Happy Thanksgiving

Hi All, I just wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving. I am thinking of you all and being thankful for you and wishing you warm delicious dinners. Eat some turkey and maybe a sweet potato or two for me.

love
Katrina

Well hi there! What’cha up to? Not much you say? Just surfing the web? You wanna take a little photo tour of my neighborhood? You do?! Awesome! Step right up! Ok folks, no pushing, everyone gets to come along, this is after all, an electronic tour. Geez.

Ok. So. Stepping outside of my gate, across the street we see a big purple and yellow building. Yes, that’s right, purple and yellow. This is the headquarters of the PLD (Partido de la Liberación Dominicana - the Dominican Liberation Party - which is the party of the current president). I find the difference in what we see as appropriate political colors and what Dominicans see as political colors to be very interesting. There are always a ton of people coming and going here, and a couple of watchmen all night who play music which you can sometimes hear softly in my room.

It has a ton of great murals,

and this one in particular always reminds me of my Dad – the heads look just like him when he had short hair and a beard. Hi Dad!

Walking up the street we see the corner that is a flower shop in the morning, and a painter’s studio and gallery in the afternoon. Since it’s 3pm, we can see the paintings on display.

In the afternoons the flower woman moves across the street to another corner. I really wonder what this arrangement is about.
Across the street, conveniently located about 100 yards from my apartment is a local branch of a big supermarket chain here, La Cadena (which literally means the chain).
On the cross street we see my local internet café, J&G Computers. Isn't this an exciting tour? Aren't you so glad you decided to come along? Me too!!

This guy is selling coconuts – you can see guys with these types of carts selling all kinds of things – mangos, avocadoes, etc. – all over the city.

One block over and we can visit the first apartment I lived in – it’s the top floor of the building straight ahead. Across the street from this building is my favorite colmado, the front is all one big long porch.
This colmado is so great it's actually a supercolmado. (whenever I see this sign I think of SuperWawas)

So now we’re back to my street,
walking home
and now we’re here! This is my building
and this is my little apartment!
I hope you all enjoyed visiting me – it was lovely to have you here :). Please come again soon!

Tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 5am I take off for the north coast for a long weekend, so look for some awesome beach and kite-surfing shots next week. Love you all!

Messy

I’m sorry there hasn’t been more posting happening here recently. I wish there had been, and I mentally start posts all the time, planning them out as I walk down the street or prepare dinner or grocery shop. I think of the things I could tell you all, the little stories, like how recently I was sitting on the couch early on a Saturday morning, watching a little TV, and I had just turned on the ceiling fan and sat down and suddenly, plop!, something landed, a little wetly, on my shoulder. I took a BIG breath, and stamped down the overwhelming urge to hurl my body off the couch, to shake whatever it was off, off, OFF! I slowly turned my head to see a little black gecko peering back at me. He must have been chilling out on the fan when I turned it on. I set him free in the jungle-y alley running alongside my apartment’s back door.

I think about telling you how much I love my new gym. There are a set of huge fancy hotels that run along the Malecon (the street which fronts the ocean – named George Washington, of all things) and I joined the gym in one that is located just one block from my house and I go and work out on the elliptical machine and then one of the gym guys helps me think of interesting weight stuff to do and although it’s only been a few weeks, I am so excited to have a regular exercise schedule for the first time since high school, really. There’s a rooftop pool at this hotel as well, and access to it was included with my gym membership, and although I wasn’t really even thinking about it when I joined, it has turned out to be the most wonderful place to escape the city for brief periods. It gets a wonderful breeze since it’s close to the ocean and elevated, and I get a towel and lie in the sun and read a book or take a swim and it’s quiet and clean. I’ve been going a lot since I haven’t been working and today a bunch of my friends came as well and we made a whole Saturday of it.

