Mornings in La Hoya

So, it’s the school holidays but it is almost impossible to sleep in in the morning. This week these are some of the things that I have been woken up by:

- Children imitating the turkeys next door then the turkeys responding

- Miss Mish (the  COPA cat) meowing for food outside my door
- Roody (the local carpenter) and his workmen doing something which sounded like grinding metal outside at 7am when they came to fix the office door.
- Cockerels which think its time to wake everyone up at 2am

- people from the Catholic church in the village going carol singing at 4am with a scraper board! 
- Mota (our next door neighbour) grinding chicken feed

- Mota playing really loud Christian music at 8am on a Saturday!
- Mota having what sounded like a full blown domestic next door but was probably just a discussion about what they were going to eat for breakfast (Dominicans tend to shout… a lot!)
- Mota’s family thinking its OK to watch Mama Mia at full blast at 7am

- Mota having a confused Spanish conversation with Cathy (the new health adviser who doesn’t speak much Spanish): 
     Mota: (shouting in Spanish) ‘Cathy how are you?’
     Cathy: (in English) ‘I don’t understand’.
     Mota: (in Spanish) ‘say ‘I’m fine…. I’m fine’’.

     Cathy: (in Spanish) ‘I’m fine’.

     Mota: (in Spanish) ‘ that’s good, I’m fine too’.
Now, I didn’t think there was much need to shout this across the garden right outside my window at 7.30am.

These things can be annoying especially when it’s the start of the holidays and you were looking forward to a lie in. However, mostly they really are just hilarious and I actually get up in a really good mood after being woken up by whatever variety of random things have happened in the small hours of the morning.

December update

OK, first blog post in a wee while! Thought I would give you guys a low down as to what’s been happening here at COPA.

First of all, at the end of November we were robbed while away on a shopping trip in the local town. The thief/s broke through three locked doors and both Ruth and I are now both camera and computer less. Brilliant! It was a pretty rough few days after the robbery and I especially was feeling pretty emotionally low. However, all the other volunteers were fabby, we felt very supported and after a long phone conversation with my lovely family (first time I had spoken to them in 4 months), some speedy internet sessions in Bombita and some retail therapy in the crazy market the dark cloud had lifted. Not having technology at my finger tips is annoying but it makes you look up and realise what’s around you. It’s kind of nice to drop off the internet grid for a while and not be consumed with facebook and email. So all in all its OK, life goes on, Christmas is almost here and term has finished and we are still loving life in the beautiful Dom Rep.

In other news, I have been doing Christmassy projects for the past few weeks with my classes which has been really fun but as I said before, term is pretty much finished for the year. There have been exams all this week  and we haven’t been teaching, instead I have been concentrating my efforts on making Christmas presents, grading peoples work, tidying the dreaded art cupboard and tackling Spanish. It was the last day of term on Thursday. All the children go a Christmas shoe box from their sponsors in the States so we helped to organise them and hand them out. There was also a MENTAL assembly. Some of the highlights were: Aris (the school PE teacher), Ron (another COPA volunteer) and Perez, the school janitor and local bar owner, (a man who rides his motor bike from one end of the school to another to give the 5^th grade teacher her keys when she has forgotten them) doing a dance to a jingle bells remix. Possibly one of the best things I have seen in my life. Ever. Another highlight of the assembly was a drama of the Christmas story told through the medium of rap complete with a weird donkey which was to 8^th graders covered in a green sheet.

The other night we had an interesting experience teaching three Dominican men and Ron to cook pancakes. Men don’t do cooking here or cleaning or any domestic chores for that matter, that’s the woman’s job, regardless of whether they have just returned from a full days work or are planning to go out later or have a large extended family to care for. But that’s a rant for another day! Anyway we had a very funny experience teaching Aris the sports teacher and two other guys from the village how to mix and flip. There was a lot of confusion as to what a sieve was, how to crack eggs and how much mixture to put in the pan! However once those minor hurdles had been overcome everything went pretty smoothly with lots of patting on the back and fist pumping whenever a successful flip was made, there was even a pancake rap complete with beep boxing! Extremely funny experience.

