Another week in la Cumbre

April 12, 2009

So I had another full, busy week full of activities. We had to do a mini-diagnostic in groups based on the communities we live in (there are 4 communities with a total distance of 9 kilometers between the first and last) that we have to present on Tuesday. I am pretty much finished with my part but we are meeting tomorrow as a group to go over all of our stuff one more time. We made a map of our community, which was fun because we went exploring down some of the roads that I might not otherwise have ventured down. I also did a family tree of my household, which was quite extensive considering the large size of family here. My mom has 9 other siblings, and my dad has I think around 17. So I fit in as many people as I could but there was not enough room on my poster to go back to far. I also had to do interviews with 3 people in the community which went alright, I sometimes got answers that were a little odd or lacked some depth but I think that’s how it is with people everyone. It reminded me of working at the survey lab and asking questions and getting responses that did not quite fit the question I had asked, but I still think I learned some things I can present for Tuesday. We also have to do the presentation in Spanish as we are also being evaluated on our Spanish at this point, but I am not to worried about this. I feel like my Spanish is doing pretty good. I can’t always think of the word I want to use or always use the right tense but I can usually get my point across at this point.



me with the neighborhood kids











I also started another project we have to do with my friend Sarah in making a compost pile at the conuco of one of the kids who lives next to me. We finished making the enclosed area we are gonna put the compost (it took a while with having to collect and chop the wood to length) and are going to collect everything to fill it up later this week hopefully on Wednesday.

compost pile with me and sarah, my host sister (on left) and another neigbor

On Thursday night our Spanish class met up our teachers house here to make an auyama pie. Auyama is like a type of squash so we basically were making pumpkin pie. It was a lot of fun and it turned out good, but it was kind of funny because all of Dominican women at the house at first were trying to tell us how to make it, even though they didn’t really even know what we were making. I think they had a hard time understanding the concept of a pie because they don’t really have pies here. We had to keep explaining that the crust was not supposed to rise, and that it wasn’t like a cake which is what I think they thought we were trying to make. But it all turned out well and I think everyone who tried it enjoyed it.
My spanish class, my spanish teacher (one on the far right bending down, with white shirt and green sweater), and other locals at Dona Nena's house (one in pink) with our finished auyama pie




On Friday we had a day of from class so I worked some on my part of the diagnostic project and in the afternoon some of us walked to one of the other communities about 3 kilometers away to hang out at one of our friends house there and drink tea. Overall it was a pretty low key day.


Yesterday me and two of my friends, Woodley and Andrea, went on a little hike down to look for a lagoon and a river that is somewhat close to my house. When we took a wrong turn in our search for the lagoon we stopped to ask some people who were outside eating lunch for directions. We ended up sitting down and talking with him for like a half hour, which has become a very common thing here. It is almost impossible to enter into someone’s house without them asking you to sit down and have some coffee, a soda or some juice even though they have never met us before. The people here are just super nice and friendly. After this we continued down to the river (we went to the lagoon after the river) and followed it down for a little bit. The river wasn’t that big, its more like a little stream. I don’t think there was much more than a foot of water in depth. Later that night all of us met up at the plaza where we had a few drinks and just sat around to chat. It is always nice when we can all get together as a group since we are all more spread out here. I think tonight we are going to go to the plaza because people want to go dance (last night the part upstairs where there is room to dance was closed). The people here will dance meringue and bachata for hours one end. I haven’t been able to escape it either, everytime I go out I have to dance with at least one or two people. The Dominicans think I’m crazy when I say that I don’t dance very much, so I guess I’m just gonna have to learn in order to fit in a little better here. But at least meringue is easy to dance, you don’t really have to move around all the much. But that’s all for now. Feliz Dia del Resurecion!

La Cumbre

Saturday April 4, 2009

So first off, I have not had internet here in La Cumbre as much as I had originally thought. I actually haven’t been able to use internet at all since I’ve been here but am writing this in the morning at my house and am going to post when I am in Santiago later today along with the other post I wrote earlier this week but didn’t have internet to post it. So you guys will have lots to read!

But I have really enjoyed it here in La Cumbre. As I had mentioned it’s a smaller community so it is easier to just walk around and get to know everyone. My family here is really cool, I have a younger sister who is 11 years old who is usually around the house when I am and then 3 brothers who are 19, 21, and 23 (I think I’m not exactly sure about the middles age) but they are not usually around the house and I haven’t met one of them because I think he is away at the University. But my Dona and Don are really nice as well and there are always other people coming and going through my house. The town is super beautiful as it is on top of a hill and has a view of the valleys and mountains around it. La Cumbre actually means “the highest point on a hill” so is very fitting.

