Does a coconut a day keep anything away?

I have now been at my site for three weeks and have been having an interesting experience so far.

The helicopter ride was amazing. A little scary at first because it was really shaky, but the view was amazing.







I started working on my diagnostic (going house to house with community members to meet people. Also, I started teaching English in the school and one class to the adults. Everything has been going well so far. I have had one meeting with the group I’m going to be working with, Junta de Vecinos, and they sound very excited about working. I have yet to see a turtle but there are plenty on congrejos or crabs and one day a couple of dolphins came close to the shore.

In two weeks, I will present my diagnostic at the one year conference, and decide which project to undertake.

As for communication, there is internet at the restaurant next door to my house, but the owner for some reason doesn’t want us to use it. The “centro de llamada” or call center is a really tall tree that you have to climb to the very top. I haven’t gotten to the top yet, but 4 kilometers away I get a little bit of service.


Centro de llamada

Time for a change

So after a couple of months of long debate, I have decided to get a site change.

I will be moving from the northwest to the southeast. You can go to Googlemaps.com to see exactly where. The name of my site is Mano Juan, Isla Saona. It is an actual isla or island that I will have to take an hour boat ride to get to.
The island currently has generators that provides three hours of electricity every day from seven to 10 pm, but the Taiwan government is currently working on a solar panel project. There are currently about 350 people that live on the island, in which each person’s income in some way affected by tourism. There is one school that has grades 1-7th that has 53 students. When the students get ready to enter eighth grade they have two options: quit school or move to La Romana to continue (an hour and a half away).


This is the beach at my site. The green building on the far right is where I will be living.

This is a pioneer project meaning that I will be the first volunteer on the island. The Minister of Environment has been trying for some time to get a volunteer there. He really wants to start an eco-tourism project on the island. His idea is to have tourists ride bikes in between the two villages on the island, Mano Juan and Catalina (11 kilometers or about 7 miles). He is so behind the project that he already bought 40 bicycles. Another main assignment of mine is to identify potential projects for any of the six sectors: Environment (mine), Information Technology, Youth, Health, Water (aqueducts), and Business. Possible secondary projects include English classes in the school, Brigada Verde (youth environmental group), stoves, and working with the sea turtle house. They have a center there that collects sea turtle eggs from the beach before they are eaten, hatch and raise them in incubators, and then when they are ready release them to the wild. This is the project that I am most excited about learning more about and working with.

I went to the isla yesterday and it was amazing! It’s very beautiful and the people were quite impressive. I am going to be living in the guard house for free and get fed for free (but can make my own meals or eat out when I want). This Thursday and Friday I will travel to my old site with a Peace Corps jeep and driver, get my stuff and Rosalinda, and then return to the capitol. Then next Tuesday or Wednesday Jaime David (the minister of environment), Alberto (my boss), me, and Rosalinda (hopefully) are going to load up my stuff on a HELICOPTER and take it down to the island!!! I’ll be sure to put up pictures soon after.

Counting my Blessings

Last Sunday, I was in the capitol for the Super bowl. That morning, I didn’t have too much to do so I went to the intake of a med mission to see if I could help out.

Various doctor groups come to the DR from all over the US for 1-2 weeks to provide free health care. Most of the doctors only speak English so Peace Corps set up a system to allow volunteers to accompany the doctors as translators during the “med mission.”

Sunday was intake day of the cosmetic surgery mission in the capitol. People came in to give general information and schedule surgeries. Now let me make this clear, when I say cosmetic I don’t mean breast implants and gastric bi-pass surgery. We saw people with clef lips, deformed or extra fingers, fire or acid burns, extreme scarring, extra skin on ears.

I went to the med mission thinking that I would be taking people’s names and phone numbers, and/or crowd control duty. A friend and I traveled there and the closer we got the more it hit us that this was going to be a crazy day. There was a line of patients for two blocks to the hospital, and there was a loud crowd just outside the doors. We gripped hands squeezed are way to the front, and asked where they needed us.

We ended up taking people’s general information, but also working with a specific doctor to figure out what exactly happened to the patient. Then describing to the patient about the required surgery. Both the patients and the surgeries were widely ranged. A four month old with an extra finger and extra toe to a 35 year old with major burns on the side of his face down to his chest and elbow.

The person I’ll remember most was a 23 year old girl who came in with a horrible burn on the inside of her ankle. “Two years prior,” she told me. She took off her shoe, “a electrical cord from a fridge exploded and deformed my ankle.” Deformed was an understatement. It looked like her skin had become clay and someone had moved and kneaded the skin. More chunks in some places and so little in others so that you could see the white canvas (bone) peeking out from the background. Then the same person had flicked different colored paint…brown, red, black…on the mountainous clay.

