More words from Miss Lindsay
check it out yo
------------------------
Second mass email coming at ya, Adrian, I hope you are feeling better. I definitely know how you feel…I too had parasites last week from the water I had been drinking. And I’ll send you my home address for a postcard if you send me tours. Everyone else who wants a postcard, send me addresses now! In the meantime, read on.
Hola a todos y todas,
Hello again! Yes, it’s been a long time, I apologize. But there is a lot of work to be done here (fun work, not boring). And I still have not perfected my methods of getting three pre-teens off the computer so I can send an email. It’s like being back at home in that regard...only there’s three kids instead of one!
I am doing well, finally. Last week was a bit of a struggle as I was sick with one thing or another. Sunday morning I woke up with my foot swollen to the size of a balloon, red and throbbing. Turns out I had a spider bite, which made it difficult to walk for the next few days. The spiders here aren’t deadly, but their bites are not friendly. I’ve had three in my room so far, and I hope that’s the end of it. My host father and brothers think the spider thing is hilarious. I’m sorry, but when hairy spiders as big as my foot like to sleep in my room and bite me, it’s not funny! The first time a spider was in my room, I made my host dad kill it as I was terrified. He then proceeded to chase me around the house with the dead spider in his hands. He swears I got the spider bite in the campo, but I know it bit me in my room: I saw it staring me down when I went to bed Saturday night.
But my week got even better. Tuesday night I came down with some sort of stomach bug or parasite and spent the night with the worst stomache pains, vomiting, and diarreah I have had ever (when you have both at the same time, you know something’s wrong). I spent the next two days in bed, not moving, not eating, not doing anything. My host family wasn’t sure what was wrong or what to do, so they just left me, with my host mom checking in on my once in awhile. Thank god Jose is my good friend, besides being my boss, and kept coming by to check up on me and make me drink water. He told me that he had felt bad that day too, and said that it was the water we had been drinking in the campo. You see, he said, the family doesn’t boil the water they give us. I was too weak to yell at him for not telling me this earlier and could only glare at him. I thought we were drinking boiled water! I’m just surprised it took me a month to get sick. From now on, I am bringing my own water everywhere. And Friday, when I finally got out of bed, I discovered I had another infection due to the heat and latrines, which meant a trip to the pharmacy. I’ve always thought I was a healthy person, but I guess I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I’ll move on to less disgusting topics and just say that hopefully that’s the end of the parasites/infections/spiders for me.
Last week while on the phone with home for the first time in quite a long time, my mother asked me if my internship here was a nine-to-five work day. I almost laughed out loud. The question, of course, was a perfectly valid question, but a simple “no” answer is not enough, since my role as an intern here varies almost on a daily basis. So let me try, as best I can, to document my job here and what I hope to accomplish while I am here.
Although I am “officially” here to work on the preschool program, because right now only José and I are working with Cambiando Vidas in the DR, my jobs extend beyond the preschool program. While helping to build the first house, I was working mostly with construction: mixing concrete and cement, laying blocks, sawing roof beams, threading electrical wires, and mostly running errands and assisting the more experienced house builders. The second week was more construction, finishing up odds and ends on the house, running errands, and taking a lot of pictures of the process. Since those first two weeks, each day is different. Since Cambiando Vidas has just started and there are currently only two people in the Dominican Republic working with it, there is a lot to do, and no one has one specific job. When you don't even have an office space and your biggest purchase to date is a printer, it's rather difficult to delegate jobs. In this sense, my work experience here might not be what you would call a typical “internship,” but I think I am benefiting more from working here because I get to learn how a non-profit works as a business and an organization from the administrative and fundraising levels, as well as how it accomplishes its goals out in the community and how it works with the community.
Yesterday we just finished taking a census of the entire community of Las Charcas de Garabito, going door to door to find out how many houses there are in the community and how many preschool age children there are in each house. This way we also started to spread the word about the upcoming program and alerted parents that they will be a vital component of the success of this program. It took us a couple of weeks to do the census, working in the mornings with some very enthusiastic kids from the community helping us out.
