fotos, la grippe, and brief fame

Hello, hello! I'm back in the capital after my site visit. Yesterday was Dominican Labor Day, which I celebrated by hanging out at a colmado with my companeros and drinking juice. (Not a euphemism, for the record. A bunch of us are getting over a mild bout of "the grippe" [Dominican for any sort of cold/flu illness, in my case a cold], so we really were just drinking juice.)

I also uploaded some photos of my site. As always, the whole set is on my Flickr, but here are a few highlights.


Here's my school!


And my computer lab!


Here's my host family, minus one of the older sisters who is away at university.

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A view of La Vega. My region is a valley between two mountain ranges. It's pretty!

And finally, a note on my brief fame--on Thursday we're having our swearing-in ceremony, to commemorate the end of training and the beginning of our stint as actual, real-deal volunteers. Some people from the US Embassy will be there, as well as some Dominican officials. Our group had to elect someone to give a speech at swearing-in, and we picked, um, me. The speech has to be in Spanish, which I am un chin (a little) nervous about, so I'll let you all know how it goes.

Anyway, after Thursday's graduation, we have a big party at the Embassy on Friday and on Saturday we're all shipping out to our sites for the duration!