five senses dominicanas

Sight: The Dominican Republic is a very beautiful country, with gorgeous tropical foliage and beaches to die for. The Entrena center where I attend classes every day is beautifully landscaped, with banana trees, well-manicured hedges, and giant pink flowers everywhere. However, the Dominican Republic is also a country with a severe waste management problem. I have yet to see a trashcan in this country. In my house, there is a trashbag tied to the counter in the kitchen and a small wastebasket in the bathroom, but it’s unheard of to have a garbage can on a street corner, and Dominicans think nothing of simply throwing garbage into the streets. There is apparently some sort of waste management system, meaning that every once in awhile I see someone picking up trash off the streets, but there’s not the kind of organized trash pickup we have in the US.

Smell: See also: lack of waste management in the Dominican Republic. Gross. However, there is also often the smell of delicious food cooking, or the fragrance of tropical flowers.

Taste: When I began applying for the Peace Corps, I was prepared to compromise my vegetarianism, knowing that some cultures simply do not understand the concept. For me, the Peace Corps experience was more important than not eating meat, especially since meat in other countries often comes from your neighbor’s chicken coop rather than a giant factory farm. However, PC told us that in the DR it was possible to maintain a vegetarian diet, and this has held true, although when I first told my Dona I was vegetarian she said, “Oh, OK,” and then asked me if I ate salami or hot dogs. But when I told her no, she came up with hard-boiled eggs and salad, and she’s been great about working around my diet. Last week I spoke to another vegetarian volunteer who has been in-country for about a year, and she told me that all three of her host families had been very accommodating towards her diet, and she found that after she lived with them, her families began to eat more vegetables, too. Vegetables are not a very common part of the Dominican diet for the most part—the basic dietary staples are meat (mostly chicken or fish), plantains, potatoes, and rice. But my Dona gives me okra, carrots, yucca, eggplant, cucumbers, and potatoes. (Although somehow she cooks the potatoes so that they turn pink and look exactly like ham?? It’s kind of unsettling but they taste just like normal potatoes.) Also, I’ve been comparing notes with other PCTs and apparently it’s not just my family; a lot of Dominicans are crazy about saltine crackers. I also get rice and beans pretty often, which is one of my favorites. Breakfast most days is cornflakes & milk, plus café con leche. (Dominican café con leche is made roughly according to the following ratio: one fourth coffee, one fourth sugar, and one half milk. It’s very, very sweet and not very coffee-y.)

There’s also tons of great tropical fruit available here in the DR, but again, it’s not a big part of most Dominican diets. At Entrena they give us fruit for lunch a lot, because they are familiar with the peculiar American tendency towards fruit-eating, but I don’t get it very often at home. The other day, though, I got fresh pineapple and papaya for dinner (along with some saltines), and it was amazing. Plus, both times so far that I’ve visited Karina’s house, her Dona has given me delicious homemade pineapple juice. Mmmm!

I’ve also discovered las galletas Dino, dinosaur cookies. They are the Dominican equivalent of Oreos; they’re not quite as chocolatey as Oreos, but they do have completely adorable smiling dinosaurs stamped on them.

Sound: Santo Domingo is LOUD. There are always tons of things going on: motorcycles zooming past, roosters crowing, dogs barking, sirens going, the telanovela in the living room, your neighbor playing merengue music at volume 11, and your neighbors yelling a conversation over the merengue. Since I can barely understand Dominican Spanish in ideal circumstances, you can imagine how hard it is for me to understand people trying to talk to me while we’re watching TV, the dog is barking, and someone is playing loud music in the next room. Almost impossible! I’ve adapted to the noisiness for the most part, although I still wake up every day around 4am when those darn roosters start crowing.

Touch: Dominicans in general need much less personal space than the average American. I’ve mentioned before how in carro publicos, seven adults fit in a five-passenger Toyota Corrolla. I’ve also seen up to four people on one motorcycle. Plus, it’s always in the 80s here… so people are often pretty sweaty. However, I’ve already adapted pretty well to the level of closeness, and carro publicos no longer seem that strange to me. The first time I rode in one I didn’t understand how it was physically possible to fit so many people in there, but now I know that it can and will be done!

we´ve been andaring all over the place

I´ve had more Internet access since coming to visit our volunteer (Helen) than I have the whole time I´ve been at Entrena. Plus, I haven´t had any digestive issues since moving away from my dona´s cooking. A girl could get spoiled!