Each day traveling around San Juan and Las Charcas I learn more about life here. The other day José and I went to buy vegetables for lunch at the largest market in San Juan, and of course I couldn't pass up such an opportunity to check it out. San Juan has many markets, as it has a population of about 80,000 people, and even though I saw only a small fraction of it, its size and variety of products sold told me its size. But the size didn't startle me; what startled me was something that always catches me off-guard, even though I know that it exists. Here, when you visit a stall, you do not pick your own produce, but instead tell an attendant of that stall what you want and how much. When we arrived at the first stall, the attendant came out, wearing jeans that were barely held up by a belt, no shirt, no shoes, and spoke with the confidence that only comes from years of hard work and dealing with customers; this boy couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. While I watched him fill a bag with our order, quickly adding the prices in his head, all I could do was stare and think to myself, "He should be in school," and consider the, irony, I suppose, of providing a preschool for families who don't have such access and who desire the education, while we dealt with child laborers in the market.
But both Jose and I are reassured, almost daily, that creating a preschool program is very important to people here. Members from neighboring communities have asked Jose to start up the preschool in their communities as well (we would, but right now we can barely afford to work in one community at a time, let alone multiple ones). And all the families with young kids that we have interviewed in the community are thrilled about the prospect of a preschool opening in January. For example: the other day I entered the house of a mom who told me she was twenty-six and had three kids, raging from age five to nine. Although all her kids were in elementary school, and therefore could not directly benefit from the preschool program, she was ecstatic about the program. What should have been a two minute interview turned into a twenty minute conversation (mostly one-sided) about the benefits of such a program. You are helping the children learn how to learn, she told me, and feel confident in the classroom so that when they enter elementary school they will be ready. If you wait until they are seven or eight to put them in school, like this woman's experience, it is too late to teach them how to learn and they will feel uncomfortable in school. Moreover, she told me that, as her children had learned more in school, she had too, just be helping her kids with their homework. You're helping the entire family, she said, and you're doing what the government should be doing, but never does. Talking with her made my day.
But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a workaholic here. I get to spend my evenings relaxing with my host family or José’s family, who have become my second host family here as I spend so much time there. On weekends there are basketball games with teams from different neighborhoods in San Juan, so we always go to watch, especially since José’s brother’s team is now playing in the championship game. And we spend many hours with different families from the community, just hanging out and having fun.
This past weekend was particularly fun and relaxing. A group with Habitat for Humanity is here working in San Juan, consisting of high school and college students from the Marin area (small world!). They were going to beach in Barahona for the weekend, and invited Jose and I to tag along so they could find out about what we were doing. The beach has always been a relaxing place for me, and it was fun to meet the kids from college. I always enjoy meeting people my age who love to travel and volunteer, and find out what they are doing. A couple of them had even volunteered with Amgios (the program I volunteered with when I was in Costa Rica four summers ago). It was nice to take a break and talk to more people about Cambiando Vidas. Jose and I even had a “business” meeting with the hotel owners to see if we could get a bargain price for Cambiando Vidas volunteer groups to stay at the hotel. But, of course, it wasn’t your typical business meeting. I said to Jose afterwards that never before had I been a part of a formal business meeting where everyone was still in their pajamas. He had to laugh and admit that he hadn’t either.
On Sunday Jose and I drove down to a small coastal town called Paraiso to take pictures. The town is aptly named.While the beaches in the southwest don’t appear to be as famous as those in the north, I think they were the most beautiful I have ever seen. Instead of sand, the beaches had small white pebbles, and the water was an amazing turquoise color. Never have I seen such pristine water. If the pictures I took don’t convince you to come to the DR, nothing will.
That’s all for now. I hope you are all doing well and getting ready for the 4th of July (I can’t believe it’s almost July....)
Sending amor y paz.
Always,
Sarah
------------------------
Second mass email coming at ya, Adrian, I hope you are feeling better. I definitely know how you feel…I too had parasites last week from the water I had been drinking. And I’ll send you my home address for a postcard if you send me tours. Everyone else who wants a postcard, send me addresses now! In the meantime, read on.
