The Moons’ Dominican Adventure

Thanksgiving Week 2009 - Before Danielle left for the PeaceCorps we promised that we would come to visit her while she was gone. Shortly after she left I became pregnant with our first child. This would have made some people cancel, but not us. We are adventurous people, we like to travel and see the world. We like to experience life directly rather than sit on the sidelines watching it go by. Having a child doesn’t have to change that right? We don’t think so…

As we slept in our cabana the sound of the roosters began at about 3:30am, calling out the approaching morning. Brian has a habit of waking up with the sun and making coffee. As he goes outside to explore our gorgeous surroundings, Carter and I like to have breakfast and take things slow. Suddenly Brian yells excitedly from the garden below. He has rescued a tarantula from the swimming pool and wanted to show off his prize. I was not nearly as excited about the find.

In the mid morning Rafael (Danielle’s Papi) came to pick us up to take us all to his family’s Sunday lunch. We stopped at Danielle’s casita, to see her modest accommodations and then took the very steep, very bumpy walk down the hill to the family’s house. We walked past Rafael and Teresa’s house on down to her parent’s place where all of the family was gathering. It was filled with people. The grandparents were sitting our front porch enjoying a game of dominoes, the teens were all huddled on the couch watching TV while they had electricity and the women were all busy in the kitchen. When we arrived we were warmly greeting by everyone and Carter was immediately swept away. She went bouncing along from one person to the next, loving every minute of it.We had an amazing lunch with fresh green salad, rice, beans, bananas, avocados and just killed in our honor; guinea fowl.

Around 1pm Carter is used to going to down for an afternoon nap. She is a very happy and laid back baby, but when she gets over tired, things get ugly quickly. Right around lunch time she began to get fussy. Danielle set up a stroller in a bedroom and I went to lay her down. All of the women of the house did not understand how I could do such a thing. “She’s awake, I’ll hold her” they would say. I tried to explain that she does much better if she is allowed to sleep on her own but they disagreed. For the next hour, there was a parade of people going to check on my fussy baby. She was too distracted and entertained to think about sleep, too tired to maintain her happy disposition any longer. We needed to escape somehow.

Danielle had planned on taking us on a hike to the local swimming hole after lunch so we decided, now was the time. I knew that once Carter was in the baby carrier and away from all this activity she would sleep so we had to go. We set off into the woods; two Dominicans, 4 Americans and a sleepy Carter. All of the women at the house thought we were crazy…”don’t take the baby into the forest, leave her with us.”

Just as I predicted, Carter fell asleep in the carrier on my chest almost immediately. Which posed quite a challenge when we came across our first of 7 barbed wire fences that we would cross on our hike. With everyone’s help, I was able to safely scamper over and under each of the fences and Carter never stirred. We climbed up and down the riverbank, walking on rocks and ducking under branches. We’re not crazy, just adventurous.


After about 45 minutes, we had arrived. Joel immediately stripped down to his swimming trunks, climbed up a tree and prepared to jump off of a branch. Everyone else entered the water from a more logical location, jumping off a large rock. Carter was still asleep so we sat down to watch. I kept her covered with a shirt because Danielle mentioned that there were biting magis. I learned later that I should have been more worried about myself. I ended up with more than 50 bites on my lower legs and upper arms and Carter had 2. Luckily I squeezed each of them as I was instructed to get the poison out and they never bothered me, only in appearance. Carter did wake up and I was able to swim too, before we started our hike back.


Since we had already had the adventure through the woods, we decided to take a slightly longer route home that was out on the road. There was just enough cloud cover that it wasn’t too hot. The road was pretty quiet, just an occasional motorcycle to kick up some dust. As we were walking along, Brian noticed a large bull that was on our side of the barbed wire fence. Unfortunately, Lucy didn’t see it and got close enough to startle the bull. Lucky for us we had Shanti, Danielle’s dog with us to chase the bull away before we could get into too much trouble.

As we got closer to town, the traffic picked up and we began to see more and more people along the side if the road; socializing, sitting in front of little stores and just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. Then up ahead we heard a lot of commotion and saw that there was a group a Haitians fighting and armed with sticks. We stopped at a safe distance and waited for the situation to disperse before we moved on to our destination.
When we finally arrived at Danielle’s Casita we visited with her housemates and waited for Rafael. We returned to our little cabana to make dinner and relax, looking out over the mountains with the beautiful blue sky and a yard full of flowers in full bloom. And that was just day one.

We had an absolutely amazing time. At 10 months old, with her big blue eyes, blonde hair and fair skin, Carter was adored everywhere we went. She didn’t mind all of the attention one bit. She started crawling for the first time in the cabana. Her first real word was established while we were there also. She said “Hi!” to every new person we encountered, often 4-5 times in a row. When we were leaving she squeaked out “Hasta Luego!” Well..…….Maybe we just imagined that part.