The thing that blocks those peppy little mental posts however, is that I’m not really very happy right now. I am happy, quite happy, in small doses. I have friends I really like, and an actual social life that I’m finding quite fulfilling, which is not something I really expected at this stage. I have a lot of time and I am doing more nothing than I think I’ve done in years – in fact, most of the last two weeks of my life has consisted of going to the gym, reading, hanging out with friends, and watching movies. This nothing makes me happy in small doses – I can’t believe how wonderful it is to have time to go to the gym and do a whole, long routine, without the pressing dread of how I’m going to get my reading done for Metaphysics tomorrow. I love staying up late re-reading the 7th Harry Potter. I love that I can meet my friends for dinner any night of the week and that I can plan a long weekend away (next weekend I’m going to the kite-surfing capital of the world on the North Coast. I’m so excited!). I haven’t had the ability to do that much in the last four years.

But. But the truth is that outside and around and in all the times other than these small doses of fresh air, of light, of fun and relaxation, I feel very very messy. And I’m having a hard time writing about this messiness. I can write about true feelings – good or bad, but messiness trips me up more – things are not clear in my own mind and I am disturbed by how I feel.

It is of course, partly that I am effectively unemployed. I am working on finding a new position, but although I have a couple promising leads, it may take a couple more weeks to track them down and make a couple of site visits. I am disheartened by the lack of organization and drive and proficiency I have been presented with. I am trying so hard to let go of my American expectations, expectations which I believe are ultimately not good for us, expectations which I see as working us into the ground, expectations which I find myself frustratedly using to make grand cases against people around me here. It’s such an endless process for me – I let go of my expectations, I accept that things just work differently here, and then I find myself angry again the next day, all zen forgotten.

And if that was all – if I could tell that my feelings were occasioned by a lack of purpose and place, if I thought that the intense messiness that I currently feel would be mostly erased by a well-fitting job, I wouldn’t worry about it. I am optimistic that even though it might take a couple more weeks, one of my leads will turn up something that will be good for me, and I do think this will help. I think that a schedule, and a purpose, and being part of an organization that is doing something to combat the conditions I see around me will improve my mindset a ton, will help to clean up a bit of that messiness.

But the dark truth is that I don’t like this country right now. I really don’t want to admit this to you. I re-wrote that sentence multiple times before I finally got down to it, slowly unwrapping the deception I would like to cover my ugly feelings with. I got up and went to grocery store after writing it, letting it sit there on the page, thinking through what it meant to post that sentence on the worldwide web as I chose between all the different kinds of fresh breads. I even came back and changed it. You’ll notice I chose the noun country instead of other possibilities and that I end the sentence with a lovely little clause meant to temper, to contain, to limit my ugliness. I am so hoping this is a temporary, culture shock feeling.

It is unfair to feel this way about a country and a people. That you, from your tiny little, one-person perspective, do not like them. And I know so many people who love this country. And I have never felt this way before. Despite being in situations that were hard or trying, I have never felt that I couldn’t unearth redeeming qualities somewhere that could help me to gain a better picture of those around me, that could help me get the better of dislike.

I am having real trouble doing that right now. And this feels like an exceptionally dark thing to me, too dark, really, to write about on my “year in the DR” blog. It feels unwieldy and unjust and I don’t want to admit it about myself. I am posting about it nonetheless, because I feel a little stuck and I sincerely believe in the power and importance of putting it all out there and because I want you all to know who and where I am, even if I’m not very proud of it at the moment. Let’s hope that in a couple more months I can write a post talking about how much this has changed, okay?

Look for more posts on geckos, coming soon :).

Well....I guess I asked for it....

oh going to the beach - it was hot and bright, although slightly cloudy on my walk from my house to the hotel where I am sitting in the lobby and using the WiFi, and I pushed the warnings I've been hearing that we'll see rain through the weekend and into next week to the back of my mind and merrily emailed and posted that I'd be feeling the sand between my toes by this time Saturday.

It's pouring. The palm trees are whipping back and forth outside the windows. Sigh.

Hey There Square One

I quit my job last Thursday. Well, not the whole job – I am still employed by Princeton in Latin America to be in Santo Domingo and to work in the non-profit, non-governmental, public service field, but I am no longer working for Censel.

