It is so hard to believe it has already been three weeks of training! The end of last week, March 15-18, my cohort split up and traveled to different sites where volunteers are currently working. I traveled all the way north to the Monte Cristi province. Leaving Thursday morning was crazy! I left at 6:30am with three other trainees to take a taxi together to our bus station in Santo Domingo. Three of us were meeting our fourth trainee at another barrio down the highway. However, because everyone was going into work in the city, all of the carro público’s were filled and she was a 40-minute walk away. After finally splitting up and finding two different cars with space, we made it to her barrio. The traffic was so severe that a normal 10-minute drive took an hour. Then I called two separate taxi services to get a car to take us to the station. The night before I called to see if I could make a reservation, but they both said call 15 minutes before and guaranteed we would have a taxi. We did not get a taxi. There were none in the vicinity, so we called an uber. That was the nicest car we had been in yet; he had a huge screen next to the dashboard that he starting playing Youtube videos for us. We finally got to the station at 8:39am (my bus was at 8:30 and two of my friends at 8). Luckily we could take the 9:30, actually all together instead, so it worked out well in the end.
We made it to my stop, Villa Vasquez, by about 2:30pm. Then to get to my volunteer’s site I had to take a motoconcho, a motorcycle. (Sorry, mom! I rode a motorcycle 5 separate times this weekend, but don’t worry, I had a DOT issued helmet on the whole time!) She lives in a smaller campo that is mainly made up of dirt roads, but they’re starting to pave the main road now, so hopefully they will have it fully paved soon! The purpose of our PCV visit was to see how the current volunteers in the DR live and work. So, she showed me her house that she now lives in alone. It was a pretty nice house, in my opinion, for a PCV. She has a living room and two separate bedrooms, one that she uses as her room and the other to dry her laundry and for storage. Her kitchen is outside of the main house, as well as the shower and the latrine. She was lucky enough to find a house that was already furnished and had enough connections to borrow a few kitchen items. She introduced me to many of her neighbors. That night we even went walking with two other Dominicans from the campo down the road past all of the beautiful rice fields. They had just cut rice that day, so the campo down the road from hers had the street lined with giant bags filled with rice practically bulging out the seams. For dinner that night she made some homemade hummus with some veggies and some tuna salad on crackers; it doesn’t seem like much, but it was very filling.
Friday we went to her school that was only a few minutes walk from her house. The school has fewer than 200 students for K-9. They were all so interested to find out who this new white girl was in their community. All of the teachers welcomed me with open arms and spoke very highly of their volunteer. She is fortunate enough to use their library for her literacy pullout classes, which I may not have in my site. The schooling system here is going through many changes currently and there is not a very strict time schedule. So, once their first hour ended, the kids started their long recess, which ended up being about an hour and a half. Unfortunately, we could only work with 2 of the 4 groups she wanted to that day because many of her students were not at school that day and we were also pressed for time. However, the classes I did see her teach were great and she has some very smart kids that are already excelling in literacy after only a few months of her classes. They start by singing the ABC’s and then go into the letters they have already learned. Each day they work on a new letter in the alphabet using different games and tools to help them learn the letter and sound. The kids were very excited to work with her and although they might not understand everything instantly, they still get the repetition they need in order to learn in the end.
After the long lunch period and during the primary school’s final recess, I attended a pedagogic group with the primary school teachers. It was so much fun to see how one of the teachers works in her classroom, and they even had me present one of our in class activities. I had filled out my answers in Spanish alone, so once I finished reading the questions and my answers the whole room of teachers clapped and showed their sounds of enthusiasm for my level of Spanish. That night I attended my volunteer’s bible study with her and some of her church friends. Two of them picked us up in a car and drove us to the study in another nearby town where they also do church on Sunday’s together. I sat and observed and was intrigued to hear hymns and prayers in Spanish. It was a fairly quick study and soon we had dinner at this woman’s house. She had made mangú, which is a typical Dominican dish of mashed plantains usually served with sautéed onions on top and something on the side like fried sausage or fried cheese.
Saturday was a day to relax a little more. After our wonderful breakfast of coffee, pancakes and apples with peanut butter, we went over to her host family’s house in site. They were so sweet and had us sit down and kept filling our water bottles. We sat and talked with the younger daughter since the mother and older daughter were cleaning the house. Saturday is the day when everyone cleans their house. While we sat in the shade, I tried my first tamarind from their neighbor’s tree. It was pretty good, a little bitter but I can see why it would make for good juice. The family also has a guayava tree, so I tried one of those for the first time as well! It was almost like a cross between a pear and an apple, but there are so many seeds inside that you have to swallow, unless you want to break a tooth.
Eventually we went back to my volunteer’s house to change so we could head to the beach in Monte Cristi! My first time at a Dominican beach! I cannot believe it took this long considering how many beaches there are here. It was beautiful and a gorgeous, sunny day, I was staring in awe the entire time. We had a pizza by the beach, which was surprisingly better than I expected (but definitely cannot replace my Chicago style pizza I miss so much). The water was not that cold either; eventually it was even warmer than the breeze. One surprising thing that happened to me while we were wading in the shallow water: we were sitting there and I was sitting with my legs bent when I felt something grab at my left knee, like a crab would with its pincers. But it felt like it could have been one of the kids nearby too. Either way, I screamed a bit and jumped and we both moved down the beach a little more. We were definitely paranoid after that and wouldn’t stop moving, but we never saw anything or had any other encounters with anything.
An interesting cultural situation we had to face upon returning to her house after the beach was paying our moto driver. He is the only one my volunteer uses since she had to find a moto de confianza (trust). But I think because he knew I was there, he wanted to take advantage of it. So instead of us paying $150 total for one way, he had us pay $150 per person each way. She fought with him a little bit, more jokingly than anything because he knew she knew it was a trap. In the end we gave in because it wasn’t worth the fight and he wouldn’t change his mind on it. One difference here with transportation is that for the public transport services, the prices are not fixed. The buses and public taxis and motos can all change their price one day if they feel like charging more than the previous day. So far on public transport I have not experienced this, but I have heard stories where the cobrador (person that takes the fare) will charge more because they know you are foreign and may not have good Spanish, even in some cases where they have excellent Spanish but are with other foreigners that look more foreign. Transportation is definitely a new experience here, and I will have to write more about it in the future once I have more stories.
Overall, my weekend with a current PCV was truly enlightening. I learned so much about the life of a PCV here in terms of the living conditions, cultural differences and teaching literacy. She helped reassure me a little that I can integrate into my future site and I can work with kids on their literacy. All they wanted to do was talk to me; they were all so interested in me and who I was. Everyone in the town thought I was their volunteer’s sister (a cultural stereotype about Americans)! Seeing her relationship with her town made me more excited to start my own journey in this truly beautiful country.
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