So that’s just a quick update on what’s been happening here. The PT boys working in Santiago are coming here for Christmas and we are planning on a major eating marathon around La Hoya on Christmas Eve. Food is a big deal most of the time here but at Christmas it seems to be the only thing on anyone’s mind. On Christmas day all the COPA volunteers are headed to the beach for a bonfire and barbecue. After Christmas the PT volunteers are headed to Cabarete in the North for New Year before heading back for the start of term on the 7^th of January. So. Busy few weeks ahead of us here! I will try and do another post before we flip into the New Year but if I don’t get a chance to, have a wonderful Christmas!

Me and my 8th grade class wishing you a Happy Christmas!

A funeral

When someone dies in the village life goes on hold at least for a few hours. Everybody here seems to be connected in some way and so when there is a death it affects a large proportion of the village.

On Wednesday night a man from the village died quite suddenly of a heart problem; he was only 45. One of his older daughters is in seventh grade at school and so at 10am all the children lined up and walked down the road to pay their respects to her and to the rest of the family.

It was a fairly intense experience, everybody filed through a small room with an open casket in the centre. It is customary to have an open casket here, regardless of how the person died. 

Children, even the smallest ones are not sheltered from death, kids from pre-school and first grade stood in the corners of the room in their school uniform, fascinated by the sight of a dead body. Shuffling past the open coffin we paid our respects to the six children seated in numb silence round their father's body. We were then led into a bare room where women sat in plastic chairs around the wooden slatted walls. Their grief was tangible, infectious. I didn't know the man who had died but just being near the women who had loved him - mother, sisters, wife, shaking with grief, tear stained faces pressed to mine as I hugged each one - I felt my throat tighten.

Outside in the sun the oppressive, grief-laden atmosphere lifted. People sat in the shade in plastic chairs some laughing, some quiet. The children from school milled around, chatting, gossiping the smaller ones running to the shuttered windows to peer in when ever cries of grief resonated from the house where the body lay, curious about what was happening.

There was a real feeling of community. Whilst lots of people there were relations, friends and neighbours also came to offer their condolences. People drank coffee, a group of men played dominoes under a tree, children played in the sun, chickens strutted around scratching in the earth and a cool breeze made the roof of the marquee flap and the palm trees sway.

It felt like a very Dominican experience. Like most things here there was no hiding: when people grieve they grieve publicly and without shame, children aren't sheltered or cushioned from what’s happening around them, when something happens the whole village turns out, and of course, there is always coffee and dominoes.

International Children’s Day

Whilst children here can be... challenging they are all really great. You have to remind yourself that their behaviour isn’t always their fault; some if not most of them have pretty tough home lives. Infidelity, alcoholism and domestic abuse are huge problems here and its common for many men to openly have more than one wife or girlfriend. As a result lots of children are missing solid role models and be it because of that or lack of economic stability, their home lives are often far from stable.

It was International Children’s Day on the 20th and to celebrate, as well as doing the weekly mural, I have been doing art projects about games and playing. Like for most children in the world playing is an important part of life. There aren’t a huge amount of activities to get involved with here, especially for kids. There is no play equipment and many cant afford toys so they will literally make games out of anything. The big craze at the moment are small socks filled with rice which the boys play keepy-uppy with but they will also play keepy-uppy with juice cartons, small stones, bits of the bread rolls they get in school, plastic bottles crayons in my classroom... you get the idea. My art projects have focused on chichiguas (kites), which was a fad a few weeks ago - I’m a bit behind the times I know but I thought they would look nicer on my wall than small socks filled with rice.

In the village and in Barahona kids make kites out of sticks with the plastic from plastic bags stretched across them. Driving through Barahona there are always a couple of homemade kites that have found their way through the maze of wires that crisscross the streets and flutter on the skyline.

