4X4 to Laguna Limón

A blog post by Melissa. A couple of weekends ago, Mina, Adam and I took a road trip in the clinic's 4WD truck to the north of The DR to kayak on Laguna Límón and stay at a rustic ranch. It was a three day weekend because Friday was Restoration Day, which celebrates the DR's second independence from Spain (I know, it's complicated, but if you're really confused, consult Wikipedia). The landscape was beautiful with lush rolling hills. 

The view on the way to Miches

Before we arrived at the ranch, we stopped in the coastal town of Miches and had a picnic lunch in the city's park. We then visited an artisan sanctuary and workshop. The founder, Cayuco, wasn't home, but his wife, April, welcomed us with open arms and showed us around. In the ceilings, walls and floors their was art. The kitchen was open to the air and had a deck that overlooked the river. April said that sometimes she kayaks out to the ocean from the river to watch the sunset. She probably needs the R and R because her three year old was a bit out of control. His name was Mayo and in the short time we were there, he urinated off the balcony onto the first floor patio and then spilled an entire plate of sliced avocados on the living room floor. 

The front of the main house at the entrance of the school.

Mina and Adam with Isidro, one of Cayuco's apprentices. They are standing in front of Cayuco's many carvings.

Saturday morning we went on a five hour kayak trip with Kayak Limón. It's a small eco-tourism guide company started by a Peace Corps volunteer. Actually, we were the first group of tourists they had that were not other Peace Corps volunteers. I think the main challenge for this organization is that no one really knows about it. But it's also really far off the beaten path. It was great for us. We paddled from Laguna Limón right out to the beach.

Our guide found coconuts for us on a nearby tree and chopped them open with a machete. First we drank the coconut water and then ate the meat inside. Delicious!

Here is Mina and our guide in the "Mangrove Cathedral."

On Sunday, we stopped by Playa Esmeralda. The road to get there was filled with puddles the size of lakes and hundreds of potholes. Mina put the four-wheel drive on and got us there and back in one piece. In fact she was four-wheel driving it nearly the entire trip. It was one big, bumpy and muddy ride.

Playa Esmeralda is one of the longest stretches of undeveloped beach in The Dominican Republic. We were the only ones there and the water was bathwater warm and calm. Our kayak guide told us that there are already plans underway to develop this beach as soon as a highway connecting it to the nearest city are complete. But until it is developed, it is a quiet little treasure that we were lucky enough to enjoy.

Way off the beaten path, Playa Esmeralda has a crescent shaped beach with a large pool of shallow water and mellow waves. 

The challenge of living (and washing)

A blog post by Adam. We've been back in the DR about a month and a half since our trip to the US. And of the many things that have struck me since returning to our temporary tropical home, nothing has been more ever present than the difficulty of life here. Unless you are among the super wealthy elite, most daily tasks are just more challenging than in the US.

Sometimes there isn't electricity and on rare occasions there is no water. When there is water it is always cold, including in the shower. And sometimes we get unsolicited water (and bugs) entering our glassless windows during torential downpours. Baking isn't possible because like many (perhaps most) Dominicans we do not have an oven. 

But nothing epitomizes the challenge of daily life like washing clothes...and we have a washing machine (sort of). Washing here is a several step process....

First we put our washing machine out on the sidewalk in front of our house. Next we fill manually fill the washing machine with water, soap, and clothes.

After the machine "washes" the clothes, we take out the clothes for the rinse cycle (i.e. put the clothes in a bucket of clean water and rinse them by hand).

Once the clothes are more or lense rinsed we dump the sudsy water into the drain in front of our apartment so that it can drain into the street.

From here the clothes goes into the washer's second chamber - the spinner.

After spinning for 5 minutes, we put it in a bucket and hang it up on the roof to dry. Usually within a couple hours it is dry and ready to go.

Given our space challenges and our economical ways we further complicated an already complicated situation by buying the smallest and cheapest washing machine we could find. For this reason we are only able to wash one sheet at a time, or maybe a couple towels at once. It leads to a lot of loads and a lot of time. Following camp, Melissa cleaned our entire home and made two meals while I spent at least four hours straight on 15 loads of laundry (not including the time waiting for the clothes to dry). Just another long Sunday morning in the sunny DR. 

Back from camp

A blog post by Adam. We've been away from the blog because we've been away from everything...from our phones, from television, from the Internet, from daily salads, from contact with family and friends. For fifteen days we were away...at summer camp.

Campamento Esperanza y Alegría (http://camphopeandjoy.wordpress.com/), or Camp Hope and Joy, is a summer camp for kids with HIV sponsored by the clinic where I'm volunteering. In its ninth year, the camp hosts 80 kids over a two week period, with younger kids coming the first week, and adolescents arriving the second week.  Melissa and I were among ten international camp counselors, which included five Peace Corps Volunteers, and five additional Americans. The rest of the staff were Dominican.

The camp was like the major leagues of Dominican culture. In other words it was like the DR on steroids. The joy. The dancing. The singing. The starchy carbohydrates. The power and water outages. The yelling. All of it was bigger, more colorful, and a whole lot louder.

The bus ride from La Romana set the stage for fifteen days of souped-up Dominican life. The music blared full blast while one person played the drum, and another played a güira (a metal Dominican percussion instrument). Everyone spilled out into the aisle and the dance fest commenced. It was, well, like nothing I had ever experienced.

By the time the campers arrived after three days of preparations we were starting to get our Dominican  groove on.  The kids, however, really pushed us over the edge. Their enthusiastic energy coupled with their incredible dance moves took the camp to a whole new level. They were so much fun and they were so exhausting. 

Still, what stuck me most was how loving they were to each other and to the counselors, regardless of how well we understood them. There were a few campers with disabilities...deafness, developmental delays, and physical disabilities. And rather than facing ridicule and abuse, the typically developing campers treated them with respect and love, particularly when they performed in the talent show - the loudest cheers were always for the kids with disabilities. It was a wonderful display of the very loving Dominican culture.

Nevertheless, as each week of camp came to a close, the underbelly of Dominican life emerged, just as much on steroids as the rest of camp. This was the harsh reality facing so many of the campers back at home. Many had lost one or both parents to HIV. One evening a camper asked which counselors would return, knowing that many us would not be back next year. Sadly, for some, camp's ever changing counselors mirrored the lack of consistent adults they experience in their lives outside camp. For others, returning home meant limited access to food - one camper told me he often didn't take his morning HIV medications because he did not have the breakfast that was supposed to accompany the pills.

It was a bittersweet ending to what had been a great week for the campers. Tears filled the eyes of the younger campers as their bus pulled away from camp. And in their own way, the older campers seemed sad that the camp had passed by so quickly. For me, it been had a great learning experience and yet another reminder of the tremendous joy and sadness that seem to be so ever present in the DR.