An Avocado a Day, Two and a Half Books a Month

Only the better off Dominicans have the luxury of eating an apple with any frequency—at US $1 each or more, they have got be imported all the way from Washington State (or else from the moon, at that price!). Most families share one or two at Christmastime, and are a surefire hit if you show up with a few after a trip to the city.

On the other hand, it sure is a good thing I acquired a taste for avocados over the last couple of years, because avocado season here runs from mid-July to oh, nearly March I’d say, and considering that fresh produce is hard to come by here, coupled with the fact that between my neighbor and I we have at least eight trees on our properties, I have overwhelming access to and consumption of these fine, Omega-3-rich green goodies.

A normal person, especially an American 20-something woman, would worry that eating up to 2 (huge) avocados a day, most days, might result in some additional poundage. But I like to be different. Attributable to several factors (it’s hot; I walk A LOT; I am BORED TO TEARS of the food here; anything other than coffee in the morning should be a punishable offense) I am as thin as I’ve been in a while, so it’s cool with me I double my daily fat intake comiendo aguacates. It still doesn’t amount to much. My concern is that these, too, will lose their luster long before the season ends.

***

People ask often enough what we, Volunteers, read, both on the inside and outside of the Peace Corps circle. I just did the math and I have read 31 books since September 13, 2007 when I left the USA. An average of 2.5 per month. What can I say, I’m and Oro…

… in order, with the best in italics:

1. The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner
2. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
3. Monique and the Mango Rains by Kris Holloway
4. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
6. Naked by David Sedaris
7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
8. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
9. Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez
10. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
11. Paula by Isabelle Allende
12. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
13. The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr
14. To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel
15. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
16. This is Not Chick Lit by Elizabeth Merrick
17. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
18. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
19. Atonement by Ian McEwan
20. The Namesake by ?
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
23. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
24. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty
25. Midwives by Chis Bohjalian
26. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
27. The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende
28. Nine Hills to Nambonkaha by Sarah Erdman
29. In the Name of Salome by Julia Alvarez
30. Sushi for Beginners by Marian Keynes
31. Marley and Me by John Grogan

***

Last but definitely not least, please give a warm welcome to the new group of Peace Corps Dominican Republic Volunteers who will be working in health, business, youth and water/sanitation (just like my group!). Volunteer groups arrive about every six months, alternating between these sectors and environment, education and I forget the other. Anyways, the “my sector” group ahead of me is winding down (they leave in November) and the new “my sector” group arrived, well, today, I think. This is a milestone for my own group of Volunteers; it means we are nearly at the half-way mark. We are no longer the “new” group. We have accomplished much and are (supposedly) nearing the elusive “lightbulb” moment they tease us with when all our projects and work and frustration come together and we start seeing fruits of our labor.

My First Dominican Car Accident

So I was coming back from Chery's site today (congratulations to her on the inauguration of her community and computer center) and our guagua was involved in a car accident on the highway. Two guaguas and one or two private vehicles rearended each other... I think we were last in line. I AM FINE. This was a hysterical Peace Corps Moment, not only because we were not the least bit distressed or hurt, but we saw it coming and STILL weren't worried because the gugaguas here always ALMOST crash but never do. Until today. I am not sore at all or anything, but if that changes I'll be sure to be a grown up and see the doctor. Anyway, so I was with someone who had a plane to catch so we took advantage of our rubia-ness and got ourselves on a different guagua that was going by, and made the trip, which should NEVER take less than 2 h 45 m, in 2.5 hours, including the lost time in the accident. They were FLYING. Incidentally, this was not the cause of the accident as when that happened we were going a much normal pace in traffic.

Anyways, if you read this and several previous entries, you'll notice that I've had some interesting things happen to me of late here in the DR. Thankfully nothing has been too serious!

Ratoncitos en mi ropa interior

Sunday afternoon, sitting in the neighbor’s enramada, getting good-naturedly chewed out for sleeping with earplugs in because I won’t sentir potential things out of sorts during the night. I sleep with earplugs in because of the chickens cantaring (although I think “singing” is not nearly an annoying enough word), but also because of the critters that scurry and play in my house at night. I have a TON of cute little lizards which don’t bother me at all. I try to ignore the tell-tale little black pellets I find and tell myself that all the scurrying I hear is the friendly lizards.

So, Sunday night I go to bed without the earplugs… maybe I was feeling guilty. I shouldn’t have, because what I need to worry about sentiring at night is rats in my dresser moving my clothes around and pulling things from one drawer into the other. I’ve found rat turds in my drawers all along, but actually hearing them in there was new. Obviously this was not an ideal situation, but I didn’t know what to do at 3 a.m. so I shoved in my trusty neon orange tapones (interestingly, also the word for a traffic jam) and went back to an unrestful sleep.

