Rain Rain Go Away

January 11, 2012

Rain, rain, rain. That’s about all we’ve seen here for the past week. Which means that we have plenty of time to blog but very little in the way of updates to blog about. So instead of telling you all the boring details of our week, I chose to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the daily routine of our family.

As we may have already explained, our host family is composed of 6 people, not including us. First, there’s the mother and father, Doña Ena and Don Patricio. Then there are the two daughters and one son – Paula, Yubrelis, and Carlito. They also have a grandson living with them named Manuel, and occasionally their older son Bienvenido (literally meaning “welcome”) stays the night with the family.

Like most of the women in our community, our doña is the “ama de la casa,” or a housewife. Here that basically means she works harder than anyone else around here and doesn’t get much appreciation for it. Doña Ena is usually the first or second person to wake up for the day. Sometimes Patricio gets up first to go to the fields to work with the crops. The first thing our host mother does is make coffee, usually in time for the men to drink a bit before heading off to the fields. After that, she sweeps the whole yard with a broom to move the trash away from the living areas (imagine someone sweeping dirt around the yard and you’ve got the picture). That might sound strange but people here do not use trash cans, and therefore just throw their trash on the ground when they’re done with it. After that Doña Ena starts to make breakfast for the day – usually hot chocolate with bread. After that she starts on the real chores of the day, which can range from sweeping and mopping the house, doing the laundry by hand (this takes most of the day), or going to the fields to harvest guandules (a type of bean that has to be shelled after harvesting – it kind of looks like peas). She starts to make lunch at about 12 o’clock and usually finishes by 2 pm. Then, if she doesn’t have any major chores left to do, she usually has a little bit of time to rest. Some of the other chores that she works on daily include: feeding the pigs, shelling the guandules, working in the garden, collecting and chopping firewood, and taking food to the fields for the men. At night she usually makes something small for dinner and lights the fire. We all end up sitting around a campfire for an hour or two before turning in to bed.

While Doña Ena is working at the house, Don Patricio spends his morning working in the fields. He does all of the regular things you would imagine a farmer doing – planting, weeding, and harvesting. The usual crops he works with are yucca, rice, auyama, batata, and sugar cane. He grows other starchy vegetable crops as well. As Don Patricio is a little bit on in years, he has to hire help (usually from one of the Haitian families that live here and don’t own land) to work with him in the fields. While Patricio sometimes spends all day working in the fields, he usually comes home at about 12 or 1 o’clock in the afternoon and is then free to hang around for most of the rest of the day. Sometimes he does other chores in the afternoon like drying and pounding the rice and fixing tools. Around evening time, Patricio usually leaves the house and visits the nearby colmados to hang out with his friends and relax. He then comes back at night and spends some time with the family around the fire before going to bed.

Like their parents, our host sisters also work very hard. When they are not in school, they usually spend most of the day helping Doña Ena with the chores. This includes sweeping and mopping the house, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, and doing any of the other numerous things that need doing. Even when they do go to school, they usually leave at about 7 in the morning and come home at about 12 in the afternoon, so they spend the rest of their day helping with chores. They often leave around evening time like their father to spend some time with other teenagers in the campo and come home a bit later.

As for Carlito, our host brother, he is actually quite lucky in that he is one of the few people in the campo to have a full-time job. From 9 to 4 Monday to Friday he works for a government organization called Brigada Verde that works on reforestation projects in campos like ours. Therefore he spends all of his morning and afternoon planting pine trees in various locations in our campo. He often comes home to eat lunch with us but besides that we don’t get to see him that often.

And what does Manuel do then? Well, he spends his day terrorizing the chickens and generally being a nuisance to everyone around him. He’s really not that bad, he just has a bad case of ADD. He does actually help a bit too. He runs to the colmado occasionally to buy food or sometimes he even works with Patricio in the fields.

