Mi vida en la Republica Dominicana: May 2009

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Off to my site

So last week I finally figured out where I will be spending the next few years here in the Dominican Republic, and visited it over the weekend. I am in the region of San Juan and am locatated in a campo that is a little bit north of Las Matas de Farfan, the closest bigger city to me. My host family there is really nice, I live in a house with a host mom and dad, and one of their neighbors, an older women who lives alone, always is at my house helping with the cooking. My site is pretty dry, it doesn't really rain to often there, and its hot, but at least i am used to the heat from living in Florida. My community is pretty rural, most people have some farm land where they grow, sugarcane, yuca, juandules (they are pea like things that grow on little trees), and other root vegetables. Also a lot of people have cows and cow pastures, there are "gangs" of sheep and goats that roam the street, and tons of chickens at almost every house. Also most people have either a horse or donkey as their main mode of transportation (as well as the occasional motorcycle). I have electricity pretty regularly (but there are no internet cafes, its pretty remote place) and also water coming from a hose because a former peace corp volunteer helped to build an aqueduct there in previous years. I have cellphone signal when i climb up a little hill, but not in my house. I use a latrine for my bathroom, and also bath ouside in a little shed thing using water from buckets. I like my site but i think it'll take me a few weeks to get used to life out there, especially being more isolated than i have been the past 2 months. But there is a lot of projects i'll be able to do there.

Today we are going to be graduating and tomorrow we have an all volunteer conference where all the volunteers in the country come to Santo Domingo, which will be fun to get to meet all of the other volunteers. Then on Friday i go back to my site. But we are about to start the day, so thats all for now. Hope everyone doing well back home.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

back in Santo Domingo

So we arivied back in Santo Domingo this past Tuesday. It was kinda sad to leave La Cumbre because i really like it there and like my family a bunch, but now we are one step closer to arriving in our actually sites. We actually won´t know what we are doing or where we are going untill tuesday, then we will go there for 5 days starting wednesday, then come back to Santo Domingo for a week, and then go back to our sites to live for two years. I really want to know where i´ll be going, i wish they would tell us sooner then the day before we go there... but what can you do.

This week we have been going to visit a volunteer who lives about an hour out of Santo Domingo and works with a national park trying to promote tourism. The park is on the beach and also includes a coral reef in the sea, and so the main revenue for the park is getting people to come in to go Scuba Diving. We actually got to go snorkeling one afternoon, but it started raining about an hour into it which didn´t make it quite as fun as it could have been, but it was still really cool. Also at the park they have some burial remains from the Caribe indians so we got to see some of the bones in the ¨museum¨ they had there.

One friday we went to a cave that was by his site and walked around in there for about 2 hours. The caves were cool but there has been lots of damage done to them on account that people go in to take the stalagtights to make carvings out of them to sell. That night we also went camping, but not in what i would consider in the traditional sense becaus we basically just set up our tents on the driveway of a person who lived by the cave. But it was still nice since all of us evnrionment volunteers were all haning out together for the night by the fire. But i´m gonna try to put up some more pictures now and will try to update again when i know where i´ll be living the next few years.