Una dia en la Vida...

Just thought I'd give you a taste of how I am living...so get ready to be jealous!!! Hahaha, just kidding. It is gorgeous here, and I love it, but I still have school and service and everything!

First, ILAC. That is where we live while we are here. It is a Jesuit Mission in the Dominican Republic that caters to the entire country, dealing a lot with health issues in the communities up in the mountains and in the campos. By increasing health care and making the lives of the people living in the campos easier, they are decreasing the population in the big cities. People can stay up in their own villages because many now have running water and better health care thanks to the efforts that the mission puts forward. We help with this, too. Next week will be our first immersion into the campos. Our group goes to a campo that needs help, and we each stay with a family, and do service during the day. This time around, we are going to build an aqueduct so the community can have running water. It's pretty amazing the effect ILAC has, and the amount of people it reaches and all these different communities. They have people in charge of healthcare in something like 150 different campos across the country.

We are guests of ILAC while we are here, but it is also our home, so we talk to the people that work here, and they talk with us. We work on our Spanish and form some really great relationships with the people that do all this work. All our meals are made by the kitchen staff, so at 8 am they ring the bell and we all file in for breakfast. It's a similar process at 12:30 for lunch, and at 6 for dinner. The food here is pretty good, but it is taking a little getting used to. We have a lot of beans and rice, which I LOVE, but we also have a lot of plantains and yucca, which are both starches and are cooks like potatoes, but just have different textures to them. Like I said, just taking some getting used to.

Every Monday and Wednesday, we go to our service sites. There are four of us that take the guaguas and then the F car to Cien Fuegos for the morning, and return by lunchtime. After lunch its studying/laying out/napping until Spanish at 3:45. We have Spanish every day of the week, and there are only four people in our class, so it is really easy to learn and understand. Tuesday's and Thursday's we have our class in the morning, and in it we talk about history, culture, and theology in the Dominican Republic. We talk about our service sites, and learn about why the DR is the way it is, and how our service is effecting it.

Friday's are open, but are sometimes filled with other activities. This past weekend we traveled to Santo Domingo, rich in history and culture, and stayed the night in a hostile. It was fun to get to see a different side of the country, but also very different because of the clear Spanish influence and a more tourist oriented part of down. But it did make all the history we were learning come alive, and it was great to walk in the footsteps of all the great and not-so-great leaders.

Saturday's are also free for the most part, and are used for homework, trips to La Sirena, the department store, or to the Colmado on the corner to buy a soda or candy bar. Then Saturday night, we go out!!!! The dancing here is so much fun. The traditional dances are the Bachata and Merengue, and it is so fun to dance them with the Dominican's. I wish that I knew more of the music so I could sing along, but I am getting familiar with some of the songs, and our group has our favorites!

Sunday is then reserved for more homework. We also have church at 11 in the chapel, which is gorgeous. Mass is in Spanish, but I am really starting to understand more. People from the community come to the mission for mass, and we all pray together. It is a great feeling of solidarity with the people, even though I cannot communicate with them the way I would like to.

Overall, I am having so much fun. It doesn't feel like a vacation anymore, but it still doesn't feel like school. The things we are learning are so easy to apply, and we are learning directly from the people here. It is a great way to learn, and I am so glad I took advantage of this program that Creighton has offered. I can't wait for this coming week in the Campos, and I will be sure to update you when I can! No computers, no cell phones, no electricity...only the company of my campo family whom I am doing service with. I CAN'T WAIT!!!!

Cien Fuegos

I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the school that I am working at for two hours twice a week. Every Monday and Wednesday, we take the guagua to downtown Santiago to walk a block and take the F car, which is like a taxi,but operates like a bus in that it just makes a loop to one part of town and back. The F car takes us about ten minutes out of downtown to a little suburb called Cien Fuegos. The community started off in the 70's when one hundred (cien) families were displaced from their homes to this community that surrounds a garbage dump due to the fact that the houses they lived in, that were small and all connected, had burned down in a fire (fuego). A new community was born that lived on the outskirts of town and were never really considered a part of the community. They were treated poorly, never hired for jobs, adn consequently turned to crime to support themselves. They were not given the time of day, so many turned to robbing people in order to pay for the small amounts a food that they could not afford by themselves.

The community quickly grew, and it is now home to more than 150,00 people, on less land than makes up the City of Burlington. There is a hospital, four schools, and still many are unemployed and struggle to make ends meet. Many adults and children work at the city dump that remains right outside the community, sorting through the garbage for metal that can be salvaged and sold, materials that could be used to make a kite to fly, and throwing the rest in a pile to be burned. It is a community that is growing exponentially, but is not being developed at all. The people there have little hope of getting out of the rut they find themselves in. 

My job here is at the school. I work in one of the smaller schools for two hours in the morning. In the Dominican Republic, all the public schools have a uniform of khaki bottoms and a light blue top, and everywhere in the country, the younger kids go to school in the morning, and the older kids in the afternoon. As I work in the morning, I am with the second grade class of 40 students with one teacher, and far less than 40 desks. The teacher has maintained the room away from chaos, but when she leaves, I am left telling the students to sit down and do their homework as they all get up to roam around the room, leaving their notebooks on the table, and the writing on the board that they were supposed to copy goes ignored. The teacher comes back into the room, and they all sit back down, but then she moves on with the lesson, although many students have not finished copying what was on the board previously. Some can learn this way, and do, but there are also some who copy what is on the board letter for letter, having no idea what the word is that they are spelling, or what the whole sentence means. There is just no way for one teacher to manage 40 students who already do not listen, and make sure they are all learning what they need to be to move onto the next level. 

Halfway through the morning, a few older students bring in a few bags of bread, and on a good day a case of lukewarm milk in juice boxes. The hungry children scarf it down, and for many they will not get a whole lot more than that, before heading outside for recess. Some play tag as other climb on top of the roof of a shed and jump off, bringing old broken school desks with them to push around the basketball court. Other kids climb over the barbed wire to go retrieve some things that have fallen down the hill. After running around for fifteen minutes we go back into the classroom. At that point 5 of the children come up to me and ask for a sip of my water. They are thirsty after running around, and there is no running water at the school. I gave them each a sip and resolve to not bring my water bottle back to the school. It is not fair that I can drink water whenever I am thirsty right in front of these kids when they have no running water available to them for the majority of the day. I can wait until I get back to ILAC to quench my thirst if they have to wait all day just for a sip. 

As hard as it is to imagine, these kids grow up this way and don't know anything different. They are happy. It is not my job to show them what they are missing, or to make them feel bad about their lives here, but to show them that I care, to offer them that sip of water when they are thirsty, and to play with them like they are the children that they are, not treat them like they are nothing, which is how they are treated by most of society. I look forward to working here, and I can't wait to build my relationships with the kids and the teacher. I know that although I may not be able to change the world, if I can make just one child's day a little brighter, I will have done my job and this trip will have been worthwhile.