sports day and post sports day adventures

this week started out with a real dominican BANG!

el domingo pasado fue (last sunday was) "sports day" in la monteada (past arroyo seco for anyone who has been here before) and it was as good as imagined.

amy (my roomate and sometimes other half - in the nerdy sense) and i were promoting and talking up sports day all week, mostly to momma d and fam. mirian, the pharmacist in our clinic, and her husband plan a big weekend event every year out in different villages where they have different sports like beisbol, volleyball, futbol (soccer) and then other games (we apparently missed the potatoe sac races) and lots and lots of food for free. she invited momma d and then we invited ourselves along but when we asked her when it started she said "it's all day" and we couldn't get a straight answer, so we aimed for 12ish.

scott managed to get on the villa nazaret team after a short tryout, and they forced him to squeeze in to some small dominican man's tight white baseball pants - hilarious!! i also inherited a son for the day.

now don't fear, sports day had music too, but i think the dj might have been busy playing or eating because we listened to the same song on replay until 5ish when we left. needless to say, the soundtrack to sports day was a hit.

post sports day we were up in the clinic and also going around the village to talk to parents about registering their kids for kindergarten next year. on tuesday some friends that are staying in puerto plata came to check out nazaret and the clinic and we took them down to visit baby ruth. in the afternoon we were apartment shopping in cabarete for amy and being assaulted by sand - it was a little windy.

hoy (today) i went with the puerto plata girls out to arroyo seco to check on our friends. we played for a couple hours and then the kids decided they wanted to go swim in 'el rio' (the river). it was fantastic. it is nice to just hang out with everyone for once rather than having a strict schedule to follow. we stayed for almost 5 hours of fun/madness. for tonight amy and i are going to be beisbol groupies for scott - he got invited to play with the team again. he even bought real pants...

and el viernes (friday) the parents are coming. woot woot.

tick tock

one thing you need to learn when you come down here is that everything (but driving) is in dominican time. no matter how hard you try to get other people to be somewhere "en punto" (on the dot), or even to be on time yourself, it just never seems to work... i dont even bother wearing a watch.

when it is raining most people pull off the road to hide under a little store front roof or just sit inside until it is over. when it is too hot and sunny most of the dominicans again hide inside or in the shade while all the 'gringos' are out there soaking it up. when there is construction or just a big load of anything, the whole road just gets blocked off until they decide to move their big dumb truck. and nobody seems shocked or even aware that an event started at 3 but nobody is there until after 4.

last year one of my friends was invited to his dominican friends' wedding. he said it was supposed to start at maybe 5 so he planned for that and still showed up at 530 and they were just beginning to set up. even this week some friends were coming over to the house to help me make dinner and they said they would be there at 7. luckily i still made some kraft dinner beforehand because my first friend showed up at 8ish with some plantains and the other two didnt come until after 10 - and they forgot the food. finally we ate around 1130. good times (literally, ha im hilarious).

everyone always just wanders around town slowly, hissing and people watching, and finally when they put their mind to go somewhere they can be the most impatient, speed-demons you have ever seen. i dont know how many times we have been passed by a truck full of people in the back while there is a motoconcho on our right and a car and motoconcho driving towards us. everyone just moves over as far as they can and speeds off to wherever they are headed. i sometimes figure it is because they know they are already so late so they try to make up for some of it with their driving techniques, but who really knows.

basically, the point of this blog, (besides the fact that i was assaulted by dominican time again today when i went to pick something up that we ordered last week and was supposed to be ready two days ago, yet wont be ready until at least next week) is that if you come to the dominican and start getting upset that people arent meeting you or calling when they say they will, you just have to remember what i was told... "the white man invented the clock"

strabis-wha?

so i just got home from the puerto plata public hospital - rana i know you would be proud. there is a public, where the families have to basically take care of the patient and bring sheets, food, water etc and a private hospital which is just expensive.

so a couple months ago there was a medical team working in a nearby village and scott made a little friend who was terribly cross eyed, which scott had been when he was a wee little thing. so the other day we went up to the clinic and found a poster taped to the door saying another ministry down here was having a free eye clinic to help correct cataracts and strabismus (which i just learned means cross eyes-ness) so scott thought ..."fantastico" and took him for a consult last thursday. then on sunday scott was supposed to bring him to the hospital for around 12 (p.s i dont live alone anymore. a new friend named amy came in saturday night...) so amy and i were deciding what to do for the day and pdaddy mentioned he had gotten an email that said at the eye clinic they could use help, so we tagged along (maybe that didnt make too much sense though).

