Last weekend we were sent to visit other volunteers so that we could see how they lived. Another trainee and I were sent to a city called San Francisco de Macoris to visit a volunteer who is now a Regional Volunteer Leader, which means they have already finished their 2 years of service and have now extended for a year to live in this city and be a contact point for all the volunteers living in the north. After taking a truck down the mountain and then negotiating with a taxi driver to take us to the city, we arrived. It was a lot hotter in the city, but we were happy to be in a new place. After we met the volunteer we went to her house, which is nice according to Peace Corps standards (it had running water and everything). We ate lunch and sat around and pelted her with questions about her service. One of the more interesting things she had to show us was a list of everything she spent one month when she was trying to justify getting a raise. The things she spent the most amount of money on were work-related expenses (copies, folders, books, etc), transportation and food. It was nice to see her budget and where we could cut down on some expenses and what we had to keep in mind when spending our meager salaries.
After lunch we walked around the city, our host showed us all the cool, posh restaurants, bakeries and cafes in the city that we of course couldn't afford. She said she felt bad for tempting us, but it was cool just to look in the windows and imagine what we could be eating. We also went to a big supermarket, an activity that I later found out many volunteers who went to cities did, just because big grocery stores are a novelty when you are living in a small town where there is none. At the supermarket we got ingrediants to make brownies, and as soon as we got back we began making them. Our host, like most volunteers, does not have a fridge or oven, but she did have a “baking pot” which is basically a pot that is shaped kind of like an angel food pan, with a whole in the middle, and then a top with holes around the side so that the air will circulate around the entire thing evenly. The Peace Corps Dominican Republic quaterly magazine publishes recipes for this kind of pot in each issue, so we used the recipe and made some excellent brownies, which are also rare in this country!
The next day we ventured into the “campo” to visit some other volunteers who still lived in their sites. We first took a minibus to a little village where a technology volunteer was living. He showed us around his town, which was a nice size, and then we all got on motorcycles to go out to the “campo campo” (super small town in the countryside) to visit another volunteer and some other trainees who were visiting her. Her site was interesting, it was very, very small and rural. The one thing that all of us were surprised at was the state of her latrine. She shared a latrine with another family, and it was in awful shape; there were bugs and toilet paper everywhere and it smelled awful. Apparently even when she cleans it, the other family that she shares it with doesn't bother to keep it clean. That definitely made all of us hope that we would not have to use a latrine, however later a neighbor told us we could use her latrine, and when I went in that it was actually quite lovely: it was painted dark green and light green, it was completely clean and there were no bugs (somebody said a frog lived in there and took care of the flies, but I didn't see it). After that I felt better about the prospect of using a latrine.
We had a lunch of chicken fajitas and guacamole at that volunteers' house and just hung out. Another interesting part of her living situation is that little kids were constantly playing outside her house and peering in at all the “Americanos”. After talking to some other volunteers, they made it clear that many people set limits as to where the kids can play and when people can come over, so that they can at least have some privacy when they need it.
After lunch and hanging out, we each got on another motorcycles (I forgot to mention that we were not driving, we have to hire drivers which is a pretty common thing to do here) and headed back to the pueblo, where we caught a minibus to take us to the big city to find a bigger bus headed in the right direction. When we got to the bus station we had to do a lot of haggling to ensure that we did not get charged to much, but we finally got on and then got off at the bottom of the mountain. From there we got in a truck for the very long trek back up the mountain. The trip itself was only two days, but traveling took a lot of our time. The total cost of transportation was 800 pesos—about 23 American dollars, however for us, who as of right now are receiving about a dollar a day for spending money, that was a lot of money! Welcome to Peace Corps life!
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