maybe i could inject bug spray intravenously

i am so sick of mosquitoes. i think one of my incredibly personal secondary project here will be to start the war of the mosquitoes. they fight all guerilla style and i am gonna walk in with my deet and bug bomb the daylights out of them. that's the plan at least. i would be a hero...

anyway sorry for the delayed post, i have been very busy and important. well, the busy part is true. we have youth groups formed and it has taken a lot of work to throw together a project with them in the short amount of time we had left. that said, i am very excited about the project we have created. it's gonna be a night of merengue when the jovenes will talk about the history of merengue, read poems they have written, talk about the traditional clothing, and read a biography of a famous merengue artist, fernando villalona. and they are gonna dance. we somehow ended up with the leader of a local dance club in our youth group, so he got all of his friends in our youth group and what was a 4-5 person youth group became 12-14. it's gonna be great, they are fantastic dancers! and the best part is that all their stuff is already choreographed so we didn't have to worry about preparing that part of the presentation. the other cool part is that the volunteers are just supervisors and the jovenes do most of the visible work. i mean, we wrote the letter to the mayor and i stalked him until we thought he would be in his office (its really hard to actually catch him in the office--the mayors here spend a lot of time out in the town and in santo domingo) so we could deliver our letter requesting space for our presentations. and he said yes! so we do a lot of the background work, but the kids are the ones taking the reigns on the projects. i am very proud of our kids. also there is one, Adolfo, who is an aspiring writer which makes me so happy. yesterday another volunteer, Alex, and i spent hours typing up some of Adolfo's stories so he can have hard copies. there are computer labs here, but you have to pay to use them, so Adolfo just had a giant folder of all his hand-written stories and a memory stick that our jefe had given him. just reading his stories, and understanding what i could, was interesting. he has a very strong voice, and his stories almost sounded like fables. he has a very strong writing style and i hope he keeps writing because i think he could really be successful. we are going to teach him how to set up a blog today so he can "publish" his stories for free, and if he does end up doing it i will post the link here. but i'm not sure if he will be able to, because, like i said, the computer labs aren't free and if he couldn't use them to type up his stories, i doubt he can to update a blog.

Let's see, what else...OH we went to the beach last weekend! it's the first time i had been to the beach since coming here and holy cow it was awesome. first of all, we were all pretty stressed from the week and working ourselves so hard with our jovenes, so we kind of had this unspoken agreement to check all peace corps related anything at the door and just enjoy our time at the beach. which we so did. it was beautiful with the giant palm trees and the incredibly blue water. and the white sand. and the sand dollars. and the gentle waves. jealous yet? well get this: after the beach we went to our leader's boyfriend's land aka his coconut farm! and i ate coconut straight off the tree. now i'm not the biggest fan of coconut, but that was delicious.

The drive to the beach was also great. we were all loaded into two pickup trucks and i was in the bed of one of them with Brendan, Ben and Paul. We got jostled around quite a bit, and i have a beautiful shiner on my knee from a particularly mean speed bump, but it was the best ride ever. we went through the mountains to get to the beach (it was over a 2 hour drive on not always so very paved roads) and it was just so gorgeous. we actually all stopped to get out and take pictures once. On the ride back we had a bunch of coconuts back there with us which was an interesting experience because a bunch of bouncing coconuts can actually be a bit dangerous. we almost lost some shoes to the bouncing (which in hindsight is probably my fault for taking my shoes off...) i did develop a handy tactic for going over particularly large pot holes or bumps in the road: hop into a squat position as fast as possible so that you just bounce on your toes and don't ram your tailbone into the bed and your spine into the side every time the car bounced. winning.

Anyway it was the longest day maybe ever, but also one of the best i've had since being in the country. and that is really saying something because i've had more than my fair share of fantastic days. i do have a peeling back because, being the genius i have proven myself to be (remember the rain situation?) i forgot to put sunscreen on my back. i remembered the rest of me though! so at least the rest of me is burn free. i've actually gotten obsessed with my sunscreen because the sun is so strong here, and i've gotten so tan, that i feel like a walking warning sign for skin cancer. i've even taken to putting sunscreen on my legs which, i am not exaggerating, i have never done in my life. even when i was a kid i never put sunscreen on my legs. but now? SPF 50! i am not leaving this country looking 10 years older thanks to sun damage. no sir, not happening.

