Peace Corps: Dominican Republic

Nombre: Jenn
Ubicación: Las Matas de Farfan, Dominican Republic

In May 2005, I graduated from Carroll College with a B.A. in History and a minor in Anthropology. As useful as my majors are, I'm working in Agriculture with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic!

08 marzo 2006

A real life PCV

So, I´m not so great at this blog thing. By time I get done with my e-mail, I am tired and don´t want to write a blog. Anyway, I´ve been doing great. Training is all day, most days. Last week, luckily was a short week with a three day weekend for independence day and a trip off to meet a real life PCV starting on Thursday.

For our three day weekend, my housemate and close neighbor traveled to Playa Caribe with our host brother, his girlfriend, and another brother and sister...in a Geo Metro. Now, I told you about travelling in public transportation, but the clown car act in a Geo Metro seemed a bit much. Actually, seven people can fit in a Geo Metro quite comfortably. The day was AWESOME!!! I deemed it the BEST day ever in the DR. The beach is known for its deep waves, and sharks, but fortunately we did not run into any sharks. My friend, Michael, who cannot win in English Scrabble, beat a native speaker, and fluent speaker, in Spanish Scrabble. I was proud. All in all, we had a great time playing on the overly crowded beach.

Thursday morning, I got up before the sunrise to get on the road to my far off campo. I made my way to the highway to catch a bus into the city to catch my long distance guagua. Well, to let you all know, as PC volunteers we have to carry helmets with us to ride motocycle taxis. So, there I was, on a packed bus, standing out because I have a large backpack making me twice as wide as I am, then carrying a water bottle and my brand-new, shiny, bright helmet. And to top it off, I'm white, so I REALLY stuck out. It's definately like living in a fish bowl here, and I thought I lived a pretty high profile life back home. Well, I made it downtown and on a four hour bus ride without problems. But once I got to Neiba, I had to ride a motoconcho for thirty minutes up into the mountains. Now, the mountains were a lot like our mountains, but my thirty minute ride was probably like going up the W for thirty minutes. The problem was, I didn't pick a big enough motoconcho for my bags and me. So, I ended up walking for about a mile up a very steep hill with my pack after a long day of travelling, and I'm incredibly out of shape. Next thing I know, I have a trail of kids following me as I walked into the campo, I felt like a celebrity as I searched for the other Americanos that I was going to be staying with for the weekend. Luckily, since there aren't a lot of Americans that live in the small campo of San Pulin, it wasn't hard to find them. My parade led me to the school, where I found Cassie teaching a group of first graders. Cassie and her husband, Nathaniel, are both Agroforestry volunteers who no longer do Agroforestry work. I guess it's incredibly hard in their community to get people motivated to do anything. So, Cassie is now teaching kids and working with mothers and Nathaniel is working on designing an aqueduct that collapsed from a landslide, as well as designing a children's park.

The weekend was pretty relaxing. We did a lot of sitting with Dominicans. Dominican time is incredibly slow, so you spend a lot of time sitting and talking, not pushing subjects. I guess it's considered rude to not sit and talk about the family, the weather, the harvest before you get down to business. Every house we went to, whether were were there to talk about healthy babies, the organization of the teenager's club, or trying to get a kid to come to school, we had to sit for a long time just to prevent offense.

Another thing we went off to do was chop sticks for a fence around the volunteer's garden. We took a few 9 year old boys with us to help carry the sticks back. Now a 9 year old Dominican boy sure can use a machete. On the other hand, a 22 year old American Girl sure cannot use a machete. It was a disaster waiting to happen. As all young boys get when they are holding something as cool as a machete, one of the boys stopped paying attention to where his feet were going. He slipped, and the machete sliced open his forehead. Not a pretty sight. There wasn't much blood, but the welt was as big as my thumb. Word to the wise: Don't let 9 year old boys use machetes.

Well, I´m looking foward to getting all the snail mail you´ve sent me. Be sure to check on my pictures, I hope to get them up soon. Also, Michael´s blog has some awesome pictures of the beach. You can also find PC/DR pics at www.flickr.com/groups/pcdr . Hope to hear from you soon!!