bananaland

Hey,

so I've been here a few weeks now.  I'm trying to get in a few words and a picture, and then walk home before a rainstorm hits. I'm finishing up the first part of my training in the capital city of Santo Domingo. I've been living with a wonderful host family who make sure to get me my daily ration of fruits and various carbohydrates (plantains, bananas, yucca, plantains, etc).  Fortunately they're also way into beans which they call habichuelas, not frijoles. Chickens are our favorite animal to bite into. they're sort of a pet and food source in my neighborhood.

Improving my spanish and more importantly learning to understand and speak like Dominicans, who are known for a pretty strong and difficult to follow accent has gone well.  As usual, guys are the hardest to understand.  Evidence of my improvement is that I can now joke with my host father, Milongo and his son who lives near by.  At first I could hardly understand a word of the 'old man' style or 'street' style dominican spanish.  Our neighborhood is I think the way a neighborhood is supposed to be. everyone knows eachother and social activities break out unexpectedly.

one of my favorite activities has been chatting outside the house with neighbors/relatives/ peace corps friends while waiting for the electricity to come back on at night.  the electricity is important just to keep the fans going to make sleeping better.  I've played a bit of baseball both in the street and on a field mostly with other volunteers and/or young kids.  I'm pretty good at dominoes (for an Americano -- still need to get better at counting the tiles).  I think I'm probably on par with the average Dominican dude at dancing bachata and merengue.  Besides being a lot of fun in itself, knowing latin american music and how to dance to it seems to be an easy way to make conversation and gain respect -- since they assume americans can't dance.

My training thus far has been a lot like school. I walk about 1/2 an hour everyday to a training center among various school children and other ridiculous looking gringos and then have various lessons throughout the day. The big differences are that our classes are outside in ramadas (huts -- sort of) and the school lunch is awesome - although there is no grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Tomorrow I'm traveling north, past Santiago to a place near Altamira in the mountains to visit a current water volunteer and learn more about my future service. I'll be there thru the weekend and then later next week I'll begin technical, community based training in a different mountainous region more to the south. besides more spanish and cultural stuff, we'll learn (and build) water and sanitation infrastructure for a community that needs water, etc. It's sort of like practice for our individual projects.

My actual service begins at the end of october. not til then will I know exactly where I'll be for the next 2 years.

Anyways, gotta get home before the donya gets too worried.  In summary, yes it's hot here, I sweat a ton every day, but I feel super healthy; the people are great; certainly different and similar enough to Mexicans or Bolivians or whoever to keep me happy. how's that for grammar.  I'll try to throw in an insufficient picture of something here. hasta luego!