Little News and Some Notes

Work has been keeping me busy, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to check in with everyone. On Wednesday afternoon it became nearly impossible to conduct classes in my classroom. A road was being built right outside (meaning they were laying down rocks over the already existing dirt, and then flattening it to the best of their ability). Huge Catepillar and JCB equipment went back and forth over about a 50 yard span all afternoon, about 20 yards of which were directly outside the windows of my classroom. While this was by far the most difficult-to -deal-with distraction that has taken place directly outside the classroom (to the point where it's louder than normal human talking), it reminded me of the many that occur on a day-to-day basis, including:

Donkeys braying (this is by far the most common and the most funny. By the way, donkey in Spanish, as many of you already know, is a burro. Keeping in mind that in Spanish "ito" is added to names to indicate that someone is small (e.g. Pablito, Juanito), I have therefore declared that baby donkeys are called burritos. Keep that in mind the next time you're at Taco Bell).
Horses neighing.
Roosters doing whatever they do.
Sidenote: If anyone has ever played the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I'm fairly sure that they came to my neighborhood here to record the animal sounds for that game.
Haitian street fights.
Motorbikes.
Montessori pre-school students (we have one upstairs in the school) inexplicably being allowed to play drums outside.
High intensity games of Dominoes (Dominoes here is more hardcore than hockey in Canada and David Hasselhoff in Germany combined).

I'm sure there's more, I just can't think of them.

Other than that there are few changes in my life over the last few weeks. I am now teaching a writing class. I am also working on a census that will blow the census done by the organization in August out of the water. We've basically mapped every single house in the entire town, and can attribute each set of data to each house specifically. Plus we changed the questions so stuff that are more applicable to our organizational goals. I'll have plenty of interesting numbers to crunch over the next few weeks or so before I come out with my report. That's my daily job in the morning before teaching in the afternoon. I'll have to compile a post about the census with a few interesting stories.

Tuesday night we plan to go to a staff member's house who has a TV and constant electricity to watch the election results come in. I'm thinking about bringing a camera for some video documentation, but I still haven't decided yet. It will be a pretty partisan crowd; we're all twenty-something volunteers from the Northeast, Illinois, and California (who actually care about stuff like this: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/). I'm sure we'll (read: the two guys) make the night into some kind of drinking game, probably involving the word "electoral."

Other than that, I hope everyone is doing well. By the way, I am now an hour ahead of all of you on the east coast. I guess the Dominican Republic already has enough sunshine that they don't need to save daylight over the summer.