Guest Blog #2: The Best Friend

I arrive in Santo Domingo, the nation's capital, at night after a long day of waiting, waiting, and a little flying time. Daniela and her driver arrive in style and the first priority is clear among all of us - falafel. Some insiders may know that falafel has sometimes been the glue that holds our friendship together. Particularly when we were living together in Kalamazoo and moving through the knowledge factory of WMU. Anway, we head to a classy falafel / drinks / American music establishment to dig in. I have my first sip of fresh chinola juice (passion fruit) and blissfully forget about my stiff body, lack of sleep, and disgust for the Miami airport.

On Monday, the adventures officially begin. At the crack of dawn... errrr... when our eyes crack open and we jump out of bed, we head out in search of the right guagua to get us to the northeast coast of the island. A guagua is the Dominican term for and van or small bus that will get you where you wanna go. We find the man for the job, have a strange conversation about the cost of transporting my luggage, and are off for the 3-hour trip. Our destination? The little town of Sabana de La Mar. Our purpose? Mangroves, caves, and whales, of course. Another Peace Corps volunteer lives here, and we stay with him. He leads a chapter of the national youth group, Brigada Verde. One project of theirs is to give tours of the nearby large, beautiful national park - Parque Nacional Los Haitises. So, we pay a couple of members and a driver some big bucks to take us out to the action. After a long, dusty drive past the cattle and rice, we hop into a boat and zoom through the mangrove forests - the coast's protection from tropical storms. The place is amazing, especially under the bright blue sky. Next up? Stop and check out some caves in the coral. We stroll through several series of caves, many of which boast ancient sculptures, drawings, and carvings from the island's indigenous Taíno people (who are long gone). Last stop: a fancy eco-resort inside the park for some café and a little tour. It's a fantastic place covered with streams, waterfalls, and German tourists. After a standard Dominican dinner of chicken and fried green plantains, it's time to continue recovering all of my lost sleep.

Tuesday is another experience in getting to know the country. There's a ferry across the bay to the whale-watching and fishing town of Samaná. We're assured the night before that it leaves at 9am. Ready to go in the morning, we hear some conflicting news. After wandering, waiting, hanging out with some kids, and contemplating which local to trust for our ferry information, the boat finally comes at 11 and we're off to our tourist destination. Whale Watching with Kim, that is. Kim is a very cool marine biologist, marine activist, and dog-lover. She's engaged in whale protection and research here while running her business. All of us "watchers" are offered Dramamine and herded onto the boat. The tour begins, in 3-4 languages, and we pass a giant cruise ship on the way out to open ocean. We learn about whales from Kim and crew and the fun process of finding them. It's not long before they start breaching (jumping out of the surface and back in) and flipping fins all around us. It's also not long before many people start getting sick, including mi amor Daniela. These can be some rough waters. The whales are worth it though, especially as a pair decides to start playing with the boat. They come say hi within 20 feet of us and must be amused by the "ooos" and excited giggles of 40 humans with cameras. A few hours of watching these incredible creatures gives one a new appreciation for the oceans that surround our little chunks of land.

Over the next several days, we hang out in Daniela's community, which is near San Jose de Las Matas, on the other side of the country. It's in the mountains, has a comfortable climate, and has plenty of dust. I enjoy meeting her friends, colleagues, and neighbors. It's also fun to play the guessing game of when we'll have electricity. The power goes out daily for anywhere from 4-10 hours. But, we usually have running water and huge supplies of candles, so things are alright. Daniela has been here nearly a year, so she knows everyone quite well. There are even people who act like they know her when in fact they've never met. During these relaxing few days, we read, cook, eat with other families, hike the river, and play dominoes. Oh, and can't forget the blasting music that plays whenever the power is on. These folks are serious about their beats.

On the last day in the mountains, I get a chance to see El Centro de Validación y Transferencia Tecnológica Los Montones. This is an amazing project that teaches agricultural skills to many people in the region. They are also growing tons of crops; raising chickens, pigs, and bees; experimenting with greenhouses; and doing some intense worm composting! Vermicomposting enthusiasts, prepare to be wowed when I show you these photos. These worms have got it made. The center is currently running a free class that teaches locals how to start their own greenhouse businesses (growing tomatoes and/or peppers). This place is an incredible community empowerment resource and I hope more like it are successful around the world. Check out these links for more info:
El Centro de Validación y Transferencia Tecnológica Los Montones
Plan Sierra, funded by W.K. Kellogg Foundation

