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!