuesday (a day when the Dentist wasn’t even in the office). I stared down each of the secretaries, and demanded to know which one of them changed my appointment to today but no one would come forward. They knew I was angry so they promised me they would see what they could do.

I sat in the waiting room for about fifteen minutes trying to stay as angry as I could when one of the Dental assistants came up and told me to go back to the x-ray room. The dentist didn’t know how the mix-up happened but he was going to head over from his other office to do my filling because he had finished all his other work for the morning. I felt a little better and sat around on the couch for about a half our (he got there at about 11:30, which was when I was going to have my appointment anyway). He came in and was apologetic about the whole thing and I told him it was no big deal and thanked him for coming over and doing the filling. It took about 20 minutes and after he finished he even offered me a ride back to the Peace Corps office. I thanked him but as it turned out I was done just in time to catch the 12 o’clock bus back to my site.

I don’t have any service on the way home so my phone was off, but when I got home I saw I had a message. The message was from a dentist’s office saying that I never showed up for my appointment… it turned out that I had actually made the appointment with the wrong dentist’s office on accident. Whoops.
I guess that means that this morning I walked into a random dental office, angrily insisted on having an appointment with a dentist that was not working and had him drive across town to spend 20 minutes putting in a filling. “Boy, I sure feel like an asshole” I later told Joel. He gave me some consolation by reminding me “we’re American’s; being assholes is what we do best.”

Throwing water

2009-10-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

As a Peace Corps Volunteer people always seem to assume that I am some kind of overly compassionate human being who runs around hugging orphans. Last week I was pretty close to the opposite of that.
Recently the children that play outside my house have become more bothersome. I put a light out in front of my house to scare off the criminals during the night but it has ended up creating a well-lit playground for the kids who play around screaming until about 10:30 each night. I consulted a neighbor who never seems to have a problem with the muchachos. He told me that his solution is to take a bucket of water and throw it out his front door every morning to scare off the kids, a little water never hurt anybody but staying dry is enough incentive for the kids to give him his space. I thought that would be a good idea but only in case of an emergency (or when they don’t listen to me the first five times).
There is particular 3 years old, that Kathy, Malia and I have dubbed the “naked kid” because he never wears clothes. Three weeks ago he discovered he could climb over the dog gate that I have in my front door (with the intention to keep Lobo in and the muchachos out). He climbs about half way and I tell him to stop and get out, but he just looks at me for a minute and continues to climb over. I don’t really like to host children, especially naked children, so the solution usually ends up with me picking him up and putting him on the other side of the dog gate. I then close the door and he goes away.

Last week one morning I was washing my socks and underwear in the front room and the Naked Kid came over and stood at the front door. I was shocked to see that he was actually wearing clothes this time. I complimented him on his pants and shirt. He began climbing over the gate and I told him to stay outside, as usual he stared at me a moment from on top of the gate and said, no. He entered; I picked him up and put him outside. He entered again; I put him outside again. He entered a third time and I told him that if he climbs over the gate one more time I am going to sick Lobo on him. He called my bluff (everybody knows Lobo doesn’t bite people) and climbed over. That’s it, I told him, I am going to throw water on you. He shook his head and said no again, as if he didn’t believe me. I said ok, and picked up the nearest bucket of water. He shook his head no again, I told him to get out again but he didn’t. All right then, I told him, and splashed about a quarter of the bucket of water on him.
The water was enough to make him scream and start crying loudly, we do have pretty cold water up here in the mountains. I asked him “what did I tell you? I told you to get out and you didn’t listen, this is your fault.” But he could not be reasoned with. “mama juevos” he told me, which can either translate to “mother eggs” or “suck balls.” I’m pretty sure he meant the latter. I then solicited the help of his older brother who is 8 years old. “How many times did I tell him?” I asked. The brother responded with 10 times. At least he understood where I was coming from.
I picked up the screaming child and put him on the other side of the gate and told his brother to take him to his mom, who lives two houses down. When I put the kid down I realized that the bucket I had splashed on him was what I had been using to wash my socks and underwear and, like any rational human being, I had put some bleach in it. I immediately felt awful that I ruined this impoverished child’s only shirt, but also relieved that none of the water hit his face or bare skin, and yelled at him “quitate las ropas! Ahora, hay cloro en este agua” which means “take of your clothes there is bleach in this water.” He just looked up at me confused, I don’t think he understands what bleach is and couldn’t figure out why I wanted him to take of his clothes. I told his brother to get the shirt off of him and have his mom soak it so it didn’t get ruined but he looked about as confused as his brother. Screw it, I thought, “vayanse a su casa” I told them, go to your house. They left and I didn’t see the naked kid for the rest of the morning. He came back that afternoon and was back to normal, naked and trying to climb over the dog gate. It looks like if I taught him a lesson it wasn’t the right one because he still keeps coming back but I haven’t seen him wear clothing since. Regardless, the only 3 year old I have been throwing water on lately has been Lobo, and that’s only because he has a bad habit of peeing on his own leg.
Also, I don’t think the shirt was ruined because his mom hasn’t said anything about it. Just to be safe though I gave away about a third of my wardrobe last week when I found a dead rat in my suitcase (I told all the moms to wash the close first). Now all the kids in the neighborhood are wearing my t-shirts and business casual clothing that I brought to country and never wore.

Mondongo

2009-10-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

Pig intestine, it’s a delicacy down here for some reason and until tonight I had been able to avoid it without any problems. My friend came over to play cards and I was eating pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese like I always do. I asked him if he wanted some and he said yes because he never had eaten Spaghettis like that before. I gave him half the bowl and he returned 15 minutes later with something his wife had cooked that I had never tried before. Mondongo is the name for pig intestine, he didn’t tell me what it was until after I had my first bite. It was chewy. I gave him half of my spaghettis so naturally he gave me half of the intestine dish. I ate it all and it was considerably better than the pig snout that I had eaten six months back, I think because cartilage is really gross to chew while intestine is just kind of spongy. It also looked a lot different than I thought; it was braided together as if the butcher who prepared it was a 5-year-old girl. I suppose it was more visually pleasing that way, when it was all knotted up it was less like an intestine and more of a bite of some mystery organ. I still don’t know how they can clean out the inside of the intestines before preparing it; I think they gave us a hepatitis A vaccination during training so I should be ok either way. And by ok I mean only suffering violent spells of diarrhea for 24 to 72 hours.

Cell phones, Doctors and Transvestites.

2009-10-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

About 3 days ago I played guitar for about 20 minutes with a guy who opened with a group for CSN about 30 years ago. By my calculations I played indirectly with CSN for about .0055 seconds (20 minutes ÷ 3 Days ÷ 20 years ÷ 4 Band members = .0055 Seconds), so that makes me kind of a big deal. We switched off playing songs for the group and then the giant Dominican speakers came out blasting Merengue Tipico for the next couple hours and my moment of glory was over. I was up in a campo for the past week working at a free clinic that a group of doctors from the states puts on every few months, it was a very rural area but people were coming from miles around to get the free medical coverage. I was translating in pediatrics and the doctor was so friendly that she let me tag along and explained everything she was doing. She let me hang out for the lab stuff too; we looked at poop from a diaper under a microscope to look for worms. Even though there were no worms to be found it was still pretty cool, though stinky. The campo was beautiful and I felt bad being a Peace Corps volunteer that was getting the nicest place to stay of everyone, but not that bad. I had one hot shower (and several cold ones), a toilet and Internet access while the Doctors and translators where using latrines in houses without electricity. I was essentially living the campo life of a millionaire.

The night before the clinic started I stayed with a couple volunteers in Santiago at a cheap hotel that over the past few months has become considerably cheaper, and not in price. I had never really seen a transvestite hooker up close before and last Saturday night I saw enough to last me a lifetime. I am not sure if the bar across the street from the hotel was having a special Transvestite hooker night or if it was just becoming a fad in Santiago that I had not known about, either way there was a lot of them coming outside and standing around. I am not usually quick to call every transvestite I see a prostitute but in this case it was clear because they were going up to cars and entering the hotel accompanied by men with poor vision. The female volunteer who was with me noted that she was probably the only girl in the hotel who was paying to sleep instead of being paid. I wondered if she was the only girl in the hotel who wasn’t a boy. Transvestite hookers or not, the hotel had free wi-fi in the lobby so I can’t complain, especially because it was only four dollars per person for the night.

I was out of my site for four days, which would normally stress me out because I would have to leave Lobo and my house to the punk kid who always takes my things and doesn’t really take care of Lobo, but this time, thanks to Chris, Charlotte and my mom I had some bargaining tools to arrange something better. They all gave me their old cell phones from the states that are pretty much worthless up there, but down here are worth hundreds (of pesos). So I traded my mom’s old cell phone with my neighbor in exchange for him watching Lobo. He lives tucked away from the street so we could set up Lobo and his cage outside (He promised to take care of Lobo as he would his own son and if it rained he would bring him in and feed him rice and beans, after all, it was a Motorola Razor Phone). It’s funny because he uses my mom’s old phone (which don’t worry I deleted all the contacts) but hasn’t changed the background picture of Tye and Newton (our old Dogs). I think he has mistaken them for small lions or bears. Having him watch Lobo was awesome because when I came home this time there was no pee in the house (sadly, about an hour later Lobo marked the kitchen as his territory all over again) and nobody took any of my stuff. I think the rats are dead, I put the poison out and I think they took the bait.

Home again, find my groove

2009-10-03T09:09:00.001-07:00

And I’m back to hand washing my socks and underwear and having hungry children watch me eat my rice and beans. I am back to choosing which glass of water is safe to drink and having middle aged woman touch my sun burn because they have never seen skin get so red. They say it takes a couple of days to get back in the groove of things but I may be prolonging the effect by hiding in my house and listening to the Allman brothers, pretending that I am still back in the states. In Lobo’s and my absence the rats have taken over the house and now they think they own the place. I almost caught one as it ran across the floor two nights ago but it was too fast and good at hiding. As I chased it with a broom I felt like Tom from Tom & Jerry, except maybe a little angrier because my mouse had the nerve to leave droppings all over my bed, in all of my drawers and on the kitchen counter. I have marks on my torso that itch, I can’t decide if it is because I was bit several times by something, the humidity is giving me a skin rash or if it is related to the fact that I slept in a bed that was covered in rat droppings (I had them washed the next day, and I brushed them off the night of). I suppose the few days of getting back in the groove really means a few days getting back to the point where you are not ridiculously uncomfortable. I cleaned up the house, wrote a PEPFAR proposal (where we try to incorporate HIV/AIDS education into environmental education) and am trying now to take care of Jerry with various methods (sticky paper, tying a cheerio to a mouse trap and putting a stick of dynamite in the mouse hole.)

Getting Lobo back into Constanza was much easier than getting him out. There was considerably less vomiting and because we rode in the back of a truck on the way up the mountain no one really cared if he got sick anyway. We were more afraid for our lives, as the truck had 10 people in the back along with 17 people’s luggage (which included my dog in his dog cage.) I was straddling Lobo’s cage when the driver picked up the four additional passengers (that brought the count in the back from 6 to 10 people) and was blown away by a man’s willingness to stand on the tail gate of the truck and use Lobo’s cage as his only support. I asked them if they were getting a free ride because I would never pay for such a precarious seat in a guagua. The man and his friend said they paid and quickly changed the subject to the fact that my dog is missing a leg. “Three feet. Your dog only has three feet.” He informed me. The other 8 people in the back repeated his observation “three feet!” I smiled and told him that he was good at counting and asked him where he learned to count so well. Prison, he told me, he had been there for the past three years. The other nine people repeated his statement “three years!” Oops, I thought to myself, I guess I shouldn’t tease the ex-convict about his ability to count. I asked him what part of Constanza he lived in and he told me barrio Las Flores. That’s where I live. “What part of Las Flores do you live in?” I asked him. He told me arriba, which means the upper part (I never know if I live in the upper part or lower part). Either way, we decided to be buddies for the ride up and he helped me take Lobo out of the back when we got to the neighborhood.

New York City

2009-09-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

Do I still write about things if I am not in the DR? The blog is called the DR and The Cuerpo de Paz and my trip to New York didn’t really have anything to do with either. I guess I can keep it short.
I got there on Tuesday and was a little worried because everyone tells me that people in New York are a bunch of assholes and that the city is huge and impossible to navigate, but really the subway isn’t that bad and the only assholes are the bus drivers (one left me behind on my way to the airport after I ran half a block with all my stuff. There were people at the bus stop yelling for him to stop and I even was able to knock on the front door to the bus as he pulled away, leaving me 15 blocks deep in this place called “Harlem.” As I stood there this half drunk lady told me “you gotta say F that [racial expletive] and get on the 15X bus uptown to catch a different bus. I’ll take good care of you baby, c’mon” Needless to say I waited the extra 15 minutes for the next bus and did not say F that [racial expletive] or get on any 15X bus, it was weird though because I am used to half drunk people at 10 AM talking to me in Spanish not English.) As for all the nice people, some lady gave me a three-day metro pass so I didn’t have to pay for any public transportation until the last day. People kept giving me directions and showing an interest in what I had to say, it was like the opposite of Los Angeles, California.

Going back to the states

2009-09-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

I am pretty excited.

White people do the darndest things

2009-08-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

My friend Joel has begun pointing out how ridiculous we always end up looking in front of Dominicans. He referenced the fact that we are always reading at the beach, which to an average Dominican is completely ridiculous. When we are hanging out there is usually some kind of strange activity that takes place that leaves many Dominicans asking what the hell is wrong with white people?

Recently, at the annual diversity camp in Jarabacoa the volunteers ended up dancing because none of the youth would. The second night, after the talent show, during a Reggaeton song (Reggaeton is Caribbean Rap music) I was drawn to the dance floor by some unidentifiable force. I began dancing the steps to some dance that I thought was a new Caribbean phenomena, it took me a couple tries to learn but after a couple repetitions I had it down. I thought to myself, a dance so easy that a white person can learn it in 30 seconds? Wait a minute, then I had a flash back to Church Camp in 5^th grade when the made us learn the electric slide. I realized that a Dominican was not leading the dancing but instead a volunteer. So there I was, dancing the electric slide with 15 other white people and a few Dominicans to a rap song in Spanish, in front of the rest of the camp. I shook my head as I danced and looked up to see Joel who asked me: why are white people always dancing in a line? Good question. I blame genetics.

Rain and Unwanted House Parties

2009-08-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

As I said in the other blog entry, it had been a while since we got some rain. I was getting a little tired of the awful smell and the other problems that a lack of water falling from the sky can cause for Constanza. Luckily, last Thursday we got some rain. It started pouring down when we were having a “field day” as part of an intercambio with another Escojo group that was visiting from somewhere 6 hours away that I can’t remember the name of. I brought Lobo up the hill to play with us and the other dog that the volunteer before me had. We were up on the hill outside of town for about an hour and then the rain started, we decided to take off and head back to our houses but on the walk back we ended up getting soaked and the rills where the water normally runs off was turned into creeks and of course that spawned a mud and dirty water fight. I tried my best not to be involved but Lobo seemed to be enjoying himself. We started heading back to the house but in all the excitement Lobo had tired himself out and couldn’t really walk much farther, I kept pulling him with the leash but he wouldn’t budge. I ended up having to pick him up (he was soaked and muddy) and carrying him back through the barrio to get out of the rain in a timely manner. I got a few looks from people but I think they understood.

Also, during the intercambio I went to the capital for a night because I had a meeting in the afternoon at the office. When I was gone the kids had a party in my house, without asking me, or telling me afterwards. I talked to the neighbors when I saw pieces of spaghetti on my table and an extra pot on my stove. They told me that yes, in fact, there was a party at my house and that the kids started it at about 11 o’clock last night and were loud and obnoxious. They told me that they had been playing the guitar and singing loudly and running around outside. The next day when I went to the charlas that they were presenting to each other a girl showed up in a University of Oregon sweatshirt. Hmm, I thought to myself, that looks exactly like the sweatshirt that my aunt Sherry gave me for Christmas in 2004. I was very reserved when I approached her and said “That’s my sweatshirt, did you take that from my house?” The girl gave a little laugh and pretended not to understand me. God damn it… I am so happy to be working with these youth again.

