A Peter Pan Year

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

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?

The Good List

Last week I flew to Chicago. One of my best friends was getting married on Saturday and so on Wednesday morning I took a cab in the rain and flew through Atlanta to get to be with her, help with wedding preparations, and be there for the event. It was wonderful – that word is pretty insufficient to explain what last weekend meant to me, but when I first found out, last summer, that she would be getting married in October, I had a split second of thinking about not going, since I would be in the DR, and it would be expensive to go. And now, thinking about what it would have been like to not have gone, I can’t believe I even considered it. So wonderful doesn’t really cover it, but maybe you can understand what I mean for that word to cover.

Anyway – I want to write a post about the weekend, about what it was like to be home in the US for four days, and now what it is like to be back here, but my life here is a little tumultuous at the moment – I am thinking this week may be my last week working for this organization, and I don’t feel clear enough to write it.

So, because there’s general consensus that focusing on the positive side of things helps one to actually feel more positive about the things in question, I’m going to write you all a little free-form list about the good, surprising, enjoyable, funny, useful things about the DR, Santo Domingo, and my life here.

The Good List
- Avocadoes. Dominicans LOVE avocadoes, and I eat a slice for lunch everyday, all mixed in with my rice and beans. I have hated, for 22 years, avocadoes, and I was dismayed when I first got here and Dona Ramona put a slice of one on my plate at lunch and I realized that I was either going to have to eat it or say I didn’t like them, and I didn’t want to say I didn’t like them since pickiness in general is not a quality favoured by Dona Ramona and I was new and I wanted everyone to like me and think I wasn’t a stuck-up American princess. So. I ate it. And the first day I didn’t really like it. Or the second or third, but I think that around the fourth I started thinking about how the combination of flavours with the beans and the rice was actually pretty interesting, and now, closing on two months of eating avocadoes semi-daily, I LOVE avocadoes. I weep at the thought of all those years wasted, deprived of the buttery, green taste of avocadoes.

- Beaches. I’ve already posted some pictures on here, but no Good List of the DR would be complete without mention of the beaches. People, this is good stuff. The Caribbean is an awful place to live in lots of ways (and yes, I am listing them in my head, but I will not write them down – this is a good list!), but the beaches are GOOD. The beaches are definitely God’s way of saying sorry for the giant cockroaches and the rampant ants (I tried so hard but apparently I’m feeling pretty bitter about the bug thing – it just kept creeping in!). The beaches, with their perfectly white sand and perfectly blue, perfectly warm water, ringed by their perfectly arranged palm trees blowing in the perfect hint of a breeze, might just be enough to get Him out of the doghouse for those ants.

- Coffee. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t like coffee. Well, except for those three weeks I spent in Cuba in high school, where I learned that Cubans drank their dark, already sweet coffee in tiny cups with more sugar than coffee. Turns out the Dominicans drink it the same way. And Dona Ramona keeps a carafe full in the office kitchen, and one of my co-workers gave me a pretty brown cup. Oh coffee.

- Cold showers. I bet you’re surprised. What are cold showers doing on a List of Good? Cold showers are bad, right? Cold showers should be avoided. And, yes, while most households in the DR do not have hot water heaters, my apartment is fancy enough that it actually has one, so if I wanted to, I could switch it on 20 minutes before I wanted to take a shower and avail myself of lovely, relaxing hot water. Except it wouldn’t be. Lovely or relaxing that is. This country, friends and family, is what we call HOT. Today it is 88°F with 70% humidity. That is a recipe for making a girl discover the restorative properties of cold showers.

- Candles. Now, I always knew I loved candles, but when the power goes out for more than five hours at a time, and then the generator runs out, I find a whole new appreciation for candles.

- Dominican Rum. I don’t really feel this one needs any explanation.

- Geckos. I really love little lizards. They are so cute and they eat bugs! Two weeks ago, I had just turned on the ceiling fan and sat down on the coach to watch a little TV when all of a sudden there was a weird little “plop!” noise, and something definitely landed on my shoulder. I fought the urge to completely freak out and run around desperately trying to shake off whatever the thing was, and calmly looked down to discover it was a little gecko who must have been chilling out on the fan. I know this story should probably bar geckos from the Good Thing list, but somehow, it only makes me like them more. Plus, did I tell you? They eat bugs!

