One Month Mark

I can't believe I've been here for a month already! Less than 4 months to go. The program ends on May 1st, but I'm staying until the 21st to do some exploring with my parents when they come visit. We just had our one month check-in retreat on Friday and we all went to this place in the mountains called Jarabacoa. It was beautiful, green, lush, lots of flowers, and the sounds of birds rather than the city sounds of cars, car alarms, roosters, and dogs. It was a really relaxing environment and we did some group activities and reflections on what we have experienced so far. It was a nice little check-in. Time is going to go by so fast here. The weekdays fly by because we are so busy and it will only get busier as we become more involved with our organizations and start our research. I'll be home before I know it.

I love it here and I sometimes don't like it, but overall I have no regrets and my goal is to stay happy and positive here even when things get tough. There are a lot of challenges I have to face here but it's all a great experience and I just need to take a step back and not take anything too seriously.

Let's see, what have I done since I last posted? Well, we had a four day weekend last weekend and my friends and I went to the beach in Las Terranas, Samaná to relax. We sneaked 6 of us in a room meant for 3 people and stayed there for three nights, chilling on the beach, drinking piña coladas, sun bathing, swimming in the warm beautiful water, and eating good food at the nearby restaurants. I promise I'll do a food post soon! So that was a nice relaxing weekend, very much needed.

Other than that our weekly routine has started. We have classes in the mornings and then go home for lunch if we have time and then leave for our organizations at 1:30pm and stay there until about 6pm. Then we go home, eat dinner, do homework, and go to bed. I've been having trouble staying awake past 8:30pm here, that's how exhausting everything is. There is no time to do anything during the week, not even go to the bank. I went 4 days without any money because I literally had no time to walk to the bank and change money. The only time I have is when it's dark and it's not smart to go change money on the streets by yourself when it's dark. I actually went to the bank when it was dark though because I knew I wouldn't have any other time until the weekend, but the bank was closed by then anyway. I ended up asking my director to trade me dollars for pesos so I didn't have to keep borrowing from other people. That's just an example, but we literally have zero minutes of free time during the week. It kinda sucks. And Sunday everything is closed, literally. So Saturday is the only day to do everything. But I'm learning how to plan my schedule and what I need to do, it's just stressful during the week sometimes, especially with homework. I don't always have internet, so sometimes homework is hard to plan. But it's alright, I'm getting used to it, and it makes time go by fast when we're so busy.

Someone (I'm 98% sure it was my maid) stole $400 from my room, so that has been a not so fun ordeal lately. I told my host mom and she was really good about the whole situation and when she asked the maid about it, she ended up getting really offended and decided to leave, so now we're looking for a new maid. I feel really bad about the whole situation, but I know I had to do something about it. This had never happened to my host mom in the 20 years that she's had exchange students stay with her so she was really shocked and said she will pay me back incrementally. I feel bad though because it's not her fault, but I do need the money back. Anyway, now I have my suitcase locked and I lock the door to my room whenever I leave.

So that's what I've been up to lately, I think I'll try to post more throughout the week about specific topics: host family, food, academics, community organizations, conchos, noises, piropos, water, etc. Lots of topics deserve their own little post. I hope everyone is doing well! I miss you guys! Now I'm gonna take a nap....

Bipolar

It's been officially over two weeks since I've been here and the pace is going to pick up pretty fast. This is all gonna be over before I know it. And then I'll wonder if it ever even happened.

