Thursday, April 29, 2010

Site Posting Update

I'm going to be posted in a CTC! These are the labs that are run out of the first lady's office, and are usually pretty well equipped with lots of batteries and solar panels.  I was almost certain that I'd be placed in a high school, but this is cool! Although, it also means that I won't really be able to do much technical work (computer repair, etc) in my site.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Training almost over!

 

Community-based training ends on Wednesday! On Monday we find out our site placements, and on Tuesday we head out to our sites for the rest of the week.  Then, we have a few more days in Santo Domingo before returning to our sites and starting the next two years!  I’ve loved hanging out with all the other volunteers, and am looking forward to reunions and flota calls.

To celebrate the last weekend of CBT, we went to the most beautiful beach in the world again!

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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Running the Campo

 

On Friday, Sabrina, Mas, and I Peace Corre’d through the town, across the river, through the sugarcane fields, across another river, across more fields, and up a big hill. Because we are IT volunteers, the excursion was photojournaled.

Campo is Spanish for field/farmland/middle-of-nowhere. Sudor means to sweat.

Last time, this is where we realized we had to start running from the horses.

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Mas and I crossing the river. 

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Sabrina climbing through a fence.

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The view from the top at sunset. 

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Win!

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It was dark on the run back, and we ran into a campo man with a shotgun and machete. He was friendly, and asked if we got scraped up when we were climbing the mountain.  I wanted to take a picture, but my compañeros didn’t like the idea.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Bolas

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This is Joe, Heather, Justin, and me riding in the back of Anne’s truck.  Yeah, my hair is really short.  It’s pretty necessary. 

Monday, April 19, 2010

Diseño Gráfico

 

These are two of the youth who are working on making logos for Mabi, the local beverage that tastes like Care Bear sweat.

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Here is Jenn pointing at something on the screen. She gets +10 points for teaching kids how to read good, and to do other stuff good too!

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Here is Joe, reconsidering his Photoshop competency. Jenn is still pointing in the background.

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The kids can draw! This is the sketch that they are working off of in Photoshop. 

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The computers in the lab are either 600mhz or 933mhz Pentium III´s, with 256 or 512mb memory.  That was enough to run Photoshop about 8 years ago, but they definitely drag with CS 3. 

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Group shot

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These are my friends in the Info/Comm Tech group!

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This is the whole group. We are considerably tanner now.

Anne

 

Meet Anne.  Anne is our technical trainer, and has more energy than the sun. She drives this badass truck everywhere, and sometimes we get rides.  I am continuously amazed at how much work she does.  When I worked at UNC, I would have 8 programs and dozens of Chrome and Firefox tabs open.  Anne does this in real life, with people and projects and bags of candy.  She doles out the dulces enough that she has conditioned us to salivate at the sight of hard drives and Windows discs.

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She will carry on three different conversations with you at the same time, and by the end of it, you aren’t quite sure what happened, but you’re excited.  And exhausted.

It isn’t my way of doing things, but she gets shit done.  She also just had a birthday, so we didn’t kill her off early on when we played Mafia at her party.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Playa!

My training group went to the beach! It was pretty much the nicest one that I’ve ever seen, and the pictures don’t do it justice.  The Peace Corps-issued sunscreen does nothing, and most of us left pretty burnt.  I scraped my knee on some coral, and another volunteer stepped on a sea urchin. I helped her pull the big spines out, but a few were pretty deeply embedded.  I also offered to pee on it, but that was deemed unnecessary.

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Now, it is back to work.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Work

 

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Today, my group met with our jovenes at the high school to plan out our graphic design project.  We had 10 or 11 on Friday, and 4 today.  4 is a good number… 3 girls, and one guy who showed up the first day in a suit (he was coming from some presentation or whatnot).  We call him the suit guy, because I can never understand/remember his name.

Sabrina made an awesome lesson plan. We played two dinamicas/ice breakers: Espalda a Espalda (back to back) and símbolos (thumper).  Thumper is technically a drinking game—and by far one of the better ones—and magically tied in with the project they decided to work on: designing a logo for Mabi, a (nonalcoholic) drink made from sugar cane. Mabi is pretty dank, and tastes like Care Bear sweat. The first sip is ok, but the second sip goes too far, and you can’t imagine ever subjecting yourself to such treatment again. 

Three of us are teaching a PowerPoint class on Thursday at the LINCOS, which should be pretty fun.  It counts as our second technical presentation, which is pretty damn important.  As our technical trainer, Anne, says, “you’re all going to pass one way or another, because in this game the points don’t matter.”