F words and Haircuts

2009-08-18T14:37:00.001-07:00

Have I already complained about getting your hair here? I probably have, and if I haven't I should have. They just don't know how to cut pelo rubio and always end up giving me a fade. I look like an elderly member of new kids on the block. He tried to leave my bangs super long at first so I looked like a huge tool, luckily I took care of the haircut issue three weeks before heading to the states so I have time to let it grow back in place.
The guy cutting my hair used the Dominican version of the "F" word (Joder - To "F") a lot as he cut my hair. He said "you are the guy who lives in barrio Las Flores right?" I told him I was and that I wasn't that worried about the delinquency that exists there. He said "yeah, of course you don't. People know who to F with and no one is going to F with you because if they F with an American there will be a problem. The American has an army that will F you up." Yeah, I guess. Really I wasn't worried about people F-ing me up in the barrio as much as I was worried about him F-ing up my hair and looking like an F-ing idiot for the next two weeks.

Funerals

2009-08-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple months a few factors have created the perfect storm of drama between several of the youth I work with and myself. The first, being the river clean ups that I have supported, participated in and helped organize with the local government and community. The youth are insistent that they will not work with the local government because they believe everything the local government does is for political gain, which may be true, but the local government is in control of nearly all of the available resources and therefore, in order to create progress (the recent summer camp was almost completely funded by the local government) I have been actively working with a few groups that they do not support. The second, because Escojo (HIV/AIDS education) participation has been growing rapidly on a national level, there is less funding for the desired activities in the group and the youth are taking the lack of financial support personally. Third, as the youth become adults (many of them graduated this year) several of them have moved or attempted to move to larger cities with colleges and better job markets. Most of them where unsuccessful and returned frustrated, however, in the migration we lost one of our key members who helped us break some of the tension. Over the past month we had gotten to the point of being “strictly business” instead of hanging out and being buddies like before. I am just as stubborn as any 18-year-old machismo Dominican Youth and therefore we cut out the weekly English classes and Domino/Uno sessions. I was bummed to have the situation get so ugly that Dominoes was almost completely cut out of my life.
The weeks passed and over the weekend last week I ran into the key youth that had moved away. He was back in town because his dad had died that morning; he told me that the funeral would be 8 days later (this last Sunday). Despite being on “strictly business” terms with the kids I felt that the funeral was an activity bigger than our drama. I made it clear to the boys that I would be going with them to the funeral and we all went together. I learned quickly that Dominican funerals where not like American funerals. There was a huge crowd outside the boy’s father’s house and they were playing Dominoes and having a good time. There were no speeches given and it was more a time to remember the dead by sitting outside their house and being happy (there was also an altar inside if you wanted to pay your respects), the longer I sat there the more sense it made. There was food provided for everyone at noon (the funeral was from 10 to 4) and everyone was in good spirits. It ended up being the opportunity that the youth and I needed to reconnect; we made plans for starting the English class back up and the tension between the youth and I has started to dissipate. Also, the man who died had 20 kids. I wouldn’t have believed it but they were all there (or at least I lost count after 12 or 13).

I wish it would rain

2009-08-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

Rain is kind of like nature’s shower and Constanza is getting a bit ripe, especially when you consider the fact that I live in its ass crack. The cañada behind my house is now filled with garbage and excrement; usually it rains at least a couple times a week to wash the waste to some other poor town a couple miles down the river but as it has not rained in a few weeks the piles are getting high. I suppose in some perverse way I should be happy that we are all suffering in the barrio from the stink and increase rat and roach problem (I got my first mice a week ago) because it shows the people of the barrio how problematic it can be to toss trash in the river. The reality however, is that I too am praying for some rain to get the trash and smell out of here just like everyone else.
I can no longer open my bedroom window to sleep at night because the smell wafts in with the breeze. This means I have to keep the window closed and deal with the smell of my feet, which may be worse. I am no longer angry at Lobo when he pees in the house because I know that all of the walls outside have been marked by other dogs and there has been no rain to wash it off, now he is merely making the inside of the house more like the outside. I can no longer eat food after it has been left out for a few hours because I have mice and the nurse during training said that mouse pee on food can make you die. I have begun looking for excuses to walk across town to the well-to-do neighborhoods where they have proper garbage disposal to catch my breath.

That was awkward, but at least I'm not that guy

2009-08-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I was hanging out in my site trying to take advantage of the high voltage electricity that I have not been getting recently (I need 100 - 240 Volts to charge and operate a computer and I was trying to put together all of our charlas as one big manual for Brigada Verde). Our electricity comes back around 5 pm but doesn't get above 75 volts until after 8 or 9 at night. The rough thing about me needing high voltage to do work is that the loud speakers for the parties need High Voltage too. So while I am working the party gets started and after about an hour my female neighbor comes over and says she is selling tickets to the Discoteca tomorrow night and that "they" are going. She invites me and I say sure. I figured it would be a good bonding experience especially because the last time I went I didn't dance with any of them and now had to show the barrio that I'm not a square. She took my message of a yes and told the other neighbors that were dancing next door, I kept working and told her I will buy the ticket tomorrow.
The next day they all tell me that I am taking my other female neighbor out on a date and I find out that no one else is going. The neighbor girl already bought the ticket and so I couldn't back out (25 pesos was on the line). As it turns out, the neighbor, despite being great and all, is married to my other neighbor who happens to be one of my better friends in the barrio.
After I figured out the situation I went over to the neighbors house and said "I can't take you out on a date. My friend is your husband and I don't want to die" (I have seen his machete). She laughed and said "no es nada" but I was convinced that it was more than nada. Later she brought her husband/my buddy over by the hand and told him to inform me that the date was no big thing. He told me that he would go himself but someone has to watch the kids. Alright, I told him, but I was sure that there would be all kinds of awkwardness. And there was.
I picked her up prom style at 9pm (when the good electricity was finaly back and I should have been working) and sat with her husband for a few minutes while she got ready, then off we went arm in arm. The discoteca is about a ten-minute walk from my house (you would be amazed at where they stick dance clubs in the developing world) and consists of dark room with mirrors and a discoball.
It was my neighbors first time to the discoteca and my second time. Neither of us knew the appropriate time to get there, 9:10pm was not the appropriate time. It was near empty and the patrons that actually had shown up looked like they were in middle school. This is awkward, I thought, I am one of two people over age 25 in this building and the other person is my friends wife... who I am on a date with. We remedied the awkwardness with some dancing merengue and bachata as the discoteca slowly filled up. After a while the music stopped. A man got on the loudspeaker and announced that there would be (another) Michael Jackson dance competition. We were all forced to get off the dance floor and a guy dressed like Michael Jackon got on stage. He danced horribly for about 15 minutes to a techno version of all the old Michael Jackson songs and the crowd looked at him with disappointed faces. He kept dancing and dancing and no one could look away, it was like a wierd techno car accident. I turned to the neighbor’s wife and said, "well, at least I'm not that guy."

WW2D (What would 2Pac do)

2009-07-31T08:04:00.000-07:00

I was in the back of a pick up truck the other day on my way from Jarabacoa to Constanza. It was late in the afternoon and I had been waiting for about 2 hours for the guagua to leave. For a majority of the trip I was stuck on the side of the truck bed hanging on for dear life while the old lady next to me kept adjusting a box of vegetables and raw meat against my leg. I was uncomfortable and tired. I decided to put on my new (ancient 5 year old) ipod that Jeremy gave me when he came down last month. I was enjoying the music and the scenery along one of the country’s most beautiful (and poorly maintained) highways when the majority of the passengers in the bed of the pick up got out and left only myself and a Haitian guy who had just hopped on a few miles back. He sat next to me against the cab of the truck and I noticed his 2pac shirt that was quite gangster. I said “2 Pac, el es bueno!” The Haitian guy responded politely with a “Si, 2pac bueno.” We sat in the back for a while and I kept listening to my ipod. I was listening to something not very gangster, like Iron & Wine, and the picture of 2pac’s face on the Haitian’s shirt was staring right at me. I asked myself, is this whole Peace Corps gig turning me into a softy?
As I contemplated, the Haitian tapped me and asked if the ipod was a radio. I told him si, más o menos. Then he asked me if it was a phone too. I told him no, this one just played music. After a moment it became clear that he had not seen an ipod up close before so I thought I would give him one of the earpieces to listen also. Before I passed it over I realized that The Old Crow Medicine Show was probably not the music he wanted to be hearing. “Te gusta 2pac?” I asked him again. He told me yeah, but really I don’t think he had ever heard the music before. Lucky for the Haitian and me, Jeremy had a copy of All Eyes on Me on the ipod and so I put on 2pac. As the Gangster beats were dropped my new friend started nodding his head and smiling. He looked so content that after one song I offered him the other earpiece so he could have the stereo experience. I wanted to explain to him that he almost had the whole Gangsta look down but he had to stop smiling. We sat in the back of the truck for the next hour with him listening to the ipod and I was beside myself the whole way. I laughed at myself for feeling so good about doing something as silly as introducing Gangsta rap to a Haitian who probably had no idea who the guy on his T-shirt was in the first place. I had worked so hard the week before to run the summer camp for the poor kids of the barrio but this little experience left me feeling warmer and fuzzier. A lot of the rewarding things that we do down here can’t really be put on a resume, I guess “keeping it real” would be a good example of this.

Summer Camp done right

2009-07-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Last year about this time I wrote about a 400 kid summer camp that tested my will to live. This year the local government gave Kathy and I the opportunity to plan a week long camp. Needless to say we went for quality over quantity and cut down the number of kids to 42. We also got the help of Malia (the new volunteer in the next town over) and our friend Renata. The camp focused on art, environment and self-esteem, meaning we are doing a lot of hiking and a lot of painting and drawing. There is also a lot of talking about feelings, I let Kathy and Malia take on that part. It has ended up being better that I would have imagined, the kids from my barrio that were supposed to be a bunch of trouble makers ended up being a bunch of little angels that do everything you ask them too. It has really come to my advantage because I am getting to know the neighbors better (36 of the 42 kids are from Barrio Las Flores) and I also have a small army of children that can go fetch things from the colmado for me. I just give them the money and they go get it. Its like that homegrocer.com thing that they had a couple of years ago (that I think went out of bussiness) except I don´t have use the internet and it only costs me about 3 cents per purchase (I give the kids a peso to go get the stuff), I also can pay them in rubber bands, which go 10 for a peso. There is a rubber band gambling ring amongst the 5 to 17 year old population in the barrio, I upped my street cred by teaching them how to play black jack. The concept of an Ace being 1 and 11 has baffled some of the younger participants and I have had to resolve a couple issues. People get pretty fiesty when rubber bands are on the line.

Stomach issues and candle light vigils

2009-07-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

This week Lobo and I both got sick from eating or drinking something, I am not sure what because I am not eating any of his dog food and I don’t give him to much “people food.” I suppose getting sick with a buddy can be a good bonding experience. The problem is that when the two people getting sick are of different species it can be a little hard to compromise on the most comfortable set up. For example, Lobo does not use a toilet and I almost exclusively use a toilet for going to the bathroom. This became a problem when he wanted to go outside so he could be sick and I wanted to lie around in the house all day to be sick. The compromise was that I stumbled around the neighborhood with him for 5 minutes every hour or so and he limited his vomiting in the house to 3 times. I think that vomit karma had come into play again because a university student from the states passed by my house taking surveys of water quality and she asked my if I had suffered from diarrhea or vomiting in the past month and I told her yes, when really it had been more like two months. Within 10 hours of giving her slightly false information I was cursed with the pain of intestinal parasites, as I lay awake all night in agony I took consolation in the fact that at least now I wasn’t a liar. On a slightly related note, the neighbor’s rooster was retrieved from the latrine without problems.

Also, the other night I went down to the park to try and enjoy a little Spanish Karaoke with a friend of mine, which is pretty fun because you can make up the words in English and nobody knows if you are wrong. At one point several months back I sang the first two lines of “Hey Jude” for 90% of the song and thoroughly impressed the patrons of the little pub in Constanza. Interestingly enough, immediately after I sang “Nights in White Satin” almost dead on and was cut off from karaoke by the crowd I was with. I guess the Moody Blues hasn’t quite hit the Constanza region yet, or anywhere. Anyway, the place ended up not offering Karaoke anymore because they lost some cable that they needed to hook up to the TV, I was upset by Constanza’s loss of its only Karaoke bar and went to the park to lament. When we got there, we saw there was a candle light vigil being held in someone’s memory. I thought to myself, with my new knowledge of catholocism: “those Catholics sure love their candles.” We watched the ceremony from about 50 yards away but it was hard to tell what exactly was going on because the crowd was so huge. At one point the mayor showed up with his entourage and made a few comments to the crowd. At this point I knew it was a big deal, and I began to get offended that people kept playing “Thriller” and “Billie Jean” from their car stereos, the music was overwhelming the procession and I was starting to get a little tired of hearing “Michelle” (yeah, the call him Michelle not Michael) Jackson on the radio all the time. It made me realize how little respect people had for the dead, until I got a closer look of the whole show and discovered (because a man in the center was holding a giant framed portrait) that the whole candle light vigil was dedicated to Michael Jackson. I looked around and realized that everyone was dressed in suave Michael Jackson-esque suits and white gloves (on the left hand only of course), and I was forced to ask myself “Where the hell am I?” There were probably 150 people in the park and after about 10 minutes of realizing the circumstances of the event the parade started. People began dancing as if they were in Thriller following a truck that was blasting Michael Jackson tunes. So Thursday night at 9 PM there was quite a procession in memory of MJ. I had to laugh, sit back and enjoy some pop from the eighties.

Stress Release: Masses and Neighbor's latrines

2009-07-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

Lately with all the stresses of my site and the outside world I took some advice from my catholic buddy and went to a mass or two and checked out how the whole process went in my town. I was surprised by the tranquility of the whole thing, the service I went to in Tireo before the medical mission seemed really hectic but probably just because the church was packed to welcome the doctors. When I went the past two times in my community it was the first time I sat in a room with 100 Dominicans and every cell phone was silent. There was no yelling or loud music and I had about 45 minutes to relax. The service lasted an hour but I take out 15 minutes for all the mumbling phrases in Spanish that the whole church was doing in unison that I had no idea what they were saying (it kind of stressed me out). It was nice to sit in the back and enjoy the fact, as Joel pointed out to me, that the Catholic mass is about the same all over the world. So really I could have been somewhere in the United States and it would have been exactly the same, except that the phrases would have been mumbled in English (I still would not understand though). Despite not being Catholic, I thought that the mass was a great way to focus and breath for a minute. It was also a way to bond with the community because the Dominican Republic is about 95% Catholic. No one really bothered me before or after the service, I think I confused a lot of the church members because so many people in my town think that I am a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness. One neighbor lady did ask to borrow my digital camera; I told her it was broken, because it is broken.

I thought the Mass was a good way to relax, but I found another great way this week, or more appropriately bettered another way to relax. That would be hanging out with my neighbors. I found recently that the same people I feared upon moving in to my little house are actually the people that are stepping up to protect me and provide me with some friendship during stressful times. The past few nights I have been hanging out playing “casino” with a couple of the guys and it has been pretty great. It’s nice to have people hang out in my house, even if sometimes they smoke cigarettes inside and drink a little of the Haitian moonshine. I don’t mind sweeping ash of the floor and taking drinking advice from 8 year olds; one of the neighbor’s kids told me that I should drink some of the moonshine too because it makes you sleepy but doesn’t hurt your head. Thanks Gregory. I had to ask him how he knows. The highlight of our hanging out was yesterday when we sat around for a little while and tried to figure out how to get his cock-fighting chicken out of the latrine. They kept telling me that it fell down a hole, and jokingly told me that I should go down and get it out. I didn’t realize that other things fall down the hole on a regular basis too. It’s the second time it has fallen in the latrine and one of the neighbor ladies was so bothered that she suggested that this time when they get it out that we should just kill it and eat it.