I also like the technical training here more so in Santo Domingo as we are doing more hands on projects and what not. So for example we went on a tour of a coffee farm and learned some about how to grow coffee, what trees are good to provide shade for the coffee, and a little about pest control in coffee fields. We also have walked through a bunch of conucos, which are mixed tropical gardens. At first when looking at the conucos they look just like a random collection of trees and bushes but in actuality ever plant/tree provides something to the farmer. The plants on most the conucos I have seen here include bananas, platanoes, coffee, cacoa (chocolate), pineapple, yucca, tayota (a vegetable that grows on a vine, I think its called the Mexican pear in the states), citrus trees (orange, lemon, and grapefruit), avacodo, these pea like pods called juandules (sp?), sweet potato, other root vegetables, celery type plants, and others all of which I can’t think of now. But it is really cool because at any given time of year there is something to harvest to eat for food and helps to balance the eco-system it creates due to the variety of things that are growing.

Another day we learned how to make living and dead barriers on the slopes of hills in order to help prevent soil erosion, as this is a big environmental problem here in the DR. We learned how to find the contours of the slope and either plant things such as lemon grass to help retain the soil or even just use dead wood and rocks to create a barrier along the contour that helps retain the soil when it rains. We practiced these two techniques at the coffee farm as well as at a conuco of one of the people of the town.

Yesterday we learned how to make and manage a compost pile and made two of them at the coffee farm for practice as well as learning how to make some other types of organic fertilizer using manure and the leaves of certain trees that are rich in nitrogen. I have also been slowly learning about different types of trees, plants, and vegetables such as how to recognize them and what their names are in Spanish which is something I’ve always wanted to know (being able to identify more trees and plants).

Besides the technical we still have Spanish class every morning to continue helping us with our Spanish. We watched a movie earlier this week, listen to music, and just have conversations to help us all learn. Its still really nice because the classes are small (my class has 5 volunteers and our language facilitator) which I think really helps the learning process. But one of the mornings our class walked to the monument for the Mirabal sisters, Las Mariposas (the butterflies), who were three sisters who lived under the dictator Trujillo and are well known for their part in the revolution to overthrow the dictator. They were eventually killed by Trujillo’s henchman in 1960 along a mountain road as they were returning from visiting their husbands in jail. Even though they tried to make it look like an accident (the henchman, after killing the sisters and the driver, pushed the car over a cliff) everyone knew they were murdered which increased the anti-Trujillo sentiment throughout the country. The place where they were killed is about 4 kilometers from my house here, and this is where the monument to commemorate them lays. It was really cool to see this especially since I had just finished reading “In the time of the Butterflies”, which is a book by Julia Alvarez that is about the Mirabal sisters, before I arrived in the DR.

Yesterday was the birthday of one of the volunteers here so we all went to his house last night and his mom made a cake for everyone to share. There was also a guitar there so people were playing guitar and singing for a lot of the night. It is another one of the volunteers birthdays today, as well as another one tomorrow so I think we are gonna try to do something else tonight and tomorrow as well, but I’m not exactly sure what yet. I think the plan for tonight is to meet at the play (baseball field) and then maybe go to a colmado to hang out. But we’ll see. But this is about all I can think of to write now. There are still some things I haven’t gotten a chance to tell you all but I’ve done so much since being here it would be very hard to write it all down. But hopefully I will have some more internet next week where we have our classes in the evening but as of now it’s not looking to promising. If nothing else hopefully I’ll be able to make it to Santiago again next weekend to do so more updates and check my mail. To everyone, take it easy and I’ll talk to you all later.

Weekend with Brigada Verde

Tuesday March 31, 2009

So I have a lot to write about so we will see how far I get. This past Friday our two groups in training, the environmental group (I’m in this one) and the Information technology group split up. The information technology group went to the city where they are doing their technical training, I think its called el cebo but I’m not positive. Us environmentalists on Friday morning went to the Eastern regional conference of a group called Brigada Verde in the region of San Cristobal, a little to the west and south of Santo Domingo. Brigada Verde is one of the projects that the environmental development program here works with. Basically volunteers try to start and environmental awareness group in their communities (called Brigada Verde) that learn about the environmental issues here in the Dominican Republic as well as participate in community service activities such as trash cleanups at beaches, rivers, or along the roads. This conference had different Brigada Verde groups from the eastern region, and the focus of the conference was on how to run a summer camp in hopes that the groups would be able to start their own camps this upcoming summer.

