12/9/08I’m addicted to Spider Solitaire. I must be. I can’t stop playing. I sat down to start writing this about 30 or 40 minutes ago. Who knows how long it’s been. I lose time when I’m in the world of Spider Solitaire. I kept saying to myself, “one more time. I’ll just play one more time, or just until I win one.” When I won though, I didn’t want to stop because I obviously had things going my way. I can’t quit while I’m hot!
But here I am. I’ve finally torn myself away. Hmm…maybe I should play a little Hearts, or Free Cell while I think about what I’m going to write. No, No, I should get to it.
Ok, so I’ve decided that I will begin journaling electronically. Not a blog exactly, but an electronic journal. I tried doing a handwritten journal, but that didn’t work for me. First of all, the journal I bout was terribly small and hard to write in. Also, my handwriting is painfully sloppy. If I concentrate enough to make it legible, even to me, then I have to write very slowly. It takes forever. I get frustrated, and end up playing Spider Solitaire. There’s also my blog. I started blogging and it seemed like a fantastic idea. It is a fantastic idea. The problem is that I don’t a ton of internet time. So when I get to an internet café, or make my way to Santo Domingo and use the wireless in the Peace Corps office, I always use all of my time checking my email, checking Facebook, or catching up on the news. In this way, my blog has been neglected.
Initially, I planned to do both a journal and a blog. I planned to use the blog to keep people up to date on actual events and things that I’m doing here, and use the journal for my own reflection purposes. Turns out, that’s a lot. Not gonna happen. So, my new plan is to keep an electronic journal that will melt both the journal and blog into one. I will type it out on the laptop and then decide what is worthy(coherent) enough to make it onto the blog. Then I can save those entries on a memory stick and quickly paste it on my blog when I get time for internet. If this works (not making any promises), there should be a lot more blogs coming your way!
So what’s been going on here in the DR? I’m not sitting in front of my blog at this moment, but based on my calculations I haven’t posted a blog since September. September?! Not sure on that, but I am sure that it’s been a while. So what have you missed? Where do I start?
TrainingHow was training? Training was good. I learned a lot about the DR, its culture, and doing health promotion here. And of course there’s Spanish. I have so, so, so much more to learn, but I do feel like I’ve come a long. As much as I hope and pray that it will happen, I’m most likely not going to wake up one morning, magically having learned all the Spanish I need to know. The whole two years is going to be a learning experience. It’s still frustrating at times, but I think I’ve come to terms with it.
Training was 10 weeks total. The first 3 weeks was spent in Santo Domingo. During the 5 weeks in the middle called Core Basic Training (CBT), all the sectors were split up and sent to various campos (rural areas) around the country. The health sector was located in Las Tablas, a small town in the southwest part of the DR. It was not easy, but in the end this part of training turned out to be really good and I learned a lot about health and being a health promoter in the DR. The only bad part was that we lost 3 of our 11 members in the health group during that time.
Hightlights of CBT:Super giant pigs/hogs/monsters
Beach trips
Playing dominos
KFC delivered on motorcycles
Visiting Dominican hospitals, clinics, and nutrition centers
Bucket Baths
River Trips
104F temperature, headache, body ache, vomiting
Diarrhea for 5 weeks
Spanish class
Tarantulas
Wonderful scenery
Crazy kids
After CBT we only had 2 more weeks of training left. That was kicked off by us meeting our project partners and going to visit the towns that would become our homes for the next 2 years. Who your project partner is can range widely, depending on the sector, the town, what organizations are present, and which of those organizations has the time/capability/motivation to work with a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). A project partner could be anyone from the president of a small women’s group in town, up to a larger NGO. PCVs are supposed to integrate into their community, get to know people, and build trust in the community before they start doing anything else. The project partner
12/12/08
Not sure what happened. As you can see above, I stopped in mid-sentence the last time I was writing. I guess I was boring even myself. Either that, or Spider Solitaire snuck its way back onto the screen. Oh, and now I’ve managed to master Free Cell also. I had played before, but I never had the time or interest to really get into it. Ok, where was I?
Project partners are our link to the community. So with only 2 weeks of training left we found out our site and met our project partners, who then took us to our sites for a 3-4 day visit. Trenita and I were placed in Guaymate, which is a small pueblo 30 minutes north of La Romana, in the eastern part of the DR. Even though I am in the health sector and Trenita is in the youth sector, we were both assigned to a youth group in Guaymate for our project partner. Because they were a youth group interested in health issues and health education, they were able to be a match for both of us. The visit went well. The town is an interesting place. It’s bigger than a lot of other sites. It’s actually an ideal site for us. It’s not tiny, but it’s not as big as some of the sites people in more urban or touristy areas have. It’s definitely not touristy, but it is 30-45 from the more touristy places of La Romana, Bayahibe, and their surrounding beaches. Also, there is a lot of need in Guaymate. This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that Guaymate probably used to be a batey, but has grown and become large and established enough to become the municipio or small pueblo that it is today. There are smaller bateyes in the area, it’s surrounded by sugar cane, and there are barrios within Guaymate that have the physical appearance of a batey. Bateyes are generally the poorest parts of the DR. They are really small and are built by the companies that own the sugar cane fields. People who live in bateyes are usually Haitian or of Haitian descent. There are many bateyes around Guaymate, and at least one barrio that’s actually in Guaymate looks much like a batey. Guaymate, on the whole, is definitely poor and seems to be an interesting mix of Dominicans and Haitians.
