i don’t know if i have been talking much about it but scott (oldest son of momma d and p daddy) and now josh (my roommate from last year) have been playing beisbol on team nazaret, the village we spend the majority of our time in. incase you were unaware, i kind of LOVE watching /playing beisbol so i have gone to every game/tournament – sometimes they say one game and it turns into 5 with a trophy, lasting until 1am – i’m die hard... so most sundays they actually have tournaments and scott was told to be there for 8am but there was nobody there... so we thought maybe they were just staying true to
their culture and started playing in the field a little bit ourselves and then around 9 a couple men showed up and started cleaning up the diamond a little bit and then around 10:30 teams started arriving. turns out they were going to start thinking of getting ready at 8 and scott just didn’t get the secret code. luckily my 3 year old best friend, nano, came with his dad who is on the team, so we swam in the river and went on adventures all day, since beisbol lasted until 6. beisbol has been such an amazing addition to this year because i am getting to know some dad’s of the kids i spend so much time with (usually they are working), and i think it shows them that we aren’t just going “to work” for an hour or a couple hours but are wanting more than that and care more about them than that. and i am learning so much about the dominican culture, and falling more in love with it. everyone is just so friendly and relaxed – sometimes a little too much though when someone in the field pulls out their bottle of rum in the middle of the game but it makes it more entertaining.a couple days later when i was walking through town with amy, we bumped into snotball’s (widline’s) 15 year old sister who had promised to get me a phone number so i could reach their grandma that snotball is living with in haiti. so jean-wisline (jon-wisleen) took us back to her 18 year old sisters apartment. we wandered down a back alley where a man was making a fire to cook his dinner, past some ladies getting their hair “did”, past some naked kids laying on the cement to stay cool – it was like a whole different world just a block away from the centre of the tourist hub in
sosua. they invited us in and it turns out that their older sister has the cutest baby boy ever. amy and i quickly made ourselves at home on their bed while we just hung out with 5 girls that we have seen around town working as prostitutes with a baby almost as light as us, making it rather obvious that he was the son of a foreigner – but none of that mattered as we were all just talking and joking like we were old friends in an apartment only big enough for a double bed and a toilet. we eventually started talking about widline (snotball) and how she is doing in haiti. they told me that their grandma is struggling to take care of them both but they both went back there because here the dominican government won’t offer any support since apparently haitians aren’t people...? but the way she told me wasn’t as if they were just looking at me as a bank. money never even came up except that she said she was trying to send them support in haiti. one of the coolest things about this was that they were calling me widline’s godmother and were saying how they appreciate that i would come look for her year after year. this was by far one of my favourite times, ever – we didn’t want to leave but figured the girls might need to start getting ready for their night.this week we also started doing a garbage program up in nazaret. it was our first attempt so amy and i decided not to do a lesson but 
just see how many kids would actually come join us. we set out with a pocket full of grocery bags and a box of fun blue gloves, and in less than 10 minutes we had a crowd of about 20 kids and had filled up and run out of bags. we had to start using rice sacks that we found in the ‘gutters’ but then couldn’t go too much further. basically garbage day was a SUCCESS and we are going to start doing it every week and talking about why it’s bad for your health etc.
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