Dominicans love to decorate for the holiday season, I’m learning, and the PLD, just across the street from me is no exception. It is covered in multi-colored strings of lights and the effect as I’m walking home is completely wonderful. I’m so excited for the holiday season this year. I hope you all are finding some of that holiday warmth in your own setting.I’m sorry there has been so much radio silence around here recently; I think I just really needed some time to let things marinate. It has been a very difficult three and a half months, but I think I’m finally coming out to the other side and I’m feeling so happy and positive about my decisions. Since my last post I have cemented a couple of projects for myself, changed my thinking about this year, and decided not to come home for good tomorrow, when I come to the States for a nice long holiday vacation. It’s been a very busy month J.
I started work last week for CIPROS, a development NGO which has ongoing projects in a number of the poorest suburbs of the city, as well as in another region in the south of the country. They have a center which helps single mothers train for and find employment, a medical clinic, and a prenatal care clinic. I have been put on the team that is working on a new project – a young child (2 to 5 years old) education center that will also provide services for families – education on nutrition and hygiene practices, etc. I spent the last week working on developing a form that will be used to interview all the families in that suburb with children in the age range, to determine basic facts about the families’ situations. I am not convinced that this position is really going to provide me with much interesting work to do – this one form was really the only concrete suggestion that came out of a long meeting we had to determine how I could assist – but I am hopeful that as I get more into the organization that may change, and if not, it provides a nice “home base” of sorts.
The reason I feel ok about this is that there is another project that I have been offered which will provide real work to sink my teeth into. The Secretary of State’s Department of Education has a department which administers funds for educational programming, both within the government, and to NGOs. I will be examining the programs run by NGOs funded through this department in the last year, and determine keys for success employed by these programs which could also be employed by governmental programs. This is pretty much exactly what I am interested in – determining how to successfully address issues of social concern. It is what I feel I most tried to study at Princeton, and I completed a very similar project the summer I lived in Uganda. It feels like a major challenge, and I feel somewhat intimated by taking it on, but it doesn’t feel completely out of my reach, and I actually believe that I have the skills to do this job and do it really well. It will allow me to do real work that will be actively used for social good, it will challenge me, but I have the skills to begin to chip away at it. I am incredibly excited about beginning this project.
So, while CIPROS may not provide me with much intellectual stimulation, it will provide me with a home base, and this project through the Secretary of State will provide me with a lot of intellectual stimulation. The idea is to work somewhat part-time at both of these places, and then to not actually be working full-time overall. Here’s where the change-of-mind piece comes in. I came into this experience with my usual perfectionist goals. I wanted a job that was going to involve me intensely and allow me to affect real! change! I wanted to be totally immersed in my work experience, and once I began to realize just how much I clashed with the culture I was living in, this became even more important to me. I spent a couple of weeks focusing on a sort of trade-off – if I wasn’t going to like the culture, I needed to LOVE my job to make up for it. This makes sense to me still, abstractly, but I’ve come around to thinking that perhaps it doesn’t make much sense in the context of the Dominican Republic.
My drive and work ethic seems to be confusing to people around me. I was pushing so hard for work, more work!, give me work to do!, and the people around me were asking if I had gotten around to going to any of the beaches yet. I’m going to start approaching this year differently. I’ve decided that instead of making myself crazy by pushing the current, desperately seeking work that I don’t think really exists, I’m going to swim with the current. This is the advice for those caught in rip tides, and I’ve begun to think that Dominican culture very much qualifies for rip tide status. I’m going to do good, quality work on my projects, I’m going to try to make sure I have something to occupy my mind and something to work at developing my skills through, but I’m not going to try to take on a lot of work. I am, in fact, going to work part-time overall. Wow, that feels a little scary to announce that to you all. I am styling this year as my hooky-year, my Peter Pan year. This is just not going to be the year that I grow all up and have a “real job” and work long hours and change the world. Instead, it’s going to be the year when I do a small amount of quality work, and the year that I sleep late and go out with friends a lot and the year that I go to the beach way more than is good for my skin.
I’m feeling pretty excited about the self-styling as Peter Pan. It sounds like a lot of fun, and even more than that, pretty restorative. So far I’m really loving the amount of breathing and thinking time it is giving me, the way my rhythm is slower. I don’t think this would work if there was a long stretch of time in front of me, but I am also thinking that it is likely I will end up leaving here earlier than I had originally expected and for another 4 to 6 months, I’m a little in love with my plan.
I’m heading to Philly tomorrow morning, and things are almost all in place. I’ve been running errands and cleaning like crazy (confidential aside to my Mom: I think you can consider your job done – I am officially an adult who is constitutionally incapable of leaving for a vacation without making sure her apartment is squeaky clean), and I am SO beyond excited to be home and to see so many of you. I hope you all have wonderful holidays and I’ll be back here in the New Year!
All my love.
Katrina