In other news i got proposed to (this is a very mild way to describe the situation). by "got proposed to" i mean this incredibly drunk man begged me to marry him and take him to the states while he was practically falling over. actually he did fall to his knees once. it was a pretty uncomfortable situation, and nothing happened, but i have never been confronted with such a persistent person before. no matter how many ways people told him to leave, he just wouldn't. so we left and that was that.

And then last night we all american-ed it up. first the girls came over to my house and we painted our nails, chatted, learned a dance from Yaazi, and threw popcorn into our mouths. that took two and half hours. Then the guys came over and we attempted to watch a movie, but the volume on my computer wasn't working out, so we listened to music (ranging from nsync to mumford and sons, what?) and played spoons with pesos instead.

So now it's sunday and so far it's been a pretty great last weekend in El Seibo!

The gods must be crazy part 41

so remember that last post when i mentioned not following rule #2 often enough? yeah. busted again. this time was awful! i had just finished playing dominoes with my friends at Don Garcia's house and knew the storm was coming but was hoping i could beat it. as if the storm was gonna wait 20 minutes for me to get home. please. about 3 minutes into the walk it started to rain. but did i turn back or go to a nearby friend's house? oh no. that would have been giving up. it also would have been way too smart. no, i decided it was only sort of raining and i would keep on keeping on. oops. a few minutes later the sky opened up and i found shelter under an awning of a closed colmado. and i stood right under the electrical box until the other lady who was there pointed it out to me. so that was my third great decision. after a few minutes i thought it seemed like the rain might be letting up so i decided to try to make some headway on my journey home. luckily maybe 2 minutes after leaving the awning the rain got even worse than before. men started yelling at me that i was gonna get the gripe and i just smiled and said "i know" which made them laugh. at least i could find humor in my soaking wet, chilled situation. i decided to take shelter again under another awning but that didnt work because the rain went full on horizontal on me. at that point i dumped out my waterbottle and put my phone in it in the vain hope that that could save it, even though it had already gotten pretty gosh darn wet. and it worked! so yay, i'm not phoneless. about 800 motoconchos offered me bolas home, but i figured at that point i couldn't get wetter, and it was probably safer walking and risking the gripe than to ride 3 to a moto sans a helmet in the crazy rain. i saw one guy riding and using both of his hands to shade his eyes. so that made my decision for me. No motos. by the time i finally got home my skirt was so wet it probably weighed 10 pounds and my shoes were slush. gross, i know. believe me, i know. Dona Agueda took one look at me and was like "get in the house! get in dry clothes! dry your hair! do you want to get the gripe???" so despite my protests about drying off a bit first, i was hustled into the house dripping wet, not even allowed to leave my disgusting toms outside. don't worry though, i did take a picture. someday i will put it up. (edit: i put it up)

so yeah, i basically foretold this event and yet did nothing to prevent it. you know why? because i am a genius. want further proof of said "genius"? the sky is still falling at this point, and i'm hoping it lets up so my friends and i can go dancing tonight. you're right, i will never learn.

In other news, i am liking this town quite a bit. apparently for safety reasons i'm not supposed to say where i am. i might have already. i can't remember. anyway el seibo is great. oops i said it. stalkers keep away! This morning my friend and i scoured the town for jovenes we could practice our teaching skills on. actually we were more trying to practice our "assessing the reading level of the children" skills. we weren't being annoying for fun though. it was homework. anyway i bribed the kids to help us by promising to take their pictures afterwards. those pictures are also pending. sorry, but i'm lazy. no getting around that. It's a risk carrying my laptop all the way to the internet source without knowing if the sky is gonna go nuts on me. because, take my word for it, you NEVER know. case in point: today.

Anyway, i'm all dry now and, si dios quiere, gripe free. suck it rain.

rule #2: never leave home without your raincoat

I've broken this rule more times than i would like to admit. especially considering how many times it's backfired for me. there's really nothing like walking home in toms that are soaked through...mmmm good times.
so yeah, it rains here a lot, but don't let that fool you: it's still hot as hades. and it's just gonna get worse. luckily last summer prepared me for anything the DR can throw at me. heat-wise at least. the hurricanes and tropical storms will definitely be new experiences.

let's see what else...it's semana santa here, which basically means the town shuts down and everyone goes nuts drinking and having a grand old time for 5 whole days. so i'm looking forward to seeing what happens this weekend!