The phrase in Spanish for “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed” is “Me levanté con el pie izquierda.” IMAGINATE! Obviously I had to get dressed Monday morning so inspecting the damage could only be put off for so long, plus I had somewhere to be. I figured my clothes would be out of ordered, and even perhaps with a few new holes, but I didn’t think I’d pull open the top drawer and find the damn rat STILL THERE. Well, we surprised each other. I squealed, and she ran out the back of the drawer into the safety of the rest of the dresser. I gingerly pulled the top drawer, full of my freshly hand-washed underwear (humph!), and dumped the whole thing out on my cement floor. To my extreme dismay, I heard squeaking. I used the handle of my escoba to fling my panties off the pile one by one. I heard myself let out one of those long, slow, crescendo-ing cries of alarm as I came upon a little, wiggling, pink, furless, newborn baby ratoncito furrowing about in my skivvies.

BEELINE to the neighbor’s house, because I sure as shit don’t want to deal with this. And plus, mom is still hiding in the dresser. So my vecina mandars her 14 year old son over to help me. He whips out my machete (yes, I have a machete, although I feel much less safe with it in my hands than when it’s it the sheath), scoops squealing baby onto the tip (please, please Daivin, don’t poke it and make it bleed it’s baby rat blood on my underwear…) and flings it out the door for the chickens or opossums or whatever to snack on. Then I made him pull out all the rest of the drawers, hopefully finding and getting rid of the mama rat. We found her, but she ran away before he could put down the drawer and arm himself with the machete again.

I just spent 900 pesos (almost 30 dollars, a significant portion of my monthly stipend) on poison… rat poison, cockroach poison, ant traps, Raid spray, and half a Saturday cleaning and placing all this toxic goo. So aside from being totally grossed out (I had the willies all day) I was annoyed that this happened after so much time and financial investment. It was like they were laughing at me.

Well anyways, I really did have somewhere to be and how I was half an hour behind schedule so I had to hurry up and get going, and then my 9 am meeting to weigh sugar (as Claudette calls it) was a mess—literally, the KitchenAid mixer with 2 pounds of melted cocoa butter, 3 pounds of sugar and a pound of pure cacao paste was already turned on when they plugged it in and the whole gloppy mess fell all over the ceramic tile floor (in another entry I will blog about the lovely sanitation resources of our beautiful chocolatera). When we remade the mixture, the women ran it through a machine made for grinding cacao (to make the granulated sugar not feel so grainy, instead of paying for powdered sugar) and sprayed liquid milk chocolate all over themselves, the floor, the walls, the machine and anything else around (I, miraculously, escaped).

Ugh. Jo’s rat story still wins: I make no claims to be able to beat arriving to site to a bed invested by a family of rats, but I now have my own to share. Is it a rite of passage? Something to bond over, or just to laugh at (my mom and Cheryl sure got a good kick out of it yesterday…)?

In other news, the busted part of my toenail (Cheryl also thought that was funny… are we noticing a pattern here?) fell off and I’m on the mend. I handed out the last of the Actas de Nacimiento today, just in time for school registration (a convenient coincidence for me). I thought I had scabies but it seems to have cleared up without taking the medicine, so I’m thinking it was something else, which is good. Other than weighing sugar and passing out birth certificates, I haven’t been doing that much work, but I’ve definitely been busy. Mango season is just about over, but avocado season is off to a delicious, Omega-3-y start. I ate almost two whole ones today… that weight I’ve lost is going to be reappearing de una vez.

Oh yeah, and it’s been H-O-T. How am I going to survive the summer, and is my family ever going to forgive me for letting them come visit me in the hottest month of the year?

Stay tuned!

A New Universal Truth?

Forgive me for oversimplifying the Peace Corps experience, but I can’t believe a paragraph in the book I’m reading, “Nine Hills to Nambonkaha” by Sarah Erdman:

“… Near the edge of the table, she scatters her best-selling item, her backup, since vanity is a luxury for most of these women: Maggi flavoring cubes of all different persuasions—shrimp, onion, tomato, chicken, bushrat. They are the heart and soul of Ivorian cooking, the only source of spice other than dried hot pepper and bay leaves. The magic little blocks of MSG are a cheap substitute for any ingredient.”

Fellow Volunteers of the world (or at the very least, Ivory Coast and Dominican Republic): Know what I mean?