The Flood

I'm going to start this entry off by apologizing for any typos or grammatical errors that I make. It's hard enough for me to see my computer screen, never mind correct mistakes. I'll get into that in a bit. This week has yet again been another crazy week. This is going to be a long entry. Just a heads up.

Tuesday morning I went out into a neighborhood called Barrio Blanco, about a 15 minute walk towards the other side of town, to make an attempt at completing a census of the neighborhood.

Barrio Blanco is one of the poorest neighborhoods in town, with an appearance very similar to a shanty town during the Great Depression. It's incredible, this neighborhood backs up right to the main road and is just behind tall luxury condos and resorts, yet this is the condition that many Dominicans (and Haitians) live in here. They live on under a dollar a day. Barrio Blanco is a strong mix of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans. The questions on my census included everything from how many kids live here? what grades are they in? do they have birth certificates? to do you have a bathroom? latrine? neither? to how do you get your drinking water? All volunteers are required to spend at least one morning on the census, and it certainly gave me a feel for a different part of the community.

In Barrio Blanco there are some well constructed small houses, but most are tin roofed places that seem to have been built in a hurry. Every house I visited I was invited inside immediately, Dominicans and Haitians alike are very hospitable when it comes to stuff like that. It's truly amazing the power of TV, most homes in this neighborhood had TVs, and some had crazy sound systems and speakers, but then little else. Due to the higher number of Haitian immigrants in that neighborhood there were a few times when I got caught in the crossfire of creole conversation, as Haitians spoke to each other in their native tongue. Overall the process was well recieved by everyone there, with a few people eagerly asking us how their son or daughter could enroll in the school run by DREAM.

Wednesday morning I found myself observing classes at Colonia Nueva, the public school directly adjacent to the DREAM Center (the public school where I work here in the callejon). Classrooms are SO overcrowded, another volunteer and I found ourselves observing from outside/the threshold of the doorway because there was absolutely no way we would've find space inside the classroom. Things I learned just from my first class? Marta, the Dominican history teacher believes Christopher Columbus was a thief (and rightfully so). Sex and religion is not off limits or inappropriate either. What is the reason that we're alive today? Marta asked her students this. Kids yelled out all kinds of answers (insert sexual comments from the kids that are all deemed mostly appropriate here). No one got what she was looking for, her answer was God. I don't think there's going to be a Scopes Monkey Trial here or anything anytime soon. So religion (okay so that was evolution, but still) it is.

I've spent most of this week preparing and planning for my classes to start tomorrow morning. I'm teaching English, Math, and eventually Computers here. It's all a little frightening, never mind that it's still pretty difficult just to adjust to living here. Now time to talk about why I can barely see my computer screen.

Friday night the water went out. Sounds silly, I know, I never thought something like that would happen. The power goes out here all the time, making water pressure pretty much terrible. But I've never seen anyone run out of water. All the power was on, yet there was no water. I turned on my shower...nothing. Sink...nothing. The only thing is, apparently my sink was no ALL the way off when I went out for the night (not having showered after a long day at work, I'm sure I smelled nice). I came back at about 3am to find the guachiman (yes that is legitimately Dominican for watchman just like poloche is Dominican for t-shirt [derivative of polo shirt]) sitting outside waiting for me to tell me that my apartment had flooded. Sweet. I walked in to an inch of water on the floor...my faucet trickling, barely on. But on enough that seven hours and plates in the sink allowed that inch of water to cover my floor. Well, my laptop was on the floor.

Yes, I'm typing on my laptop right now. Somehow the hard drive and everything that makes the hard drive function all survived my sinks attempt at drowning it. Somehow, my screen did not. I turned on my laptop right away and only saw a black screen. But I saw that my hard drive was working because well...the light that indicates it was working lit up. The next day I realized that when I turned it on again, I could faintly see the box to sign in. Certainly not well enough to see anything beyond signing in. So today I tried again, same thing.

Except I realized something.