Ovaltine

2009-06-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

My mom sent me some stuff in the mail. One of my favorite things was the rich chocolate'y ovaltine. It is good in the states with 2 percent milk but here when you have it mixed in milk that is practically half and half it is delicious. I by milk by the box (at 50 pesos a box) and make about a liter of it at a time. Usually when I make it there is residual ovaltine pockets of dry powder, which are usually deliciosos. Yesterday, I thought I drank an ovaltine pocket of dry powder but it was moving around a little. It didn´t break down so I decided to spit it out. It was a fly. I was pretty grossed out, but the fly was probably having a worse day than I was.

Friends in town

2009-06-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

Holy crap.
Jeremy, Will, Blake and or Bryant have been here for a couple weeks now and I am actually more tired than when they got here. I guess hanging out with your best friends for weeks straight is kind of like smoking a pack of cigarrettes all at once. The only difference is that at the end of their vacation I will still be ready for another healthy dose of the amigos in September!
So far we have climbed the highest mountain, have seen the beaches of the south and north and given Will B and opportunitty to show of his world class salsa in some ancient ruins in the capital (where they have live salsa music every sunday). It is hard work to have so much fun and I think I am ready to get myself back to some hard work and impossibly frustrating working circumstances.

1 Year!

2009-05-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

This week was a big week because we had our 1 year In Service Training. This means that my group and I are half way through the Peace Corps! Woohoo, we were all excited to celebrate our one year anniversary but also a little scared to realize that we are over-the-hill in Peace Corps standards. I went through a mid-service crisis a couple of months ago but I am doing better now. It was good to have everyone together for the first time in 9 months and to present our work to each other. I was actually very impressed by how much our little group of 20 Volunteers has done over the past year, I guess all our work adds up over 9 months.
After the training a few of us went to the north coast to a town called Monte Cristi (near where Columbus discovered the Americas). We did some snorkeling on a little secluded island that we had to ourselves for the whole day. It was awesome because I got to see all sorts of animals that look cool but can sting you and make you hurt. There were king fish and the black sea anenomies that can put you in the hospital. I was pretty jealous of the Environment volunteer whos job is to monitor the reef around the capital area by scuba diving all the time (he never has trouble soliciting help from other volunteers with his project). A friend got stung on her arm by a jelly fish and she said it was hurting pretty bad, it was confirmed by Peace Corps medical staff a few months back that you are supposed to pee on the sting because the ammonia helps clear out the venom (or whatever it is that makes it hurt). Joel had just peed, the other guys were in the ocean still and the rest of the group was girls so I got recruited to be the designated pee-er. It was a little awkward peeing on my friends arm but she felt better afterwards. That night we went to the Patronales for the town, which is the celebration of the patron saint of Monte Cristi. It was a good time, there were rides like at a county fair except the looked like they were all about to fall over. We took a ride on the sea dragon and the swings that go around in the circle. The swings made me want to throw up. No one wanted to go on the ferris wheel, one broke apart in one of the girl's sites a few months back and nobody felt brave enough to be the guinea pig this time.

Strays in the Barrio

2009-05-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

I guess Americans are always good targets for anonymous puppy gifting because we are seen as crazy and overly compassionate about taking care of animals. People get the idea that because their dog had puppies and they don’t want to find a family for them that they can just leave them in front of the Peace Corps volunteer’s house in the middle of the night. It has happened to a few of my friends, one girl living in Bonao had two near dead puppies left for her that were too weak to even open their eyes. Another girl rescued a few that were about to be drown in the river by a little boy who was sent out by his parents to get rid of them.
I am not especially friendly to animals in my community but I guess Lobo gave me away as someone who would look after a dog that nobody wants. Maybe for that reason, maybe because the backyard to my house and the downstairs apartment is empty, someone left two puppies that were about 3 weeks old behind my house four or five nights ago. I took them in and washed them because they were filthy and then wrapped them in a towel. The next day I had two puppies in my house and everyone asked why I had two new dogs and I told them that I didn’t actually want them and was trying to find a home for them. Little kids love puppies, they also like to pester Americans, so within 10 minutes of opening my front door there were about 15 offers to take the puppies. I was a little reluctant to give them to little kids because it is really the parents call if they can have one or not. The oldest kid in the group swore to me that he went and asked his parents if he could have it and they said yes. I put some flea medicine on it and gave him half the bag of the puppy chow I bought and he took off. Later that day a vendor who walks through the neighborhood selling snacks said he would take the other one. He said he would pass by later to get it (which ended up being 10 PM that night). I was asleep when he showed up, I will not deny that I go to bed early, and so when I woke up I couldn’t really form sentences in Spanish but gave him the dog, some flea medicine, the milk I had been giving them and the rest of the puppy chow. I figured that my work was done and went to sleep satisfied.
The next morning I woke up and saw that the pregnant dog hanging out behind my house had set up shop and gave birth to 5 more puppies. They were all really tiny except one, I looked at it a little closer and thought: “Huh, that’s funny. The big puppy looks a lot like the one I gave to that little kid yesterday.” I went down to give the mom dog some food and realized that the big puppy was the dog I gave the kid yesterday. It turned out that the little bastard child came back in the middle of the night and didn’t have the nerve to give it back to me and instead just left it with the pregnant dog out back. He also kept the puppy chow (what the hell is he going to do with puppy chow and no puppy). I brought the dog back up to my house and washed it again, at this point it could barely walk because the kid hadn’t fed it. I took care of it for a couple days and convinced a neighbor to take it and give it to her sister in Bonao who is looking for a dog.
At this point, the problem is as solved as I am willing to solve it. Both Lobo and I can rest easier with the puppies out of the house. It was kind of funny; Lobo hated and feared the puppies. He would hide or go to the opposite end of the house and they would sneak up to him slowly until they were right next to him, and then he would get up and leave again. One kicked him out of his doghouse. I can’t blame Lobo for his fear of the young of his species; I am not too keen on baby or child humans myself.
Now there is a dog nursing four new puppies behind my house right now. Three of which are female, which means that if they do survive the same thing will happen again three times over. I am not too disheartened by it, because that is the point of Peace Corps, to do what you can and not get down on yourself when things stay the same.

Flat on my face

2009-05-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

I was walking home yesterday and I tripped and fell down in front of a bunch of people in my neighborhood. I was walking with my laptop in its bag and I had my sunglasses on so when I fell and my hands hit the ground my glasses were thrown from my face and my laptop bag was thrown over my head and onto the ground in front of me, smashing together my two most expensive pieces of property in the country.

I got up and only had some cuts and a little gravel in my hands. I got up and the people in the colmodos nearby came out to help. One lady went and got some water and alcohol to wash of the cuts. It was very nice of them and I felt loved my community, I also felt like an idiot for tripping over nothing and falling flat on my face.

Coincidentally, tonto, the word for silly or stupid, and how I described myself to the people helping me also means to feel dizzy. So the people helping me got worried that I had passed out from low blood sugar (many of the people in this country suffer from Diabetese, they call it sugar sickness). Today people kept asking me how my dizziness/stupidity was going, I told them I was doing much better.

Donado por M.D. Rail

2009-05-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I moved into my new place and had spent only a couple weeks there before my friend Diego arrived. He came down for ten days and we had a plan to see most of country (which we did) and spend a couple days in my site to see the fun things around Constanza (which we did not do). The problem when he came up to Constanza was that when we went to get Lobo dog food from the vet I did something I don’t usually do; I locked my keys in my house. I can’t remember how it could have happened, I always keep my keys in my pocket, maybe it was because I changed my pants at the last minute for some reason. What I do remember is cursing a lot. I sat there for a few minutes with Diego and Jenna, who was also visiting, and tried to devise a plan.
I had the only keys to the door and all of the windows except the bathroom are persianas (mental vent windows) that you can’t climb through. That meant there were only two ways two get in. The first way was to break the little piece of glass I have in my bathroom window and climb through there, the other option would be to climb up the balcony and go in the back door. I went around and looked at the bathroom window, I realized how impractical it would be to enter this way because the window was so tiny I would barely fit through it. Not to mention it’s about 10 ft. off the ground and I recently hammered a board with some nails sticking up out of it onto the window ledge in the bathroom to act as a security system and soap holder.
That meant that I only had the back door as an option. Because my house is built on a hill, the front door is at ground level and the back is about 12 ft. up. I had to figure out how to get up on the balcony. At first I thought I could try to walk across my neighbors roof, but because it’s a rusted tin roof I opted not to try. Instead I ended up “spider man-ing” between my house and the neighbors house (where you put your left hand and left foot on one wall and your right hand and right foot on the other) and that turned out to be a huge pain in the ass and in the hands.
Once I got up to the balcony I had to break down the door. It was a flimsy door and I had seen it done in movies enough times so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I positioned myself as best I could and rammed the door with my shoulder. The first hit the top latch broke off, only one left. The second one took considerably longer and I think I made a little bit of a scene to the construction crew who was working on a roof across the river. They all stopped working and looked at me funny. I waved and tried to explain with hand signals that I lived in the house I was trying to break into. After a while they lost interest and went back to work. After about five minutes of kicking and ramming the door with my shoulder it finally broke down. I climbed over the door and let Diego and Jenna into the house.
We sat there for a few minutes and tried to decide what to do for the day. The hike up into the hills for the day would have to be cancelled because I didn’t have a back door and didn’t want to leave the house empty and open with all of our stuff inside. Instead, I left Jenna and Diego to watch the house when I tried to find a guy to build me a door. The guy down the street was happy to build it and it would only cost 1500 pesos, which is about 45 bucks. I didn’t have 45 dollars because it was the end of the month and we are spread pretty thin with the Peace Corps pay so Diego said he would pick up the tab.
The guy built the door while we hung out and played cards, Diego introduced us to Kings In the Corner, or Reyes en las Esquinas. The man ended up building a door that was much more sturdy than the original (I don’t think I could break this one down). So in the end I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. Diego likes to give to charity and he considered this one of his contributions for the month. Because he was the largest donor in the Get Chris Ward a New Door fund, he also got a special message put on the door. My door now says on it in big letters donado por M.D. Rail (donated by M.D. Rail) and M. Diego Rail told me if I didn’t write that and make a public display of his generosity he would return in a few months and take the door back.

So, Diego, here is your Public Display of gratitude, please don’t steal my door. Thanks.

Playing Doctor for a week

2009-05-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

This last week I helped on my first medical mission from the states. It is customary for a Peace Corps volunteer to help translate for doctors when they come down to help sick people and then rave about how great it was on their blog. So here it is:

They came down from Boston and are associated with the Catholic Church so most of our week had a lot of call and response praying in Spanish. We went to the Sunday mass when they first arrived. At one point the congregation sang a song to the tune of The sound of silence by Simon and Garfunkle. I laughed and elbowed my friend because I figured that the Catholic Church ripped off a 70’s folk song, to my dismay, I was informed by my friend Dave that Simon and Garfunkle had actually ripped the song off of an old Spanish folk song called The Condor Passes, or something like that. I trusted Dave’s explanation because his last name is Garfunkle and he looks like Paul Simon (which makes him an expert on 70’s folk and other music that puts me to sleep). After the mass we met all the doctors and went to check out Constanza’s hospital and the clinic that that they were setting up for long term patients.

The doctors quickly got the idea about how the medical system works down here when we took a tour of the hospital and saw that it was pretty much a bunch of empty rooms. There wasn’t really equipment to treat anything. They also got to see the degree of racism between Haitians and Dominicans when we saw a Haitian man who had been hit between the eyes with a machete in the middle of the night by a Dominican neighbor who didn’t want him in the neighborhood. The man had a 3-inch gash coming vertically down his scalp to his forehead. We also went to the prenatal room where there was still blood on the floor from the recent births, so that gave them an idea about the level of hygiene in the hospitals.

We ate most of our meals at the nun’s house, she was a pretty good cook and she had a pretty solid team of nun sidekicks who knew how to make all kinds of juice. I think I gained some weight this week with all the food. We stayed at a hotel outside of town that was quite nice. Joel, Dave, Cecilia, Lobo (yeah, they even let him stay with us!) and I had a hotel suite to ourselves that had a balcony and wi-fi, it was close to living the live of a millionaire.

During the week the group would set up a clinic at elementary schools in the area and people would come by the hundreds to be helped. There were three teams of general practice doctors, a dentist and a gynecologist. I spent a couple days translating for the dentist. It was a good time and I didn’t have to worry about translating too much because you only had to know two phrases “This is going to hurt a little bit” and “It’s ok, we are almost done.” There was a lot of pulling teeth; I think we did 8 on the first day and 6 on the second. I figured out why people say “its like pulling teeth” when something is difficult. The dentist became a good friend of mine and Joel’s as we did the translating/calming of crying children for her throughout the week. I was traded about midweek with Joel and I started doing the general practice stuff while he was on dental. It was fun; I felt like a doctor, people have already started stopping by my house when they have headaches, back pains or diarrhea. It was a lot calmer than pulling teeth.

The week flew by and we were all sad to say our goodbyes as the doctors and nurses left yesterday. Between the good feelings of helping people, the boston accents and all the fun after the long day of hard work I would say this week was one of my more enjoyable experiences in the Peace Corps thus far.

Here is a link to their blog of the trip if you anyone wants a little more detail about what actually happened, I think they have a picture page on there too:

http://constanzamission.blogspot.com/

Yes ladies, my block is quite gangster

2009-04-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago when I had some guests come up to my site and visit I was told that my site was probably the most ´gangsta´ of the Peace Corps sites. What makes a site gangter? I was told that it was a combination of things. First, because we have all the pretty mountains and the cold weather. Second, because it´s scary to leave your house at night. We got a good laugh because when people ask me where I am going and I tell them, they warn me that Americans shouldn´t go there. I tell them I have to go there because I live there, then they look at me like I´m crazy. The barrio las Flores is called a barrio caliente because there is a little bit of diliquency during the evenings.

Luckily, I upped my ´street cred´ when my mom made some dinner for the neighbors last night. The neighbors where definately feeling the chicken marsala, and my thug appeal.

We're both dudes. Yeah. That's why it is awkward.

2009-04-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to Santiago on friday. The guagua that I was in stopped and got gas. I took advantage of the stop by going to the bathroom. I went in to the Gas Station's bathroom and left the door open because there was no electricity for light. That was a mistake because the driver of the guagua walked up next to me and without hesitation whipped out his equipment and started peeing... in the same toilet as me. "So we are going to share this toilet then?" I ask him. I was hoping that he would get the idea that it wasn't really culturally accepted in my country to stroll up to a guy peeing in a toilet and start peeing in the toilet with him. "Yeah, it is not a problem because we are both dudes" He tells me. Hmm, I thought about what he said for a second and decided that it wasn't really a good enough reason.

Response to Brian's comment: I guess it would have been equally awkward, or possibly more so, if he was not a dude.

Ugh, Sunburn

2009-04-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

The sunscreen will wash off right when you jump in the ocean so you might as well just put it on after you get out. Thanks Dave, that's a great idea.

Now I am sunburned bad, taking Ibuprofen the size of horse tranquilizers and receiving charity bottles of Aloe Vera from concerned citizens. The average Dominicano/Kathy doesn't understand the concept of sunburns so I am in constant fear of being poked, hit or receiving a pat on the back for a job well done.

Really? An accident?

