Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Finally...pictures!

Views of mountains from our campo

View of house on mountainside

Mama hen with chicks. Isn't the yellow chick adorable?

A fogon! Pretty much what everyone uses to cook here. 

Our family's beloved dog, Taliban. Yes, that's correct, Taliban. We're still not sure why they named him that. Poor doggie, it's not his fault.

View of the community center from our bedroom door.

Our host family's house.


We'll post more pictures soon!

Entertainment in the Campo


December 20, 2011
As Scott and I are in the planning stages of the health classes that we want to start in February, I have often found myself wondering if anyone will actually show up to our courses. The style of teaching for our courses is a combination of discussion and fun activities that engage the audience. These activities might remind of you of those you would see in a kid’s camp (Boom-Chicka-Boom, anyone?). I can understand why kids would like these kinds of activities, but I still have trouble believing that adults would be interested in this sort of thing. And besides, don’t they have better things to do than attend a health class with two Americans who can’t even speak their language properly?
Well, the truth is that they don’t. There just aren’t that many things to do around here. When they aren’t working, the people here spend a lot of time sitting around on their porches gossiping with neighbors. There is also the occasional dominoes game or cock fight. Here are some other forms of entertainment that we have observed:
1. Painting things with makeup: One day Scott and I saw one of our host sisters painting a piece of old cardboard with eye shadow. The next day we discovered that she had painted the side of the kitchen table with red lipstick. Sadly, we only discovered this after getting thick red lipstick lines on our pants.
2. Throwing rocks at chickens
3. Sitting on motorcycles: Whether your an adult or a kid, this seems to be pretty fun around here. Our host brother Manual loves to sit on his uncle's motorcycle making vroom-vroom noises.
4. I don't even know how to label this: There is one kid in the neighborhood who enjoys running around naked in the street making farting noises. We have observed this behavoir on numerous occasions and for various durations of times (once for forty minutes). He's working hard on being nick-named “fart-face”.
5. Standing around in the colmado watching other people dance. Even better, watching the Americans try to dance. Sometimes dancing yourself.
Needless to say, Scott and I are having a lot of fun thinking of creative ways to engage people around here. We are hoping to have a sports day for the younger kids in January and maybe even a talent show for the adolescents. We also picked up some coloring books and crayons when we were visiting the capital last week, which I think will be a big hit among the younger kids.

Thoughts about Education


December 17, 2011

We find that every day that we spend here we discover something new to be thankful about. A few weeks ago we were talking to our host sister, Paula, who is in her sophomore year of high school and at the time was studying for her December finals. It is really pretty impressive that she is still attending school at all, considering that a lot of girls her age are already married with children. It is even more impressive when you consider that she has to travel 40 minutes every day by motorcycle to get to school. That might not sound like that much, but consider that it costs her family over $100 pesos a day for the gas money to send her to school. That's equivalent to a day or two of food for the family. Then consider what happens if something goes wrong with their motorcycle, as happened last week. In that case, Paula has to get up an hour earlier than usual to stand at the entrance of our campo hoping that she can catch a free ride with someone else to school. Or if that fails, then she has to walk an hour and half to get there (including crossing a river). 


On top of this, the school system here is atrocious. What we think of as learning is a totally foreign concept here. From what we have gathered so far, it seems that the students spend their day in school writing down notes verbatim from the chalkboard. There isn’t any discussion or activity about the lesson, so essentially the students don’t learn anything about what they’ve written down. When a test rolls around, the students then have to memorize their notes and regurgitate them verbatim for the test. Unfortunately, this means that the students never actually learn the material. If you happen to ask a student to explain their school lesson to you, they can only read to you from their notes. This also means that the youth here don't really have any critical thinking skills and do not understand the concept of creativity. 


 When you consider all this, you realize that we really have a lot to be thankful about. Unlike a lot of the people here, we actually have the opportunity to attend good schools in our country, learn, and hopefully move on to good careers and make something of ourselves. Unfortunately for the people here, schooling usually ends at high school if they are lucky enough to get that far and does not often lead to other opportunities like going to a university or pursuing a career. 

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Welcome to the new blog!

After many technical difficulties, we have finally managed to start a new blog. Let's hope this one works better than the last!

It’s hard to believe that we have been in the Dominican Republic for almost four months now. For the last month we have been working on the diagnostic portion of our service - conducting interviews with the 90-or-so families living in our campo, socializing with people in general, and basically trying to learn as much as we can about our new community. We are also starting to plan ahead for the health classes we will start teaching in January and February. 

We live in a campo called El Dajao that is locatedin the northwest of the country in the province of Santiago Rodriguez. El Dajao is located an hour away from the closest town on a dirt road that winds up the mountains. The only way to get in or out of our campo is by motorcycle, although there is also a truck that comes in on Wednesday mornings to bring people to the market in town. El Dajao covers about ninety families that live in four separate communities that are spread across the mountains. The campo doesn’t have electricity, but luckily an aqueduct was installed a few years ago so everyone has running water.

Most of the people in El Dajao make a living working in agriculture. They usually plant starchy crops such as rice, yucca, batata, yautia, banana, platanos, corn, ñame, and many, many more. For that reason the local diet is pretty high in carbohydrates but low in proteins and vitamins and minerals. Many of the families here also own a lot of animals, including chickens (they’re everywhere!), turkeys, goats, pigs, cows, and horses. Speaking of animals, we’ve made the pleasant discovery that roosters begin crowing at 2 am in the morning, and not at daybreak, as is commonly believed.
We are currently living with a host family. There are six people in our host family, including two parents, three kids, and one grandson that is currently living with them. With us included it gets pretty crowded around here! We enjoy their company a lot but are looking forward to February when we will be able to move out and live on our own. We haven’t had control of our own diet for four months now and are ready to cook some good American food again. Our meals here usually consist of boiled yucca, boiled banana/platano, rice, beans, and noodles. For breakfast we have been consistently getting hot chocolate and bread. And I don’t mean nice bread. I mean the type of old hot-dog roll bread that you get from the bargain bin in K-Mart. In fact, I think that bread tastes better.
On a bright note, we are having a lot of fun introducing our host family to American foods. Yesterday we pulled out some marshmallows (or “cotton” as they call them because they look like cotton balls) for them to try and showed them how to roast them over the fire. They had never had them roasted before and really enjoyed them. They almost died laughing every time someone’s marshmallow caught on fire.

Until our next post!