In other news we have had our first case of dengue. my friend got taken into the capitol for a few days to rehydrate and get his fever down but he's coming back today. Dengue sounds kind of like mono...but from a mosquito. they are awful here by the way. my ankles are constantly one giant red blob. but anyway about dengue: people react to it in very different ways. some people just feel like they have the flu, and some people hurt so badly that it's called "breakbone fever" and you feel like your joints are breaking and all sorts of fun stuff. the best part is, there isn't really medicine for it. universe:1, PCDR: 0.

Training is going well. ehhhh, well...it's going. just kidding, it's cool. i'm really liking the tranquilo training here as opposed to the incessant onslaught of information that was core training. CBT (community based training) is way better. we have youth groups we are supposed to be working with, but (back to that whole it's semana santa thing) they keep on not showing up. i think 6 kids came last time. that works out to 1.5 kids per group. i think we can do better. anyway once we actually have kids we are going to have a technical project for them that we will complete during our time here. Like, making a recipe book, or a children's book, or a youtube video or radio show. i'd be down with any of those ideas by the way. especially the recipe book, because i want to make a recipe book of dominican food anyway. so i could basically cheat and make the kids do it. it's called winning, guys.

ooh other news. i have a resident mouse in my kitchen. i have named him hewie. giving him a name makes him cute and not gross. once again: winning. actually he is really cute though. he's little with great big dumbo ears. i'm not saying i'm excited about having a mouse living in the kitchen, but i am definitely making the most of it!

To wrap up: i finished the last of my peanut butter tonight. bummer. looks like its rice, beans, veggie stew, and friend bananas here on out! until i buy more peanut butter.

ok that sounds ungrateful. my dona's food is great, just sometimes unvarying. she actually sat me down the other day to ask me what kind of veggies i do like since apparently i'm not eating enough. and here i thought i was. clearly i'm wrong though and it was time for a serious conversation about it. i tried to explain to her that i really do like her food, but i don't like eating until i'm stuffed because i feel sick. at that point she thought i had the big D once again and started to basically mime it telling me she will start serving me less fat again. (by the way last time she served me "less fat" i had fried bananas and fried cheese for dinner. what?) anyway i told her no no no i'm not sick anymore, i just get full quickly. that seemed to make enough sense to her and she accepted my explanation. only after many protestations that i like her food though. i think we are good again though, because she finally let me do the dishes! this is big news guys. i haven't had enough confianza yet to get into the kitchen, much less to actually wash the dishes. but now i do. WINNING.

ps, i totally understand that it sounds weird to be pumped about washing a sink full of dishes. but believe me, this was a giant step.

Baby's first tarantula!

Sorry for the delayed post, but i have moved and it's taking a while to get re-settled in. All the education sector people are now living in El Seibo, a town in the eastern part of the country. I once again have a little old dona who is super sweet. this one, dona agueda, is much quieter though, which is...very different. i am definitely still getting accustomed to not having 800 people running in and out of my house all yelling for each other all day. Now it's just me, my dona, and our little dog bandito! he is only 8 months old and is pretty cute, despite his unfortunate handicap of being a small dog. he is always trying to hump my leg though. gotta put an end to that particular habit!

So I'm sure you are all wondering about the title of my post. yes indeed, i saw my first tarantula! it was pretty exciting and i forgot to be nervous. we hadn't learned yet about their mad jumping skills, so i was more intrigued than nervous. besides their bites hurt like a mother but they don't kill you or anything. anyway, i had my volunteer visit last weekend up in the northern part of the country, in the Cibao region (which coincidently is GORGEOUS). It was a great visit. i was there for 4 days and got to see my volunteer's youth group, helped her prepare for a charla on AIDS awareness and women's health, and basically just got to see all the things she is working on. it was really nice to get advice from someone in the field, as opposed to just hearing stories and brief meetings with volunteers at the training center. it was a big reality check, but ultimately just got me more excited about starting my service. so anyway about the tarantula: so my volunteer's host mother is the mayor's sister. and the mayor's daughter had her 10th birthday party while i was there (it was awesome by the way, if i could eat that cake for the rest of my life i would die fat and happy). So we stayed at the party until it was after dark and when we were walking home we were looking at the stars. they were stunning but we wanted to get out of town a bit because some lights were distracting us. There was another volunteer visiting so the three of us walked around the lake outside of town to look at the stars and we even saw some shooting stars which is always fun. I am aware this is a really long lead up to the tarantula by the way, but deal with it. So we brought flashlights with us because obviously it was very dark. i was scanning the ground and saw something move quickly on the side of the lighted area and managed to catch it in my beam. like cops in a helicopter or something haha. anyway it was a tarantula! i have pictures i will put up as soon as i can, i will spare you all the details but suffice it to say it is difficult getting internet here, and much moreso to get it on my heavy laptop.

