Update, One of Two -- both a little old.

October 7, 2007

The last few days have been pretty rough for me, emotionally. Nothing remarkable has happened; I think it’s more that the past three week’s stresses and strains are building up. I’m not sure if my head is messing with my stomach or the other way around, but I’ve been having a bit of trouble with both.

Getting comfortable with the group of volunteers is taking longer than I had hoped, and that has been making all the other stuff more challenging because the others in the group seem like they were all fast friends and I don’t know where I fit. I’m trying to keep a positive frame of mind about it because I know if I let it get to me too much it will be even more of an obstacle, and anyways, I know that I have a pretty darn good cheering section back at home and that all of you are rooting for and supporting me from afar. It goes along way, knowing that.

Anyways, a bit of news on the DR front…
My new host family: Dona Ana and Don Yea are the head folks in my new house. Their youngest daughter and her husband also live here. They have a huge family and everyone lives, more or less, on the same street here in the barrio. They gather here daily. Everyone seems really nice, but we don’t have a lot to talk about yet because I’m still learning Spanish in the first place and they have a pretty thick campesino accent out here. I think I understand about 30% less here than I did with most of the folks in Santo Domingo, but like everywhere, some people are easier to understand than others. Overall, though, the people here are harder. The house I’m living in is more humble than the one in SD, but it’s a lot more what I expected from this experience. We still have electricity (most of the time), running water (most of the time), flush toilets, and the like, but the house has a zinc roof (which, actually, I love the sound when it rains)…

It’s about 10 degrees cooler here than it was in the capital. The low here is probably around 72 and it the capital the lowest I ever, ever saw the thermometer on my alarm go was 79… at 4 am or some ridiculous hour like that. The cooler weather has been great, but I wish I had brought another long sleeve shirt or two from the capital. The ones I have with me are going to get a lot of use here.

Our trainer, Tim, said that pig and chicken poop only smells when it rains. Well, it’s been monsooning here for the most part. And boy is it smelly. Good think my stomach problems have been achy, instead of queasy, or I’d be in big trouble right now.

The mosquitoes are doing better as far as leaving me alone. I’d say I’m down to an average of 1.5-2.5 new bites per day. Los mosquitoes me pican mucho. This is a result of much effort, between the vitamin b, repellent, long pants/shoes/socks, so it hasn’t been without a cost to my comfort. It’s definitely been worth it though, because the 8 bites a day thing was driving me absolutely bananas. There is some other biting critter here, some sort of mite or something, but we think they are harmless and except for the fact that they leave red blotches with little droplets of blood, they don’t itch or hurt or anything.

Yesterday was, shall we say, an adventure. Definitely a lesson for Kira in patience. It was absolutely infuriating. We went into Moca to find an internet café, and first of all I forgot to bring the phone number where I can be reached here, so that was annoying. Anyway, we went to two cafes that were closed before we found one that would be opening in 45 minutes. So we wandered around and came back at the indicated time, and what do we find? Well, we found that the center only had four functioning computers, two of which had been snapped up by a couple of pervy teenagers who had prepaid for three hours and spent the whole time watching Japanese anime porn (on public computers!!! They have NO SHAME!) and taking bathroom breaks with the animated sex just got too hot for them. It was frustrating because there ended up being a line of 8 or so volunteers and we only had two computers, and these stupid guys just didn’t have any sense of public courtesy (or 8 gringas STARING THEM DOWN WITH EVIL EYES) to realize a lot of people were waiting and just cash out their remaining time to be polite. Whatever. Anyway, we got back and it was dark as shit and we had to walk from the main road to our barrio in the bitch black and lots of lodo (mud). I was really irritated from the long wait (almost 3 hours) and because my feelings of being an outsider had been getting to me, but I’m feeling better today.

The first day we were here (Thursday) we saw the hugest pig I have ever seen in my life. I wasn’t close enough to say for sure, but I’m willing to bet he went as high as my shoulders (or higher) and his ball sack was probably as bit as two bowling balls sitting side by side. That was one potent pig. Hahaha.