The remaining days in La Republica are definitely more urban. Back to the land of cars, constant electricity, and fruit vendors on every block. We stay in an excellent guest-house in Santiago for Peace Corps members and other volunteers. I get the fun opportunity to meet lots of other volunteers and hear all about their projects. Some are building aqueducts in rural communities with no running water, some are doing youth environmental organizing, and another is building a solar-powered community center. In all, they're great people to get to know. We have two days to see the city. On the first, we visit Centro Leon — a museum filled with Dominican history, environmental exhibits, art, and overzealous salads. A fascinating place complete with a fake mangrove forest that you can walk underneath. There's also a cigar-rolling shack out back, which is unfortunately closed at the moment. The whole operation is funded by a large beer and cigar producer.


And, the best is saved for last. I'm not sure that I can adequately describe the experience with the written word. And, it was too wet and wild for cameras. So bear with me. There's a place about an hour outside of town called 27 Charcos (27 Waterfalls). You might imagine what aquatic feature one can find there. A Peace Corps volunteer is also stationed here to help with the tourist development (these people are everywhere!). After shelling out some cash, we trek up a mountain with our guide. After a 45-minute hike, we reach a spring that feeds this alluring river. And, it's time to jump in. A quick dip in the cold, clear water gets us ready for the next few hours of the unknown. It helps that I can't wear my glasses, which offers fun new sensations of dulled depth perception and balance. The adventure begins when the three of us jump off the first 20-foot high waterfall. And, yes, there are 26 more to go. We spend the afternoon swimming, sliding down natural waterslides, and jumping off waterfalls in the most beautiful place I've been to on this whole trip. The water is clean and fast. The guide becomes increasingly more goofy as we go on. Warming up to the time-honored practices of singing, rehearsing animal noises, and mocking the accents he hears from a global variety of tourists. I become increasingly more... brave to jump into the unknown. Daniela becomes more giggly. The waterfalls, rock formations, and small canyons that we flow through are incredible. Red, tan, green earth under a hot, bright sun. When we finish, I am exhausted and amazed at our feat.

The True Value of a Milkshake and a Heavy Table

My fellow volunteer and good friend Ryan and I have a Monday routine, a ritual that has become part of our beings here in the DR. Every week we meet at the organization we both work with in the pueblo and try to get work done together while meeting the social requirement of greeting every person in the office, asking them how they and their families are – though the answers are always the same, “Bien, Gracias a Dios”- “Good, thanks to God.” Then we open our laptops and stare at the documents we’re supposed to be working on while we catch up on each others lives and talk about all the hard issues of the world. At noon whether we’ve done any actual work or not we head for El Rancho for the best papaya milkshakes in the Dominican Republic, the rice and beans is just a side dish.
This week, we quickly ran through our greetings and found a back room away from the hustle and bustle of the Monday morning office, purposely hiding ourselves from the people and at the same time staying out of their ways. The room we found had nothing but the basic requirement, chairs. But laptops, as their name suggests do not require a desk or table of any kind. After a half hour or so or chatting, and sometimes venting our frustrations with Dominican culture, we were spotted. The tiny old woman who works in the kitchen entered the room with two big cups of oatmeal lime-aid and two packages of crackers apologizing, as is customary, for the plastic cups and some fictitious lack of lime that the juice possessed. We, as is customary, insisted that she was wrong, the juice was the best we’d ever tasted and it was much too generous of her to have brought it in the first place (both true). Less than one half hour later the younger of the kitchen women appeared with a tablecloth, followed by two men struggling to fit a very large table through the door. I hadn’t picked up on it because the place was generally under construction and they hadn’t even said anything that would have elicited a thank you, but Ryan knew that they had brought the table in just for us and when they left he suggested that I try and lift the table to appreciate just what had been done for me. I could barely lift the one end, there was no way that I could have carried it, and so I reflected on the amazing generosity of Dominicans. I work very hard not to generalize this culture, positively or negatively, but the majority of people here that I have come to know, poor people who live in the country, give constantly without expectation of anything in return. (I also had to reflect on the small daily benefits afforded to me for being either white, rich, young, educated, or pretty… and many times in this country the last four characteristics are assumed as a result of the first...But thats another blog!)
So, whether we complete any tasks on Monday morning is irrelevant, because I value Ryan's insights on our lives here and his friendship a great deal and I think we both end up leaving these mornings feeling better and more productive… And so I say “Gracias a Dios” for our friendship and the time we’ve already spent in this country.