Pico Duarte

Pico Duarte (for the dads): 

• 3087meters making it the highest mountain in the Caribbean 
• The first recorded ascent was in 1944
• 46 kilometres (over 23 of which are very much up hill) 
• Named after Duarte, who fought for Dominican independence 
• and is considered one of the founding fathers of the country

The expedition began on Friday the 4th of October when we were picked up at about 7pm by Braulio who was organising the hike. Thus began the drive of death to the base of the mountain. It's about a 5hr drive from Barahona to Pico Duarte and in true Dominican style Braulio kept a steady 74km per hour for almost the entire journey, ducking and weaving through the traffic of motorbikes and wooden-sided lorries carrying bananas and sugar cane. The last hour was on winding, unpaved, unlit mountain roads where he slowed to a sedate 50 kmph. Anyway we arrived at the national park cabin in one piece at about 2am and got out into the cold (!!!) night air. It was a bit of a shock to be shown into an empty, concrete floored room by a fairly confused night guard. We were all too tired to care however and promptly layered up and curled up in our sleeping bags.

We were woken at 6.30 (meaning most of us had had about two and a half hours sleep) and went across the path to eat a breakfast of plantains and eggs before kitting up, meeting our guides and mules and setting off in the blissfully cold, fresh morning air.

After a fairly flat 6km through jungle that felt like it should be from a scene in Jurassic Park, the path began to incline and within an hour or so we were up in the mountains surrounded by green ferns and small pine trees. Fiona and I forged ahead loving every second of the walk up through the clean mountain air, of feeling our muscles being pushed as we propelled ourselves up the red clay paths. 

Fiona - the PT art teacher at Bombita

As we got higher we walked up into the cloud that had built up at the top of the mountain and our view was obscured by mist which made the dead trees stand out against the milky background as humming birds flitted from shrub to shrub. Suddenly the thunder that had been rumbling ominously for a while broke into torrential rain. It was so hard that it was like having a shower with your clothes on. Whilst we scrambled to put our jackets and rain covers on, our guide seemed totally un-phased and promptly put on what looked like a bin bag and proceeded to lead the mules up the mountain. Whilst this for me was one of the hardest parts of the climb, walking up what had essentially become a clay-soaked river with rain pelting down and thunder crashing overhead for about an hour, it was still great. There was no escape, you have to keep walking, you are at the mercy of the elements and there is nothing you can do about it. As we reached the part where the path curved round the mountain the rain eased and we treated ourselves to a snickers bar (probably the best I’ve ever had) as we waited for the others to catch up. From then on the path wound down through sparse pine forests wrapped in mist that are only just recovering after a wild fire destroyed the hillside a few years previously. The air was so still and cold the only thing you could hear was the trudge of feet and hooves and the distant rumble of thunder as the storm raged further down the mountain. The humming birds appeared again and danced around us like fairies in the mist as we walked and chatted along the red path.

Me with Ron, Assistant Director at La Hoya

 

Dusk began to set in as we rounded the hillside towards camp. We were all freezing and soaked and the sight of cabins and log fires coupled with the promise of hot chocolate was the best feeling ever. As we waited for dinner we sat by the big log fire in our dry clothes and spread our sodden shoes and clothes out to dry. The cold, mosquito-free night air was fantastic and coupled with the swaying pine trees and burning log fire it felt like we were deep in the heart of Scandinavia rather than in the Caribbean. As we ate our pasta and drank hot chocolate in our sleeping bags on the wooden floor of the cabin we listened to the laughter of the other groups gathered round the fire outside. Bliss.

We got up into the cold morning air at around 6.30 the next morning after a fairly chilly, hard night’s sleep and watched the sun rise over the hills in the valley below us. After breakfast of chocolate porridge we were ready to make the last 5km push up the mountain. I went ahead grazing almost constantly on boiled sweets and energy bars turning occasionally to look at the sun-soaked landscape rising around me. After about two hours I caught up with two American girls who had come up the mountain behind us the day before and we made the last push to the summit.

 We reached the top at about 9.20am. At the summit there is a bronze bust of Duarte, a white cross and a Dominican flag. The views were amazing and I sat in awe with the other girls until first Ron then Fiona then the others arrived. At each arrival there was a sense of relief and amazement as they sat down and took in the awesome panorama. We stayed at the top for about half an hour, taking pictures, and eating before heading back down the steep path to camp.
                        

