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!