Hola a todos y todas,
Hello again! Yes, it’s been a long time, I apologize. But there is a lot of work to be done here (fun work, not boring). And I still have not perfected my methods of getting three pre-teens off the computer so I can send an email. It’s like being back at home in that regard...only there’s three kids instead of one!
I am doing well, finally. Last week was a bit of a struggle as I was sick with one thing or another. Sunday morning I woke up with my foot swollen to the size of a balloon, red and throbbing. Turns out I had a spider bite, which made it difficult to walk for the next few days. The spiders here aren’t deadly, but their bites are not friendly. I’ve had three in my room so far, and I hope that’s the end of it. My host father and brothers think the spider thing is hilarious. I’m sorry, but when hairy spiders as big as my foot like to sleep in my room and bite me, it’s not funny! The first time a spider was in my room, I made my host dad kill it as I was terrified. He then proceeded to chase me around the house with the dead spider in his hands. He swears I got the spider bite in the campo, but I know it bit me in my room: I saw it staring me down when I went to bed Saturday night.
But my week got even better. Tuesday night I came down with some sort of stomach bug or parasite and spent the night with the worst stomache pains, vomiting, and diarreah I have had ever (when you have both at the same time, you know something’s wrong). I spent the next two days in bed, not moving, not eating, not doing anything. My host family wasn’t sure what was wrong or what to do, so they just left me, with my host mom checking in on my once in awhile. Thank god Jose is my good friend, besides being my boss, and kept coming by to check up on me and make me drink water. He told me that he had felt bad that day too, and said that it was the water we had been drinking in the campo. You see, he said, the family doesn’t boil the water they give us. I was too weak to yell at him for not telling me this earlier and could only glare at him. I thought we were drinking boiled water! I’m just surprised it took me a month to get sick. From now on, I am bringing my own water everywhere. And Friday, when I finally got out of bed, I discovered I had another infection due to the heat and latrines, which meant a trip to the pharmacy. I’ve always thought I was a healthy person, but I guess I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I’ll move on to less disgusting topics and just say that hopefully that’s the end of the parasites/infections/spiders for me.
Last week while on the phone with home for the first time in quite a long time, my mother asked me if my internship here was a nine-to-five work day. I almost laughed out loud. The question, of course, was a perfectly valid question, but a simple “no” answer is not enough, since my role as an intern here varies almost on a daily basis. So let me try, as best I can, to document my job here and what I hope to accomplish while I am here.
Although I am “officially” here to work on the preschool program, because right now only José and I are working with Cambiando Vidas in the DR, my jobs extend beyond the preschool program. While helping to build the first house, I was working mostly with construction: mixing concrete and cement, laying blocks, sawing roof beams, threading electrical wires, and mostly running errands and assisting the more experienced house builders. The second week was more construction, finishing up odds and ends on the house, running errands, and taking a lot of pictures of the process. Since those first two weeks, each day is different. Since Cambiando Vidas has just started and there are currently only two people in the Dominican Republic working with it, there is a lot to do, and no one has one specific job. When you don't even have an office space and your biggest purchase to date is a printer, it's rather difficult to delegate jobs. In this sense, my work experience here might not be what you would call a typical “internship,” but I think I am benefiting more from working here because I get to learn how a non-profit works as a business and an organization from the administrative and fundraising levels, as well as how it accomplishes its goals out in the community and how it works with the community.
Yesterday we just finished taking a census of the entire community of Las Charcas de Garabito, going door to door to find out how many houses there are in the community and how many preschool age children there are in each house. This way we also started to spread the word about the upcoming program and alerted parents that they will be a vital component of the success of this program. It took us a couple of weeks to do the census, working in the mornings with some very enthusiastic kids from the community helping us out.