anyways, when we got to the hospital it was 'jam packed' (which i want to learn to say in spanish because i think it is a hilarious expression - i'll keep you guys posted) and everyone assumed we knew what to do since we weren't dominican, however that was not the case. finally after waiting for a little while in the chaos i decided to sneak myself into the office and ask if they needed any help. it turns out they needed translators and the little amount of spanish amy and i knew was more than all the other 'gringos' combined so we were enlisted.

what happened was they organized all the cataract people in the morning and then by the time we got there we helped wrap that up and then we started organizing all the 'crazy eyed' kids in order of age for their next consult. we would bring them in about 3 at a time and do a little physical (had to make up some awesome spanish descriptions since i couldnt remember all the right words to explain their results) and then ask some more history questions. next they were taken one by one into the next room to get some eye drops to dilate their pupils or something of the sort, but all the kids hated life at that point and we didnt want the others to notice. despues - after we walked them down the hall to get blood work done, which took a decade, and they were brought back to be re-examined and organized into a surgery schedule for this week depending on their results.

we got home around 6ish and i went to sadrak's church in charamicos and got to see his family and some old friends. then we went to one of his friends houses where she and her mom cooked huge amounts of rice and beans and also crab for about 12 of us as we squeezed in to stay out of the dumb rain - which ended up catching me half way home on the motorcycle and amy said i came in looking like a wet dog...

today we decided to go back out to the hospital to help with translations and whatever else but at first we were of no use. we were almost ready to leave and go to the clinic in nazaret but then i again wandered upstairs and asked some random white lady in scrubs if she wanted help. she was ecstatic. so once scott and amy agreed we were given scrubs (scott was busting out of his - he looked like a fruity bouncer ha). anyways our main job was to help with IVs (setting them up and then holding down the frantic kids - our little 4 year old buddy ended up taking about 5 of us to hold him down and he still managed to bite bernard). after we did that we got to get in on a surgery and see them remove some of the muscles in the eye and poke things in it and stitch it up. it was great. we took awesome pictures in the OR (which reminds you we aren't in canada) but amy forgot her camera cord so until we figure something out you will just have to leave it all up to your imagination (p.s. that is a google picture).

i shall try to write again sometime soon (but rana i dont want to give you too much of an excuse to stop studying)
love you all

a light in the street

ayer (yesterday) phil, scott, bernard (our translating friend) and i went to a place called agua negra (black water), which is now a village built on an old garbage dump. they warned me to wear some old shoes because it had rained all through the night, and in agreement with the name, there would be at least a couple inches of black water coming up over my ankles, but i had no idea.
we went to have a meeting with a dominican lady who has started a ministry called ‘a light in the street’, which is now responsible for 2 schools, a clinic and some vocational schools, among many other projects. she seems like an amazing lady, and the things they are doing for that community are incredible. she said that she had grown up there for 18 years of her life now (she is only in her early 30s), which would definitely help her to see the needs more clearly and be able to prioritize projects when different groups come to support them.
after discussing different needs in that neighbourhood she decided to take us into a few homes just down the street to show us a more clear picture of the problems they are facing – the main one being dirty water build up. most of the houses, we noticed, were at a lower level than the street which allowed for a lot of flooding. almost everything they had in the house was built up on stilts from past experiences, and all the furniture they could carry had been lifted up in the ‘rafters/supports’ for the ceiling/walls.
one particular house we went in, after walking through other people’s homes because the streets were too flooded, was about 2 feet lower than the ground outside – meaning even more run off. they gladly welcomed us in/carried us across a little rock path and even though they had used a pump to empty the house that morning, there was still about 2 inches of water on the floor. one of their solutions was that over time they had collected cinder blocks and made a little floor platform for everything in the kitchen, which was a good start, but in most cases the water would probably be much higher. at one point i turned to scott and said “who would ever think you needed gutters in your bedroom?” because as i looked in, i noticed a little area chipped/worn down to facilitate water flow out towards the kitchen area.
i cant even imagine what it must be like to go to sleep every night praying that it wont rain, and then you wake up and the majority of your things are soaking wet after just drying from the last storm. we are just now in the middle of rainy season (may is usually the wettest), which for most people on the island is a good thing because it takes care of their crops, but for this little community it means many more soggy days - plus i imagine a lot of sickness results from all the things floating in the water and from it sticking around for a couple days afterwards.
the solution...? - the only real thing phil could think would work is to bring in dirt-like materials to build up under the houses and then repour a cement floor, much higher than the pre-existing one. once that was done they would have to build up the walls and raise the roof because you could only be about 4 feet tall to fit in after that was all done. but then figuring out how to fix the door openings would be the next issue since that is where a lot of support beams for the house run through.
in july we will be back out there working with that group but please keep them in your prayers and maybe i will get a chance to go work with them sooner.
hasta luego - until later/see you later.
p.s - i unfortunately didnt get any pictures from there but next time phil goes out i will give him my camera...