Yesterday, a few spanish classes got together at a trainer’s apartment to watch a movie.  None of the street DVDs would work on the laptops people had, except on a MacBook that was lacking a display adapter.  I ended up projecting The Science of Sleep from my netbook, which is only a “Spanish” movie because Gael Garcia Bernal is Mexican.  It hadn’t occurred to anyone that we would need speakers, so we all spent the next hour and a half in silence and collective spiritual exhaustion while a movie no one could hear or follow played on the wall. No one made any motions to stop the movie or find speakers, and when we left the apartment at the end, we all looked around and realized what had just happened. I guess we all needed some decompression time.

Swearing in is creeping up, and while I’m excited about it, it has been hella fun waiting for it.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Wi-Fi

The high school we are working at has a wi-fi signal, so I got the school director to type in the password for me.  Then, I clicked “show characters.”

Free wi-fi for all!

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Informacion

In training, we talked about the difficulties in dealing with problems in a fatalistic culture.  Things are expected to not work. Examples: The power and water are expected to be out, the mail system doesn´t actually deliver mail to houses, and microwaves are used for storage.  If you say you are going to do something, or ask someone to do something, a likely response is “si dios quiere,” if god wants it—if it happens, it happens.

These seem to be accepted things; however, when it comes to technology, people are rather activistic. Cell phone adoption was explosive, phones are expected to work, and they depend on them heavily. Many play MP3s, take pictures, and have games.  Everyone has a TV with cable, whether the feed is legit or not.  These things aren’t luxuries anymore, and while TV is a passive medium, they show a remarkable affinity for integration of technology into the home.

The number of people with computers is low, and the number with internet connections is even lower.  Interest in internet is high, but daily utility isn´t—even if it were ubiquitous, few would be able to make use of it. Computer education is greatly lacking, and there is a lot to be done to increase internet literacy (the ability to find reliable, trustworthy information sources online). There are more pressing matters, but recognition of the importance of access to information is growing, especially as it relates to developmental matters.

Secretary Clinton made the case for the right to open and free information access through an open internet.  This makes sense for industrialized nations, but what about the global south? The internet as a commodity needs an established user base, which requires easy access and access to education.  Treating the internet as central to free thought and open societies may be overlooking its popularity as a porn clearing house and meme generator, but it certainly piques my interest. 

We are in the DR to build technical capacity and give people access to the tools they need to positively impact their living situations.  With the perspective that access to information is a right, and that establishing a base is the first step to transforming information technology in the developing world from a novelty to a development tool, it is shocking to suddenly realize that dependable networks and infrastructure depend on the profit incentives of utility companies to supply 24hr electricity.

Power (energy) is a problem. While power (hegemony) and the free flow of information have seldom enjoyed a healthy working relationship (and the First Lady’s network of labs is likely linked to her political aspirations), national and local  infrastructure is central to any progress.

The DR´s temporary fix to long-term systemic energy problems is to rely on power invertors and banks of car batteries and solar panels, which is yet another example of rejecting fatalism with regards to technology.  However, when 42% of the population is living in poverty, and there are only about 8 different keys that open the majority of all locks (Globo locks, WTF), batteries can be a very very temporary fix.

The most successful example of computer networking in this city is among the gambling houses, the bancas.  The whole town is blanketed by their wi-fi signal, which links the bancas together to tabulate and set odds.  If private businesses can do it to gamble, public institutions should be able to do it for information access (or maybe there is a combination of the two…).

Pictures!

This is Sabrina, another volunteer who lives a block away. She’s pretty great, but watch out: UNO can become a contact sport.

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This is the street I live on. It was paved about a year ago!

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This is the IKEA in Santo Domingo. This picture was taken over the heads of about 30 Dominicans in a 20-year-old Toyota minibus van. IKEA… I was pretty shocked. WTF, Sweden?!

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Sunday, April 4, 2010

Poder de Dios

I'm sitting at a baseball field on the edge of a small dusty town that somehow has a wifi signal.   The training group went out to Discoteca WOW last night and partied, which was a needed respite from three hours of Pentecostal evangelical church with my host family.  There were people writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues, and others seizing and flapping their arms.  The pastor stalked out the new people and tried to convert them by laying hands and blowing in their ears.  Luckily, I could affect the "bewildered gringo" look, and got out of being lead to the front of the church.  From now on, I'm just going to say I'm catholic.  Their churches are nice and boring and predictable. 

I don't know where I'm going to be placed yet, and won't find out for a few more weeks.  I'm definitely looking forward to DOING things (or trying to do things and failing- still better than killing time.)

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These are the two little girls that my host mom takes care of during the week. They call me Tio, and I can’t really understand anything else they say.

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Countryside!