Us new volunteers showed up at the ranch where the camp was being held, it was like a summer camp type place. When we got there we split up into different groups based upon our Spanish class and set up our “stations”. Half of us were going to set up an “obstacle course” the groups would have to go through before entering the camp that where supposed to encourage group strengthening, and the other half were going to do activities at night with the kids. My group was with the obstacle course so we had to set up quickly when we got there so we would be prepared when the kids arrived. There were I think 8 different stations/activities and each had a volunteer overseeing that station. The first station was to make nametags, the next the group had to use objects to cross a “river of fire” (they couldn’t touch the ground but had a chair, a board and some other objects to stand on to go from one side to the other), the next was a activity where everyone got in a circle and grabbed the hands of someone else in the circle (not next to them) and then had to untangle themselves without letting go so the persons whose hands each one was grapping was on either side of them. The fourth station, which I was at, we divided the group in two teams and one person on each team had a blindfold on, and their teammates had to take turns giving the blind folded person directions to find an object I had put on the ground. Next they did a jigsaw puzzle of the different regions of the Dominican Republic, after that they had to do a relay race where they ran to a stick, had to spin around it 8 times, and then try to run back to tag their teammate and they repeated until everyone had finished. The last activity was a drawing game where someone drew a picture then covered most of it, then someone else had to expand on the part that was uncovered then cover their drawing except for a little part, and so on until at the end there was a non-sensical drawing made up of 4 or 5 different little drawings. All of the games we tried to teach a lesson or have elements of group strengthening. So for example, in my activity, when it was over, I would talk about how sometimes we have to rely on others, our teammates, in order to obtain a goal. The person who was blindfolded had to have confianza (trust) in his/her teammates to not run him into a tree or other obstacles along the way, and the people giving directions had to be clear and concise or else their teammate would end up moving farther away from the ultimate goal: the object. But we had to do all of these activities in Spanish so this also helped with our language and was just a lot of fun because we would do these activities along with the kids. It was also a way to give examples of activities they could implement themselves if they were to start their own summer camp, as this was the overall theme of the conference.

After everyone had gone through the obstacle course we all ate lunch and afterwords everyone went to one of the pavilions where we had a couple presentations from volunteers and our technical trainer about how to funding for summer camps, issues that can be addressed, group strengthening techniques, how to recruit members for a Brigada Verde group and so on. By the time we had gone through all of the presentations it was time for dinner so we all ate and after dinner the other groups who hadn’t done the activities earlier split up the kids and did their activities with them.


The next day we had more presentations throughout the day, but also had a little bit of time to hang out and play with the kids. In the afternoon some of the volunteers and some of the kids got a game of ultimate Frisbee going which was a lot of fun. I also gave a presentation to the volunteers (we all have to do one about one subject or another and present it to each other) about interpretation. Basically it was supposed to teach techniques on how to interpret trails and other things for such activities as eco-tourism and I was able to used examples of when I volunteered at the museum of natural history at UF to explain how I interpreted exhibits and tried to keep the kids interested. Later that night there was a bonfire that everyone went to and where we made smores. We also were playing music together and singing as some of the kids from the youth group had brought some drums and other instruments and had a little meringue/borchata band going on and I had brought my guitar along. It was a lot of fun and another great way to interact with all of the kids who had come to the camp.

The next day we left before noon to head back to Santo Domingo but stopped by the beach for a little bit before returning back home. I was really excited to see the beach since I hadn’t been there since I arrived. It was super pretty and a relaxing activity to do before returning to the big city. On returning to the city I ate lunch at my house and hung out a little bit with my friends before I had to go back home to back because on Monday we left Santo Domingo to go a little town called La Cumbre where we are going to be living for 4 weeks for our technical training. I left early Monday morning and arrived here in La Cumbre for lunch with my new host family. They are super nice and I think I’ll like it here better than Santo Domingo because it is a super pretty town up in the mountains and is much smaller with much less noise and hustle and bustle. But I will write more later this week. Oh and I got a camara last week so hopefully I’ll be able to put up some pictures soon. Hasta luego.