en la clinica - in the clinic

every monday and tueday the clinic in nazareth is open. momma d and i go up there for around 8 to open la farmacia and then i get to sit in with the doctor or fill prescriptions or play with the kids. monday's we are open from 8-12 and then we get a 2 hour siesta or prep time and then are back open from 2-6. we all have matching navy blue embroidered scrubs now and everyone just assumes i am a doctor. they are too trusting...
this year i decided that i want to learn how to cook more dominican food so i asked if one of the ladies in nazareth named antera would teach me. yesterday we fried up these short, fat banana/plantainish things and if you have ever eaten the 'frito verdes' that i make then you basically know what these were. we also fried some cheese - which i dont love - but it was better than i expected, and made some fresh jugo de cereses (cherry juice). it was a pretty simple lunch but i've gotta start somewhere... (this morning she made us a fresh banana juice/shake... yumm!)
for the rest of today we will just be doing some renovations on my little house and working on other projects for child sponsorship etc (i'm pretty pumped - we are making screens for the windows because the mosquitos love to sleep in my bed).
que tengan un buen dia - have a good day.

love you all and thanks for your prayers.

feliz día de las madres - happy mother's day

weather report: its about 30 degrees in the shade so therefore in the sun it feels like 40++.

and just so everyone is caught up on key characters to my dominican adventures, right now i am staying at a house beside a missionary family i worked with last year - phil (Pdaddy), donna (mommaD), scott (oldest son) and jimmyjames (youngest; i couldnt decide which to call him last year and that name stuck) ... p.s you can only see phil and donna in that picture to the right...so when i got in last sunday there was a mission group down from canada working with donna and phil (and i happened to know three of the people). the first day we took some of them to the public hospital to see the conditions and help improve the children's ward a little bit. at this hospital the patients are totally reliant on their family to bring them food and water, bedding and anything else they may need, which is a mega issue if you don't have family - you can only be assured a bed and IV. some of the team went to hang out in the maternity ward and got to 'watch'/support two women giving birth. apparently a garbage bag was used as the sanitation for the table and within 2 minutes of giving birth the women were up, showering off and getting ready to go.
we also took the group out to villa nazaret where the clinic we helped with last year is and all i could hear as i walked down the path was "kike, kike" (keekay) which is the dominican name i was given last year (because when you say "krissie" with a spanish accent it sounds like spanish "crisis"). anyways it was nice that they all remembered me, and seeing the clinic was awesome.
on thursday most of the group left and i got to sit in with doctor raquel in nazaret, and santo the nurse was teaching me to give needles (which i am supposed to wait to learn next year at school, but what the heck...)
since then we have mostly just been catching up on sleep and doing things around town to get ready for the next missions groups (hero holiday included) and to get the house im staying in ready for some other girls to come stay (rampage jackson will be busy). and yesterday scott and i went to another village (redemption) to check on a family that rana and i helped out a lot last summer. if anyone remembers any stories about baby ruth, she is doing a lot better and although all the kids were still running around naked, it was laundry day so there is hope for them this year...
anyways, i am being taken to the beach today (sunday is beach day for dominicans - for real - before you go to church at night) so i can work on not glowing when im in a crowd. everyone was so shocked by how 'white' i became this year...
alright, i shall talk to you all later and feel free to email me if you have any questions or anything. alwaysfresh__@hotmail.com
love krissie/kike
p.s happy mothers day!

estoy aqui- i'm here

hola everybody.
just wanted to let you all know that i'm here and give you a little update on life in the DR, so here is my blog (and if all you parents forget how it works you just have to paste the link into the www.___.com part anytime you want to read it). i will try my best to write frequently but sometimes the internet is funky and sometimes i just wont want to sit on the computer but i promised mom i will try.