After a fairly lazy afternoon of sleeping, stretching and chatting by the fire in the late afternoon mist we started to layer up for the cold night ahead. We toasted bread and cheese over the fire (which takes some skill) and ate marshmallows as the stars came out. With quite a bit of enticing we even managed to get all the guides to try at least one marshmallow.

After one final chilly night we headed back down the mountain at 6.30am. The sun had just risen as we walked along the winding path away from the now quiet and deserted camp and it bathed the pine-covered valley and mountains behind in a golden light. The national park lay vast, empty and still all around us.

The walk down hill was steep and winding and it hurt a whole new set of muscles! As we descended the trees became denser, the air warmer and a we could hear the regular afternoon thunder storm begin to gather momentum on the mountain tops above us. Fiona and I found ourselves at the front and, as the thunder got louder, we hurried along through the green jungle at the base of the mountain. After about an hour we met a man carrying what looked like half a tree and asked how long we had left, he said that it was about five minutes down the path before giving a creepy smile and stroking my arm... back to reality!

Despite our aching feet we ran the last 100 meters and crossed the bridge together. The others arrived five minutes later just before the torrential rain forced us to retreat under the shelter of the building that we had stayed in on the first night. We ate lunch and divided up the remaining food between ourselves and the guides before saying goodbye and squishing ourselves back into Braulio's car which he had driven to collect us.

After another fairly terrifying journey we arrived home at about 10pm and crawled into bed to get as much sleep as possible before 5th grade first thing the next morning. Despite the fact that we spent the next few days limping around and wincing whenever we had to struggle out of a sitting position it was totally worth it. I’m now having Pico Duarte withdrawal symptoms; I miss the cold, the log fires, the humming birds and the fresh, mosquito-free air. I miss the weather-beaten guides and sturdy mules, the quiet mountains and the beautiful scenery. However, despite the fact that it was hard to come home it is great to be back teaching again, its nice to be able to put my head on a pillow and have a shower. Plus, it did feel a bit weird not to be hissed at by a man for at least three days!

We had an amazing trip and have already started to plan more like it for the future.  

  

Bryony, Fiona, Alice and Ruth

The Capital

A couple of weekends ago we all went to Santo Domingo. Most people don’t actually refer to it as Santo Domingo however, preferring to call it 'The Capital' which does somewhat make you feel like an extra in the Hunger Games. On Friday afternoon we embarked on the three hour bus journey to 'The Capital'. 

The hotel that we stayed in is located right in the centre of the colonial district which has a slightly strange atmosphere: it feels very European, with big grand buildings, cafes dotted around tree-lined plazas and winding cobbled streets. 

However you soon realise that this isn’t Paris or Barcelona when you look along the street and see hundreds of electrical wires strung haphazardly on spindly wooden poles, or when you are almost run over by a motorbike which is carrying about 5 people plus a few crates of bananas. We did a lot of exploring in the colonial district, drank coffee opposite the oldest church in the Americas, wandered down winding streets, stumbled across the odd 15th century monastery and watched  life in the city.

 

On Saturday night we went to a shopping centre to watch a film. I found this a very strange experience, after living in a rural Dominican village for just over a month it was bizarre to wander into a place that was so incredibly Western. The centre was very plush: white shiny floors, expensive bakeries, air conditioning and potted palm trees. However, as soon as you step outside you are back to sticky reality where there are people selling goods on the side of the road, children sleeping under bridges between carriageways, people pushing shopping trolleys or tattered prams piled with cardboard boxes. You are back in the real Dominican Republic. On one side of the wall there are people following the path that capitalism has laid out for us: buying fast food, shopping for nothing in particular, killing people on bleeping screens. On the other side of the glass there are people on the opposite end of the scale, who can’t afford to buy their next meal let alone go to the cinema or buy new clothes. Opposite lives, side by side, separated by the smooth, impenetrable glass wall of a shopping centre.  