So overall I'm enjoying this experience a lot, but I have to admit I've been pretty bipolar since I've been here. A lot of it has to deal with personal issues, but a good portion of it is dependent on whether or not I'm drenched in sweat and whether or not I'm being harassed by tigeres (the name for creepy men who think women are their playtoys). So basically I tend to be in a good mood when I'm on campus or inside my house or something, but as soon as I walk outside, I sweat bullets and get harassed non-stop. This is also why I've started waking up at 5 or 6am every morning to go running because it's the only time the creeps aren't out, and for those of you who know me well, you know I would never wake up that early unless I had no other option. I was talking to Elaine about all this earlier (she's the super awesome director of the program) and she gave me some advice, but it's going to be really hard for me to get used to. I hate being passive about it. Usually I start off by ignoring the first few men, then i get really angry and usually flip off a few people, but after multiple men honking their horns, staring incessantly with hungry eyes (sometimes i feel violated just by the way they stare at me), hissing, and yelling obscenities, i start to feel resigned, defeated, and powerless. Maybe that's what they want. Women to feel powerless. It's hard for me to understand and it makes me really sad, especially when boys who look about 7 years old start imitating the older men. Yes, I've been hissed at by men of all ages, from 7 years to about 70 years old. There is always at least one part of the day where I end up going through this sequence of feelings when i walk outside--happy, then i get yelled at and at first im passive, then aggressive, and then feel defeated and drained of all my fight. And I end up in such a bad mood and all I can think is "fuck this godforsaken country and everyone in it!" I know I shouldn't let it get to me so much and I'm trying, but it's not easy and it's not something I want to "get used to". I know I can't really do anything about it though. Maybe I'm being culturally insensitive or something, but I can tolerate many different beliefs and customs, just not this one. And I don't hate the country and everyone in it, I just get in that mood sometimes (well usually once every day haha). There are a lot of things I love and hate about the DR.

Love: my host family, my university, my professors, the people in my program, the support students, some cool dominicans i've met, the nightlife, the exchange rate =P , the beaches, the environment, the organizations, the fact that i walked into a bathroom one night and ended up getting a mini make-over by another woman who decided she needed to do my hair and makeup, the people (except for the tigeres), the kids, the communities, the culture, the food (well, not all of it, i'll make a post just dedicated to food one of these days, and i've decided not to be veggie here), the traditions, etc. too many things to list.

Hate: the constant harassment, the humidity, the double-standards on women, the incredible socio-economic class differences, the racism, the pollution, the crazy drivers who just barely missed running me over yesterday, the government.

So it's a mezcla of love and hate. I just needed to vent a little about the whole tigere thing because it was driving me nuts earlier. I'm all good now though, but I know the cycle will start again tomorrow. I think I would be enjoying myself so much more if that aspect was not included.

Bueno, other than that I'm doing really well. I just found out yesterday that I'm working with an organization called "Fundación Cuidado Infantil Dominicano" which in english is roughly "Dominican foundation for infant care" or something like that. It's actually not just about infant care anymore, they just never changed their name. I'm working there with my friend Lexa from Clark, but we're in different programs in the organization. I'm working in the PITS program (prevention of STDs) and I'm not 100% sure what my role will be, but this week and next week I am basically shadowing "my people" and watching what they do and how it all works, and then I will become more integrated. They mainly do visits to the communities and they work with what are probably the top 3 largest and poorest ghettos in Santiago. We'll be doing house visits and holding community meetings to teach a curriculum regarding the prevention of STDs. We will also be doing research and collecting survey data and doing office work. I'll be working on my own research project that is related to the topic and I will eventually add my own extension to the program based on my results.

I'll be going to my organization at least 3 days a week for 3 hours, but that will most likely increase as the semester goes on. I'm SOOOOO EXCITEDDD! This week my group in the PITS program is doing some office work and curriculum planning, so there isn't much for me to do yet, so I'll be going around and observing other aspects of the organization in order to get a better idea of what they do as a whole. I can't wait to see everything and get started in my program!!! I know there will be a lot of challenges especially with the communities I'll be working in, but as we are continually told, "guilt is a useless emotion". It's hard to remember this and stick to it, but i know I have to because it's reality, it's life, and right now I just need to focus on dealing with people as people and not as things to be pitied. This weekend I was hanging out at the monument at night with some friends (the monument is the highest point in the city center and is there to recognize the heroes of the restoration) and a man walked up to us asking for money so he could go to the hospital. His showed us his arm. His humerus bone was completely snapped in half and part of the bone was sticking out. One day jsut walking around I saw two legless people and someone whose leg was completely dislocated sideways. But these are normal images. There is only one public hospital in Santiago and it's always packed and many people don't have the money to be treated. Also, the nearby city Puerta Plata doesn't have a hospital, so they all flood into the Santiago one. It's so sad and frustrating, but it's reality, it's life.