So long story short, i had a wonderful, exciting volunteer visit and have moved out of Santo Domingo. two big events in about a week's time. here's the zinger though: after i got back from my volunteer visit i got crazy sick. once again i will spare the deets and just say it was gastritis. you do the math. so moving and packing with all that going on was not fun. luckily i am feeling better now. and super luckily it wasn't appendicitis which the doctors were worried about because i was in so much pain and my coloring. apparently i'm just a wuss. who knew?

holy strawberries batman, this is bananas!

the food here is awesome. whoever said the peace corps was the best diet ever clearly wasn't placed in the dominican republic! the fruit is insane. every time i eat a banana, i enter a state of nirvana. i don't like mangos in the US, but here? don't even get me started. and i know it's early on to make such a declarative statement, but i may never get sick of rice and beans. or yuca. yuca is definitely hit or miss with people, but for me it's a huge hit. when i told my dona i had never had yuca before she replied asking if i had ever had rice and beans. that's how big of a staple it is here!

all this said though, i would kill for a piece of chocolate. or some salty chips. basically any piece of the crap that really sticks to your gut back home. just lemme at it. also hot sauce. they really don't like spicy foods here at all, which surprised me. although some volunteers have discovered hot sauce at the sirena (basically a walmart) so i think i may have to cave and get in on that action. i have been fairly good about saving money so far, (my only indulgences have been the bracelets from the market and a patch for my bag), but this feels like a justified purchase to me. although i would hate to offend my dona and show up with hot sauce. it might have to wait until i have my own place. at which time i will most definitely be getting a dog by the way. so many volunteers here have dogs, and i know some of them are bringing their dogs back. so there is a precedence here, and i'm following it!

so we have been having several hours of spanish class everyday along with safety, cultural, and medical training throughout the week. and i actually feel like i have improved some, but mostly i think it's due to the interactive aspects of life here. whether it's practicing out in the city, activities in class, or, most importantly practicing mi espanol en mi casa, i really have started to sense some improvement. as in now i can sometimes tell what is sort of going on. it's a start, what can i say.

speaking of going out into the city, i have come to realize that santo domingo is actually a pretty cool city. the DR has a rich and turbulent history, and you can see remnants of it still in the city. partially this is due to reconstruction by the spanish, but still. we can now see christopher columbus' house which is pretty cool, even if he wasn't exactly the greatest of human beings. that's me practicing the dominican technique of "understatement" by the way.

another interesting tidbit: it rains here just about everyday. and yet i've managed to get a burn. how is that possible you ask? it's because it can be sunny and bright and gorgeous and suddenly out of nowhere rainclouds will appear. on saturday a group of us went to the botanical gardens which was absolutely gorgeous ( this is a picture of the explorers and i also took lots of pictures of flowers duh) and i got some serious sun. not a bad burn, but definitely some sun. and lo and behold the next day is equally sunny. we had a tour of the colonial zone in santo domingo on sunday and i figured i would bring my raincoat just in case, despite the fact that the afternoon was shaping up to be the same as the day before. the first hour of the tour was hot, and so sunny i couldn't really take good pictures and then suddenly we were in the middle of a torrential downpour that lasted for over an hour and we had to cancel the rest of the tour! it felt good though.