By the end of the trip it really did feel like an extract from The Hunger Games. Leaving behind the wealth of the capital, we traveled home through slums (‘bateys’), sun-baked dusty villages and sprawling towns. We passed lorries piled high with green bananas, sacks of sugar cane and buses full of people. We arrived in Barahona district in the late afternoon and wandered home through the village, past brightly painted houses with skinny dogs basking outside them in the dust and along the path by the drainage ditch where children splashed in the afternoon heat.

         

School

So, we have been teaching at COPA, La Hoya for three weeks. So far it has been a little... challenging but very interesting and rewarding. We are called by our first names in class and so my Spanish name is Alex or Ali and the variations on Ruth include Rue, Rud, Brue and Grue which is highly amusing. When they have forgotten our names its 'teeeacher', alternatively just a clicking of the fingers.

I teach grade 1-8 once a week, most classes have between 20 and 30 pupils but they all have one common denominator, they all like to talk! I teach Monday through to Thursday, and Friday is reserved for lesson planning, doing the school mural and watching the fairly lively school assemblies. At the moment we have about 3-4 classes per day but once we are a little more settled we will be helping students with reading and writing skills, translating letters sent by their sponsors and helping out in classes during our free hours.

 It is a fairly daunting task, being thrown in front of a class of fairly loco Dominican children with just a few days of teacher training under my belt and not a huge amount of Spanish. There are few slightly mental classes (6th grade for example prefer to eat the glue and tissue paper rather than do their work) but at the end of the day most of them do what they were supposed to do and the classroom isn't usually a total bomb site. It is difficult keeping everyone quiet, especially when you don't speak amazing Spanish but so far I have kept the lessons fairly simple so there isn't much explaining to do.
 My classroom is nice. In the first week we had an interesting battle with mural paper and attracted the attention of a few well meaning but a little confused small boys who... assisted us in stapling up the brightly coloured mural paper and there is now some work up on the display boards.

 Boats by 7th and 8th grades

 

At break time, when we are not being force-fed empanadas and fizzy juice by children who wander into my classroom, we sometimes head out to the school gates where people sell food. You can buy oranges and various strange fruits that we haven't yet learned the names of, empanadas (not enchilada... that is something different) and weird sweeties which cost one peso (one peso!) which I add to the sweetie stash in my classroom which is reserved for when a sugar boost is needed.

 

We had an assembly on Monday the other week. The lady who washes our clothes lives right next to the school and from the assembly area you can see her house very easily. As we give her our washing on a Monday, on this particular afternoon you could also see all of our clothes gently swaying in the breeze. We were the only ones who knew they were ours but it was still very amusing to see our freshly cleaned bras drying as children sang religious songs and talked about the coming school year.

After fairly exhausting days of teaching we definitely have learned the value of relaxation. In the evening we cook, talk with friends in the village or walk to the river along roads which are surrounded on either side by banana fields.

First impressions

First things first, a quick note to anyone who has a place at university: get your ass over to that phone, defer your entry and get out here into the real world, because its pretty freaking awesome! Ill try and give you a quick snapshot of my first mental, amazing week in the Dominican Republic.

I appologise that it is so long, I do relise that probably the only people to reach the end of this particular marathon will be my mum and dad but do your best. If you would like a more... Succinct version of our first impressions then visit my partners blog: ruthelizabethwebster.wordpress.com

Apologies for the terrible picture arranging but with the current internet connection its the best I can do. There are also more pictures on my Facebook page 'Alice's Year in the Dominican Republic with Project Trust'.

