Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Sweating in December

Batey life is going well. I spend most of the day playing with kids, supplying endless sheets of paper to draw on and fold into airplanes, and dealing countless hands of Uno. The lab is doing alright, and is pretty much running itself at this point. I have a group of youth who make sure it is open in the morning and in the afternoon, and while I’ve given up on any sort of work shift schedule, they make it work. We charge 5 pesos for an hour of internet, and don’t charge if you’re there to do school work.  The vast majority of people go to play Unreal Tournament and look at Facebook, which is fine. They’re learning how to use the keyboard and mouse, and in the case of Facebook, I doubt they have ever read or written this much in their lives. I do movie nights every once in a while, which are a hit until the power comes back on.

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Every 15 minutes or so, the giant sugar cane trucks roll by and make the ground shake. My batey is off the main road, so we don’t have the sugar cane train, and the trucks have turned the road into dust 4” deep.  Zenia and I walked down to the other side of the canal one day to watch them cut cane, and we came back completely covered in dust. They set fire to the fields at night after they harvest, and the whole horizon turns to an eerie red glow. It rains ash during the day, and it collects in the corners of my house and gets caught in my mosquito net.

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I took two kids to the regional Brigada Verde conference, which was pretty fun. We went to the island in the middle of lake Enriquillo, the giant below-sea-level salt lake that is slowly rising, which may make it possible to kayak from Puerto Principe to Barahona in a few years. Thar be crocodiles! And giant iguanas with red eyes!

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Thanksgiving was a blast. Three other volunteers and I stayed at the country director’s house in the capital and baked pies for three days. He and his wife told us stories at dinner about all the things they’e done in all the countries they’ve lived in with all the different organizations they’ve worked for. For example—they went to a Soviet bloc country after the fall of communism, and had projects to essentially create a market economy. I forget if that was with Peace Corps or USAID. When he was a Peace Corps Volunteer, one of his projects was to introduce these small cows to the Andes that could deal with altitude better.

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View from CD’s apt in Santo Domingo

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