(break for BINGO)

I just got back from the Sunday tradition of bingo with the dona and the family up the road, and what a riot. I didn’t play for long because they only told me to bring 15 pesos, and I would have needed 200 or something to play as many games as they played, but it was fun regardless. I had a hard time with the numbers because of the accent – for example, what would be 66 is “sesenta seis” or even “pareja de seis” (pair of sixes) would have made sense, but here they say “pai say,” which took me forever to figure out. And what’s worse, they have crazy thinks like “la bruja” means 13 and “mariaelena” is 69… I have no idea.

Let’s see… what else…
Moca, well, Juan Lopez de Mocha, where I’m living for my CBT these six weeks, is absolutely beautiful. It is surrounded by lush (almost) forest, with what appears to be deciduous trees mixed with palm trees and all sorts of fruit and other trees and foliage. There are avocados, oranges (but they’re green on the outside here), plantains and banana trees everywhere!

A side note on PLANTAINS aka. Platanos:
If you are not careful here, you could very easily end up being served plantanos, in one form or another, in every meal. Here are some examples, and I’m sure there are more than the types of preparations I have thus far encountered:
- Tostones: this dish uses “platanos verdes” or green/unripe plantains. They are sliced into chips and fried, and served with salt and ketchup like French fries. Pretty good.
- Platanos Herbidos: This dish is simply boiled platanos verdes. Totally bland, and so pretty hard for me to eat because they are dense and tasteless.
- Mangu: Platanos verdes cut into chunks, then boiled, then mashed into a really thick mashed potato kind of dish. Hopefully served with butter and slightly crispy sautéed onions and garlic, and pepper. With all this, mangu is decent, but without it its pretty much just as bland and boring as platanos herbidos, above, and they serve it as the main dish so it’s not like you can get away with a tablespoon size portion of this stuff.
- Platanos Maduros Fritos: Fried ripe plantain slices. The platanos maduros are a bit sweeter and do actually have some flavor. This is how plantains are usually served if your order them in the States, and the sweetness of the ripe fruit caramelizes when you fry it so it’s kindof a dessert.

Okay… moving on (sorry this is so long but this is kindof my first chance in a while to do a rundown on the latest information)….

Our group overall is holidng fast – we’ve only had two people ET (early terminate) so far, and from what I hear that’s a pretty good number for where we are at in the service process. I think I wrote about the guy a while back who pretty much left our second day in-country. The second one was a girl in Youth, I think, who left our first day back after our site visits last week. I guess she was just not feeling the PCDR thing, and I’m not sure she had really looked inside herself to be sure why she was here. You really have to know why you came in the first place in order to pull yourself through when the going gets tough. I think she was having a hard time with the language too, which makes all of it that much harder.

One of the things here that is challenging is that, as with everything, all host families are not created equal, and especially when it comes to feeding us a balanced diet. My host family in Santo Domingo was pretty top-notch when it came to my meals, but Dona here is not so much on top of the fruit and vegetable situation. So yesterday, I really wnted some fresh fruit, so I walked over to the colmado (more on that in a bit) to get some and there wasn’t ANY. NONE. No fruit available for purchase. How can it be that there is no fruit available in a country where they grow orange and banana trees on the side of the road like a maple grows in Oregon?... I have no idea.

Ok, what is a colmado? Did I already write about this??? I forget. Oh well. If you are still reading this insanely long entry you can probably stand two more minutes, right?

A colmado is like a really small mini mart, but they are on every corner and every block, and I don’t mean one at each intersection either. I mean it is not uncommon to have one colmado on each corner of the same intersection (or equivalent distance bc this country isn’t really laid out in an organized grid pattern), multiple blocks in a row. In addition to the fact that colmados are about as numerous here as mosquitoes, they sell everything (except, apparently, fruit on an odd Saturday in October). Really, they sell evertying. They take the place of a grocery store altogether for many people. The folks here do their grocery shopping 60 pesos at a time (US $2). You can buy 5 pesos of vegetable oil (they put it in a little plastic sack and tie a knot at the top). You can buy 20 pesos of cheese, 3 tsp of flour, two eggs, one cookie, one cigarette and a trial size of Pert Plus shampoo and conditioner. Again, it’s crazy.

Ok, enough for now. In case you wondered, this entry is almost 1900 words long. Thanks for your attention!!!!

Love, Kira