 Ok, so. On Tuesday I left Edinburgh behind and headed south. After a night in London we hopped on a 9hr flight to Miami where we stopped off for 2hrs before getting onto a shorter flight heading straight for Santo Domingo wooop wooop Dom Rep here we come! By the time we arrived it was 9ish local time but about 3am uk time so we had all been up for roughly 22hrs... We were pretty tired. However, exhaustion was replaced with alarm as we stepped out of the airport into the heat! Sheesh! Santo Domingo hot and humid! At this point we were all wondering what we had let ourselves in for. However we battled on and got in a taxi. As we drove through the city listening to meringue and watching life, our nerves calmed well, that is until we hit traffic when it turned into a bit of a a white knuckle ride. As Amilia explained later that evening 'Dominicans don't follow any highway code'. Anyway, we made it to the hotel to drop our bags, in one piece and were met by Amilia who took us straight out for pizza and talked us through some basic Dominican customs, she also warned us girls about cat calling... More of that later! After a delicious meal we headed to bed where we all slept very soundly. The next morning Amilia met us at the bus station where we said farewell to the boys as they headed to Santiago and we boarded a bus to Barahona. So. That's one adventure kicked off the list. Now. Onto part two.

These are a few notes about my impressions and experiences in the first week:

 House

 our house is small but we reckon it has a big heart. With in about 50 meters of the front door there are 5 banana trees, 2 mango trees, an orange, guava and coconut tree. Also in close proximity are next doors chickens who are very noisy especially at around 6am. Im not going to lie,we have number of invertebrate friends of varying sizes, the other day I opened the lid of the coffee pot and inside was a huge cockroach, fairly terrifying! There are lots of lizards which are better, we like the lizards (although not when you find them in your bed at 11pm!). So far the best thing about the house is the roof. On the second night we climbed up onto the roof and listened to meringue while watching the sunset over banana fields and palm trees and looked at the amazing sky which cheered us both up quite a bit.

     Motor bikes
 So mental! There are people on motorbikes everywhere. We regularly see 4 people on the same bike, in fact its rare to see a single rider. Many people cant afford cars and so transport what they can on their motor bikes, we have seen people riding with mattresses, huge baskets of bananas, children on the handle bars, bricks, chickens, gas canisters and water containers. Some of the bikes are fairly run down but people tend to improvise for example the bombita girls saw a guy without a seat on his motorbike so had just put a coconut.

Cat calling
There is lots and lots of cat calling and declarations of love from the guys which is soooooo funny and a little bit unnerving! When we were driving to Barahona a guy came up on his motorbike while we were in the back of the copa truck and was like 'I love you, you are beautiful' (we looked minging) whilst blowing kisses he drove alongside for a good five minutes, it was fairly hilarious. I think they do it, unfortunately not because we look beautiful because, unless they find sweat attractive, we invariably don't look good. They do it because we are white and they associate white people with money, also young men want to marry girls from america and the uk to obtain a visa which they think would allow them to escape poverty here. However, I have received my first proposal of marriage, unfortunately I had to decline.

                                          School

School started on Monday. Within the day there are 2 tenders, half of the children come in the morning and half in the afternoon. Monday began with a parade through the village which was designed to remind children that school had started and to persuade the ones that hadn't turned up to attend. Kids here tend to stretch the holiday as far as it will go which usually means skiving the first week. For the first week I have just been clearing out my classroom which has been empty all summer. We discovered a number of random items like half a tambourine, lots of lolly sticks, a bag of tiny pieces of felt, a fair number of cockroaches both alive and dead and even a gecko who had been camping out in the cupboard for the summer.
Most of the kids seem great and they are all very interested in us, I guess it would help if I understood what they were saying but I guess that will come.



People
Everyone here is very welcoming. Its hard for me to tell considering I have have only been here a week but there seems to be a huge sense of community, in the evenings people sit outside their houses and just talk, everyone is outside: talking, laughing, eating, drinking coffee. There is invariably no power in the evenings so as it gets darker fires are lit in the street and electric torches come out. Music is always playing (often on repeat) from someones house or car radio. There is sometimes lightning in the evening so the street is sporadically lit with bight light which adds to the already crazy atmosphere. You cant walk down a street without someone shouting you over (or whistling at you, but that's a different story) giving you food and sweet coffee, pushing you into a chair, introducing you to their friends, family and neighbors. Ok, well I could go on and on but I will force myself to stop for now.

To conclude, the first week has been overwhelming, scary, mental but totally amazing. However, teaching starts on Monday... I have a feeling that the honeymoon period is about to come to an abrupt end.