Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Life in Sweat

Saludos everybody!

I made it! I´ve been here for 2 weeks now, but it feels like soooo much longer. I have never done so much at one time in my life. My training group is really, really nice. There´s 52 of us in the group with four different sectors (health, water and sanitation, community economics, and youth). There are 12 of us in the healthy families group. We´ve been training everyday in Spanish, culture, history, safety, and technical training. All of the trainers are wonderful at what they do. The training is quite intense, and we´ve just started discussing our project plans. My Spanish is coming slowly, but hopefully it will pick up once we leave in a couple of weeks for our Community Based Training. This consists of 5 weeks in a rural area near the southern coast. I´m secretly hoping for a little beach time too!

As for living conditions, it´s a major transition, but I´m adjusting like a camelion. It´s soooo incredibly hot here. I have a layer of sweat on me at all times. The temperature on my alarm clock reads from 80-90 degrees, so you can imagine that the fan has truly become my best friend. During training, I´m living with a 30ish year old woman and her 7 year old daughter. Her mom (my Dona) makes me food and washes my clothes. If I don´t gain 100 pounds, I´ll be really surprised. She gives me two mounding plate fulls at every meal. I feel bad when I can´t eat it all. The food is pretty good though...lots of rice, beans, platanos, bread, and cheese. Good thing I love carbs! The house I´m living in has electricity most of the day, but it goes out from 7-11pm. I´m also growing quite fond of my pink mosquito net and cold bucket baths. Next time you´re taking a nice, hot shower, please think of me. I even saw a cockroach for the first time in my room a couple of nights ago! I was on the phone with Jackie, so she got to hear my surprise. :)

Well, tomorrow I´m leaving for the mountains to hang out with a volunteer who has been volunteering for 2 years. Hopefully I´ll get a true sense of what it´s going to be like. I´m a little nervous about using the crazy transportation system, so please pray that I make it there and back to Santo Domingo on Sunday. Unfortunately, the girl I was supposed to visit alone became sick with Dengue Fever, so now I´m going with another trainer to the cooler mountains. I can`t wait to stop sweating for once!

Well that´s about all for now. Right now, there´s an internet cafe close to my house, but the computers are really slow and from the 1990s. There´s also only 4 of them, so it´s sometimes hard to get online for a long time. Right now, I can´t download pics to it, but hopefully I´ll find a more modern internet cafe sometime in the next two years. Otherwise, I´ll have a bunch of pics to show you all later.

Thanks to all of you for you support and prayers. How is everyone doing back home? What´s going on in your lives??

Well take care for now and God bless!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! I hope your trip to the mountains went well! It sounds like you are already gaining a lot from your experience. I still can't imagine what you are seeing or feeling. I had a bad day today with my life and job. I decided to check your blog to see if you have been able to write and now I see what I'm going through is probably not even close to half of what you are dealing with or what the people you are helping have to go through. Even though I am not there, knowing you are truely helps me put things in perspective. I hope things are going well with you and you arent' sweating too much!! LOL it's actually still pretty nice in GR. Even though it's October, it's still going to be almost 80 for the next few days. I miss you lots and can't wait to hear what you've been up to.
Lots of love
Jamie

Unknown said...

Hey hon!! I hope everything is going well! I miss you so much but I know you will/are doing wonderful things over there! I hope you had fun in the mountains and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again soon!! It was probably the greatest surprise I've had in a long time to hear from you when you called a couple weeks ago. Good luck with everything!! Love ya and I'll talk to you soon I hope!!
love ya!!!
Kait