While this is a typical day in the life of our host family, rest assured that none of this has been going on for the past week. Unfortunately we’ve all been cooped up in our rooms hoping that the rain ends soon and the sun comes out.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

January 3, 2012

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  Rather than travel elsewhere within the country for Christmas, we decided to stay with our host family and experience a Campo Christmas.  This was good in that we got to spend time with much of the extended family and meet a lot of people.  It was, however, challenging in that we had to spend time with much of the extended family and meet a lot of people.

Many people come to visit the families in our campo for Christmas and New Year’s.  This is because many of the people who grow up here eventually leave to attend school or find work.  Frequently they get married to someone outside of the campo and start a family in the city.  It would seem that all of them return for Christmas, and I would venture to say that the population of the campo doubles.  We had 15 people living in our house for the Christmas holidays, which extend to about a week and a half or two weeks here.  As I mentioned previously, it was very nice to meet all of the relatives and spend time with our host family.  However, that many people living in one house for such a long time can make you go crazy.

Additionally, it turned out that our house was a top visiting spot for everyone in the campo.  I would say that there were two main reasons for this.  One, we have two teenage girls in the house who are a magnet to young bachelors from all over the region.  Two, our family has two Americans staying with them that apparently are remarkably entertaining.  I’m not sure why, but it is a rare occasion when visitors from outside the campo want to talk to us.  They would much rather stand right in front of us and talk about us with other people.  This can be frustrating because they do this even after they find out that we speak decent(ish) Spanish.  I think this is partly because they just don’t know what to make of two Americans living and working in the campo.  Anyway, the large groups of gawkers that we encountered did little to make us feel comfortable.

Christmas Day did not feel very much like Christmas, but it was still a good enough day.  There were no decorations, presents, nor carols, but we did have a nice meal with pork, rice, and beans.  We were a bit spoiled with meat during Christmas as it is generally a once-per-week occasion.  On Christmas day, we went to a Palos party that was pretty neat.  Palos are sort of like large African drums and people dance to the playing and singing of some of the community men.  The dance itself is not very complex and I would describe it as fancy shuffling.  Everybody wanted to see us shuffle, though, as we were constantly encouraged to dance more.  I believe that while this may be for the pleasant intention of them wanting to us to share in their culture, it’s more likely that they find our dancing to be extraordinarily entertaining.  We had some very tasty refreshments at the party as well, including an orange-flavored juice and the stale hamburger bread biscuits.  We would regret the juice around midnight as it turned out to have been made from unpurified water and we spent the rest of the night clearing our systems.  Yay!

We did not stay up for New Years.  We did go to a New Year’s party at the brand-new colmado recently opened by our project partner.  We did not stay long though as people were mostly sitting around and talking amongst each other.  And, if you recall that people in groups prefer to talk about us rather that to us, that wasn’t very exciting.  We went home and watched the Lord of the Rings on our laptop with Spanish subtitles.  I probably didn’t learn much Spanish, at least not useful Spanish. You rarely get the opportunity to say things like ''Find the halflings!''

Right now we are getting ready for our courses and writing up our diagnostic report.  It’s a bit quiet but we are pressing forward.  We are also excited that it looks like the foundation will be poured soon for our house!  As much as we love our host family, it will be good to have some space and privacy* to ourselves.  Here’s to the start of a new and exciting year!

*on privacy: It is unlikely that the word “privacy” has a direct translation to Dominican Spanish, because it does not exist here.

December Pictures

Host father proudly sporting a huge Auyama (starchy vegetable that we eat a LOT of here)

Scott playing with our host brother Manuel

Festival of Palos

Meg and one of our pals from the community

Making juice for the Palos Festival

Baby!

Baby of a different sort!

Our host family´s pig

The pigs apparently don´t mind if Manuel rides on their backs

One of the streams we have to cross to get to one of our communities

 

More dancing at the Palos Festival

Meg working on the health diagnostic

Pictures - Garden and Host Family

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.