2009-04-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

Before I left last year I received some advice from a co-worker at the Ink Factory who was from Mexico. He said that in Latin America you shouldn't even trust your own shadow. I thought that his statement was pretty intense and I have done almost the opposite. As a young idealistic American I figured I should probably trust everyone because we are all good people underneath it all.
Now, it's not that I don't still think that but I have to say that my trust has been violated just a little tiny bit over the past weekend. You see, when I leave town I have to have someone guard my house so that no one breaks in, they also have to watch Lobo. I told this kid who is friends with my project partner I would give him 200 pesos (6 bucks) if he would watch my house and if he made it the weekend without Lobo peeing in my house. When I got back I saw where Lobo had peed and where he ran the dry mop over the puddles. I figured he tried so I would give the kid the money, after I give it too him he says "oh yeah, and the other day when I was trying to move your guitar I accidently bumped your luggage and broke the zipper." Ok, no big deal. The zipper got busted on my luggage. The kid leaves and I take a look at the luggage and it was pretty clear that he tried to bust the lock open and ended up ripping the luggage open, i.e. there is no way in hell that he "accidently" broke open my locked luggage with my guitar. I open up my computer, which was inside, and check the recent documents. Sure enough he had opened up my computer around midnight the night before. His intentions were clear, he opened it up looking for video games and porn. He opened a bunch of pictures of pretty silly things which he must have figured would have been dirty pictures; in spanish maybe CFCs stands for something dirty instead of Chloro Fluoro Carbons and Atmospheric Conditions sounds more sensual when pronounced with an accent. The picture he opened called "sexy preppy" was really a picture of Bryant in college dressed as a nerd before some party (I didn't name the photo for the record). He looked at a couple other pics and the video of the Trojan nuclear plant imploding and then moved on to video games. He was right to guess that Halo is one of my most favorite video games ever, but the guy barely knows how to cut and paste yet alone mount a disc image to the desktop as a CD. So he tried to open up Halo but it was of no luck. After that he messed around with Adobe Creative Suite but didn't really do anything interesting. I figure he got bored of that and started to play with the old gameboy that Eric gave me before I left.
In the guy's defence, he didn't take anything. He just wanted to play with my computer and gameboy in the middle of the night, we all have those urges sometimes. Since all of my stuff was still in the luggage I think that the only thing I have acquired from this incident is damaged trust and a broken suitcase (which is really Doug's old suitcase from the 80's, so not a big deal. Sorry Doug).

Hey, I can be professional too

2009-04-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

I realize that most of my blog entries aren’t about my project or all the “good” I am trying to do in the world and are really just about silly things that happen to me. I figure that for once instead of writing about something ridiculous that happened to me over the past couple days, like when I accidentally bought women's pants from my buddy’s mom or when some lady offered me her screaming child as I walked past, I would fill everyone in on my project and what I am working on right now. I think this will be good just in case, God forbid, someone looks at my blog to know what my professional status is.
Ok, so for starters, I am a CEDE volunteer. CEDE stands for Community Environmental Development and Education. The CEDE sector was started last year when we swore in; it was formed from the remaining Agro-forestry sector and the Environmental Education sector. In theory, every CEDE volunteer is trained to both work with schools and youth groups to teach about the environment and also to improve farming and agricultural techniques in small communities. I don’t live in a small community so I am definitely more on the Education side of things vs. the agriculture side of things.
My original project was to work with the youth of Constanza through an environmental youth group called the Ecoclubes. When soliciting to the Peace Corps, the Ecoclubes was described as a youth movement of about 100 kids. The reality is that they are about 12 kids. And instead of being a “movement” they are more of a small group of 13-20 year olds who sit around and yell at each other once a week for about an hour. I dedicated several months to these kids and reached my wits end about 3 months ago when I could not get them to participate in the community trash pick up, give a charla (lecture) to the school or help me to raise funds for a field trip. These kids are so hard to deal with that I want to master the Spanish language just to tell them eloquently how ridiculously frustrating they are.
Regardless, I was put into my assignment in Education because the administration felt my science background and “light hearted” attitude would make me good with youth. So instead of trying to motivate the kids in the Ecoclubes to give charlas, I just gave the charlas myself. That meant that for the past couple months I have been giving 1 hour lectures to the Sophomore science classes 3 times a week. The Peace Corps stresses that we should be striving for sustainability but instead I opted for more of a shotgun method. I figure it is like this; I am presenting to 150 kids every week in the high school and if 1 out of 10 kids learns something from the lecture then I can say I reached 3 more kids than the 12 Ecoclubes kids I was pulling my hair out dealing with before (which for the record, I am still working with).
Also, I decided it might be a good idea to start dealing with adults in the community and the local government. Not only because they are much more capable of making changes on a larger scale but also because there is considerably less handholding and dramatic phone calls during the meetings. A few members from different environmental groups recently formed an Ecological Society of Constanza where we have been deciding where and what types of trees to use for the reforestation program that is in town, the next step is to mobilize a group to begin planting. Over the past month, I have been working with the presidents of the 7 neighborhood associations and the Ayuntamiento (local government) to clean up the main river that passes through town. This is more something where I attend meetings to fill roles when they come up. There has been a great showing the past three weekends (I have only been there for 2) and people have been pushing to make a difference and clean up the badly polluted river. People of all ages from within the barrios are coming out to help with the project (everyone except the Ecoclubes, they are abstaining from the river clean up for political reasons… did I mention these kids make me want to pull my hair out). Luckily there are other youth involved in the clean up and they have offered to help me take readings of the water quality in the rivers around Constanza, the CEDE volunteers are trying to gather information on the water throughout the country (because right now there isn’t any) in order to better understand where contamination is coming from and what can be done to prevent it.
Other than that I just try to be of service to whoever needs a random white guy that speaks Spanish. The Harvard Engineers without Borders come down every 6 months or so and try to build a well or fix an aqueduct. A couple weeks ago Bryant and I helped some missionaries build a couple houses and play some baseball. In about a month I get to help out with my first Medical mission, where we interview patients and translate for doctors (I hear Med missions are the quick fix for making you feel good about helping people, however, I think I’m in it more for the nurses). The Dominican Sustainable Tourism Alliance, a group that is funded by USAID to set up economically responsible and environmentally friendly tourism is trying to get a project going at a waterfall 45 minutes out of town, they want to use me as their “point man.” I agreed to do it immediately after the term “point man” was used. I’m supposed to help the DSTA to set up committees in the nearby towns to manage the vendors and the maintenance of the site.
I think that sums up what I am trying to do around here these days. I hope it wasn’t as boring to read as it was to write about! As for the lady that offered me the baby yesterday; I laughed and told her that you have to give away children when they are doing something cute, not when they are doing things like vomiting, crying or other gross baby things.

Karate, Baseball, Discipline

2009-03-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday afternoon I was playing Dominos with Bryant, Eiji and Joselito after an excruciatingly filthy river clean up. Eiji mentioned that Japan was playing the United States in baseball that night and that it should be a good game. I agreed, but in the back of my mind I figured that the US would smoke Japan in a baseball game. After all, it is our sport and how many Japanese players are there in the MLB anyway? Five? Ten? One of the Dominicans observing the Domino game, or maybe it was Bryant, chimed in that the United States’ players can hit but the Japanese and Korean teams have something we lack called “Discipline.” Discipline, I have heard of that but I am not sure if I had experienced it first hand.
The next day we run into Eiji on his way to work, he informs me that Japan did the smoking of the United States by winning 9 to 5 to make its way to the championship game. I guess discipline beats big hitters. It turns out the championship was won by Korea; luckily there are no KOICA volunteers in Constanza to brag about it (Only Peace Corps and JICA).
Five days pass, Bryant goes home and I make my way to my first Karate lesson since 1st grade. I had been promising Eiji and Joselito that I would make my way to one of the practices because Eiji is the karate instructor and Joselito is the Kung Fu instructor. Bryant and I were going to go earlier in the week but the day we wanted to go it was rainy… and we were lazy i.e. lack of discipline.
I get there and immediately feel like the episode of The Office where you find out that Dwight is in the karate lessons and is 15 years older than any other participant. Feeling like Dwight from The Office sucks. Luckily, Joselito got there around when I did and he made a point of treating me like an adult. He had all the kids run two laps around the outside of the gym, which I was pretty excited about not doing, while we cleaned up and set up the karate mats. After the kids got back Joselito explained that we would practice Karate today and not Kung Fu because they had a tournament this weekend in La Vega and because Eiji couldn’t make it until later we were going to just warm up and go over the basics. Sounded good enough at first. Then I discovered that the “warm up” was more of a burn out for me. There was a lot of painful stretching and running in circles, not really my style. After about 45 minutes of warm up the lesson started, and it was actually a lot more fun than Aikido or Thai Chi ever were (maybe because it was taught by a Dominican and a Japanese guy instead of a dorky/hippy professor at U of O). There was a lot of blocking, kicking and punching, sort of like Street Fighter 2 in real life. By the end of the day I felt like I was ready to break a board with my head. I am pretty sore now from the karate kicks/chops and it made my hike up the lloma with Lobo less scenic and more agonizing than usual, but with a little discipline (and a signed permission slip from my parents) I might make it into the next tournament in La Vega.

Ya Scott Viene

2009-03-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend the volunteer who was in my site before me came back and I was expecting to see him turn water into wine just like the people in my community tell me he does. It turns out he is a normal guy, except for the graduate school at Harvard and Columbia (the guy has more Ivy in his education than I have in my back yard). Scott, the returning volunteer, explained that a lot of his miracles were actually exagerations and that someday I would be talked about as if I had risen on the third day as well. They told me that he learned spanish in two weeks, but his spanish was like mine (kind of Gringo sounding). They told me he never got diarea from their cooking, but it turned out that he had a malaria pill explode in his esophogus and was suffering from stomach problems for the next two years (ok maybe not their cooking´s fault but it still meant he got sick a time or two). They told me that he was the best domino player to ever set foot in the barrio and Bryant beat him and a Dominican, and Bryant seriously sucks at Dominos (In Scott´s defense, Bryant´s was on some sort of freakish hot streak where we were beating Dominican Domino masters as well). It was great to talk to the guy and it made me feel a lot better when he told me that he had struggles and challenges here too. I will admit that he did tell way better jokes than they said he would.

Busy, really busy

2009-03-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have not updated this thing for a little while because I have been in the midst of a hurricane of work, play and stomach issues. Diego got here about a month ago, and it was awesome. We ran around the country and saw all sorts of touristy things I had never seen, there was a lot of cool stuff such as- waterfalls, humback whales, TGIfridays, tropical beaches and of course a lot of quality time with M.Diego Rail. I am sure I will put up a post all about that adventure as soon as the craziness dies down (which it hasnt). After he left I was back in my site for 3 days and then had to go back to the capital to help write, edit and make graphics for our quarterly magazine that we put out for the volunteers in this country (I felt like kind of a jack ass because everyone else in the room had degrees in things like english and art but I brought some chemistry to the table). We were in the capital for about a week for that one and were working from 8 am to 8 pm everyday. It was fun, in a working a lot kind of way. After that I came home (on the 10th of this month) and found that my dog Lobo looked like he was going to die... which I may be partially to blame for... because I spilled boiling water on his head a couple weeks ago and I guess it burned him pretty bad. He had a scab all over his head and I thought he was not going to make it so I ran down to the Veteranerian and dropped a thousand pesos (one tenth of my monthly income) trying to figure out what was wrong with him and what we could do. The vet assured me that he would be ok and told me his biggest problem was that his owner was an idiot. I went back home and was kind of bummed because I was sure that it was going to be the worst birthday ever. Little did I know that when Kathy showed up an hour later and said she had a surprise she was talking about Bryant Royal my oldest friend who had snuck into the country for 17 days to surprise me for my birthday. Needless to say I did some excited cursing (which was ok because the little kids watching the comotion didnt know what I was saying) and was very excited to see my friend. Other than that the site has been super busy with my project in the high school and with the organizing of a river clean up. Not to mention Bryant and I tagged along with some missionaries to help build a couple houses in one of the poor communities outside of town. Things are good, except I ate some pizza the other day that had some bad brocolli and now I am vomitting and going to the bathroom a lot more than I want to be. I think it is pretty silly that I have been healthy until my friend gets in from the states and then I get a stomach bug. I think my stomach will be better in a couple days and Lobos hair will be back in about a week (says the Vet) and hopefully life will be a little slower again.

Alright, I wrote this down really fast in the Religous internet cafe so dont judge me for lack of punctuation, bad spelling and poor grammar. Also, I am working with a spanish keyboard.

What does hell smell like?

2009-02-20T04:49:00.000-08:00

I came home from a walk on the lloma (hill) with Lobo yesterday and was welcomed by an upsetting odor. I began looking throughout the house because it smelled as if Lobo had peed on every wall in the entire house… for several hours straight. I began looking around and then put together the facts that it didn’t smell like this before I left and Lobo was with me the whole time on the lloma. My next guess was that some evil child thought it would be funny to take a leak on the American’s front door. I checked the front door for pee and it was all clear. I could barely breath. I started opening windows to clear the air and I noticed my back window was open and air was already coming in, then I opened the back door to the balcony and was hit by a terrible pee smoke back draft.
It turns out that the downstairs neighbor was burning her baby’s diapers for the month in a smoldering pile behind the house and my back window was open enough to let the smell of pure agony into my bedroom and the rest of the house. I sat for a few minutes pondering whether it would be appropriate to go downstairs into the back yard and pour water on the diaper burn pile. A gust of wind pushed just enough smoke into my nose to help me make the decision to go down there. I filled up a Nalgene bottle and headed down. I asked a little kid if the neighbor was there and he said she was, so I figured I would ask. “Hey, can I pour a little water on this fire outside? The smoke is making my nose hurt” I told her. “Oh yeah, of course you can” she told me, “Sorry if it was bothering you. Here, sit down and have some coffee.” I sat down for about 30 seconds and then got back up, telling her that I had to put out the fire immediamente. I poured some water on and that was the end of the stinky fire.
The neighbor was very nice and apologetic. Burning your garbage and/or throwing it in the river are the norms for my neighborhood because the trash pile (where the garbage trucks come twice a week) is a little bit of a hike. I think that to the members of the neighborhood, burning your garbage is a more environmentally friendly method of waste disposal than the river because the concept of the atmosphere and air pollution seems far-fetched. Coincidentally, on Wednesday I gave a lecture (3-times) in the High School about the atmosphere and the chemistry of the ozone to the sophomore science classes. I guess the problem is that the neighbor with the baby is only in 8th grade and her husband is a junior in High school so neither of them caught the presentation.

Ebano Verde

2009-02-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

“Give me something to eat,” I said to the students. I was given a handful of white cheddar potato chips and a Halls Strawberry cough drop. I put the mint in my mouth first but got impatient and ate the potato chips too. Eating them both at the same time was a mistake because I kept biting down on the cough drop while I was trying to chew the chips. Not to mention the sweetness and saltiness made it taste like some kind of Chinese food gone bad. I had just tested out my theory that all you have to do in this country is say give me something “dame algo” and you get something. I had seen it before: done by children, old people and even grown men but had never had the nerve to try it for myself.
I was sitting at the maintenance building/Sleeping Cabin for the scientific reserve’s employees. I was soaking wet from the rain, freezing and pretty hungry; and so was everybody else but I seemed to be the only one who was a little grumpy about it. Maybe it was because in the rainstorm my cell phone got soaked in my backpack (which became a sponge after the first hour) and now it didn’t work. Or maybe just because I can’t really speak Spanish when the hypothermia kicks in. Either way everyone was having a great time and I was sitting there eating my chips and cough drop trying to figure out how I was going to fix my phone. Take it to the hair salon, the teacher/park ranger told me, have them put a blow dryer on it for a half hour and it will work fine. I didn’t believe him but I nodded and smiled anyway.
We had just hiked down one of the tallest mountains in the reserve from Observation Tower 1 and where now at the maintenance building. The funny thing about the Ebano Verde Scientific reserve being a cloud/rain forest is that its cloudy/rainy all the time. The teacher told me that we could have seen most of the country from the tower but because it was so foggy we had to settle for just seeing our hand in front of our face. The students where still very impressed and so was I, I think I will go back again when it is not so rainy or foggy.
The hike down was almost as ridiculous as the Summer camp with the 400 kids on the side of the mountain. This trip was much more organized and the kids were older, however, the rain played a huge role in the ridiculous-ness. Trails became small creeks, small creeks became ranging rivers and my clothing became soaked. The kids played a fun game called “kick up mud and water all of the back of the person in front of you,” needless to say I walked in the back of the line most of the day.
The scenery, despite the fog and rain, was really beautiful. We ended up seeing several endemic species of trees and flowers. The trail was also one of the cleanest trails I have seen in the country to this day. There was not a spec of litter for almost the entire trip. Most of the hike was next to a river that had grown pretty big during the storm and when we first got to the river I could not believe what I saw. The students just hopped right in for a picture (still wearing shoes and everything). I kept thinking they were going to all die from hypothermia but then I thought about how many people die in the Caribbean due to the cold (but for the record, one guy did last week when he jumped into the Aguas Blancas waterfall and it was too cold for him to swim out. He was from the capital so he didn’t know any better).
Anyway, since nobody died, I chalked it up as a good time. I realized that Dominicans are good at taking a situation that would seem pretty crappy and somehow having a great time anyway. The trail was muddy and so they started kicking and throwing mud at each other and because the river had covered the trail they jumped in and took a picture. I felt like kind of a fool for letting the cold and damaged cell phone get to me… especially after I took the phone to a Salon when I got back and they really did blow dry it until it worked again.