Our visit has been really great on a lot of levels. It´s been really cool and reassuring to see Helen give classes, and even to help lead a game with one class. After 2 weeks of training, it´s wonderful to have a more concrete idea of what my own service will be like--though of course, every site is different, with its own challenges and perks. We´ve also been hanging out with Sarah, the other volunteer in town. She´s a more recent volunteer who just moved out from her last host family, and we got to observe one of her English classes.

It´s been a lot of fun talking to Helen and Sarah. Arianna and I are both already starting to pick up PCDR Spanglish, and it´s nice to have people who understand when you say things like ¨We were andaring,¨ (walking) rather than struggling to communicate with our host families. (I mean, my Spanish is definitely improving, but it´s still hard.)

Ariannna and I have also both been enjoying the slight change in diet here. We´ve eaten tons of fruit (you can buy unbelievably delicious fresh fruit here for very cheap, and yet Dominicans hardly ever eat it. And they will frequently insist on boiling their bananas.) Plus, peanut butter! And grilled cheese sandwiches WITH TOMATOES! (Like I said--spoiled.)

I´m still nervous about getting my placement site and integrating with my community, but I feel more confident and excited about it. Plus, Helen told us that most IT volunteers get sites with pretty frequent running water! I´m also looking forward to starting our community-based training (CBT) next week and getting some more hands-on training.

Oh, and another cool thing Helen has shown us has been all her back issues of the Gringo Grita, the PCDR publication. It´s written and edited by current volunteers, and it´s really funny and inspirational. Reading the highs (and oft-hilarious lows)) of other volunteers was awesome. Hopefully soon I will have my own stories in the vein of ¨So then I grabbed my machete and matared that tarantula!¨

Tomorrow we´re going on a trip to Nagua beach with some high school students, then returning to the capital for one more week of classes at Entrena. I will continue to buscar a way to upload some photos. It might be easier at our CBT site, I´m not sure.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend! I have running water and Internet, so I definitely am.

hola de la vega!

Hello! Arianna and I have successfully made it to our volunteer visit site in the province of La Vega (in the center of the country). We had a few rough spots, like when I tried to buy my bus ticket, I said I needed a ticket to La Vega and asked if the ticket vendor could give change from a 1000 peso bill. This is a big deal here in the DR, most stores refuse to change a 500 peso bill if you´re spending less than say, 450 pesos. But I figured the bus station was a good place to break it, and I was right. The guy gave me a bunch of change and started printing a ticket. But then he did not give me that ticket and stared at me. Eventually, he revealed that he had simply given me 1000 pesos worth of change, and had not taken any money to pay for my ticket. What? Who does that?

But anyway, I figured it out and gave some money back to him and got on the bus. We had somesort of vague directions, which involved getting off the bus before the main destination and taking a carro publico for a while. But we missed our bus stop (there aren´t really organized bus stops here for the most part, you have to recognize where you´re going and ask to be let off, which we didn´t). I went up to try to ask the driver for help and ended up getting advice from the entire front half of the bus, especially two very nice ladies who personally ushered us off the bus and found a carro for us--they said that if they negotiated the car price it would be much cheaper than if us extranjeras did it.

Then, in our carro, we had trouble describing exactly where we were supposed to get off, and had to do an exciting U-turn. In the final leg of our trip, the next car driver had no idea where we were going (we knew the address and that it was near the school) and kept yelling questions regarding our destination at passerby. Once again, we went past our actual destination and had to turn around. But now we´re here! Our volunteer is on duty in the computer lab for another half hour, so we´re waiting around and using some Interwebs.

I´m excited to get to see what it´s like being a volunteer in the field, and to have sometimeout of Santo Domingo. And a li´l break from my host sisters, who are adorable, but whose thirst for games of Uno is unquenchable.

Elizabeth: Bien, muy cerca (close)! It´d be more like, Todos los dias, mi dona me da galletas desaltina con el desayuno.

Everyone: thanks for your supportive emails/comments! It´s nice to stay in touch with everyone!

se me olvide!