- Friends on my same wavelength. This one is not very specific to here, but since I just sent a tentative text message to a friend, asking if there was any way that I could convince her to go to the National Theatre’s production of Sleeping Beauty the Ballet with me this weekend, and she called back immediately, SUPER EXCITED, I believe I can add it.

Bocadito

I thought I'd show you all the little gecko (? - I'm not sure how to tell between different types of small lizards) I found in my kitchen last night. There are a million little lizards everywhere, and I keep wanting to take pictures of them to show you all, but since I don't normally have my camera on me, it's been difficult. Anyway - gecko!

So not kidding about the cockroaches, although I really wish I was.

Oh people.

I wanted to write this really excited, peppy post about my new apartment and how I was all moved in and yeay! – I really really did, I even had it all planned out in my head, and the title of post was going to be some silly mutation of a line from the Wizard of Line or that “Home on the Range” song or something (I was coming up with new ones almost daily, and let me tell you, you are sorry you’ll never get to see them, because they were great, seriously), but then…well then real life interceded.

The truth is that I’m in a not-so-good place here right now – nothing is working out well yet, and I think I had been relying on the move to transfer at least one category over into the good. Instead, as I should have expected, the move just took up a ton of time and energy and presented a whole new array of sparkling problems for me to deal with. I moved last Friday, and spent the whole weekend scrubbing every surface and killing more spiders and other creepy crawlies than you can imagine. On Monday my roommate’s boyfriend uncovered definite evidence that there were at least at one point, a serious community of rats living in the apartment and killed a number of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. I’m talking only slightly smaller than a Maryland blue crab. No, no, really. Uh huh. And then we started noticing problems with the electricity.

It’s been raining a lot here over the past week, and Santo Domingo’s electric infrastructure is less than ideal under ideal conditions, so in a nutshell, I’ve spent the last two days waiting in the dark for the electrician and then trying to explain, in Spanish, concepts that I don’t really understand in English. (Our electrical problems seem to a generator problem, but the electricity which goes out for short periods regularly, went out in my neighborhood on Tuesday night at 8pm and just finally kicked back on about 20 minutes ago, Wednesday night at 11ish, and I could hear people outside in the street yelling “The light! The light!”)

It’s been kind of a trying time.

The good news is that the apartment is at least mostly clean, I am crossing my fingers that the electric problems are over, the leak in my bedroom is fixed, and the numbers of the spider population seem to be dwindling. Plus, I didn’t have to personally face any cockroaches, although I did have to see a couple that promise to haunt me, and I really think I can go ahead and put that in the “doing good in the DR” category. And I think I’m going to have people over tonight to watch Grey’s Anatomy (that’s right – the cable that comes included with my new apartment has the American ABC channel), so I think we’re close to moving the “Housing” item from the bad to the good category. And then, I promise, I’ll post that cheery post with the list of all the things I love about this place and some sort of visual information (I’m thinking about video, but I may be too technically challenged for that, we’ll see) so you all can what it looks like where I live.

'Cuz I'm not so hot at all the computer stuff

I know the post below is formatted all kinds of badly, and my apologies. I just don't really know how to manage the blog stuff very well yet, and since I'm still restricted to using an internet cafe, it's hard to find the time to figure it all out. I'm hoping I'll get it all figured out soon. Until then, please bear with me. Sorry all!

Where I went this weekend and why you are crazy if you are considering not visiting me.

Monday was Dia de la Mercedes, one of the many holidays dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and in order to aprovechar the long weekend (as my colleagues kept encouraging me to do – one thing I love about Latin America is how much support I find for engaging enjoyment), I went to the northern coast with my roommate, Andres, and a few other kids from his study abroad program. We went to Rio San Juan, a little fishing village which has grown substantially with the growth in tourism, and which one day will probably host an all-inclusive resort. Luckily for us, it is still somewhat off the beaten path, and therefore doesn’t feel all Disney-fied as of yet. In fact, at the beach we went to on Sunday we were the only gringos in sight.