My First Visitor's Guest Blog

As part of the experience of hosting visitors I love to learn what it is that they find new and interesting about this place, providing me with insights and taking me back to a time when this experience was new to me. Each visitor is required to write a piece about their adventures in the Dominican Republic, and so following is Tristan’s account of his week of “vacation” in December…

Having the honor of being Daniela's first visitor in the Dominican Republic (DR), I'm submitting this account of my unforgettable trip to this Caribbean paradise. I was impressed. Daniela lives a life without luxury in the hilly, remote, countryside of this beautiful nation. She is adored by all who meet her and she is quick to befriend all whom she meets. Without her pasty skin, she is easily mistaken for a walking, talking, dancing Dominican. While the country has much to offer with its beautifully green countryside, its unique culture with genuine and placid people, and its famous beaches and clear blue waters, it is also, clearly, a country still dealing with significant development problems (which Daniela does a great job of documenting in her blog). A vacationer can easily avoid seeing the real Dominican people and lifestyle by insulating themselves in their beachside resorts but a simple venture on a gua-gua (a cross between a bus and a taxi) can provide a perfect snapshot of life in the Republic… I am sincerely grateful for the privilege of experiencing your Dominican life and beautiful country, Daniela! Muchisima gracia!

Arriving in La Republica Dominicana: On December 23, I arrived at the outskirts of the Dominican Republic, JFK International Airport in New York City. At 11: 30pm the only people in the terminal were Dominicans – eagerly awaiting our flight – many families, with many children, joking around and having a good time. As we waited to take off, it became apparent that the omnipresent order and rules of the United States were not applicable on this international flight. There seemed to be no respect for the ‘fasten seat belts’ sign and for the entire flight, one gentleman stood up in his seat and cracked jokes (in Spanish) to an audience of his family and friends sitting on both sides of the six-person wide plane. Needless to say, it was a raucous plane ride, which culminated when the entire plane erupted in cheers and song when the plane touched down in Santo Domingo.
As a seasoned traveler with perfect directions and a couple years of Spanish classes, I made my way via taxi, bus, gua-gua, and motor-cycle taxi to Daniela's remote abode in the mountains west of Santiago. Driving up into the mountains in a gua-gua packed with 15, I noticed that nearly every inch of the rolling hills of the campo appeared to be being used for something. I saw beans, banana, guava, papaya, orange, lemon, and lime orchards, along with grazing cattle, horses, and goats all occupying large swaths of hillsides, which once held lush Dominican Rainforest. Once I made it to the nearby town about 15 minutes from Daniela's abode, I transferred to the back of a motor-bike taxi and bounced along a single hilly, muddy and at times dusty dirt road, which stretched for miles and was dotted with houses the way an exurban neighborhood would be in the States.
Arriving with Daniela nowhere to be found, I tried to explain in Spanish who I was and what I was doing in Daniela's family's home. Instead of sitting around waiting for Daniela, who was off buying gifts and food for the Christmas feast, I was sent off to pick oranges and mandarins with two young boys who knew not a word of English. I would soon learn that nearly everything that was eaten in the campo came from the plants and animals that surrounded Daniela's house…
I can, however, understand what a challenge it could be to eat three square meals a day which feature a starchy plant. On the other hand, I did explain to Daniela's host family that in the U.S., it is a luxury to eat the freshly picked fruits off of which their family subsists. From them, I learned that Dominicans eat seasonally. So, for example, I came during the avocado season, which meant that I lucked out with an unlimited supply of grapefruit sized avocados and fresh citrus fruits to the heart's content, but at other times of year they do without avocados.

The Neighborhood: A large room, which serves as a bar/dance club, and gathering place is located directly across from Daniela's driveway, and provides a safe place for her and her friends to dance Merengue and Bachata, the Dominican dances that originated decades ago right where she is living. There is a tiny cement block church just a few houses away and a few kilometers further is Daniela's office, where she conducts workshops and helps develop the people’s understanding of the environmental system in which they live.
Though not everyone is related in Daniela's campo, they all seemed to me to be one big family. As you all would expect, Daniela is everyone's favorite, she always makes sure to say hi and everyone feels as though they are an important part of Daniela's life. Her Brigada Verde Group (a group of youth that Daniela has organized to help raise environmental awareness) clearly teaches Daniela as much about life in the DR as she teaches them about life and the importance of being responsible for our environment.