Each day traveling around San Juan and Las Charcas I learn more about life here. The other day José and I went to buy vegetables for lunch at the largest market in San Juan, and of course I couldn't pass up such an opportunity to check it out. San Juan has many markets, as it has a population of about 80,000 people, and even though I saw only a small fraction of it, its size and variety of products sold told me its size. But the size didn't startle me; what startled me was something that always catches me off-guard, even though I know that it exists. Here, when you visit a stall, you do not pick your own produce, but instead tell an attendant of that stall what you want and how much. When we arrived at the first stall, the attendant came out, wearing jeans that were barely held up by a belt, no shirt, no shoes, and spoke with the confidence that only comes from years of hard work and dealing with customers; this boy couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. While I watched him fill a bag with our order, quickly adding the prices in his head, all I could do was stare and think to myself, "He should be in school," and consider the, irony, I suppose, of providing a preschool for families who don't have such access and who desire the education, while we dealt with child laborers in the market.
But both Jose and I are reassured, almost daily, that creating a preschool program is very important to people here. Members from neighboring communities have asked Jose to start up the preschool in their communities as well (we would, but right now we can barely afford to work in one community at a time, let alone multiple ones). And all the families with young kids that we have interviewed in the community are thrilled about the prospect of a preschool opening in January. For example: the other day I entered the house of a mom who told me she was twenty-six and had three kids, raging from age five to nine. Although all her kids were in elementary school, and therefore could not directly benefit from the preschool program, she was ecstatic about the program. What should have been a two minute interview turned into a twenty minute conversation (mostly one-sided) about the benefits of such a program. You are helping the children learn how to learn, she told me, and feel confident in the classroom so that when they enter elementary school they will be ready. If you wait until they are seven or eight to put them in school, like this woman's experience, it is too late to teach them how to learn and they will feel uncomfortable in school. Moreover, she told me that, as her children had learned more in school, she had too, just be helping her kids with their homework. You're helping the entire family, she said, and you're doing what the government should be doing, but never does. Talking with her made my day.
But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a workaholic here. I get to spend my evenings relaxing with my host family or José’s family, who have become my second host family here as I spend so much time there. On weekends there are basketball games with teams from different neighborhoods in San Juan, so we always go to watch, especially since José’s brother’s team is now playing in the championship game. And we spend many hours with different families from the community, just hanging out and having fun.
This past weekend was particularly fun and relaxing. A group with Habitat for Humanity is here working in San Juan, consisting of high school and college students from the Marin area (small world!). They were going to beach in Barahona for the weekend, and invited Jose and I to tag along so they could find out about what we were doing. The beach has always been a relaxing place for me, and it was fun to meet the kids from college. I always enjoy meeting people my age who love to travel and volunteer, and find out what they are doing. A couple of them had even volunteered with Amgios (the program I volunteered with when I was in Costa Rica four summers ago). It was nice to take a break and talk to more people about Cambiando Vidas. Jose and I even had a “business” meeting with the hotel owners to see if we could get a bargain price for Cambiando Vidas volunteer groups to stay at the hotel. But, of course, it wasn’t your typical business meeting. I said to Jose afterwards that never before had I been a part of a formal business meeting where everyone was still in their pajamas. He had to laugh and admit that he hadn’t either.
On Sunday Jose and I drove down to a small coastal town called Paraiso to take pictures. The town is aptly named.While the beaches in the southwest don’t appear to be as famous as those in the north, I think they were the most beautiful I have ever seen. Instead of sand, the beaches had small white pebbles, and the water was an amazing turquoise color. Never have I seen such pristine water. If the pictures I took don’t convince you to come to the DR, nothing will.
That’s all for now. I hope you are all doing well and getting ready for the 4th of July (I can’t believe it’s almost July....)
Sending amor y paz.
Always,
Sarah
posted by Jake at 8:51 PM
1 Comments:
You know its a funny thing with the market because it is the same thing here. You go to the stall, and you have to ask by weight how many of each fruit or vegetable you want. The guy weighs it on an old fashioned scale like the kind we used in chemistry class and gives you the price based on how many kilos you want. 3rd world minds think alike I guess...
Post a Comment
<< Home