Superbowl XLIIILCICCX

2009-02-03T07:07:00.000-08:00

Or whatever year it is for the superbowl. How fun was that? This was pretty much the second most fun night in the country (next to Election night, because this time my team didn´t win). My best pal Joel is from Pennsylvania so it was good to have him there getting into it. He is good and being an American and explaining to us that Pennsylvania pretty much invented football, needless to say he was very adimant about Pittsburg winning. I had sort of a loyalty towards Arizona because of my six months living in Northern Arizona a couple years back, I couldn´t believe that they actually made it... especially with fumbles mgee as their querter back. Most people where cheering for Arizona because a lot of us are from the west coast, and for some reason everyone always wants to cheer for the underdogs. Then there was my friend from boston, she was cheering for the Cardinals because she thought they were from St. Louis. Once she figured it out I think she changed her stance on the teams and started rooting for Pittsburg, but it was too late to change her red shirt. It was also very exciting to see that the Boss did the half time show, I thought I was the only person under age 35 to think that Bruce Springsteen is completely awesome but apparently a majority of the Peace Corps population likes him too. Or maybe they just like to dance around to rock and roll every sixs months and this gave them an opportunity, needless to say the half time show was a good time for all. First the stones, last year was Prince, this year was the boss, who knows, maybe next year they will bring Neil Young out for halftime... something makes me doubt it.

Pictures of Lobo

2009-02-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, here are some pictures of my new roommate. This is also my soon to be old apartment where I was drying my boxers that I hand washed myself a few days ago. Sitting in the bathroom scrubbing my socks, t-shirts and underwear next to my three legged dog made me feel like I could have been a cowboy. Or at least in some kind of country song, I decided to settle for the Allman brothers and I put that on while I did the first handwashing laundry of my life. The problem is that where I am living right now it wasn't warm enough for the clothes to dry and they hung up there for a few days.
Also, like I said before, I am moving to a new apartment that is between a few of my friends houses and it is a lot cheaper to rent each month. I won't have running water, and will have to use a latrine, and a bucket to bathe, but my rent will have gone from 115 dollars a month to 24 dollars a month. Oh yeah.

Also, if you look at the picture of Lobo in the car you will notice he used to have long blond hair behind the ears. I thought that made him look kind of like a hippy and not very professional, so I cut it. He was definately less offended by the hair cut than by the peg leg.

ACDC

2009-01-29T06:37:00.001-08:00

Ok, I have to correct something that I mentioned in my last blog entry. Highway to Hell isn't on the Back in Black album it's on the Highway to Hell album. So when I see Klievi's impersonation of Highway to Hell it isn't actually from the CD I just got. But I think that uncle Byron gave me the Highway to Hell album at some point anyway, which is better because that was before Bon Scott died when he parked his car and fell asleep in a snow storm, and he is way better than the new guy (who still rocks... but not as much) on Back in Black. Needless to say, I still am enjoying the ACDC.

Christmas presents in a sharing culture

2009-01-24T15:37:00.000-08:00

Around new years I got a healthy pile of Christmas presents. So much that it took me two trips from the capital to get them up to my site. Here is what happened to the respective presents:

1. The chocolate oranges from mom went to my respective mother and grandmother in the Dominican Republic. Needless to say it blew both families' minds. The fact that it was cut in slices and tasted like an orange was enough to make Americans are delightfully crazy. Why would you take an chocolate and make it taste like and orange when you could just eat a chocolate and then an orange. Also, on a a side note, they call an Orange a china here which I thought was kind of crazy at first but then I realized that we call Madarin oranges maderins and so do they. So really calling an orange is just following the whole Asian theme with their citruses.

2.Uncle Byron gave me a huge set of CDs, which have been a pretty big hit with me so far. This head of the water committee big wig guy gave Kathy and me a ride up from the capital the other day and I put in the Eagles Greatest hits and he liked it so much he kept saying "this music is very pretty," we explained to him that the song "Take it easy" means Coje lo suave. Tequila Sunrise and Desperado were two of his favorites, maybe that's because he could understand the titles, maybe because they are sad like bachata. With gratitude for the three hour bola up the mountain I told him he could keep the CD (because I already imported it to Itunes, but don't tell him that) and the next day his niece reported that it was all he was listening to in his truck. Also, the youth have been listening to ACDC's Back in Black and Klievi's impersonation of the Highway to Hell may be the funniest thing I have seen in this country.

3. The money, I got some money from a collective group back home. I think mom and grandma and grandpa where involved. I used that money to buy a ridiculously over-priced (even after haggling them down 500 pesos/15 dollars) dog kennel for Lobo the dog. He gets a little car sick, if fact, he makes Layla's episodes and my vomit Karma look more like a walk in the park... where there is about 1/10 as much vomit. So now he can travel and I can leave him at Joel's site when I need to do some extensive traveling (i.e. when I have visitors).

4. Uno from Aunt Sherry and Uncle Byron is currently being played by the escojo youth. They love that game like it was the next dominoes. They still don't completely have a strategic grasp on wild cards, because they use them as soon as they get them instead of saving them and using them at the end (which is really annoying when you see three kids put down wild cards in a row and ask for the same color each time). The other thing is that when you have only one card left you are supposed to say "uno" but it is actually gramatically correct to say "una" because the word for card (carta) is female. So they say una when they only have one card left and call the game of UNO "Casino Americano" which I think pretty much translates to American Card game.

5. There has been lots of other stuff used and shared by the community but right now I am being tortured by a man in the next terminal over who is singing praise songs off key... damn, why does the fastet and most reliable internet cafe have to be the religious one too? Anyway, thanks everyone for the gifts and the thoughts and the cards this year. We all appreciate them in barrio Las Flores.

New dog

2009-01-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

I left my friends dog in a vet/Kennel over new years and when I went there I was offered a different dog that had been living in the kennel for the past two years. His name is Lobo and it turned out people wouldn't take him cause he only has three legs, when really he has 3.5 legs and is just missing a back paw. He is two and a half and is pretty mellow so things have been working out pretty well. I even let him hang out off his leash sometimes, which is fine because he never makes it very far. I took him out walking about a week ago and decided I would try to make him a peg leg, it consisted of duct tape and an old broom stick. He was not having it at all. I figured if I had only one leg I would be honored to have someone throw together a peg leg so I could walk around like a normal person, apparently dogs don't think the same. He had duct tape stuck on his leg for the following week and last saturday I pinned him down with my buddy Dave and we tried got most of the duct tape off. Lobo was being a big baby about it, he hated to have the tape on him but he got all fidgety when we tried to take it off. Luckily the next morning I was able to get the rest of it off and now he is good as new. I learned a couple valuable lessons from the whole thing. First, I will never be a pet psychic or veteranarian. Second, sometimes you have to let sleeping dogs lie, even when they only have three legs.

I'll put up a picture of him sometime soon.

Sometimes you deserve it

2009-01-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

I finally got sick again last week and I have no one to blame but myself. I went on a hike to the Piedras Letreadas (ancient cave drawings) with Kathy, who after recently finishing her peace corps assignment a year and a half early has been pretty bored and pestering me in Constanza to go out and do things, we bought some food to eat for the trip. One of the items was an avocado and some bread. The next morning I left for a meeting in the capital and woke up at 4 AM. There was no power so I didn´t look at the old avocado in the dark but my thought process was: something smells bad, oh it´s the avocado, I should eat it and then it won´t smell bad in here. I ate the avocado and ended up being sick all day, which kind of sucks when you are packed 21 people deep in a 12 passenger van. In the long run the trip to the capital ended up being worth it because I became one of our region´s Emergency Coordinators. That means when there is a hurricane, I get to call everyone and make sure they are ok... woohoo.

Christmas in the DR

2009-01-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

You don’t really realize how much of Christmas in the United States is based on consumption until you spend a Christmas in a country that can’t afford to do so. I worried for two weeks about what I should get for the families that are taking care of me but after a while my friend Cristian (who is in one of the families) notified me that no one gives presents for Christmas and only sometimes the children get toys. With that in mind I relaxed about giving gifts and went back to thinking about all the great gifts I was about to receive from the states (woohoo!). I stayed in my site over the Christmas Holiday and celebrated with Cristian’s family (I posted pictures on Picassa). The Christmas Eve feast that night was the same meal as the lunch we had earlier in the day and the same meal as the day before; Chicken, rice, beans and potato salad. However, the Christmas feast did feature beer. That was cool. At first, the family was sharing only one bottle between 5 of us and I thought about how moving it was to be with a family that could only afford one beer for five people. I felt like Scrooge for sitting in my apartment only an hour earlier counting the coins in my sack of money (I had about 300 pesos, that could buy four or five beers). I felt guilty and tried to explain to Cristian and his sister who Scrooge (and the Christmas Carol) was but they had no idea what I was talking about. Then I tried to explain who Scrooge McDuck (and the Ducktales cartoon) was, but they had no idea who Scrooge McDuck or Ducktales were either. Then I explained who Donald Duck was, they were still confused until I mentioned Mickey Mouse and they said “oh yeah, Pato Donnie” or something like that. I told them Scrooge was Pato Donnie’s uncle who was kind of a dick about money and then I went up to my apartment to get the sack of money. I went up and tended to Layla, the little dog I was watching, and returned with the 300 pesos after about fifteen minutes. When I got back, five people had turned into eight and one beer bottle turned into five beers, two bottles of Sangria and some mystery rum mixed drink that one of the uncles kept pushing me to drink. Well that’s better, I thought to myself. I threw in my dinero and five beers turned into eight and now everyone had one… even Tiny Tim.
The night went on and the family was pretty silly and everyone was having a good time. I brought out the digital camera and they went crazy. Picture after picture was taken and I didn’t mind at all. After a while the family members started to disappear, I guess it is the custom to do a tour of the barrio and visit the other families while they are having dinner. I got up and went to the latrine and when I came back everyone was gone. It was about 10:30 at night, I figured I had enough holiday magic and went home to watch Die Hard (the original one of course).
As for Christmas Day, it was pretty calm. Nobody really celebrates but everything is still closed. I ran out of dog food for the dog so we shared a Christmas breakfast (and lunch, and dinner for her) of biscuits with margarine. I talked to the family back home for about an hour, Blake for about a half hour and various members of the Beutler family for another 40 minutes or so. I felt like I had more conversation than I had in the past few Christmases combined. I took the dog for a long walk and made my way back to my apartment where I had planned to drink some extra Viejo Rum (the classy kind) and play some solitaire. I figured I would drink alone on Christmas just so I could say that I did; a “lame Christmas trump card” if you will. I sit down and deal out my first hand, mix a little of the rum with seven up and before I can even sit down I get a call from Kathy. She is in the next town over and apparently feels like being alone on Christmas is “depressing” and makes her “want to cry.” Whatever, I tell her, I guess you can come over here but I will have you know that you are ruining my crappy Christmas. That gives me about an hour to drink alone (it takes about a half an hour to get here and it takes Kathy a half an hour to get ready), long enough to still tell people in a couple years about how hard and depressing my Peace Corps experience could be.
As I try to sit down and be depressed, the lady from downstairs who is visiting from the east comes up and knocks on my door. She tells me that it is wrong to be alone on Christmas and she thinks I should come downstairs (for the record, she was totally making a pass at me. Apparently no one told her that as a volunteer I am just as broke as everyone else.) So I go downstairs where I expect to find the rest of her family. It was just her, which was awkward, and so we sat around and talked about how much money I made as a volunteer (not very much), and how much money I could be making back in the states as a chemist (10 times what I’m making here, but still not that much), and why I am not back in the states right now making that money (because living in the Caribbean is sweet… and sometimes I like helping people). Kathy shows up just in time, we go back up to my apartment and make a plan for the evening, she says that playing cards on Christmas and drinking would be kind of lame. I told her that was the point. She was not as excited about the cards and drinking so we decided to head down to the discoteca and break it down for a while. As we are leaving a forty-year-old bastard man/Tiguere (who will remain anonymous) sees us walking and picks us up and offers a ride to the Discoteca; his wife and baby are in the front seat so Kathy and I sit in the back. We pass the Discoteca and it’s closed but the Park should still have some dancing, he tells us. He also mentions that he is going to go out for a little while too. So we drop off the sweet little wife and baby and he takes us out to the park where we get a beer or two at the Colmado (bar/store). Kathy and I are standing there talking about whatever when the Bastard Man comes up to us with some hussy. He says something obnoxious like “this is mine” and then grabs the hussy in a very VERY inappropriate manner. Both Kathy’s and my own jaws drop as we struggle to believe what we just witnessed. He says something to me like “does that offend you? Are you some kind of homosexual?” I shake my head and say, “No, I am not a homosexual but in our culture you can’t go around recording women like that.” It turns out I was using the verb Grabar thinking it meant “To Grab” when it really means, “to record” (oops). As the native Spanish speaker, Kathy steps in to get my back and says, “What Chris is trying to say is that we think it is completely inappropriate to grab someone like that.” Then the hussy laughs at the two of us and says that it doesn’t matter because “this is hers” and then she grabs the Bastard in an equally inappropriate manner and the two of them start to laugh. “Wow, and this asshole just kissed his wife and baby good night fifteen minutes ago” I say to Kathy in English as the Bastard and the Hussy start to get a little kissy in front of us. With a polite smile on my face I told him that they both make me want to vomit (which over the past few weeks I have learned to master the conjugation of the verb vomitar). We shared a good, and uncomfortable laugh before announcing to the two that we were going to head to the other discoteca that was open. We went there and had a few bachata and marengue dances. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful.
On a side note, it is pretty funny that Bastard man has taken a liking to Kathy and is insisting that I bring her out again so that he can seduce her. What an ass.

Mal de Ojo / Vomit karma

2008-12-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

I have never mentioned it because I didn’t think that it existed. During our first couple weeks of training they mentioned a thing called the “Mal de Ojo”, it pretty much translates to the evil eye and it is an ability that Doñas and old ladies seem to use on people they don’t like. Here are some of the examples we were given: if a young woman flaunts that she has nice hair in front of an old lady and says something to offend the old lady, with the power of the mal de ojo she can make the young woman lose her hair. If a young man is driving his motorcycle around making all sorts of noise all night, the Doña gets a good mal de ojo in on him and he wrecks his bike the next day. If you call an old lady fat, you get fat. If you call and old lady stupid then something happens that makes you look like an idiot. If you give an old woman a hard time because she is whining about being uncomfortable on a guagua and then she throws up, the following happens:

It was about 5 in the morning on Thursday (3.5 days after mal de ojo) and I was on my way from Nagua back to Constanza. I am going to watch Kate’s dog Layla for the next two weeks and was bringing her back to Constanza. I had it all planned out perfectly, I was getting a free ride from Nagua to the Cruce de Abonico (from the Cacao cooperative that Kate works with, which was headed to the capital) and then I could ride in the back of a guagua with Layla up to Constanza for the rest of the trip. I would be back by 9 o’clock or so, and I could get to my meeting at 10. And that is probably how it would have worked if that old crazy lady hadn’t given me the evil eye after she threw up. Instead, at about 5:45 we realize that we are not on the highway anymore and the Driver explains that he is going to take a “shortcut” along the back roads. Now usually I am up for a shortcut back in Oregon. It is always nice to see a little country and there is always that 1 in 200 chance that you actually save some time. The problem was that in the Dominican Republic, back roads could be overgrown, covered by a rockslide or completely underwater. We drive on the back roads for about 45 minutes and after all the twists, turns and bumps the dog (which is sitting on my lap) starts making that weird burping/gulping sound that dogs make before they puke. I yell to the driver to stop the truck, he looks back at me and I say “Ese dog va a vomitar.” He stops the truck just in time for me to jump out and have the dog vomit all down my leg and on my shoe. God damn it. I wipe the vomit off of my leg with Layla’s dog towel and we decide to put her in the back of the truck for the rest of the ride. When I get back in the driver laughs and says in Spanish “That’s called a perro, not a dog. You should have said this perro is going to throw up.” Oops.