Holiday Festivities

Now that both discos in my village are closed, every day of the year seems so dull to a young North American; the women cook, the women clean, the men work in the field, the men drive motorcycles around, people have coffee together, everyone plays dominoes. Everyday appears the same. But those who live here know that they’re only saving their energies for December, when the fact that it’s Tuesday night doesn’t mean we have to call off the party and mass starts at 6am in the morning.

My hips woke me up at 5am on the 16th, jiving to the drum and guirra (traditional cheese grater-like instrument) music out in the street and people singing, thanking God for the new baby in our house. I followed them, with only my ears and hips, to the church behind our house and the next day I got up to meet them. In the cool morning air I was glad I had my dog and that there was electricity to at least light the street lamps that were functioning. We jogged the long dark shadows that the non-functioning ones left on the country dirt road between the lit areas. Soon we found ourselves among many friends, sauntering down the street, stopping in front of select houses to sing funny rhymes about the people sleeping inside them. Eventually we reached the small concrete church perched on a hillside looking over 25 kilometers more of green rolling hills and sleeping villages in the mountains. The mass was quiet and when it finished we all went back to our beds for two more hours!



As North Americans we often forget that each crop has a harvest time; we can find everything we have ever seen within five minutes of our homes any day of the year. Here in the rural DR however, food appears on the table during its corresponding season. Around May you begin to notice orange stains around the mouths of your neighbors and down the front of their shirts. When you offer them to come in for a meal or snack, they turn it down, claiming to be full. This is when you know the mangos are ripe. In December we have more avocados and oranges than we eat, though my ‘mom’ and I together can eat all the oranges off an entire tree.

Around Christmas they have a tradition called ginjibre - ginger. This year all of the young people gathered at our friend Davi’s house at around 9pm one night to share the season and play Dominoes. His wife made us very sweet ginger tea, but one glass was not sweetened. So goes the tradition that the person who pulls the unsweetened glass has the pleasure of hosting us all for ginger tea the next night. Eventually everyone in the group will host and the last person to do so not only hosts tea but a potlatch dinner as well. It’s a great way to get around the neighborhood and gives us something fun and inexpensive to do in the evenings.

My birthday was day two of three consecutive days of rain. I don’t mean tropical, rain-but-it’s-still-sunny-and-80 rain. I mean Michigan-grey sky and downpour-from-
the-time-you-wake-up-till-the-time-you-go-to-sleep-South-Pacific -monsoon rain. As a general rule, Dominicans don’t go outside when it’s raining. There is no motorcycling riding, which means that none are passing my house, which means that I am not going anywhere. Because we live in a subtropical climate the houses are relatively open and without heating systems they can get quite chilly after three days without sun. Also, I live in a single room and with the cat and dog wanting to be inside on rainy days, we all have to leave the house to relieve ourselves (my outhouse is outside). See then, the resulting equation: 1 room studio + (woman + cat + dog)(# of times has to pee/day) – a lawn = mud in house. This might all be quite tolerable if there was electricity more than a few hours a day, but when the laptop, cell phone, and light bulbs are all dead (I don’t even have a TV or frig) what do you after reading and writing for half the day in bad light?

Grudgingly, I left my dirty studio and hitched a motorcycle ride in the rain to to buy my own birthday cake. I don’t even like cake. My best friend, the best cook within many miles, planned to make me dinner but it was my job to buy the dessert. I would have made pudding but they may not have let me stay had I not shown up with cake. (Dominicans are quite particular about how they execute social gatherings.) The cake actually turned out to be more than worth it though, when a spontaneous frosting fight broke out between the six of us. And so I wrapped up 25 childish years with a kid’s dream birthday celebration!







On Christmas Eve - Noche Buena - we had a huge meal with the family. Roasted pig, two chickens, salads, rice, pigeon peas, cake, candies, punch, wine and merriment! The best things about the 24th and 25th of December here, hardly any presents and the electricity company doesn't take the electricity away!

To Michigan and beyond!

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh

As usual, I made plans to visit Michigan with the fantasy that I would be sitting in front of a fire having relaxed tea and talks with my parents and brother, and doing nothing more. The reality was, and no one's fault but my own, that I spent more time in the car than anything else. In sixteen days I managed to squeeze in trips to Miami (the airport anyway), Chicago, Kalamazoo, Detroit, and Pittsburgh! My mother and I spent days in the Salvation Army doing our very own toys for (Dominican) tots program, many family and friends came by to chat and I took the Graduate Records Examination after months of studying! It's always wonderful to see the people I love, but I look forward to it being more commonplace and less rush! In June for sure, but right now send me back to my warm little tropical island!


Baby love from GEO! (Cousin's baby - cousin once removed? I think I deserve aunt status!)