Hello everyone! So this weekend I wrote two different blog entries on my laptop with the intent to post them when I got Internet. But here I am at the telecentro with my flash drive, only to discover that I never transferred them off my laptop onto the flash drive. Doh! So I´ll try to go back and post those later.

I still haven´t found a good place to upload photos, the Internet at this cafe is too slow & unreliable for successful uploads.

In short, life is still pretty good here. This Saturday was very exciting, we had a fascinating tour of the Ciudad Colonial, the oldest part of Santo Domingo. It was led by Lynn Guitar, one of the foremost professors of Dominican history, and she was great. Afterwards some of us went to the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful. Apparently they are the fourth most important botanical gardens in the world. I´m not exactly sure how they order these things, but it was definitely very large and very full of plants. It was a really nice respite from the busy, loud city for awhile.

On Thursday, another PCT and I will be embarking on a trip to visit a volunteer in the field until Sunday, and after that we really only have one more week here in Santo Domingo. I´m excited to start CBT, but it´ll be weird to have to get the hang of a new place again. At least our CBT site is smaller than Santo Domingo, so it will hopefully be easier... plus, my Spanish will be mejor!

My current low point is that I´m pretty gross and sweaty and our shower bucket has been empty since yesterday afternoon... hope we get our running water back soon or I´m going to smell awful!

fin de semanas... por fin

Hola! I´m back in the telecentro (Internet cafe) with Karina. I have my thumbdrive and am trying to upload some photos, but the Internet connection keeps timing out, so we´ll see if I have any success or not.

This week has been eventful... we´ve been practicing public transportation a lot and I feel a lot more comfortable with the guaguas and carro publicos. Tomorrow we have to get to downtown Santo Domingo on our own (well, without PC staff help). We´re going on a tour of the Ciudad Colonial (Colonial City) led by a noted professor of Dominican history. I´m looking forward to it!

This afternoon, we practiced getting to a bus station to travel outside of the city, because on Thursday we´re all leaving to visit different volunteers in the field. I really appreciate that they have us interact so much with experienced volunteers during training; it´s very hopeful. If they can get this far in 6 months, there´s hope for me too!

I also feel like in a week I´ve made a lot of progress with the language. I definitely still have trouble communicating, but it´s easier for me to understand the Dominican accent and I´ve picked up a lot of useful vocab. Por ejemplo, "puente," bridge--los puentes are good landmarks for knowing (and being able to describe) where to get off the bus. Also, "galletas de saltina," or saltine crackers, as in, "Every day my dona gives me galletas de saltina with breakfast."

Well, I think Karina and I are about ready to leave to visit some other PCTs para una cerveza at the colmado! I hope everyone else is having as pleasant of a Friday afternoon as I am!

ha ganado barack obama?

Hola guys! I just posted two previously-written blog entries, but here´s a quick update about right now. I´m in an Internet cafe in my barrio with my friend Karina, who is my closest PC "neighbor," a few blocks away. First we stopped at her host family house and had juice. It´s kind of like a gradeschool playdate.

The big news at Entrena today is the election at home. We´re all big Obama supporters, but the PC likes us to keep our political opinions to ourselves when among Dominicans. So when someone asks me what I think about the US elections, I say, "Ahh, me gustan todos los candidatos!"

Tomorrow hopefully we´ll have word about today´s primaries. In addition to talking about Obama, we´ll be taking a big excursion to downtown Santo Domingo and visiting the Museo Duarte, the PC office, the PC clinic, and eating at a restaurant. Very exciting!

Oh, and I also have a ton of pictures but I haven´t uploaded any yet. Perhaps tomorrow?

check-in

Hola! I’m writing this on my laptop in my bedroom at my host family’s house; word on the street is that there’s wireless internet accessible from our training center. If that’s true, I’ll be able to post this tomorrow morning! If not… well, you won’t read this until later!

Anyway, here’s what’s happened since my last update (which I wasn’t able to post until just now): I’ve moved in with my host family and have gone to several days of training at the Peace Corps Entrena center. My thoughts about the PC staff here in the DR were 100% accurate: they are an amazingly supportive, competent group of people. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to do this without their help.