He drives for another hour or so and because the sun had come up, we can actually see the dog in the back and see how it looks like it wants to die. We finally pull up to the autopista (the Dominican I-5) and we are in Piedras Blancas. This is where I am going to be dropped off instead of Cruce de Abonico (thanks to the shortcut) and it is about 45 minutes south of where I wanted to be. Kind of like if I was dropped off in Salem instead of Portland. God damn it. I say my goodbyes and while holding the sick dog he tells me something like “buenas suerte, cuida Layla” which I later learned translates to “You are up shit creek right now, and its gonna be hard to paddle with that dog in your arms.” I found out how right he was when I tried to get on one of the Guaguas up to the Abonico and learned none of the drivers would take me because I had a dog (In this country there are two types of guaguas, mid ninetees trucks and late eighties minivans, the autopista is almost all minivans, i.e. no dogs allowed). I was hassled continuously by motoconchos (motorcycle taxis) and even by a couple regular taxis that wanted to charge me 500 pesos to get up to Abonico (that’s 15 bucks, which is kind of a lot in Peace corps standards). I end up hitching a ride to Bonao in the back of some guy’s truck and find myself about 5 miles from Abonico. Someone tells me that it is only two miles so I figure I will try to hitchhike the rest of the way on the side of the road and walk it till I get a ride… the problem with this plan was that the dog was not having anything to do with standing on the side of the Dominican I-5. She was clearly very scared; I get a motoconcho the rest of the way for 150 pesos. I think she actually liked the motorcycle ride more than the back of the truck.

When we finally arrive at Abonico, I get in the back of the truck with Layla and there are already 6 people in the back; a Haitian guy with a huge stereo speaker, a little kid with his bicycle (traveling alone, with the bicycle in 3 pieces in a burlap sack), and two couples that were coming down from Santiago for the week to party. One of the guys offers me some of the cheap rum they were drinking, I look down at my phone to check the time: 9:15 AM. I grab the bottle and take a pretty big pull of the rum; I feel a pat on my back. “Hola Cristofer! Como tu estás?” It was one of the Dominican youth I work with in the group that teaches about HIV/AIDS and Alcoholism. He was down in Bonao applying for a job. “Not so good” I tell him “I am drinking rum right now because this dog threw up on my leg.”

On the way up, we get stuck on the side of the road for 40 minutes waiting for some construction to finish. By this time the Santiago couples are comfortably drunk and one of the guys decides to show off his English to me “Hey, suck my dick you mother asshole!” He says to me, I smile and tell him that he had nearly mastered the English language and that he could start teaching soon. I looked down at the time and realized that I had missed the meeting I was supposed to be at, and that this trip was going to take 7 hours instead of the usual 3 and a half. As I sat there with dog vomit on my leg, an escojo youth next to me, the stink of rum on my breath and two lovely couples swearing at me in English on the side of the road. I realized that I had been mal de ojo’d big time.

Throwing up on Guaguas

2008-12-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

We did world AIDS day and it was a major success. Other than a few inappropriate comments from a couple jovenes during dramas and me not understanding the Escojo rap groups message, I would say the whole thing was a success.
Like I said before, Kathy rounded up a guagua and that was huge. We ended up bringing about 30 kids down to Salcedo in the Tireo guagua (or School Bus). There were plenty of fun moments when the kids were on the bus. There were a few moments when we had to break up some "bumping and grinding" in the back of the bus. And there was one moment when a kid threw up on the guagua and was dangerously close to soiling my bag of things that I was bringing to the capital for the week. I had never really cleaned up vomit from a bus before and neither had Kathy, but we handled it like professionals. At one of the truck stops we grabbed some rubber gloves, a mop and a lot of toilet paper and got it all cleaned up in a matter of minutes. The kid had Salami and eggs for breakfast... and I don't think he likes to chew his food. Other than that it was great.

On my way back from the capital yesterday there was this old lady that kept whinning about how she was so uncomfortable, I may have gone the "asshole" route because I responded by telling her that we were all uncomfortable and that is how it always is when four people are crammed in the back of a late eighties toyota pick up's king cab bench seat. She started crying and I thought she was just being crazy (I swear I am not a bad person, old ladies are always sitting next to me complaining about how much space I am taking up, I figured this one was no different. And for the record neither did the guy next to me.) I had to adjust my position several times because I was losing feeling in my right leg (which was wedged up against the old lady), she kept making a big huff about it and I kept telling her that we are all uncomfortable, so lay off. Then we pull over to let a hatian out and she jumps out and throws up for a couple minutes... I guess when she said she was "uncomfortable" she meant she was about to puke. I like to think it was one of those lost in translation type of events but everyone else thought I was just a huge ass hole. In the meantime the guy who had my back earlier (about her being crazy) got into the front seat and left me to take the brunt of feeling like crap.

Thanksgiving Anchorman... and jack ass

2008-11-30T09:32:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving this year was a ton of fun because we had a country club rented out for the two hundred of us (volnteers, their dominican significant others and embassy people). This meant there was an olympic size pool, a basketball court, soccer court and a gym (which I never actually went into). The whole event went very smoothly and I like to think it is because the Peace Corps population is considerably easier to organize and motivate than the Dominican population. Needless to say there was a lot to do and swimming, dominoes and drinking where my favorites. Also, the whole thanksgiving dinner was great because we got to eat turkey, stuffing, pecan pie and all the other turkey day staples.
I told Kathy that if she could get her hands on the high school guagua (which holds 30 people) to take us to world AIDS day (This monday Dec. 1st) in Salcedo I would run in the 5k fun run the morning of Thanksgiving. She got the guagua and so I participated. I have to say that the term ´fun run´ is kind of deceptive... however, the parts before and after where fun. They gave out awards to the first place female runner, first place male runner and the last place male and female runners (there were also awards given to ´most sweaty´and best costume). Believe it or not, both Kathy and I won awards that day. She finished last place for females and I was last for males (but let the record show that I beat 5 or 6 girls in the race). We were given our awards )the anchorman award), which were toy snails attached to a knecklace. Also, on a side note, the first place winner was a cross country runner from one of the colorodo universities. He said he was gonna quit smoking if he didn´t finish in first place... but because he did finish first I think their were some celebratory cigerettes smoked. I did not partake in any smoking because my lungs felt like they were going to burst.
The rest of the day was great but their is really one more noteworthy event that I feel I should mention. When the evening came, there was a talent show. I told my friend Timo I would play guitar for him, he rewrote Folsom Prison Blues to have lyrics describing our considerably boring times when we have been standfasted or consolidated during hurricanes. He did a good job and I played the really simple chords without any real problems. The issue that came about was, after maybe a little too much Presidente and Rum, I decided I would spend a little extra time on stage to play a little song for the audience of 200 people... I ended up staying up there or about 20 minutes and buchering any attempt at music. People enjoyed it and I like to think I was being laughed ´with´ versus laughed ´at´but I was given more crap about it than the time I found myself lost in the jungle on the 4th of July. Needless to say, the name of the talent show has been changed to Untalent show and I think I may have had a hand in that change. At this point, four days later, I still have the subtle burning of embarrasment. Especially when the cruelest of my friends decided to impersonate me.
The next night I went to a baseball game in Santo Domingo with some of the other volunteers. We ended up having our picture taken and it ended up in Hoy (the USA Today of the dominican republic)... my eyes where closed in the picture and I look like a complete dufus. I didn´t worry about it too much because even if it is a national newspaper, it probably sells less copies than the Oregonian... and half the people in this country think that reading is for squares.

Look at this

2008-11-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

I think I just figured out how to put pictures... it's so easy!

Who remembers Masson and the old house!?
I do!

This was the first picture I had on the desktop to upload.

Christmas Rockets

2008-11-24T14:36:00.000-08:00

For the past two weeks I have been freaking out on a nightly basis because I keep hearing gunshots outside, or at least I thought they were gun shots. It turns out that Dominicans don´t do the Christmas presents or the Christmas tree or really anything Christmas at all, but instead they have Christmas Rockets that they shoot off four or five times a night for the month preceding that holy day. Finally one of the jovens explained to me what was going on and I have been able to sleep a little better. I also don´t duck for cover every time one goes off.
The other night I was walking back from the discoteca where I had been doing some drinking and dancing with my visiting gringa friend Kate (from Nagua). We were walking down the street and a christmas rocket went off and everyone was freaking out, I tried to explain to her that it was no big deal and that it happens every night. But, before we knew it we were swept into the nearest building (which happened to be a bingo parlor) by a bunch of Dominicans because it actually was a drunk guy firing off a gun this time (don´t worry mom, he only shot one time and it was straight up in the air). It turns out he didn´t have the money to pay off his bar tab but did have a couple bullets to spare, so he whipped out his pistol in the street and made a big fuss. The people in the bingo parlor were really nice, and we made a couple new friends.
Other than that, the weather sucks, everyone is in a bad mood, I am wearing a down vest and a waterproof jacket when I go outside. It gets cold at night, it makes me curse the fact that I don´t have windows. Only holes in the walls with persian blinds. I am hating my groups and they won´t listen to me, teenagers are such a pain. I talked to Kathy, my neighbor, and she is having troubles with the kids too. Our group went to visit her group in Tireo (the neigboring town) on friday for the movie night, they didn´t want to watch the Ladrones Domiciles so we watched batman instead. I guess the plot of Batman was too deep for them because the kids were out of control, it wasn´t my event so I snuck off to get some chicken. When I was buying the chicken there was a group of women sitting at a table across from me. They don´t get a lot of real life gringos in Tireo (Kathy is from Peru, so she is not on the gringo radar) and so I was stared and hollared at. One lady kept talking videos of me with her camera phone and another one kept trying to put the moves one me. I felt totally objectified and uncomfortable by all the special attention I was getting... It was sweet!

Dominoes Cheaters

2008-11-20T07:39:00.000-08:00

Last night I kept losing and it turns out it was cause this one kid kept signaling to the other kid what pieces he had but I couldn´t tell, or at least couldn´t catch them doing it. What is the point of playing a game if you are just gonna cheat the whole time? I haven´t been this upset over a game since Halo 2. Ugh, cheaters... they say that they never prosper but last night they one 6 out of the 8 games. I had to have a Presidente afterwards, I went into the Colmodo and the owners wife asked me the time as if to suggest that maybe 10:30 at night was a little late to be getting a presidente. My neighbor saw that I had a beer when I walked up the stairs and tried to come over and hit me up for some of it. She tried offering me rice to get me to come over and share the beer. Do I want some cold rice or this cold beer? Hmmm... I told her that I was going to bed and I didn´t need any rice.
For the record, I am not a bad person for not sharing my beer with the neighbor. She is always trying to hit me up for stuff. The two women next door try to raid my kitchen every other day, but the joke is on them; I barely even know how to cook and have no food. Yesterday she hit me up for some food, all I had to share was bread and butter (ok so I hid the Peanut butter and marmalade).

The bigger they are the fatter they fall on me

2008-11-17T14:15:00.001-08:00

I learned in spanish class that when you like someone you say that they fall well with you. If you dont really like someone then they fall bad on you and if you really really dont like someone then they fall fat on you. This weekend we hosted 60 something DOminican youth and I figured out that the older the youth get the more of a pain in the ass they are. We were cleaning up the foundation where we had the ´taller´(which I think translates to Training), and I had a brief moment to compare the responses as I asked two young women to help me clean up. The first one was 10 years old and when I asked her if she could help me wash the dishes she said ´You don´t have to wash any dishes, I will wash them all by myself. I love to wash dishes´ (and I am not exagerating here at all, she said that exactly). A minute or so later I asked a seventeen year old girl(who was getting a little to affectionate with one of my boys I might add) to help out with cleaning. Her response was ´I am going to mop in here but there is no mop so I can´t.´ I went and grabbed her a mop and a bucket, the she said ´there aren´t enough mops and enough buckets to clean up this room´ At that point I thought to myself, God damn it, how many mops do you need... and then I said to her ´God damn it, cuantos swapes necesitas?´ She then went off in a rant about how she can´t clean right now because they are cleaning the other room and she has to wait, and then she was sure to point out that I didn´t understand. I explained to her that it wasn´t that I didn´t UNDERSTAND her, it was that I didn´t BELIEVE her. She brushed me off and went back to Eduardo. Wow, I thought, I guess that´s why parents are always stressing out when they have teenagers... cause they are a huge pain in the ass. At any rate, all the 15 to 20 something boys in my group seem to have fallen in love with all the 13 to 19 year old girls in Kathy´s group (which is in the next town over). So now we get to play chaperone for a bunch of ridiculously melodramatic teenagers and all their raging horomones. This friday will be movie night in Tireo, everyone cross their fingers that ´Casa ladrones´ (House thieves, the movie we will be watching) is not a romantic comedy.

Pegaonce, or Egyptian Rat Screw

2008-11-14T10:00:00.001-08:00

I think I started a new craze amongst the Dominican youth, I introduced them to a game that we used to play at scout camp called Egyptian Rat Screw (or egyptian rat bolt if there was an adult around). The game is really simple but it involves slapping the pile when you see a pair or a sandwich (which is a pair with a card in between). The guys always want to play it when the cards come out and so we have been playing it a lot, and by a lot I mean every other time we sit down.
The playing of card games is a good way to learn about the people around you, it is easier in this country for me to learn by card playing than by having a conversation (sadly). I can pick out who is cheating... which really I everyone at this point, but I can pick out who is cheating more (those are the tigures). I can pick out who gets fussy when they start losing (the poor sports) and the watch dog kids who are always pointing out who is making a goat (In spanish you hace chevo, which is cheating, but it translates directly to making a goat. Not to be confused with Haciendo pollo, making chicken, in Dominoes that is when you cheat by shuffling the pieces in your favor.
Its great how involved in the game everyone gets, there is lots of yelling and accusations about haciendo chevo. The best part is that despite the competetive behavior, when someone loses (by running out of cards), the person with the most cards just ends up giving them some more cards to play with.
Its kind of like how the country works, everyone is willing to yell about the price of the soda they just bought or the price of the guagua, but then they end up splitting the food they bought with the money they saved.
Oh yeah, and we call the game Pega once which translates to ´´hit the 11´´ because we also called it slapjack back in the day. Cards are so confusing because a spade is a ´pi´ (whatever that means), a diamond is a ´dulce´ (because it looks like a sweet, or candy), and club is a flore because it looks like a flower (which kind of makes sense), and a heart is still a heart. As for the face cards, they all have numeric names instead of King, queen, jack and ace. They end up being 13,12,11 and A respectively. oh and every game EVER played is called casino, maybe that´s spanish for card game... nope, I just looked it up on babel fish and casino is spanish for Casino.

P.s. Lots of grammar and spelling issues because it was typed in a internet cafe again, no debe juzgar me.

The Brigada Verde Conference

2008-11-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

I took some kids to the Brigada verde conference, we gave a charla about froming a strong brigada vedre group. It was really great. Except that I think I got some bad water and was having some problems with my gastro intestinal system, things are less fun when you have to go to the bathroom all the time. Things like 5 hour guagua rides are especially less fun, or more appropriately, more painful. I sat next to a guy on the way to Bonao, I told him I was from Constanza. He told me a long drawn out story about his lost love who used to live up there, and how she moved to Japan because she was the daughter of one of the Japanese farmers that was brought in during the fifties. He said he hadn´t been back for years, but he still remembers that there was the best Baruga in the country... you could buy it next to the Banco Reservas on Abreau st. I thought about it for a second, that was the same place I went to the other day, I told him. Then I asked him if we could stop talking about jugo de vomit because my stomach was not in the right place for it.