Well, even though this was kind of a negative/depressing entry, trust me when I say I am having an amazing time here! I just needed a space to vent about the bad stuff, sorry guys. I'm sooo psyched to start with my organization tomorrow! This weekend we went out and explored the vibrant nightlife in Santiago and it was really fun. We danced some bachata and merengue and went to a discoteca. Compared to Dominican women though, I feel superrr underdressed even in my nicer clothes. They're always super fancy. That girl in the bathroom who gave me the mini make-over was probably thinking "ay dios mio, she needs help, she can't go out looking like that!" I think I should go shopping soon...haha. This weekend I also finally caught up on some sleep, only to start losing it again today, but it's okay, I'm having fun, who needs sleep anyway? Although, I do go to bed much earlier here. It's almost 10pm and I'm about to crash any second. I'm starting to get used to the farm animal noises at night, but I'm not quite there.

I think I need to have different entries for different themes instead of writing about everything in one post, I can't believe how long this got. I bet no one is even reading this far lol. Oh well, if nothing it's good for my personal sanity. Next post will be shorter, I SWEAR! =P Love you all and hope everything is going great wherever in the world you may be!

Paz y amor,
~Aysha~

Bienvenidos a la República Dominicana!

It’s my eighth day in the Dominican Republic and I still haven’t had time to stop and take everything. Many of you have asked about my blog, so here it is! I’m actually typing this first entry in segments because I’ve realized that I’m never going to have a stretch of time long enough to type everything….and it’s only going to get busier. Okay this is gonna be superrrr long…

For those of you who don’t really know what I’m doing here, let me explain. I’m here on a study abroad program focused on service learning. There are 9 of us gringos in this program and we take classes at the university here in Santiago. All the classes are focused on this idea of service learning and are in spanish. We are also spending this week visiting 6 different NGOs and at the end of the week we are going to each choose one NGO that we would like to work with. They all deal with different issues in community development like education, public health, etc. And they all work with certain local communities that are caught in the brutal cycle of poverty. So once we figure out which one we’re working with, our schedule will be: get up wayyy too early, walk to school, go to classes, go home for lunch, go to our community organization, go home, eat dinner, and crashhh from exhaustion. It’s a pretty intense program in that you don’t have much free time. Which I guess is a good and bad thing. This is my schedule of classes:

Monday:

9-10am: Social Methods (a research methods class, bleh)

11-12pm: Independent Research and Capstone (this class involves preparing us to do research in the communities. Part of it is research on the issues they deal with and the second part is developing and implementing our own sustainable development project that has to do with these issues and then write a 50 page paper on it…in Spanish.)

-then home for lunch and straight to my organization for the rest of the day, same with all the other days

Tuesday:

8-10am: Social Methods

10-12pm: Español

Wednesday:

8-10am: Poverty and Development

10-11am: Community Participation

11-1pm: Independent Research and Capstone

Thursday:

8-9am: Poverty and Development

10-12pm: Español

And Friday we don’t have classes, but it may be filled with community work.

So yeah, that’s my daily schedule for the semester. Today was the first day of classes and so far I like them. My only worry is that it’s easy to space out (especially this early), and because it’s in Spanish I can’t just space out and still understand, I always have to be actively listening and thinking so I understand. I’ve already caught myself going in and out of listening and then I get lost. But I’m sure it will get easier. It’s not only going to be exhausting because of the packed schedule and that I have to walk everywhere, but also because my mind has to be working really hard the whole time to communicate with everyone in Spanish. I’ve been so tired and busy that I haven’t had a chance to really let reality sink in.