All those times that the power goes out I use a headlamp to make dinner, read, to play the guitar I borrowed from my neighbor, whatever. So I grabbed my headlamp, put it on my head, turned it on and sweet. I can see my screen a lot better. Not very well, I see best when something has a white background (word, AIM, typing in a url). And can't see very well when something is dark in color (parts of ESPN.com, most pictures). Plus I have to lean in really close, but anyway, it'll have to do for now. I have no way to get a new screen, and I have no idea how much it would cost. The good news is all my information on here is safe...somehow.

Yesterday I comforted myself by going to baseball practice in Islabon with my friend Many (as in Ramirez, not as in a lot). I met Many and his cousin Gabriel through people working with the DREAM Project. He picked me up on his motoconcho (that's a motorbike) and I took my first ride on one. FYI...watch where you put your right caf, the muffler's on the right side and will cinge the hell out of your leg if you're not careful. On the way over Many mentioned something about limpiando (cleaning) the field. Practice for the baseball team had turned into an engineering expedition.

The field was soaked from rain over the past week, and within a short amount of time a team of about seven people had made it at least only damp. Their moethod of draining? Building small canals right off the field that run into a bunch of huge holes. The water runs out into the holes, and then buckets are used and passed in a line to each other as far away as possible and dumped out. Pretty interesting stuff. I was immediately part of one of the bucket lines.

Later on I played catch and shagged some fly balls that people hit into the outfield. Overall the field is pretty nice all things considered, the grass is certainly longer than what we're used to. Oh, and I was initially sharing center field with a horse. There were actually a few times when I had to put my hand out, like you would when anticipating that you're about to touch the outfield fence. Except I put my hand out to make sure I didn't run into the horse. He eventually moved once he saw all the commotion.

Once again, if you can believe it, there's so much more that's gone on that I haven't even touched upon.

School starts tomorrow, it's certainly going to be interesting.

La Loma

Today's my ninth day in Cabarete and I'm really to the point where I could have nine huge entries about each day. Really, at least so far, so much has gone on. This past week was my "orientation" week, which meant that the other volunteers (they're all girls by the way, Cape people, think Hyannis Mets '05 times two) and I went to a bunch of cool places and did all kinds of stuff over this past week. Taking a guagua for the first time, going surfing, helping out with kids' windsurfing lessons, and exploring an old Spanish fort are just some of the things I did this week. You'll hear about most of that stuff in future entries. Instead I'll continue to focus on giving you a feel for my immediate surroundings.

The most exhausting experience of the week was climbing the loma, which is somewhere between a big hill and a small mountain and is located at the end of my street (aptly named callejon de la loma). The loma is a national park with an abundance of caves, paths, and horses running around. Chiche, the gatekeeper for the DREAM Center (the school where I work), acted as our guide as we headed out for a day on the loma to go swimming in a cave and eat lunch. Initially I intended to memorize the path we took to the cave so that I could come back whenever I wanted. Initially that was possible as we walked down a narrow dirt road. It became a little more difficult once Chiche took a sharp left turn into the woods on a small footpath. Then it became impossible once we got to Chiche's loma hut after about a mile and a half walk up. We rested for a few minutes, he told his family to start making lunch while we went swimming at the cave, and then he pulled out his machete.

Chiche bushwhacked his way through the woods to eventually bring us to one of the caves. It turns out there are a lot of caves that are much more convenient to get to, but Chiche was hellbent on going to this one in particular. We wound through the woods (I swear there are times we could've been going in circles), trying to not let branches drill us in the face after the person in front of us pushed them out of their way. I had no idea how he knew where he was going, or how he found any sort of reference points amongst those trees, but he did. After another long walk we arrived at the mouth of a cave. Peering in it really didn't look like there was any water. It looked like a cave with a rocky bottom. But a closer look showed water so clear that it didn't look like water.

A 2+ mile walk up a hill in a country where sitting at home makes you sweat meant that everyone was in the water in a hurry. Soon there were ten gringos and a handful of Dominicans in the icy cold water. It really was a scene straight out of the beginning of a bunch of horror movies...white "tourists" splashing around and laughing in a dark freshwater cave. No one got dragged under by some random monster/animal in this one though It's a little funny, the Dominicans were freezing while all the white people were fine, not having been "spoiled" by the warm waters of the Caribbean their whole life. We dried off and headed back to our camp, I assume on the same "path" we came on but who knows.

