Americanos, mangos and rios

First let me say, it can feel really lonely being here because my american peeps only know my american life and my dominican peeps only know my dominican life. And both types of life are completely opposite. So I have to say the biggest blessing in my life right now is Lindsey Garber. If you haven´t read her blog yet, you should, cause it has a lot of what mine is missing. People here think we´ve been lifelong friends, but we only knew each other in the states for 2 days. Its amazing how shared experiences makes two people so close.

Thankfully, Lindsey was able to visit this weekend. And with two american girls, the dominicans step up the action. Past weekends were filled with movies (albeit halves of movies, lol) and reading and sleeping (aka very boring.) For the first time in a month, I actually felt semi-busy. Hooray!

Friday, Lindsey and I met up with a Hope Vision Trip that had come to the DR to see what Esperanza is doing here. I have never been so excited to get up before 6am. I caught a bus to Hato Mayor, met up with Lindsey and caught the next bus to San Pedro. From there the Americanos picked us up to visit a Bank of Hope meeting in La Romana. Besides the extra travel, not to different from a normal morning. The difference was the company. When I got home that night, I realized my throat hurt. It was the first time I had been able to talk all day long in a long time. It felt so good to be needed to translate and answer questions. And it was renewing to realize that I had been learning a lot here and speaking spanish well, when most of the time I feel somewhat useless and stupid.

After lunch at the office in San Pedro, we got to go to Milan´s school. Milan is the biggest success story of Esperanza who started with a loan to grow a business decorating furniture in her house. She noticed lots of kids fighting in the streets and with her extra income was able to provide them with food and lessons in her home. Pretty soon, parents from all over were sending kids to Milan for school and food. The group grew to over 200 kids, a 100 at a time seated on the floor of her house. So she prayed for help and got a new location. Growth continued. Prayed again and got a school building built. The cool part was that the community was able to get involved. They asked the parents to contribute labor, food, construction materials, whatever they could to help out. The building was literally built with the love and help of the community. Many of the kids at this school (boys and girls) have been sexually abused, as well as physically and mentally. This is the only place they can go and feel safe and loved and home. Milan told me she can see a marked difference in the children that enter and the children that are now in 5th grade. She likes to say she helped them trade in their weapons for pencils and pens.

That night when we got back to El Seibo, Lindsey and I got to go to a surprise bday party for my brother Fran (Francisco). The women took the opportunity to teach us how to dance merengue, which was a blast. The party, sadly, was much more fun and lively than the wedding. Go figure.

Saturday we went to the river with my family and the family of my sister-in-law Isabel. There are few things more wonderful that sitting in warm water on a cool day eating a mango. Afterwards we came back and went for a walk to get pizza and cake in the center of El Seibo. I can´t tell you how good it was to be independent. It was the first meal I had eaten out of the house in over 3 weeks. We only walked for about an hour total, but it was the most I had exercised so far here. And the pizza was delicious (although much sweeter, which I should have expected when considering the ridiculous amounts of sugar they put in everything here).

(Yes, its weird, people go in the river in regular clothes here.)

Church was even more bearable with Lindsey there. Though the sermon took foooorrrreeevvverrr, we laughed our way through it. Don´t ever try to demonstrate all the spiritual gifts/talents God gives us... 24 is way too many for one sermon (especially when each one takes over 3 minutes- and yes, I was timing it).

You´d think one amazing trip to the rio would be enough, but luckily it didn´t stop there. Sunday we went with a group of coworkers and their families from the office here to a house out in the country. Lindsey and I taught the dominicanos some American card games, we played baseball in the street, cooked/ate lunch, played dominoes and then headed down to the river. (Side note: the chickens running around in the yard kept eating the pieces of chicken bones that we tossed to the dog, which really freaked me out. If I come home with some weird unknown sickness, check for mad-chicken disease).

Once again, we had mangos in the river and just hung out. The Dominicans don´t ever seem to do an activity very long, at least not the really fun ones (I don´t count just sitting around as an activity) so an hour or two later we packed up to head home. I nearly cried when Lindsey left for Hato Mayor because it felt like the end of an era. I´m now waiting with great anticipation for my chance to visit her this weekend and go to the pool. We figure we have to get more tan or none of you will believe we were here for 2.5 months!