So what have I been doing for the past 8 days? Well, on the first day we got dropped off at our host families’ houses for a few hours to drop off our bags and meet the people we’ll be living with for the next 4 months. I live with a 67 year old woman named Rafaela who is sooo wonderful! I love her. She’s adorable and super nice and talks to me slowly so I can understand her haha. And she lives here with her “husband”, Victor, who is in his 30s….don’t ask, I still don’t get it. She was married before and he died but they had 3 kids who are old and out of the house. Victor is nice too, but he doesn’t say much. I have my own room and bathroom with occasional hot water, so it’s nice. It’s so hard to sleep though because the roosters call all night and the dogs bark constantly, and the cats are always fighting, so it sounds like a farm outside all night. My earplugs only block out so much…But I’ve been told that pretty soon I won’t even notice the sounds.

So after having a meet and greet with our fams, we all left to drive to this place about 2 hours away called Tubagua. It’s in the mountains and overlooks Puerto Plata and the north coast. And it’s GORGEOUS. We slept in canopies under mosquito nets outside and the view that I woke up to the next morning was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The pictures don’t do it justice. Even the view from the bathroom was incredible!

We started orientation there and did some activities and get-to-know-you things. There are 3 other people from Clark University there so it’s nice to have familiar faces around. The rest are all really awesome people from different US universities.

The next day we did an insanely treacherous hike up the mountains to the waterfalls (I’m pretty sure Marcos, one of the program directors that guided us, was trying to kill some of us off). But when we finally made it to the waterfalls, it was all worth it. And I jumped off of one! It wasn’t that high, but it was still scary. They were beautiful.

The next day we got up early and went to the university (it’s called Pontificia Universitaria Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) but we call it “pucamyma” for short). There we took a spanish language test to see if we were in level II or III. Surprisingly I was placed in level III even though I thought it went horribly. Then we had a bunch of meetings with “important people” and then got a tour of the campus, which is beautiful. We also had a “treasure hunt” around the city where we had to learn to use the concho routes (they’re basically taxi’s that have a certain route the follow) and find certain places so we could start learning our way around the city.

This past weekend we went to Santo Domingo (the capital in the south) and we got to see a bunch of really old stuff from like the 1500s, it was pretty cool. The theme was race and identity, because there is a lot of racism here and it goes back to colonization.

We went to a little bar/club full of old couples in the evening and danced merengue and salsa with a bunch of old men, it was fun though haha. And then we had the day off on Monday so we all went to the beach in Cabarete (the north coast), and it was BEAUTIFUL. We just sat in chairs right on the beach and sipped delicious tropical drinks, swam in the super warm water, and got sunburned. It was truly paradise.

But it’s not all beautiful. We’ve been visiting the various organizations that we might work with and they are all located in some of the poorest barrios around. Yesterday we went to visit an organization called Niños con Una Esperanza (children with a hope) and it was located in the poorest ghetto of Santiago, called Cien Fuegos (100 fires). Here the roads are all dirt and rocks, there are holes everywhere, there are little children running around barefoot without any adults in sight, no running water, no electricity, huge garbage dumps that smell really bad, and the houses look like little shacks that are about to collapse. There is a lot of malnutrition here, lots of disease, no access to sanitation or medicine, lots of diseases, drug addiction, theft, and domestic abuse. But the kids are sooo adorable! I love them. We also went to a public hospital and it was really crowded, not very clean, and if you don’t have money you can’t be seen. It’s crazy because we live in middle class families and there are some really rich families near us too that all have fancy cars, automatic gates, huge houses with maids, fancy clothes, manicured lawns, hot water, food, access to education and doctors, and they live a completely different life just a few minutes away. The class differences are really crazy. We just had a movie night with some of the support students here and it was about two boys in Santo Domingo who are friends and one is poor and the other really rich and they end up seeing each other’s houses and neighborhoods and how different their lives are. And it’s actually really accurate according to what I’ve seen so far and what the students told us. It was ironic because the student’s house that we were at was like a mansion and we watched the movie on a huge projector in the backyard next to the big swimming pool and hot tub.

