A New Site For Christmas

12-22-08



The waiting is about to end. Or at least we’ll be waiting somewhere else. It’s been almost 4 weeks since we found out about our site switch. The knowledge of our move put things on hold for us, so we suddenly found ourselves with A LOT of time on our hands. Since then, we’ve been trying to take advantage of the time—studying Spanish, attending a World AIDS Day march, visiting La Romana—but those activities didn’t even come close to filling up this amount of time. After mastering all the various forms of solitaire that our computer had to offer, we still had time on our hands. After reading all the books that we could carry back from our last trip to the Peace Corps office library in Santo Domingo, we still had time. After spending countless hours people watching in parks in 3 different cities, we still had time. And after rationing out episodes of “House of Payne” and the “The Shield,” and watching “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in English and in Spanish, we still had time. After making this:

(I call it “Llegò La Navidad,” or “Christmas has arrived” in English), we still had time.

After all that time waiting and preparing we thought today was going to be the day that we were going to move to the home of our new host family in our new community, but, alas, today will not be the day. The good news is that we are, in fact, going somewhere, just not to our new community. Turns out the family that we were going to be staying with is going to be out of town visiting family for the holidays. Since we already told our current family that we are leaving, we would rather not take it back at this point. I feel like they’ve been very patient. We’ve been telling them that we are leaving for the last 2 weeks or so, but we haven’t been able to tell them when. With Christmas coming and family coming to visit, we’ve been kind of leaving them hanging. I was glad when we could give them something solid, and it wouldn’t be good to have to take it back. So, we will be spending Christmas in the Capital! That has a nice ring to it I think. We were definitely excited to meet our new family and spend Christmas with them, but I think it will be considerably less awkward with just the two of us than it undoubtedly would’ve been in a new family, in a new community, trying to get to know them, they trying to know us, all in the hubbub that is Navidad in the DR. This puts things off a little more and creates more time to fill, but I think it will be for the best. After Christmas, we’ll go to our community, meet everyone, and get to work. I can’t wait!