We stayed in a hotel located at the end of the “beach” in town – a tiny little strip of sand that goes under water at high tide, but which is full of swimmers and sunbathers during the day. The hotel is white-washed, and perches on a rocky cliff of sorts, hanging out over the Atlantic Ocean. The wall separating the cliff from the ground floor shows rusty strips in the places where the ocean has worn away the paint. The hotel faces almost due west, so from our third floor balcony we could sit in worn deck chairs and watch the sun go down.

We spent a good part of the weekend sitting in those chairs, in the early morning, during the sunset, and at night under stars, just sitting and talking. It felt deeply relaxing to spend so many hours in front of the ocean, just sitting and following a meandering conversation.

We took a boat tour through a mangrove swamp completely full with tropical

birds and wooden houses hidden among the spindly trees.

The tour also went out into the open ocean and toured a small cave and several beaches, but one of the most interesting things we saw were these white heads – they looked like the mannequin heads used by wig makers – wearing crowns of something that look like silver coral reef. We were sharing our boat with a German family and a Dominican family but no one really seemed to have much information about the heads – the most I could gather from the tour guide was that they were sites of Indian worship.

We spent one whole day at the beach, and it was pretty much perfection – the truth is that I keep thinking of it as a representation of “beach” instead of an actual beach – white sand, crystal clear, turquoise water out for yards before it becomes deep enough that you have to swim, gentle waves that picked up enough at the edges of the bay to provide light surfing, all ringed by a crescent of palm trees. We got there early and so had our pick of spots and a quiet morning alone, swimming and lying in the sun, but by 12 cars started pulling up to the edges of the palms trees, opening all their doors and blasting music. Each car had a slightly different idea of what it wanted to listen to however, so if you walked down the sand you would go in and out of bachata, Latin pop, and reggaeton. By 4 when we started packing up there was a serious party happening to our left with a huge group of 20-somethings grilling and drinking beer, and several families were unpacking coolers to our right.

Now I'm back to the city - my main project this week is sealing the deal on my apartment - keep your fingers crossed for me!

Grace

So last week was pretty bad.

I had expected this time to feel differently – I have lived abroad before, and when I was in high school and lived in Argentina the experience was somewhat comparable because I was alone – when I lived in Guatemala I was with my family, and when I lived in Uganda I was living with two very good friends, the incomparable Amity and Nienke, and with Nienke’s wonderful family (say hi to them for me Nienkie!), and in Prague I was involved in a program with about twenty other American students my age so – none of those experiences required me to be alone in any real way. In Argentina however, I lived in a tiny little town with a host family I didn’t really integrate well into, and although there was another exchange student living there who I still count as a friend, I was much more left to my own devices. I didn’t have an immediate community that understood me and which I could find refugee in and I found that incredibly difficult. That experience was definitely trial by fire and if it had not been for the support of my community across the world cheering me on, and for Ruth from Australia, and for my pure stubbornness not to have given up, I think I would have packed my bags and headed home after the first month. The feeling of those six months was pretty searing and I can still remember it in that phantom way that lingers well after the original sensation has passed.

I was pretty terrified in the weeks leading up to my departure for Santo Domingo, and I think that feeling was largely to blame. I kept feeling the phantom of those six months and thinking of how it would feel like that all over again – like my body was made of lead and every movement was tasking, like my world was foreign and unknown and unfriendly, like I was alone and not me and I could not find my bearings. Although I count that experience as incredibly useful, and I continue to be very glad that I stuck it out, it wasn’t a pleasant six months and I am not looking to repeat the experience. I knew the circumstances were incredibly different, and I was pretty sure that this would eventually feel totally different, but I wasn’t sure that that would be true for the first couple of weeks or months, as I got used to the environment and found my bearings.

It doesn’t feel like that.