Rule no. 1: no excuses play like a champion

I promise this post is not gonna be me bitching about the peace corps. anything but actually. however, i will say the peace corps is not for anyone who is anything less than entirely committed. This first week has been incredible, emotional, and quite the struggle all at once. If the year long application process doesn't weed out the truly dedicated, training certainly will. that said, i am so excited to be here. every day i wake up more enthused about my situation than the day before. everyday i learn new aspects of the culture, and i know i am still just testing the waters.
our education trainer came and spoke to us today about what to expect in the upcoming weeks. we are moving to another town in the north of the DR with just the education trainees. there we will have our community based training (cbt) and will begin to learn the specifics of what we are going to be doing for the next 2 years. she got me so excited about it all. i haven't felt more secure in my decision to be here than when i walked out of that meeting.
i am glad that my emotions are starting to settle down a bit. it's not that i ever despaired, it's just that i felt for a while that i was all over the place. But now that i'm really making new friends, and just diving into each new experience, i am growing more and more comfortable here. the DR really is an amazing country. it is loud, beautiful, loud, happy, and loud. sometimes i hear music blaring (or maybe i should say i feel the music blaring) and i figure that it must be just outside my window. false! it is coming from a car all the way down the street. yikes cripes, those drivers must not have eardrums.
today (or yesterday when i post this) we learned the bachata and the merengue. roughly at least. it was so much fun. our teachers are fantastic dancers and then we all looked equally awesome, i'm sure, as we tried to emulate their movements. there were differing levels of success, that's for sure! i for one kept switching the order of my feet when i would step for the bachata. oops.

also you guys are getting totally spoiled. 2 posts in 2 days? what?

C'est La Vie...Oh wait that's french

so my spanish sucks. it's coming along though. little by little. the best and worst part is that the dialect here is ridiculously difficult to understand. So your learning skills are immediately kicked into high gear, but it is strenuous and very tiring. I am exhausted at the end of each day, but that's ok! that just means i can sleep through the rooster outside my window all the better.
ok i need to say 2 things: number one, sorry i havent posted yet, it's not my fault! we don't really have internet here. if you manage to actually get on at the peace corps training center not only are you incredibly lucky but you only have minutes before it shuts down on you again. which leads me to my second point: i had a huge blog post all written and ready to be uploaded yesterday, i got to the office, actually managed to get some internet going on on my ipad and...oh snap, the app on my ipad broke after i tried to save a draft locally. soooo i lost the post. bummer times.

so i have come to realize i have been incredibly lucky in my peace corps experiences so far. first of all, i got placed in the DR. i mean come on...that's pretty awesome. second, my host family is basically the best ever. My Dona (i can't figure out how to do the squiggly thing on this keyboard...) is the second best mother i've ever had. She has this huge extended family who are always in and out of the house, where the door is never closed, and she seems to cook for all of them. when they realized she wasn't gonna be cooking meat for a few weeks, she walked over to me, threw her arms around me and declared "we are vegetarian now!". everything she does just makes me feel so welcome. actually all of the women i have met here could not be more generous and genuinely happy to just spend time with people. I find myself wandering out onto the patio now because i know that soon some other family member, be it the grandson, a daughter, the great grandson, will come join me in a matter of minutes. ok another reason i'm lucky is that i have had a functional toilet my entire time here. i will spare you the details, just suffice it to say, i'm lucky.

So there are three other volunteers who live in the same area as me. a married couple lives with dona estella (the daughter of my dona) right above my casa and another volunteer lives just across parking lot from my house. hopefully i will find a way to post pictures soon. it all comes back to that no-internet thing. I am glad to be so near some other volunteers because when the spanish just becomes too much for my poor brain to cope with i can escape and play domino, tablero, and/or bananagrams with them! so we play games every night. except last night when we went to a barbeque in our barrio. There were 5 volunteers there and several Dominican families including one who had moved to miami and is here visiting their families. it was so much fun! we danced merengue, drank some cervesa, ate lots of food, and just talked well into the night. It was so relaxed and loud at the same time. although everything here is loud. apparently this is the third loudest country in the world. the rumor is that some dominicans remove the mufflers from their cars just to make them louder. i believe it.
gosh! i just feel like there is so much to write about, but i need to save some for more posts. so i will wrap up saying happy birthday to me! and that i had a nice little celebration with my neighbor volunteers over several rounds of bananagrams and now it is time for some well deserved sleep. peace out hombres.