Back at Chiche's it was nice to finally relax and be well fed. Dominicans here are very generous. The portions of food Chiche delved out were way too big, even for me. The food of choice here is known as la bandera (the flag) because it is the Dominican meal. Rice, beans, and chicken. Plain and simple. And good. Chiche threw in some avocado too. Sitting around eating in the shade with a nice breeze was the first time since I stepped out my door earlier that morning that I wasn't wet from sweating or from swimming. That rarely happens here, it's probably one of the most underrated aspects of day to day life back home in the States.

Quick rundown of everything other stuff from this week (that I'll get to more in depth later [I'm definitely going to forget some stuff too]):
Guagua - cheap form of public transportation with 20 people on a bus (read: a little bigger than a minivan).
Spanish fort - pretty cool, I mean if you like forts.
Puerto Plata - meh.
The DREAM Center - wicked nice.
Surfing - frustrating, hard, tiring, and induces sore muscles and bruised ribs.
Helping with windsurfing lessons- awesome except for not knowing how to windsurf.

Tomorrow morning I'm working on a census. I'll be walking around to houses in the neighborhood and asking questions so we can collect data for our school. I think I may try writing more often so I can get more stuff in. Stay tuned.

El Callejon

Within minutes of getting off the plane in Puerto Plata I was drenched in sweat. I wanted to blame it on my 100 lbs. of luggage but over the last two days I've realized that even the slightest movement here, or no movement at all, induces quite a bit of sweating. And I don't sweat.

I live on the third floor of Plaza Mora on the callejon, a dirt road off of the main drag in the west end of Cabarate. My apartment is really nice, all things considered. I have tiled floors and ceiling fans and a fridge. The electricity comes and goes during the day, but outside of the fans there's really no need for it then anyway. There's only cold water, which means I take really quick showers. That's something that's definitely going to grow on me...or grow old fast.

I have a balcony on the backside of my apartment. The view is nothing special (see above), just a trash heap, some trees, and a few abandoned stands. I also live down the hall from a makeshift TV studio. Apparently, despite the fact that some people here are resigned to taking bucket showers, many Dominicans here do own a TV. I have a cable box but no TV.

In the callejon there is a constant buzz of motorbikes as they zip up and down the street. Sitting in my apartment it sounds like someone's always mowing a lawn outside, that's how many there are. People beeping horns or farmers driving through the neighborhood with loudspeakers trying to sell their product from the campo seems to be a normal occurrence. There's also almost always merengue or bachata or reggaeton being played really loud down the street, so it's becoming the soundtrack of my life.

Walking along the callejon to the main road only takes about 5 minutes. We got hit by the very tip of Tropical Storm Fay so it's been raining off and on since Friday, turning the dirt road into mud, and making the short walk a little more of a pain. I've almost taken a dive about ten times already, so I'm sure it'll happen eventually. Along the walk into town there are a bunch of colmados, small shops that sell stuff like eggs or bananas or water. Dogs roam the streets and there's been a donkey and a baby donkey hanging out along the side of the road for last few days.

On the main road there are quite a few white people once you get into town. It's pretty split between Americans and Europeans. Walking on the main road you can see the division between tourism and the Dominican neighborhoods. The road really seems to act as a dividing line. The callejon is on the south side of the main road, running inland, perpendicular to the road, while the beach, condos and restaurants are all on north side.

Last night most of the volunteers (there are about 10 of us) hit the beach. There seems to be a ton going on there at night. There are a few American owned bars along the beach, so I caught Michael Phelps eighth gold medal. It's nice to know that I'll be able to catch a lot of American sports at these bars. It actually felt good just seeing Bob Costas on a TV last night. As much as I like Bob Costas I never thought I'd find myself saying that.

I'm starting to get settled here. Volunteer orientation starts tomorrow morning.