Baruga and Chemistry

2008-11-06T06:29:00.001-08:00

There is an analytical chemistry lab that I like to stop by in Constanza. I like to talk a little chemistry with Paul (Paw-ule) and Francisco every now and then. Today I stopped in and we talked a little bit about how much everybody hates stereo-chemistry (no matter what language it is in), and then Paul took me to get some ¨baruga¨.
I told him I would try it and so he took me to the place that was serving it, I guess it is a special occasion when they serve this stuff. When I told him I would try it, I had the impression I would be getting a dixie cup worth of it, instead I got a pint glass (actual glass too, which is a first) of a drink that looked like a mixture of milk and cottage cheese.
After I tasted it became clear why it looked like milk and cottage cheese. Apparently, if you put a little sugar and salt in milk and cottage cheese, Dominicans will drink it like water. I have never really had to chew a beverage before and so I was only a fifth finished with mine when he was done with his. I decided not to be rude and to finish the whole thing, that meant I had to pound it as quickly as possible. I got it down, I feel like I might vomitar and I remembered that I had tried Baruga a time before, only a sip. I gave it the name, jugo de vomit.

How many Dominicans does it take to use an ATM?

2008-10-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a clever punch line. The answer is 11, that is how many I counted when I went to the ATMs at the Banco Popular in my town. In their defense there were two ATMs, but there were two people standing at one and 4 at the other. The rest of the 11 were hanging out way closer than what we, as americans, consider ok ATM waiting line distance. I stood at the appropriate distance (which it technically is because I think they invented ATMs in the US) and was then cut by two more who went and leaned against the ATM they were waiting for. At that point I had had enough and decided to pay the extra 70 pesos and use the empty ATM at the BHD banco across the street, I got my 1000 pesos out and went to the tailor to pick up my pants (which I am having changed from size 36x32s to 32x30s, not because I have lost weight, but because I am adjusting my baggy pants to Dominican culture. Tighter = Más sexy.) It turned out because we hadn't had electricity since 8 in the morning this morning, that my pants where not done. So I am still wearing the gray ones that have an avocado stain on them from a week ago.
I realized today is Halloween, and they call it Halloween here. Nobody dresses up, so it really is just like any other night, except every in the neighborhood goes out drinking... so I guess it really is just like any other night.

I voted the other day, I went to the capital to do it. It cost me around thirty five bucks to get down there and do it. I guess Democracy is that important to me, and besides Joe Biden sent me an email the other day that said the election is in MY hands. I mean, the email was addressed to "Cassandra Ward" but I think I got the idea. Also, I can't lie, I just wanted to go down to the capital and pick up the odor eaters and foot powder my mom sent me (thanks mom!). When I was there, a few of us went to the swearing in ceremony for the 52 new Peace Corps volunteers for the country. It was very exciting for them, but as we stood around eating the free food and schmoozing with the ambassador about his sweet pool, a friend and I agreed that we had a very "Mathew McConaughey in the movie Dazed and Confused" feeling as we hung around the new kids. It was a bittersweet feeling, I am no longer the new kid in the country but at the same time, now people are expecting me to pull my head out of my ass and get to work.

Grandma has adventures too

2008-10-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

I got this email from my grandma the other day in reference to my mouse and cockroach problem. I thought it was pretty good:

Hi Chris,

I can relate to your home living environment. When I first moved to Japan we lived on the local economy, in the "town" of Ganosu on on the southernmost island of Kyushu. The kids, Jerry and Cindy, were small, two years old and 3 months old. I kept a fly swatter in the kitchen to swat the mice with to stun them so I could dispose of them. I seem to remember dispatching 26 mice in the few short weeks we lived in that house. They would run across the cupboard and stove right in front of me. I had traps everywhere. I got pretty good at it. Then we paid a rental deposit of $300 and had a brand new house built in Saitozaki on the other side of Brady Air Base. It had wooden floors and tile in the kitchen and the mouse population was considerably smaller. It wasn't a grand house but a Japanese/American mixed style in that it had bamboo cross pieces with mud for the inner walls. Then they plastered over them and it appeared fairly civilized once the mud and plaster dried after about of week. I doubt that they are still standing.

Well enough of ancient history. I enjoyed your blog entry.

Love, G-Flo

Friday Mornings

2008-10-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

That's today, I think I am going crazy or the community is playing some sort of sick prank on me. Every week I ask which day of the week is garbage day, and every week they tell me a different day. Two weeks ago it was saturday and wednesday, last week they told me monday and friday, this week as I went to put out my garbage on the street a lady told me that it is monday and saturday. I was upset. Getting rid of your garbage in a timely manner has a higher priority in a community filled with rats and cockroaches and in a country that you can't flush toilet paper after you use it.
So, I did what I have been doing for the past few months and I walk with my garbage down towards the center of the city and leave it in one of the garbage cans they have in the streets. Doing this is always a strange experience for everyone because when people on the street see me carrying a plastic bag full of something they assume it is filled with gold and american visas, everyone looks disappointed and confused when I put it in the garbage can. Also, when you put your garbage out on the street you don't put it in a can. You just put it out on the ground and a guy comes and shovels it up a couple hours later. It's kind of messy, but it works for the most part. On the subject of garbage, I also wanted to make a note that people in this country only create 1/3 as much garbage as people in developed countries. The problem is that the management of the garbage can be a bit problematic. I read in Newsweek a couple weeks ago that the Dominican Republic ranked 33rd on the worlds list of green countries and the United states ranked 39th. I'd like to think this is because I moved here and made a huge difference, but really its because the United States produces way more green house gases.
Also, shout out to Brad Kilbey for the ziploc bags a couple of months ago. I put food in them. I was told by a friend that I should start putting my dishes and silverware in to plastic containers also. I guess some people consider roaches and mice climbing around on your dishware gross. I think its dangerous, in a cool way, like bungie jumping.

Dude weekend

2008-10-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

I went to Joel´s site the other weekend, and met up with 4 other PCVs that were not girls. It was good to be back around some of the friends from training, we had not been at the same place at the same time for a couple months. We played beer pong, I got see what the ´campo´ really looks like. I bought a shirt at La Sirena for 150 pesos that makes me look like I am on a sufari and I used a latrine twice! It was pretty cool except for when this one guy woke me up by putting a machete up against my kneck when I was sleeping... somethings just aren´t cool... even in the campo.

Part 2

2008-10-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

I will sum this one up as quick as I can (I am in an internet cafe and I never seem to sound as clever or interesting when I write things on the fly). The second thing that happened to me in the 24 hour period, which actually happened that mourning, was when I ended up teaching an 8th grade class on accident. THe day before, one of the Phys Ed teachers from the summer camp-shit show- asked me if I could help him teach english and maybe some vollyball. I said sure, I mean it is clear that I speak english rather well, and I guess maybe I seem like the vollyball type to him. I showed up the next day at ten like I was supposed to and he wasn´t there. He tricked me! Or maybe the fact that I was his substitute teacher was lost in translation. There was another kid there who is eighteen or nineteen and is what the locals call a Tiguere (which translates to 1 part Jack-ass, 1 part sleez-bag and 3 parts bad ass). Apparently he was there for the vollyball portion of class time. I started teaching the kids the basics of english, the alphabet, numbers, colors and the conjugation of the verb ´to be´. I had a touch time though because the tiguere was flurting with the eigth grade girls and trying to ask me how to translate dirty phrases into english. I taught for as long as I could take the rediculous classroom behavior of Dominican children and then handed the show over to the Tiguere. We took them outside to the court and set up the vollyball net. I suggested we counted off for teams, but he told me that we were going to be captains of two competing girls teams. He said he would pick first, I said I didn´t want to pick teams (because I remember being picked last a time or two back in the day), but none the less we picked teams. I think I ended up with a better team than he did, because I picked my players based on hieght (and he picked the pretiest). We ended up playing for about 45 minutes of the 2 hour class period, at one point I made a comment to the kids that ´I think you guys are better at speaking english than volleyball.´ I made this remark because they were terrible. I thought that I had bad hand eye coordination, but appearantly they didnt play as much nintendo as I did as a young person. That´s the gist of part 2, there are probably a ton of spelling and grammar errors sorry!

Friday, Peace Corps experiences and sex appeal

2008-10-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

The past 24 hours gave me my money’s worth for Peace Corps experiences. Here is the run down in multiple parts (not in chronological order).

Part 1 Patranales (Possibly spelled incorrectly)

Every town in the Dominican Republic has one of these; it’s their celebration of the patron saint for that town. Depending on the size of the town it can vary from a couple days of dancing, drinking and partying to a full on music festival that welcomes the DR’s finest musical assets in Salsa, Meringue, Bachata and Mambo (lucky for me, at 30,000 people my town is big enough to get the music festival). It was supposed to happen September 9th to September 15th for Constanza but because of Hurricane Ike the party got moved to this week. It started on Thursday the 25th but I was still getting over the fever and didn’t make it. However, I did wake up to the firework show that went off at about 11:30 that night. Sadly I missed a good portion of it because I have grown accustomed to loud noises and explosions while I am sleeping. As I watched the fireworks from the balcony, I vowed that Friday night I would not miss Sex Appeal… that is the name of the country’s best salsa group.
I arrived at about 10:15 to the park where the show was going on, I ran into the youth I work with and a new Peace Corps trainee from Kansas. She was there with her 14-year old host sister and her 14-year old host sister’s husband. I couldn’t help but ask her who was chaperoning who that night. She told me they were actually both chaperoning her 13-year old host sister, who had recently disappeared with her boyfriend. I tagged along while she looked for the sister, and at the same time I looked for some juice to drink.
She didn’t find the sister, but I did find some juice. It turns out you can only by it for five dollars (150 pesos) and it comes with 400 mL (about a beer can) of rum. They only gave me a little plastic bottle (150 mL, and yes, I was taking notes on the quantities) of juice, which meant that the cranberry juice I had bought to quench my thirst actually burned a little bit. We returned to the stage area with my two styrofoam cups of pain juice just in time to watch Sex Appeal take the stage. I put one of the cups down, and told her that I am not here to suffer, and that I would not be touching the second cup. I also realized that if I was not the only one that they were selling this pain juice to, this place was probably going to get pretty rowdy. After this thought our conversation for the following 10 seconds went like this:

Me: “Hey look over there”
Girl from Kansas: “What”
Me: All those people are running it looks like we got a fight on our hands!
Kansas: Sure enough, there they are.
Me: Its funny how the military monitors events in this country, in the states its usually the police.
Kansas: Well they have bigger guns than the police
Me: Yeah but they’re never loaded, and I think everybody knows it- oh wait – he’s putting in a clip… uh maybe we should go over there for a minute.

We start to walk away but before we make it five feet the soldiers have the two fighters restrained. People shuffle back into the gap and the show goes on, actually I don’t think the show ever stopped. We watch the show for a little bit but she has to get home because her married host sister has to be home by 11 PM. I go and find my Dominican youth buddies (that are actually 20 and 21 years old, so not really youth) they offer me a seat and I watch the rest of the show from there. It was a really good view of everything, and it was one of the Peace Corps moments I had been hoping for. We were sitting on a ledge and the people below us were salsa dancing their hearts out, on stage there was a local guy who was invited to sing one of the classic songs for the band instead of the lead singer. It was pretty great because every time there was a break down, everyone on stage started salsa-ing away. In the mean time I looked up at the sky, and because of the giant floodlights that were illuminating the stage, there was a cloud of moths and insects flying overhead so thick I was reminded of Moses’ plagues on Egypt. The cloud was so thick that at one spot, directly in front of the lights, there was a clearing where people wouldn’t stand; except the poor kids who couldn’t find little salsa dance partners and instead decided to dance around swatting bugs to the music.

The fever

2008-09-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

I recend my comments made about Joel´s fever and about him being a big baby. It turns out he really did have a pretty bad fever, and how do I know? Because I now have it and it sucks big time. I have been hurting all over for the past two days and because my sheets are being washed at a doñas house across the bario, I have been sleeping in the -20 degree sleeping bag on a bed without sheets.
On the positive side, I have been able to use the fever to my advantage. People where being nice to me because I just got back from the states, and now people are being nice to me because I am sick. As long as I can keep finding reasons for people to be nice to me I will be set for the next two years.

Joel came to Constanza

2008-09-23T11:43:00.001-07:00

Joel came to Constanza and had to wear a sweatshirt after 7 o´clock each night. It was so ´cold´he picked up a fever of 101 degrees. However, I blame his mysteriously high core tempurature on the fact that he was bundled in a -20 degree sleeping bag with a sweatshirt when it got down to 60 degrees last night. He and the other volunteers in town kept trying to see their breath and waiting for it to snow.

Back in the DR (por fin)

2008-09-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

Hey all! I made it back in one piece, the evening spent in the Orlando airport was way better this time, with my sleeping bag and a bench to sleep on it was much more managable. I would like to thank everyone that told me they were reading my blog, when I was home at least 7 or 8 of you told me that you were reading it... which means that there are at least 7 or 8 times as many people reading it as I initially thought. Like I said back home, I am going to try really hard to get this thing updated frequently!

I noticed that it didnt take long to get my Americanisms back when I visited. I find myself doing the things I remember doing when I first got to the country. My first example is that I have been actually waiting in lines, and I get mad when people cut in front of me. This is not very Dominican, they call Dominican society a ´polychronic´ society, which means people don´t like to wait behind other people... its pretty annoying and I almost scolded an old woman who cut in front of me at the Miami airport (she was in boarding group 4 and I was in 3). To be fair, though she was dominican, we were still in the states at that point. And, once we got to Santo Domingo and she cut in front of me in the customs line I didn´t mind at all. Another thing I noticed is that I feel like I need to move faster, there were so many questions back home about what I was doing and what I was accomplishing. The people here dont mind if I take my time. I also keep washing my hands and trying to flush toilet paper, not a very dominican thing to do.

Needless to say, I am very excited to be back. I am finding that this is what I want to be doing and I am happy to be doing it, or it could just be the whole carriebean island thing... or the eating avocados every meal... or the fact that the guy in the bank salutes me. The cold showers are taking some getting used to again, and the fighting pack of dogs outside my window everynight is getting old. It has also been raining everyday, and that is more like Oregon than Oregon right now.

P.S.
The mayor finally signed my check for 36 dollars, its like I won the lottery.