So that’s gonna be something I’ll be talking about more later once I’m more immersed. Let’s see what else….The driving here is craziness, it’s like Libya, lanes don’t exist and traffic signs are just a suggestion. There are lots of motorcycles and the pollution is terrible, it’s hard to breathe. When we go places as a group we use a guagua (like a van) and our driver is hilarious and crazy, his name is Rafael, he’s great. Another thing with driving is that when you are walking, every time a guy drives by, he honks at you, either to be flirtatious or because he wants to give you a ride. Men in general here suck. I’m getting so fed up with them. They’re always hissing, whistling, and saying disturbing things to women every time we walk by. Yesterday I just flipped someone off and swore under my breath because I couldn’t handle it anymore (mind you, he was an armed guard so it probs wasn’t the best idea but I was so mad I didn’t care). It’s ironic because it’s a super catholic country and women have to dress somewhat conservatively and everything, but then the men treat them like a piece of meat that they can play with. Assholes. Anyway, it’s gonna take me awhile to get used to. Along with gender inequality, there is a lot of racism against black people because they are associated with being Haitian and there is racism against Haitians here. Hair is actually an indicator of race here, so if you have really curly hair of African decent it’s seen as “bad hair”, that’s why a lot of people straighten their hair here to have “good hair”.

Let’s see, what other random things can I share? Baseball is the most popular sport here and is seen as “a way out”. Kids practice with sticks and rocks on the streets. Dominoes is a really popular game and people just play it randomly in the streets and parks. It’s super humid here so I sweat a ton and it’s in the 80s every day, but my host mom insists it’s cold because it’s winter here right now. This morning she was like, don’t go outside with you’re hair wet, you’ll be so cold! I don’t even want to know what it’s going to be like in april and may. I’ve already managed to lose my waterbottle with all my cool stickers =( but my friend Lila let me use her extra one, let’s hope I don’t lose this one any time soon. I drink lots of water, but I’m still dehydrated. Dominicans don’t carry water bottles and don’t drink much water so they always make fun of us. You can’t drink the tap water because of parasites and cholera so everything has to be filtered and you have to make sure the restaurants are ligit before drinking their water. I’ve been having some diarrheal issues for the past week, so I’m taking traveler’s diarrhea pills for it now, but I may have a parasite already haha, oops. We’re lucky if we get hot water for showers, I’ve had one hot shower so far. But it’s so hot outside that it doesn’t really bother me. We haven’t really explored nightlife here yet because we’ve been so busy and tired, but this weekend we’ll finally have some down time to check things out. It’s dangerous to walk at night, so we’ll be taking taxis. Robbery is really common no matter what time of day. Lila was robbed the other day and she walked into the office while we were eating pizza and was like “oh yeah so I just got robbed, anyway so we’re having pizza?” She’s been here for four months already so she’s used to all of this. You just have to be really careful.

I need to figure out how to get exercise here because even though we have to walk a tonn, we eat sooo much and everything is so greasy and stuff that I’ve already gained weight. But it’s kind of weird to go running, and the men will really bother you if you’re out running. I’ll probably either try running in the morning when it’s cooler and less people are around, or just do some stuff in my room. It’s good to be una gordita here, being skinny is bad. I feel like there is a lot more pressure on men to be in shape than women here.

Anyway, this post is way too long. But now you all know what I’m up to! There’s still so much I left out. We’ve been so busy. If you want to talk with me individually, send me a message and we can try to figure out a time when I’ll have internet access. And I have a bunch of pictures up on facebook, so check them out. Overall I’m having a great time and love my program. But there are definitely ups and downs. Like yesterday I was just super grumpy and just didn’t want to be here. It was probably because I was really tired and sweaty and the men were getting on my nerves. It’s definitely hard adjusting. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. But I’ve been connecting with people on the program who feel the same so that helps a lot. Alright, I’ll keep y’all updated. Love you all and I miss you guys!

Paz y amor,

~Aysha~