January 22nd, 2009--Life Just Flies By!

Wow, it's hard to believe that we're almost finished with January, I feel as if this month has just flown by! What have I been doing? Well, that's a good question, because thinking back, I can’t think of what, but I have been busy! A lot of my time recently has been taken up with meetings--meetings with the “Junta de Vecinos” (Literally translated—Neighborhood Group, but basically the group that takes care of community infrastructure, sanitation, etc); meetings with my youth group, and then the small group of leaders within that group; organizing discussions for teenagers with our local doctor; meeting with our “health promoters” and an outside NGO that wants to do a nutrition program for children, etc.. etc.. etc...
But with all these meetings, I still don't have much to report, many things, such as my youth group, are just beginning, so things are going slowly—I'm just excited that we have elected a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer!
Since there is so much, yet so little, to report right now, I'm going to instead focus on something that I haven’t talked about much: day-to-day life here. First off, electicity: I had mentioned a while ago that our electricity is not always reliable, but it is supposed to have a schedule—it's usually on from 10am to 2 pm, and then returns around 7 pm and goes out sometime in the early morning. Every night when the electricity comes on everyone in the community cheers, and every day at 10 when the electricity comes on about half of the community turns on their music full blast while other half turns on their TVs to start watching the telenovelas.
The water here is also come and go—my host family has a spout in the back of their house and when there is water we fill up lots of large buckets and during the day we use the water in those buckets to bathe, wash the dishes, wash clothes, etc... My host family has a latrine out in the back of their house as well as a private area made out of tin and wood where we bathe. The house itself is considered a normal house around here—it has a cement floor and is made of tin and wood. It is obviously not impermeable to mice, rats or big bugs, but it's comfortable enough. My host mother and I have our own rooms, while the brother and two youngest sisters share a room. The oldest sleeps in the barracks next to our house.
And now, the other part of daily living: food. We eat similar foods just about every day, so here, for example is what I ate today and yesterday:

Breakfast: Fried green plaintains (green on the outside, meaning they are not sweet) with fried salami,
Yesterday: a soup of noodles with garlic

Lunch: Chicken fried in seasoning with onions and garlic, rice with peas cooked with onions, garlic, salt, bullion and oil,
Yesterday: rice cooked with beans and onion, garlic, salt, etc, and boiled eggplant cooked with plenty of seasonings.

Dinner: Boiled yucca and fried egg,
Yesterday: a bowl of cream of corn flour (pretty similar to cream of wheat).

During the day when we're lucky we also have plenty of fruit: bananas, oranges, sometimes papaya, etc.
As you'll notice, vegetables are a bit lacking in my diet, mainly because here in the community noone sells or grows things like carrots, tomatoes or lettuce (the two vegetables that you do see here are squash and eggplant) but when I go into the bigger town nearby I usually try to buy some kind of vegetable.
Soon I will be moving out of my host family's house and will be living basically on my own, but I am going to continue eating lunch frequently with my host family because, even though I would have never believed this four months ago, I have come to like eating rice every single day and I know I cannot prepare the rice like my host family can!

My host mother preparing the chicken for Christmas.


This is a picture of one of the baseball teams with their "Madrina" (literally translated, godmother) on the opening day of the tournament.


This is one of my favorite people in the batey-an older man who eats with us, has taught me some Kreyol and brings us yummy things from his garden like peas and bananas! It just so happened I caught him when he was wearing this funny hat one night.

Pictures!

Here's some recent pictures I've taken, three of them are of the baseball tournament that the kids in my community organized--notice the cows in the background! The picture of the three girls are three of my neighbors, and the two girls on top are my two youngest host sisters.

January 1st, 2009--New Year´s!

Well my Christmas might have been a little more mellow that I had expected, but my New Year's was certainly satisfying! The festivities started around 8pm when a group of neighbors made a bonfire in a tire in a field in the center of town. A small group sat around with music blasting, and I went and visited them and tried to take some pictures of the bonfire and the people there and those passing by. I then went down to the Evangelical church where they were having a service until midnight. There was plenty of singing and praying there. At 11 I went up to the Catholic Church where there was a mass being performed by a member of the community who is currently enrolled in the seminary. We prayed, sang, gave thanks, discussed what we wanted in the New Year, and at about 15 minutes till midnight everybody started to sing. The atmosphere was very upbeat and at midnight everybody sang loudly, hugged each other and danced around—even my host mother and some other older ladies were jumping up and down and dancing!
After midnight I headed down to the third evangelical church where both evangelical congregations and gathered to wish each other Happy New Year's. I went down and greeted them all and then the kids gathered in the back of one of the churches where they too had a bonfire going. That night they were doing a type of Secret Santa gift exchange (although, to give you an idea of the differences between here and the US, here the cost of the gift was supposed to be about 2 US dollars). After everyone settled down they started the exchange, and every person who was giving someone else a present had to present it—most people made a little, funny speech and then sang a song, which was fun, but some got even more creative and rapped or sang some kind of reggaeton-type song and danced around. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun to watch!
On New Year's day I headed to the nearest beach (which is about an hour away) to meet some fellow volunteers who had spent New Year's eve there. It was, of course, very relaxing and gorgeous. I came back to my community only to be invited to yet another church celebration where another gift exchange was taking place. This celebration was more like a normal church service, but the highlight was when four seven-year olds did their first “pantomima” (a kind of pantomime/interpretive dance the evangelical girls do to Christian music) and then when that same group of seven year olds got up and sang accompanied on the drums by a two year old who actually did a great job on his little toy drum!