On with the show

2008-08-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

A child was laughing as he rolled down the side of the mountain and I thought to myself, that is the happiest person I will ever see falling to their death. It was day four of a summer sports camp for the children of Constanza and the event for the day was a nature hike. The camp was run by the athletics teachers in the city and they invited Kathy (the volunteer down the road) and myself to help out. Over the past few months, as volunteers we have started using certain phrases to describe certain situations, in this case we used the phrase “shit show.” A shit show means any situation where there is a total lack of control and organization, this shit show happened to be on the side of a mountain.
We started climbing at around ten o’clock in the morning after we had a snack and I gave a brief lecture on why we shouldn’t throw our garbage onto the trail while we were hiking, the 200 kids that were sitting in front of me nodded in agreement (the other 200 where receiving a lecture from Kathy). At the beginning of the trail they gave every child 2 plastic pouches filled with water, that means there were 800 little plastic pouches that were ready to be thrown all over the trail for the next few hours. At the beginning of the hike none of the children were thirsty, and the pouches when punctured make excellent squirt guns. So as we hiked for the first hour, there was a squirt gun fight going on with all of our drinking water. I told the kids, you guys should save that water, you are going to want it when we get up to the top. Sadly, between yelling at them for that and for throwing the garbage all over the trail, they disregarded me as the angry gringo.
As I watched the trail I picked up the pouches, I found a plastic bag and began putting them inside, a few kids caught on and started picking up the pouches and putting them in the garbage bag. I was happy to see that some of the children were getting the idea, one kid was very helpful and even walked with me picking up all the garbage for me. We hiked for about 2 and a half hours before we got to the top.
At the top the view was phenomenal, we were on one of the highest peaks in the Caribbean and you could see all across the Constanza valley. I enjoyed the view for about 15 seconds before a child asked me for water, I started telling him I didn’t have any but before I could finish a little girl asked me if I had any water. I told them both no, and then 25 other children came up to me asking for water. As they gathered around me (they kept mistaking my bag of empty water pouches, that they had just littered all over the trail, for a bag of full water pouches.) I told them instead of drinking water, to think about how fun it was playing with the squirt gun pouches back on the trail, I thought I was really funny, but they weren’t laughing. At one point one of the teachers came up and asked for water, he was thirsty too.
The original plan was for Kathy and I to lecture the other half of the children on the top of the mountain, but because everyone was so thirsty we had to cut the trip short and get to the bottom as fast as possible in order to avoid being harassed by 400 thirsty children. One of the teachers said he knew a short cut to the bottom… I remembered for a moment the last Dominican short cut and how I ended up in the jungle for 5 hours longer than I expected. The teacher led the way on the opposite side of the peak, his plan was to head straight down the face on the cow paths that scattered throughout the forest.
The trail was overgrown, and very steep; I had to put the bag of garbage in my backpack because I kept falling down. Children were giggling and laughing as they made their way down, one would fall, get up and then fall again. “Make sure the little ones don’t fall over the edge” the director told me, at that point I was pretty preoccupied with not falling over the edge myself. Almost immediately after, a little girl runs down the steep part and lurches towards me. I put out my elbow and forearm and clothesline her before she can send us both down the side of the mountain, she is giggling as I help her get back up. “Don’t do that anymore, muchacha, you are going to kill us both” I tell her, “Lo siento!” she laughs and darts past me. It had just become my job to stand at the bottom of the really steep part and catch children as they ran down. After another teacher came down, I moved along and let him take over that job for a while. We kept hiking down the mountain until eventually we heard yelling from another ridge about a quarter mile away. The teacher in front of me looks back at me and says “how did they get over there?” I shrug, he yells for the teacher in front of him, but the kids explain to him that there is no teacher in front of him and he realizes that we have been following a 10 year old boy down the mountain for the past 45 minutes.
We were in the middle of the line of four hundred kids so there was an even split between the two groups, well at least we only have to worry about getting 200 kids down now, I thought to myself. The teacher decided we should start heading towards the other ridge and head straight into the crevice on our left… this meant the trail got steeper.
At this point I started cursing loudly (in English), I was upset that I had torn a hole in the ass of my jeans from falling and sliding down the mountain. As I was dusting myself off the child slides past me laughing, I can’t believe what I am seeing. Before I know it a fat kid falls past me and grabs on to me, he looks really scared. Perhaps because I was happy to see a kid who was finally taking the danger that was facing us seriously, or possibly because I was the fat kid from grades 4th-7th, I decided I would help this kid on the way down the mountain . . . until eventually I got tired of him grabbing me and pulling me over (don’t worry, one of the bigger Phys. Ed. Teachers helped him the rest of the way.) We stumbled and crawled the rest of the way down until we met up with the rest of the group, after that the trail was no problem, we were on someone’s property and when we found a house, 400 kids stood outside of it waiting for water by the bucket.
It turned out we arrived in the Colonia Kennedy, which is only about an hour walk from Constanza. We waited for the city school busses to come pick us up. As we stood there waiting, my friend called me up. “What’s going on?” he asked me.
“another show,” I told him.
“Same as always” He said.

Me and the Blog

2008-08-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

Using your blog is a lot like showering, after you go a few days without it you can't get in the habit of doing it again (Don't judge I live in the mountains and shower with very cold water).
As for the life in Constanza, things are starting to get going more or less. The school year starts on monday and this means I will be taking a slightly more active roll in my project. Next week I will begin training some Dominican youth about the environment and in a few more weeks we will start giving lectures in the classes around town. Last week I had my 3 month IST, which means all sorts of important things. First, it means I have been in my sight for 3 months (sixth months in country)! Second, it means I am expected to start getting down to business (the days of the community diagnostic are over). Third, I am allowed to start behaving like an actual volunteer (I can leave my sight when I want/need and I can participate in committees, woohoo!). It also meant I got to spend 7 solid days with my friends who I have barely seen over the last few months. We went rafting down a river in Jarabacoa, which is relatively high up in the mountains compared to the rest of the carribean (but it's at about half my altitude in constanza). It was a lot of fun, but a lot less organized than I remember from my rafting trips on the Deschutes. We hit a lot more rocks and that hurt, but I like to think it made the trip a little more hardcore.
Needless to say, IST was good, and I will start updating my blog and bathing again (the plumber and I finally fixed my shower with a plunger and my Leatherman)

The things we do for confianza

2008-07-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

I ate a chickens foot about 20 minutes ago, very disgusting. They were fried and everyone else was eating them like candy, I ate it like candy that tasted like dirt and bone.

Motorcylces

2008-07-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

Riding on a motorcycle makes you look cool, but when there are three of you riding on the motorcylce you look kind of silly and it´s a little scarier to boot. On the plus side, yesterday when I and two of the Ecoclub youth went from town to town I think we broke some kind of fuel efficiency record. We only used a gallon of gas to go all around the Tireo valley, it only cost us 6 dollars!

The 4th

2008-07-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

I left Constanza at 5 in the morning, got to the capital at 9:15 and then left the capital at 1. We got to Pedernales at 9 at night. I thought about how much time I spent traveling on the 3rd of July this year and realized I could have driven Los Angeles from Portland with that much time. When we first arrived I wasn’t sure if it was worth it because it was just a town in the middle of nowhere a couple of hours from the Haitian border, there was a park where we finished a few Presidentes and got to catch up with eachother (there where about 60 volunteers meeting up for the fourth of July and about 15 where from my training group), but drinking and catching up can happen just as easily in the capital.
The next day we set out on a couple of big farming trucks and drove for another hour until we hit the coast, from there we hopped on five or six little passanger boats and they took us to B’Hai de Las Aguilas (I think that is spelled right). Once I got there I figured out what we had been doing all the traveling for; there were the sixty of us, on a completely secluded beach with a perfectly blue ocean and calm waves. After eating my lunch of sardines and a peanut butter and Rolo sandwich there was nothing to do but relax and enjoy the fourth of July. There was a lot of hanging out in the ocean. I did some snorkeling and I found a starfish. To make things a little more American there was a game of football played between the new kids and the veterans (the new kids won, but I have no bragging rights because I opted for a game of dominoes on the side line instead). Also, my friend Tim spent the afternoon walking around with a little American Flag that looked like it belonged on a cake or in a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers; apparently drinking boosts his patriotism.
I applied sun screen three times that day and didn’t get sunburned.

Friends in unfamiliar places

2008-07-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

Its funny how much you can have in common with a 28 year old Japanese accountant or two 19 year old Mormon missionaries when you think about it. These are people who are also waking up everyday in a country that doesn’t speak their language, have their culture and isn’t necessarily welcoming them everywhere they go. The accountant is a volunteer for the Japanese peace corps (which is actually called JICA) and he is in a community a couple barrios down and is working on environmental education as well, because he has been here for a little over a year at this point he is way more connected than I am (or may ever be) and is showing me the ropes and the people I need to know. He knows more English than I do Japanese, but neither of us are familiar enough with the others language to have a conversation, that means that we communicate in Spanish. Our manner of communication is thought provoking because neither of us will ever be able to relax and speak freely in our native tongue and our conversations are often filled with me not knowing the word in Spanish, him not knowing the word in English and him taking out his Japanese to English and Spanish translator (which looks very futuristic I might add) and elaborating on the word in question. The thing that strikes me about the language barrier, is that this is only the tip of the ice burg when it comes to cultural differences between he and I, I can’t imagine what life is like in an apartment outside of Tokyo just as much as he can’t imagine owning two golden retrievers that weigh as much as he does. Yet somehow, we seem to get along pretty well and at times seem to understand our situations better than the Dominicans around us. As for the Mormon missionaries, who I don’t see nearly as often, but over the past few weeks have been making the rounds in my barrio, we seem to spend between a half hour and an hour talking to each other when we bump into each other on the street or in the internet cafÈ. As three gringos have a way of standing out and people tend to make guesses as the reason for my presence, I have been asked several times if I am a Mormon and how long my mission is by passing Dominicans. Culturally, I don’t think that they are as different from me as say someone from Japan, but we have our differences as well. There have been a couple awkward pauses after I curse or use the term God as an expletive, also when I mention to them my daily schedule. You see, they are working a lot harder than I am, and living on about 2/3 the money. They are busy from 7 in the morning until about 9 at night every day (except Wednesdays) doing missionary things, while I have been spending a lot of my time reading, eating chicken, playing dominoes and watching Telemundo (channel 10) with the family (I think watching telemundo is helping my Spanish because it is an American TV station with Colombian actors who speak way more clearly than anyone in the DR). I heard somewhere that Mormons make good FBI agents, I think it’s because they work so damn hard all the time, I mention this too them and there is an awkward pause.

Side note: I also ran into some protestant missionaries who are building an orphanage for some kids at the edge of town and one of the guys was the biggest jerk I met in this country so far. I thought it was kind of funny that he came from a very similar background as me (I think they were Southern Baptist, opposed to being American Baptist), I understand that he is filled with Christ’s love and all but he didn’t have to be a dick about it. As we walked away from the orphanage site (where it was clear we weren’t welcome), the JICA volunteer noted that this behavior seems to be the norm amongst those guys.

The waste water and the Regional Conference

2008-07-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

Alright, so that would be a huge project but I will see what I can do! I am going to start looking to the environmental board in town to see where I can start. Sounds like we will have to send Grandpa Bill down here when he gets better, and Bryant too because someone should hug those trees.
As for the immediate future of the my project, there is a regional conference for youth and my project partner (Cristian) has been selected to be the youth MC! This is all very exciting, the problem is that it takes money to have a regional conference and impoverished Dominican Youth don´t have any! This is where you, my American friends and family come in, each volunteer of the 27 that are attending (with their Dominican youth) is going to try to raise 100 dollars a piece. Here is the link,

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=517-253

and remember its tax deductable! And you don´t have to feel guilty if we end up with more money than 100 dollars because that will just make me look like an All'star (and make the conference better of course).

This weekend I felt like a winner

2008-07-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

I think I felt like a winner because I won things. This weekend, there were two escojo groups visiting, one from Los Guineos (the bannanas), one from Los Platanitos (the Plantains), this country is all about naming towns after fruits, vegetables or in my barrio´s case flowers.
They had a game where they gave out awards for who was the most crazy, pretty, intelligent, strong, etc. I won the award for most ´sexi´, I will admit I had the advantage of being the only gringo, but I like to think that my most ´sexi´ness transcends racial barriers.
On saturday I went to a raffle put on by a volunteer in the next town over, she is a technology volunteer who is raising money to put a computer and internet center in the town high school. I bought one ticket and got another one for free because the catholic priest bought one and didn´t want it. It turned out that both my tickets won something, I was very lucky. The first prize I won was a very shinny hair scrunchy, but because of my short hair and distaste for jewelry they gave me a free haircut at a barburshop in Constanza instead (which is awesome). My second ticket won me a cell phone belt clip, which turned out to be way to big for my cell phone. . . but I could still wear it around to look official if I wanted too.
Sunday, I didn´t win any awards, but my project partner was selected to be the master of ceremonies in a regional youth conference (we had a planning meeting on Sunday), which makes me kind of important by association. It was my first official peace corps meeting with other volunteers, it was pretty exciting.
After that I went up to La Cumbre (which was the training site this spring) and spent a little time with my old host family (the Rafeals). It was nice to go back to the town where everybody knew who I was, and to drink a little rum at the Plaza without worrying about ´losing face´in the community. (Speaking of which I learned what mamajuana is... which is not what you think... its really rum that has pieces of wood and roots and stuff soaking in it. Pretty wierd stuff, but it tastes good and the Dominicanos love it!)

Thanks community

2008-06-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

I started my interviews yesterdy with the comminity of Las Flores, they said the most important environmental issues for the area are to plant trees, pick up the garbage and reroute their black water so it isn´t going directly into the river. I´m all about planting trees, and I think I can get the Ecoclub and Brigada Verde to help with some trash clean up and with giving talks about proper waste disposal to the schools and the community. As for rerouting the PVC piping and concrete ditches that run under (and sometimes through) the streets to get the black water to go into a septic tank instead of the water... I´ll have to look into that one.

First night in Las Flores was hot

2008-06-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

After the big move to Las Flores this week I had an interesting moment when I heard yelling and breaking bottles outside my window. I looked out to the street and there was a big pile of garbage burning on the corner and people where cheering and running around throwing things. Does that constitute a riot? I asked myself, or are they just excited that tomorrow is garbage day?

Life changing experiences, or not

2008-06-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

So the other day when I was in Bonao I was served a plate of plantains that was piled high with onions, I mean there was a lot of them. I figured I would just eat them because I was hungry and I didn´t feel like being rude. As I ate them I began to tear up a little bit, and I though´t, wow I must be having one of those life changing experiences everyone keeps talking about! Seconds later, as my eyes started burning, I realized that onions will do that. An onion is a Lachrymator, now I have one more reason not to like them. But for the record, I did eat the whole plate of them.

A quick update

2008-06-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

I went to Jarabacoa this weekend and it was great, the scenery around there was beautiful. Lots of waterfalls and views from the mountains. It was only a two hour guagua ride and on the way back the driver let me play my CD in the CD player! I mean, it was bachata music after all. . . the stuff is slowly working its way into my system We went to a waterfall, that the Lonely Planet tour book claimed was used in the opening scene to Jurassic park, it was pretty enough but I think that movie was really filmed in Hawaii. I put the pictures up, check it out and see for yourself. And for the record, the fact that it was or was not in Jurassic park does not change the fact that it was beautiful and secluded. The only problem was that a snake fell down the waterfall at one point and was swimming around in the pool at the bottom, creepy. The donas baking business is back in action and it's my job to try out the new creations, actually, it's anybody who walks through the house's job. There has been some good concoctions and things are cheering up around the house. I am starting the Brigada Verde group this week and did some tutoring in physics and chemistry. It felt good to do a little deriving, even if it was just the formula for Kinetic Energy. The escojo group is getting ramped up for the summer too, we went to the scientific reserve on friday (which turned out to be a natural water park) and are planning to go to Bonao for the weekend. It should be fun and with my spanish improving I can actually catch the kids when they are making fun of me.

2008-06-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

Things have become increasingly intense in my household over the past few weeks. I was unable to put my finger on it at first but eventually was able to notice my host mother’s increasing silence towards me, within the past few days our conversations have dwindled to nearly nothing, not even a mention that there is dinner on the stove, yet alone a dinner conversation. Eating my third meal alone today, I was forced to ask myself, what I had done to anger this woman to the point of being almost completely ignored. There where several possibilities, I did not eat all of the food she gave me the first day, and I bought water from a bottle because I didn’t trust the water I was getting (with good cause). Both these gestures where likely seen as insulting to her, but I can’t quite believe that her growing silence is because I bought water or didn’t eat enough. To make things stranger, I read an article in our quarterly magazine yesterday that included an interview with the volunteer who had lived with her two years prior (and left for the states in November), in the article he listed some of his fondest memories of his time in the Dominican Republic and several of them revolved around my host mother and his time living with her. I doubt that he was particularly fond of silence and so I called him for some consultation in regards to the situation. It only took about 45 seconds and a few details to pinpoint the problem; and it turned out it wasn’t me.
As it turns out the entire globe is suffering from an increase in food prices across the board. In the Newsweek I picked up from the capital this weekend it mentioned that there were food related riots in 22 countries within the past few months. As far as I know there has not been any food riots in this country, this is most likely because Dominicans are able to produce almost all of the food locally that is in their diets. There are only a few food commodities that a farming town in this country needs to import, the two biggest are wheat and flour. The problem with my host mother lies in the latter, as a baker the tripled cost of flour crippled her once thriving bakery. Over the past three months she was forced to lay off all six of her employees and shut down her bakery completely until last Monday, when a repairman was able to fix the smaller oven. Last week she mentioned briefly that she no longer had a bakery, but that she was just an old woman making bread. I should have known then that she was not angry at me, she was angry at everything.
After the returned volunteer gave me the last few pieces to complete the puzzle I realized how self centered and foolish I had been. I was upset with this woman for making my experience here more challenging by treating me so strangely, I was thinking only about me and my comfort in the house. I know now that I should be thinking about the people who are down here, which is why I came in the first place. The new problem is that when thinking about her situation I am still left without an answer. I suppose the first step is to start talking.