It definitely has its own challenges, but I am different enough, or the experience is different enough, or both, that I have not felt like that. (So far anyway – since it’s only been 2 weeks it may be premature to be saying all this, but let’s keep our fingers crossed, okay?) I have felt frustrated by the organization I am working for, and distressed by my living situation, and uncertain about how my social life was going to work out, but none of those things felt like they displaced me – the way they did when I was 16. I feel that with a little time and a little elbow grease on my part the work situation will resolve and the housing situation will change, and if I find no friends for the year, that I will still somehow be okay – I have a deeper network now than I had 6 years ago, and I am more self-contained – I can make do much better than I used to be able to. It feels pretty amazing to realize that.

Despite all the personal growthy-ness and the growing up and the new-found sense of self last week still pretty much put me through the ringer. As I looked over my new life it looked something like this:

Work: hah
Housing: total mess, spent all my energy all week working on it, still have to live somewhere that wears me down for the time being.
Friends: that’s a negative, Houston
Yoga Class I wanted to take: you have to wear all white to be able to attend, but the only yoga pants or gym shorts I have with me are black and navy blue.



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So, even though I felt so much better than I had expected to feel at this point, I was still feeling pretty alone and defeated by Friday afternoon when I forced myself to call the friend of a friend who is living here this year working on similar issues and with whom I had not yet been able to meet up. Since it was Friday I was sure she had plans for the evening, so I suggested that we get lunch Saturday afternoon. Rachel said that would be fine, or if I wanted, she was going out later with a couple of other girls to a bar for a couple of drinks, did I want to come along?

No – I didn’t, actually. I was alone and defeated and the idea of trying to get to know a group of new people, including the girl who felt like my last chance for friendship here, felt pretty much overwhelming. I wanted to hide in my room and be anti-social and unenlightened and awkward, thank you very much. But instead, I said “That would be great!,” and made plans to meet them. So I took a shower and a 15 minute nap, got dressed (trying on multiple outfits, feeling like it was a job interview), and forced myself out the door.

About three hours later I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of what can only be described as a small platform nest, in a packed, hip bar in the Zona Colonial, watching the mixed group of study abroad students and young expats and Dominicans around me all talk and sing and bop along to American hits from the 90’s. I really liked Rachel, and we are going through very similar experiences in terms of work, and I really liked her friends. Suddenly, one piece of that dismal list looked much more hopeful and all I could think was grace. It's amazing how much difference strangers can make. One thing that week had gone right!, and I was having fun!, and maybe I was not going to just have to make do all year.

Blog Post #1

So, Blog Post #1, huh? Well hi all, and welcome – I decided that a blog was a better way to keep my friends and family updated on my year in the DR, rather than mass emails, but just so that we are clear - that does not mean that I don’t want to be in touch with you personally – I really want to hear from people, and feel like I’ve still got you all around me, even if not physically. So - comments and emails in my inbox, please! I hope everyone’s doing well and having fun and liking where fall is leading them. Even though there do not seem to be any clearly identifiable seasonal changes in my current home, I definitely have a sense that this is fall – the return to order and thought after the abandonment of summer.

It’s been about a week and a half (11 days, to be exact) that I have been officially an expat, living in the Dominican Republic, in the capital city of Santo Domingo. I am working, for those you who don’t know, with a nonprofit called Censel (Centro de Servicios Legales para Mujeres – Center for Legal Services for Women). The organization provides direct legal support for women, and also runs a number of educational programs and initiatives designed to educate women about their legal rights and standing. It has also in the past worked on political lobbying campaigns to change legislation and legal code in favor of women’s rights. It’s small – there are officially seven women who work for the organization full-time, but there are generally only four or five of us in the office all day. There are also a number of other lawyers who work for Censel on a part time basis and come and go a few times a week or less, depending on appointment schedules. The office is a little house with blue walls and an overgrown garden which sits on a tiny crooked street on the edge of Gazcue, one of the main residential districts in the city. There are four offices, a conference room, a front lobby, and a little kitchen where we all eat lunch together. I share an office with another intern named Anna who has been here since June and will be here through November. Anna is Canadian, from Quebec, and she spent some time here a number of years ago as an undergrad during a study abroad program. Luckily for me, this means that she is well-versed in this city, and is extremely helpful – translating Spanish words I don’t know, giving me advice on where to go shopping for a bedside lamp, and telling me how to get to the closest pharmacy last week when my work shoes gave me blisters.