After our visit to Guaymate, all that was left were a few things to wrap up training and to prepare for being a real life volunteer. That time flew by and induction was there before we knew it. Trenita was selected by the other volunteers to give a speech at the induction ceremony in Spanish. She did a fantastic job of course, even though the American Ambassador showed up with his secret service and a little added pressure. Everything went well, though, and we became official Peace Corps Volunteers! A couple of days after that everyone said their goodbyes and we all went off on our separate adventures in the DR.
What’s Happening Now
Our project partner in Guaymate is a youth group that was formed almost a year ago through one of the many evangelical churches in town (most of the DR is Catholic, but Guaymate is one of the places here with a growing number of evangelical churches). They are a young (12-19yrs old) and energetic bunch that seem to genuinely care about their community and helping their neighbors. They are outgoing, smart, and have a lot of things going on outside of this youth group. They have school (at times at a private school in neighboring La Romana), jobs, and other clubs or groups. This part has turned out to be an advantage and a disadvantage. Because the youth in the group are so busy they have not been able to really focus on their partnership with us. They haven’t had time for meetings or to help in the community diagnostic, and most likely wouldn’t have time in the future to help us with our projects. For all of these reasons, it has been decided that we could have more of an impact in another community. It is very important for Peace Corps Volunteers to work and do projects in partnership with the community. Since we are only here for 2 years it’s necessary to form solid partnerships in the community, so that our projects can continue after our term of service is over.
We received the news about our site change almost 2 weeks ago and there is a meeting coming up on Dec. 17 where Peace Corps people are going to be meeting with people from a potential community in La Romana. If all goes well, we could be moving into our new community and into a home with a new family as early as next weekend. La Romana is much bigger, but it seems that the community that they’re considering is kind of on the outskirts of La Romana. Our work would be concentrated to that community. At this point we don’t have many specifics about what things could be like there. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing more after the meeting on the 17th. We’ve been a sort of limbo for the last 2 weeks, and we are both ready for some stability.
In other news, the diarrhea that I experienced for most of the 5 weeks during CBT is no more. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for the past month I’ve been dealing with the opposite – constipation! After about a month of each, it’s a hard decision, but I’d have to say I’d rather have diarrhea than be constipated. When I had diarrhea, at least I felt fine for most of the day, excluding the 3-5 times of day when the urge hit me. With constipation though, I feel crappy (pardon the pun) most of the time, which doesn’t do anything for my appetite. I’m up to about 25 pounds lost since I arrived in the DR. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, but I think it’s probably the lack of vegetables, and especially fruits in my diet. In Las Tablas I ate at least 3 servings of fruit about everyday, whereas here I’m lucky if I get 3 servings of fruit in the entire week. It just doesn’t seem to be as available here. It could be the area, or it could also be the time of year. It was the end of mango season when we were in Las Tablas and there were mangos everywhere. I miss the mangos…
I just considered that poop talk and the discussion of diarrhea and constipation might not be norm for you guys back home. Sorry if you were grossed out. I’ll try to keep the poop talk to a minimum in the future, but I can’t make any promises. It seems to be part of the Peace Corps culture here. Most of us have stomach issues of some kind, especially in the beginning, and we get used to talking about it in rather specific terms (number of poops per day and consistency of poops) with just about anybody who’ll listen. While I was in Las Tablas and the diarrhea had really ramped up (7-8 times a day), I knew that my doña, her daughter, and mother knew all the specifics of my problem. They were always there, every time I looked up, offering me food or something else they thought would help me. What I didn’t know, but what I found out after the worst of it had passed and I came out of my cave, was that pretty much all of Las Tablas knew what was going on with my bowels also. Everywhere I went, people were asking me if I was better now, and telling me things that I could do to help my unsettled stomach. Needless to say, this sort of thing helps you get over the embarrassment or grossness of talking about poop. As I said before (after which I told you another story about poop, so you can see how this is going to go) I’ll try my best to spare you guys back home.
Ok this is going to be a super-long entry and I may lose some of you guys in the part where I stopped writing mid-sentence, or the parts where I spend entire paragraphs talking about computer games, or in some of the parts about poop. I offer my apologies. Hopefully in the future I’ll be writing more often so that this craziness can be spread out into a few posts instead of jammed all in one.
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