On my new normal

Hola! Today is my three week anniversary in country!!!

Last week (Thursday through Sunday), I ventured out of the capital and into the mountains to visit a current volunteer in a small rural village called Sabaneta. It is about 45 minutes away from a town called San Juan de la Maguana (where the current President Danilo Medina is from). Surprisingly, the DR has four mountain ranges (who knew!) and a pretty temperate climate in parts so it’s technically considered a subtropical climate – not the tropical beach vacation y’all probably had in mind when I told you I was headed to the DR. I digress. 

I had an awesome visit with a kick-ass young lady named Laura from Indiana. She’s a nurse, a cat-lover, motivated, dedicated, aplatanada (Dominicanized), and a bomb cook! I am very thankful for my visit and the awesome time I had visiting another region of the DR. Seeing her life made me more confident in the life I can and will lead here over the next two years. I saw first hand the true integration that Peace Corps volunteers are able to experience and the lasting impact that volunteers have on their communities. Laura was truly a part of her community and very well-respected by the families and women of the small community.

While visiting, I was able to take part in a women’s health group and see the ways in which she has connected her interests in health to the needs of the community. This was inspiring and left me confident and excited in what I will be able to accomplish with my own women’s groups. However, when I was in Sabaneta, we were supposed to make outdoor cook stoves for two families but the mason had to work on Saturday, making our efforts null and we couldn’t even start the projects. In addition to seeing the successes Laura has had in her community, I also watched the frustration and adaptability that a volunteer needs to have. Even though we couldn’t begin the cook stove construction, Laura was flexible and used the time to work on other projects, spend time with community members, and take us to waterfalls, caves, and lakes!

My visit to Sabaneta illustrated a serious need for me to keep an open-mind throughout my service. There are so many ways to become frustrated, be it when the culture seems misogynistic/racist/uneducated/poor/machismo or when I feel sick/homesick/frustrated/angry but in these moments, it will help to remember that I can learn from another culture, and that it’s not “better” or “worse,” just different. The Peace Corps has set high goals for us volunteers, including integrating fully into another culture and community, developing a plan for community organizing, impacting national policy and curriculum development, and mitigating the effects of poverty by realizing that being poor does not mean being sick/unhealthy. It’s a lofty set of goals, but seeing Laura one year into service showed me that these goals are actually possible to achieve...thank god!

Tomorrow, I am heading into the campo (rural village) for Community Based Training (CBT). We will be in the campo for five straight weeks, living with a new host family and training in a new center. I’m stoked! We will be building stoves, teaching and presenting health and nutrition to women and youth groups, gardening (!!!), and learning other technical health skills. It’s going to be a fabulous change of pace from the city living – which has regularly included being woken up at 6am by Evangelical preaching from subwoofers attached to trucks driving through the streets, never being able to fall asleep from the blaring reggaetone and merengue that reverberates throughout the neighborhood until 1am even on Sundays, and the poop, trash and sewage that seeps into the streets as I walk to class everyday. 

To me, most these things have started to seem normal, but it took me heading to the mountains to realize that this country actually is full of clean air, beautiful mountains, green rivers, agriculture, and a slower pace of life. As more strange things start to become “normal” to me here in the DR, I’ll take time to make a list and point ‘em out!

·      I eat almost six eggs a day (two for breakfast, one-ish on top of a salad at lunch, and two for dinner). Yikes cholesterol!

·      White bread has become one of my main food groups – (along with plantains, and did I mention eggs?)

·      My doña consider “a good meal” to be one with two loaves of white bread with margarine and salami inside

·      My host sister washes her hair every two weeks

·      I wash my hair every four and it’s considered "excessive"

·      We don’t have water to use for showering/cleaning/washing clothes right now

·      Frozen yogurt here is almost as good as fro-yo at BerryLine in the US

·      I hand wash my own underwear

·      I am considered “rubia” or “blonde/yellow” in skin color

·      The walls in my house don’t go all the way up to the ceiling

·      40% of Dominicans live on less than $2/day

·      Six huge jugs of clean drinking water (5 gallon jugs) costs $1, but many people in rural communities cannot afford to buy it

·      Coffee costs $0.40/cup

·      Gasoline costs more than $6/gallon

·      The DR has stricter and harsher laws for immigrants than the US

·      People don’t often talk positively (if at all) about rights for homosexuals

·      There is systemized and deliberate racism against Haitians

·      Teenage pregnancy rates here are exponentially higher than other Latin American countries

So now I’m off to the campo for five weeks and don’t know how reliable internet access will be. I’ll try to post a few times or just save my posts/picts for when I return! As always, send me updates and news and events in your life! Would love to hear from you.

I'm sending all my best - especially today on the anniversary of 9/11.