La Ciudad (the city): Our visit to the big cities of Santiago and Santo Domingo were short but I was there long enough to see that they were not cities orientated towards tourists. Santiago is a city of Dominicans (and for that matter Haitians, who stream over the border in hopes of jobs, food, and a better life for their families). In Santiago, Daniela and I visited the cultural museum, which featured the incredibly elaborate masks that are worn on Independence Day (February 27) in a festive carnival setting. We also received an unprompted tour around the city from a local man who took us to an old prison cell and execution site turned art studio. It was nice to see some of the city and learn a useful phrase in Dominican –ahorita – which is a delicate way of saying, "I don't have time or interest in whatever it is you’re offering me."

The Samana Peninsula and Beaches: When I think of the Dominican Republic, the things I think of are: baseball, lush forests, sugar cane, and beaches. We did manage to catch some of Daniela's baseball team on a big screen TV at a bar in Santiago, and heading eastward to the beaches, I finally saw some sugar cane. For the beaches, Daniela brought me to the Samana peninsula, home to what are considered to be the most beautiful in the Caribbean. In the city of Samana, we spent the first night with one of Daniela's fellow PCVs (Rosa) where we all shared a delicious Italian meal and stories about living in the Peace Corps. The next day, after an embarrassing incident with a "malfunctioning" motorcycle that left both my ego and my foot a little wounded, Daniela and I headed out on our rented motorbike to the beach. After 20 miles of riding beside crystal clear blue water beaches our Vespa was climbing the rocky terrain of La Rancheta hotel and horse farm. La Rancheta is run by some soft-spoken and generously sun weathered French expatriates, who we found also built the beautiful hacienda when the man escorted us out of our room to find the light switch saying, “Light is here, I make mistake.” We quickly made use of our time snorkeling around the reefs of Las Galeras – seeing fish of all shapes, colors, and stripes, and beautiful wave swept corals. After a flipper clad Daniela famously did a walrus shimmy back onto our kayak, I paddled our tired bodies to shore where we dined on local delicacies: Chivo (goat) and Pescado (fish). The next day, we woke up at the crack of dawn to hike through the rainforest to one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen – la Madama. It was what I imagine a desert island beach to look like – white powdery sand, crystal clear blue water and massive coral cliffs on either side, featuring bat filled caves that Daniela bravely entered on her elbows and stomach. No people (of course), no buildings, no sounds of civilization. Just palm trees, crystal clear blue water and me in my birthday suit (sorry, no pictures).

Playa Madama

The El Limon Waterfall - well worth the trip into the forest!

The Best Part of the Trip: In a trip full of exciting things (many that seemed a bit dangerous at times), it's difficult to pick out the most exciting thing. But, traveling by horseback up and down steep, rocky, and half-meter high mud to a 30 meter high waterfall lagoon took the cake for me. Daniela and Rosa can attest to my shaky voice and genuine fear that my seriously undernourished horse was going to collapse in the mud (and potentially on top of me). But, when we made it to the waterfall and I had a chance to swim in the lagoon, the death defying trip for the horses and us, seemed more than worth it. Ultimately, the horseback riding typified the best part of the trip – seeing and doing many exciting new things, in a paradise like setting, speaking in heavily Dominican-Spanish accents, enjoying heavily Dominican culture, and being guided by a confident and proud United States Peace Corps Volunteer. For those of you who know Daniela, this might not need to be noted, but it is worth visiting her if for no other reason than to marvel at her ability to blend in with the people wherever she goes. Her friends all consider her Dominican and, literally, part of their families. The gua-gua drivers, restaurant owners, shopkeepers, police officers, random strangers mistake her for a tourist until she opens her mouth and they quickly realize she is to be treated like any other Dominican. In the two days in La Semana, by my account, Daniela made friends with nearly a dozen shop-keepers, rental equipment providers, restaurant staff, strangers, and fellow travelers. You can imagine why, despite her sometimes simple surroundings, there's never a dull moment for her there…

The Fresh Air Fund

I have to admit I know little about the following organization and have never experienced their camps but it's a great idea and I'm a sucker for helping out, especially if it means getting kids outside. Check them out for yourself if you're looking for a summer gig...

The Fresh Air Fund is accepting applications for counselors for this coming summer of '09. They create summer camps in New York state and are looking for a diverse group of college-aged men and women who love to work with children for this year. You can find the media news release here: http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us/ They are also always looking for Fresh Air hosts for the summer to open their homes to a child. See their site for details.