It’s still pretty hard even with their help. The first night with my host family (which includes: my Dona [mother], my 12-year-old brother, my 7-year-old sister, my 5-year-old brother, and a Don [father] who is apparently working in Spain until December), I could barely communicate with them, because the Dominican accent is different and they speak very fast. I’d been home barely an hour when my Dona managed to make me understand that I needed to brush my hair because we were attending a funeral (that of her husband’s cousin, I think?). The funeral itself was interesting… I think it was Catholic, though it’s hard to say, since it was in Dominican Spanish, and I don’t know that much about Catholic funerals anyway.

At any rate, there was a lot of joyful singing, very different from any American funeral I’ve attended.

Later that night, I broke my bed as I was getting ready to sleep.

Basically, a totally awesome and reassuring first night with my family.

But it has gotten much better since then. I’ve taught everyone how to play Uno, which is a big hit. Luckily, I’m a big fan of Uno myself, so I don’t mind the endless demands to jugar Uno. Curiously, apparently when Spanish-speaking people only have one card left, they say “Una,” not “uno,” because “una” refers to the card, or “la carta” and the endings have to agree.

When I’m not playing Uno, I’m usually being taken around the neighborhood and briefly introduced to people whose names I immediately forget. However, I did meet several friend’s of my Dona who told me, “Oh, it must be so hard for you to understand your Dona! She talks so fast!!” That’s right, my Dona talks fast by Dominican standards. But I’ve managed to get her to slow down pretty regularly, and my blank looks are a good reminder when she reverts to her normal pace.

My family is described as Dominican lower middle class. My Dona runs a beauty salon out of her front room. Other than the front room, our house has a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. I have the smaller bedroom, and the other one holds all four family members and serves as a common room. I feel greedy for getting my own room, but the Peace Corps does pay the family a stipend and requires that I get my own space. And anyway, we’ve all been reassured that we shouldn’t feel bad if others are sharing a room, because the Dominican sense of personal space and privacy is very different from ours. This has certainly proven true. Our families are given training in how to deal with Americans (just as we’re getting training on how to live with Dominicans) and in theory know that we like to keep hold of our personal possessions. In practice, however, as soon as I unzipped my suitcase, my new brothers and sisters were all over my stuff. They particularly like my computer; I showed them how to play Snood, the only game I have on here. They don’t understand it, but they love that they can click the mouse and make something happen on the screen.

Anyway, another notable feature of my house is that it has a backup generator for when the power goes out. Which it does nearly every day, for at least a few hours at a time. I’m not exactly clear on what can and can’t run off the generator, but it’s enough to at least keep the fans going, as well as the TV. My family has a cable package that includes a lot of familiar channels—Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and TBS, to name a few—all dubbed into Spanish. It’s a bit of a culture shock in and of itself to hear Spongebob Squarepants (Bob Esponja) with a deep, Spanish-speaking voice.

Another unreliable service here is the water. All families keep a 5-gallon bucket of water in the shower, along with a smaller bucket for scooping. This way, if the water isn’t currently running, you can still take a bucket shower. I’ve gotten pretty good at the art of the bucket shower, if I do say so myself.

This is getting long, so I’ll just throw out one more adventure—transportation in the city. The state-run buses are few and far between, so most people get around by private carro publicos and guaguas. Carro publicos are shared taxis. A typical carro publico would be a Toyota Corrolla with 7 people inside it, four in the backseat and three in the front (including the driver). Riding in a carro publico is a good way to become very, very close friends with someone. The guaguas, on the other hand, are private minibuses. They’re about the size of an average 15-passenger van, but here they hold more like 40 passengers. Another excellent way to make close friends! Today my friend Karina, who lives with a host family a few blocks away from me, and I, successfully made our way home from Entrena by foot and carro publico without help from our Donas. Hooray! This afternoon we also took a guagua trip downtown and back, guided by a PC staff member. We’re going to keep practicing public transportation this week until Saturday morning, when we’re expected to make our way downtown without help. I’m un poco nerviosa about this prospect, but thus far no PC trainees have become permanently lost in downtown Santo Domingo, so I guess I won’t be the first.

Peace Corps training so far is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also very fun and exciting. I’m looking forward to becoming better at communicating and functioning in society, and between the other PCTs, the PC staff, and my host family, I have a great support network here. I’ve got water in my shower bucket and arroz y avichuelas for my lunch, so what more could I ask for?