A wonderful surprise has been how much I like all the women who work in the office – Lucila, Naomi, Gladys, Maria Luisa, and Isabel among others - they are all easy to talk to and quick to laugh and quick to reach out to the new intern. I am, as of yet, not feeling like I a good fit professionally in the office, but I am already feeling very happy about the social interaction (although I am really looking forward to that feeling increasing as my Spanish picks up – I’m clearly missing out on many of the jokes and conversations by virtue of not being truly fluent).
Another welcome surprise has been Doña Ramona. Doña Ramona is in charge of keeping the offices clean and for cooking lunch for everyone. I pay $300 pesos at the start of the week (roughly $9 dollars), and then at about 12:30 we hear Ramona yelling from the kitchen at the end of hallway that the food is ready and everyone slowly filters in. Ramona will have already dished up heaping plates of rice and generally beans with some other accompaniment (on Friday we had rice and lentils with fried chicken and platanos), and then at the end of the meal everyone makes fun of me when I cannot finish my portion. There is a study abroad student from San Diego, Andres, who is renting a room in the apartment I am currently living in, and he comes to Censel everyday to eat lunch as well. It is the mission of the ladies to fatten him up, and Ramona always serves him an indescribable amount of food. He refuses to be beaten by them however, and everyday it is entertainment to watch him slowly win out over the mountain on his plate.


So far things have been moving pretty slowly, which has been a little hard for me, but I don’t think it’s out of par for this type of experience. The non-profit world in general typically moves slower than I would like things to, and when you combine that with Latin American temperaments, it shouldn’t be surprising that nothing happens here at warp speed. Censel is going through something of a difficult time as one source of funding was cut some months ago, and a few other international sources have been delayed in their payment. This means that the organization is scrambling for funds, in particular the funds to buy a permanent office space, and that most of their programming has been sharply curtailed, both because they need to spend all their energy focusing on finding funding, and because they can no longer financially support it. For me this means some not trivial adjustment – while they can always use another person to search for funding and to help with preparing proposals, the programs that they had suggested I focus on last March are no longer in active mode. While I am hopeful that this period will pass and the organization will find itself in better footing, it is clear that this is not happening this week or next. It also adds to difficulties for me since the state of emergency within which the organization currently exists is incredibly consuming for the director, which means that she has no time to think about how to put me to work, even on the funding projects she’s currently working on. Accordingly, I spent much of the last week waiting to meet with her, meeting with her, preparing a new proposal for myself, and waiting to meet with her again. By Friday I felt like I at least had a couple of points to start with, so I began to explore some of the projects they have been working on that are currently somewhat dormant.


Yesterday I actually managed to grab the chance to set up a funding proposal for equipment – sometime ago the offices were burglarized and emptied of everything – computers, DVD/VHS player, battery-powered generator, digital camera, printers, copiers, etc. Since then the office has been working with 2 computers and one printer, which is just enough to get by with but seriously impedes efficiency. The generator in particular is incredibly important – the power goes out quite frequently here, in the past week and a half it has been out for a combined total of two and a half days. The building we are in has a generator that runs on gasoline, but it is controlled by the dentist’s office upstairs and to conserve gas they only power it when they have patients, with no notice to us of when they will be turning it on or off which means that work gets lost as computers turn off, and we all sit around in the dark in the front lobby fanning ourselves and losing precious working hours. So, a proposal for funding for these items needs to be formulated, and for the time being, it looks like I have a concrete, definable project, which I am incredibly excited about. My days at work have been filled with a lot of literally sitting around and reading the newspaper, so I’m very happy to have something productive to do for the time being.


Besides trying to figure out work, the other main item on my agenda these days is finding an apartment. I rented a room for a month from a colleague at Censel who generally rents two of the rooms in her apartment to people here on study abroad programs. While I have a while longer on my lease here, I’m pretty unhappy with the situation, and am looking forward to finding my own place as soon as possible. Luckily, through the friend of a friend, I’ve “met” (through email) a roommate. Eva is another recent college grad moving here for a year on a Fulbright grant. She arrived late last night and this afternoon when I get off work I’ll walk over to meet her and a realtor I’ve been working with to see a couple of apartments. The first one we’ll see is one that I saw on Monday afternoon and have fallen somewhat in love with, so I am hoping Eva will feel the same way and I will soon have a permanent place to live.