The doctor gave me the worse news of the day…I had to tell the girl with abstract art for an ankle that there was nothing he could de for her. Over 600 people came to the hospital that day, and the doctors over the next two weeks have several hundred surgeries scheduled.

Even though I was there for about four hours, it was an experience I’ll never forget. Count you blessing today for health, for life.

New Pictures

There are some new pictures at flickr.com!! The link in on the right side.

The Real Happening

If you know me, you know that I am a huge movie buff. I love getting lost in a different world for two hours, and in every movie I can find at least one good thing about the film.

One director that I enjoy is M. Night Shyamalan. The way he twists reality and fantasy, the way he always uses a little touch of comedy, and how you're always guessing when the director himself will appear (he played the doctor in "The Sixth Sense" and the older park ranger in ""The Village"). However, one movie that I did not enjoy was "The Happening". Even for a big Shyamalan fan, I thought that nature chemically making humans kill themselves using the wind was a bit of a stretch even for him. The one good point I got was the two main themes of the film: nature attacks and human technology is so advanced that it can spread information and keep us connected even in a disaster.

Now two years after the movie, occurs a real happening. Nature attacked with the skill and power of a predator and January 12th, 2010 will be a day for the history books. Nature could not have picked a more deadly location, Porto’O Prince was concentrated with about three million people and the infrastructure was poor. So, of course, chaos has begun after a 7.0 earthquake hit the heart of 3rd world. The earthquake was so strong, we felt it here in the Dominican Republic all the way to Samana (the peninsula on the opposite side of the DR). A friend of mine that lives close to the Haitian border said that the earth shook there for an entire minute.

The second theme to the movie rang true as well. Human technology connected Haiti with the rest of the world shortly after the first quake. The first report was a Haitian skyping! If people could not call to their family, they checked their Facebook page. I'm reading a book right now about the 1800s, in the book a husband and wife are separated by the Pacific Ocean for three years. It takes 24 days one way to send a letter, so they only get a letter from their significant other every two months. Now a days, though, you could just Yahoo! chat or Tweet "I'm doing okay." It is amazing the power of technology and the speed that it changes. For example, I couldn't imagine being a PC volunteer 10 years ago when at my site they didn't have cell service or internet. Now, I can text with other volunteers almost everyday even though some days I don't have water or electricity.

I can use the internet about once a week when there is electricity, when there are not any "problemitas" or little problems, and when I have some extra pesos. However, 10 years ago you could only use it once a month when you went into the capitol. I don't believe a tree can beat me up, but I do think that Shyamalan had a good, truthful message... Nature can be deadly at any point in time, and maybe it deserves the title of the deadliest predator. Technology has come so far, it can keep us connected through any happening.


My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families of the Haitian earthquake.

Adaptation

In the middle of December, I took an open water scuba diving class in the capitol, Santo Domingo. The number one thing to remember when diving is to always keep breathing. Sink or swim becomes drown or breathe.

The first couple of classes were lectures and diving in a pool (that was 10 feet deep). Then it was off to the ocean, the Carribean Sea, to do the first dive to 35 feet. The books and papers go out of the window, and you have to rely on everything that you obtained in the last two days. When you first jump off the boat, you're in nothing short of chaos. You're adjusting your gear, refitting your goggles, and trying to breathe. Even though you can breathe through your snorkel, you can't help but hold your breath when a wave dunks your head underwater. You think that you are already losing control, and you are having second thoughts about if you can do this. But then you get the signal, change your snorkel for your regulator, and you let the air out of your jacket, as it's time to descend. You start to breath through your regulator, your heavy air tank is now weightless, and tiny fish start to swarm around you. You are in a different world now; one that is entirely different from the surface. You defy gravity like you are in outer space, you crush human limitations by breathing air underwater, time slows down, and though colors are lost the further you go down, nothing has ever looked more beautiful.

Nombres

The names here come in three categories:

1. Traditional English names (with a Latin twist on the pronounciation)
Nelson, Jeffrey, Christian, Angel, Junior, Alexandra

2. Traditional Latin names
Maria, Rosa, Manuel, Juan, Miguel, Ana

3. The hard to pronounce and even harder to spell
Zuelaki (Sue-lake-e), Neftali, Digamara, Crismeyti (Chris-my-tea), Orbelisa, Arislati (R-is-lady)

*It seems like when a couple like a name, they like it so much they name all of their children variations of the same name.
Irlenny and Ilenny are sisters.
Crismayti and Crismeyti are sisters.
Yissel, Yolli, and Yoti, are siblings.

*My name: I go by Rebekah to the Dominicans for 2 reasons. (1) I like how they pronounce it. I can't pronounce it the way they do and half the time when I'm telling someone my name they don't understand me, but when they say it, it sounds really pretty.
And (2) "beca" means scholarship in Spanish and I didn't want to go by scholarship for the next two years.