I haven’t talked about this on here much, but I assume that through what I did say and through other conversations, most of you were aware that I was having some serious difficulty with my job. While I thought (and continue to think) that the work done by Censel is of the utmost importance, the organization is undergoing something of a financial and administrative crisis and the truth is that they don’t have any work, or that they are not set up at this time to be able to find work for me to do. They’ve been attempting to find new sources of funding for quite some time and they’ve been mostly unsuccessful, leading to major cutbacks of educational and promotional programs, and a loss of staff members, which has curtailed their legal program as well.

Because of these factors and a number of others, there really wasn’t anything for me to do. I’m not a lawyer and my language skills are not good enough to take statements from generally emotional Dominican women about the legal difficulties they face. There’s a small amount of grant applying happening, and this is what I’ve spent time doing in the last two months, but even that is slow and small and not enough to sustain the number of women working there.

So, I quit. I…well, I feel pretty conflicted about this – have since the moment I walked out of my boss’s office and a week later the confliction has subsided somewhat, replaced by the firm reasoning I am trying to do and by the really incredible support so many of you are offering me. I don’t like the fact that I wasn’t able to make that situation work – it was, and is, an incredibly interesting organization with some simply amazing history and I wanted to be a part of what they are doing and I wanted to learn from them. But, I couldn’t. And I don’t actually think that’s my fault, although it’s easy to let that little doubting voice pipe up with other opinions when I’m feeling low.

I am currently working on researching other opportunities for myself here in the city – as I said, I am still employed by Princeton in Latin America to be here, working on something in the same range of non-profit posts, and I’ve thought it through and I’m committed to staying here if at all possible. I have a little while to work on communicating with contacts and researching organizations and I hope to find a number of promising organizations to examine in depth. I’ve started with that process a little, but was thrown off track a little by the storm – as I know some of you have read, there has been some pretty intense weather around these parts recently – Tropical Storm Noel blew through and although it has been seriously impressive to watch, and somewhat inconvenient as everything has been closed and the electricity has been going out for days, I am very safe.

It’s amazing however, how much a storm can throw something like this off. Unlike the States, the DR basically closes down when hit with serious weather. The infrastructure is simply not strong enough to handle the wind and water, and pretty instantaneous flooding and power outages result, leading to a standstill for most industries. It’s been a little like having a string of snow days as a kid – the first day or two are really fun and feel like a reprieve from life, and then as the days go on, people start getting cabin fever – no where to go, nothing to do. Today is bright and dry, although still a little cloudy, and although I’ve heard rumors that another storm is going to blow through this weekend, I’m choosing to hope that it’ll pass us by.

In the meantime I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends – my friend Rachel (who is now reading the blog (well, maybe), despite my intentions to be all sneaky about blogging to real life friends here - hi Rachel! Hope you don’t mind how much I talk about you here!) introduced me to a wonderful new café (with WiFi!) where the hipster crowd all congregates, and I’ve spent a couple of days there with her, and we also went to the ballet last weekend – Sleeping Beauty :). We’ve been doing movie nights and making brownies ala mode, and going to the gym a lot. It’s funny – I was so worried about the friend issue, much more worried in fact, about the friend thing than about the work thing, and as my life seems to like to do to me – the very opposite is true.

I feel like I’ve got a somewhat cemented friend thing happening – there are a group of kids from a study abroad program who I see very regularly and really like, and although they leave in December, it still feels like enough of a social life to sustain me. And I feel like I’ve found a real friend in Rachel – so often these situations quickly and artificially bond people to one another (not that that’s bad – just that it might not happen in different circumstances), but I feel like I would like to be friends with her in real life, and I feel incredibly lucky that that’s true. So…I’m starting to feel like not only do I have a social life, I also have someone to have a deeper friendship with too, and that’s pretty much having a magical, no-calorie, but tastes like normal, cake, with butter cream icing, and eating it too.

So, as usual, things are a mixed bag and I’m going to try to keep on keeping on. Oh, and I think if the weather holds, I will definitely be going to the beach this weekend. The beach solves career worries, right?