In general, I’m finding this city to be pretty intimidating, but bursting with vibrant, exciting culture. There is dance music, bachata, merengue, salsa, bursting from every small colmedor (corner store stocked with small necessities – everything from sodas to batteries) on weekend (and not so weekend) nights. There is an obvious love of dance – my first weekend Andrew and I went down to the Zona Colonial to grab some pizza for dinner on the main walking/shopping street, and there was a group of Buddhists dressed in robes walking up and down the street with drums and maracas, and no one seemed at all focused on the religious message, but instead stopped what they were doing and everyone – parents with small children, old couples out for an evening stroll, high schoolers gathered together on in groups on the benches which run down the center of the street, all spontaneously started dancing right there, in the middle of the restaurants and stores, dancing and laughing and carrying on. When the Buddhists would move on people would slowly resume their previous activities, just moving on, as if they hadn’t just been getting down. It was quite impressive to my newbie eyes.

It’s also a difficult city to get a hold on. It’s extremely poor (I read before leaving the US that apparently the DR has the highest incidence of BMWs per capita – so while income averages evidently make the country seem relatively prosperous, poverty is literally rampant and the “gap” as we like to talk about in the US is probably somewhere more along the lines of the Grand Canyon than something scalable), and pretty intrusive, especially if you look like an outsider. That’s one thing I am finding extremely hard to get used to – although I have done my fair share of traveling, and have accepted that when I am outside the US I am probably going to stand out in a crowd as the foreigner, I have never felt like such an obvious foreigner, like such a sore thumb. I don’t know exactly what it is, but so far my guess is that it’s a combination of the poverty present here, the racial composition of the country, and the complexity of this city’s operations. Racially, the only place I’ve been where the population was so heavily black was Uganda. Anyone who looks as white as I do instantly stands out, even if they are actually Dominican. And when you combine that with my clothes, and my obvious discomfort at the piropos, and how clearly I do not know what I am doing, it must just be pretty well spelled out.

On this city’s operations: holy crap. There is – to my knowledge at least – no officially organized transportation system in this city. What there is, however, is an abundance of privately operated options which get people around the city quickly and cheaply. And, if you’re from here, easily. For me however, forget difficult-to-understand-Caribbean-accent-spanish, they truly might as well be speaking Greek. There are what are called carros publicos (public cars) and then what are called guaguas, and then the occasional private taxi (which you are supposed to call for, rather than take one which is driving around). The guaguas and the carros publicos both take set routes, and exist literally all over the city and the country in fact, and differ only in their sizes (publicos are normal cars and guaguas are typically small buses) and price - $12 pesos for a publico, and $15 for a guagua (roughly 36 and 45 cents). Shouldn’t be too hard, I thought. I have plenty of experience in getting around and figuring it all out. Hah. The catch is multiple: there are a series of hand motions which indicate where you are going, and allow you to flag the right car going in the right direction, the city is pretty dangerous, and so you have to make sure you’re flagging a legitimate operator, and you are in charge of letting the driver know when you’d like to get off, by calling out “donde pueda” (where you can) when you see your destination. This means that you have to be paying close attention to the road, that you have to know where you’re going and roughly how long it will take to get there, and that you have to have a sense of direction. So, for a new resident of the city, who even when home in the US never really knows where she’s going, how long it will take to get there, or has any sense of direction ever, - well, let’s just say I am not holding out any hope of looking like a native any time soon.

As per usual, this post is now only slightly shorter than the Odyssey, and I’m not sure I’ll have anything left to write about for the rest of year, so I’m going to sign off now. I hope to be posting at least once a week, and maybe more often, in smaller, bite-sized pieces, although those certainly sound like famous last words to me, so no promises. I’m sending you all the beautiful blue skies and radiant sun I’m learning to expect to see each morning, but without the attendant heat. All my love.