Pictures!

Laila, Ekow and I at Carnaval!

Carnaval Parade

Spanish Class in the Colonial Zone

Downtown Santo Domingo

The A-Team (Appropriate Technologies sector) on our self-proclaimed Tiguere Day

The AT Girls

The whole group at Swearing In!

A few random pictures from Carnaval on the first weekend through Swearing In to wrap up training. For more see this Facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100306631115638.2714972.5739158&l=3cb9efd37c. Eventually I’ll get more pictures up on the blog and on a better photo-sharing site than Facebook but for now this is the best I’ve got. I haven’t taken pictures in my site yet because I want to acclimate a little before pulling out my big camera but in time I’ll take some pictures in La Guamita to show you all. Enjoy!

My Site: La Guamita

I’ve been in site for two weeks now and have lots to share but I’ve spent the majority of my internet cafe time today calling friends and family so I’m going to keep this short. More to come in a week or two once I’ve had time to pre-write an entry before coming to the internet cafe!

My community is called La Guamita but you won’t find it on a map. It’s about 30 minutes north of Cotui (a pueblo north west of the capital) by motoconcho (motorcycle taxi). My community has just over 100 families but the water system I’ll be designing is for two communities, so about 550-600 people in total. I’m living with a host family for three months and I have nine host siblings! But luckily it’s not a madhouse since they’re all my age or older and therefore only 2 still live at home. One sister lives in Spain and one in the capital and the rest are married with kids and live nearby in the community. Peace Corps requires that volunteers spend the first three months in site performing a community diagnostic which for me will include observing and interviewing community members about their water, sanitation, health and education practices and needs. I know my primary project is a water system but this diagnostic will help me get to know the community and diagnose potential secondary projects. Even in just a few days there last week I already saw a huge need for a latrine project following the completion of the water system. It’s going to be a busy two years!

The living conditions are pretty rustic but compared to many other water volunteers I’ve got it good. I have electricity part of each day, but it’s a pretty random schedule so you never know when it’s going to come and go. There is no running water in my community, hence my role there. There are a few wells where people fetch drinking water and the rest of the water for washing dishes, bathing, laundry, etc is either rainwater caught from the roof in barrels or brought up from the river. I’ve already gotten amoebas since I’ve been there so for me it’s going to be botellon (big jug of bottled water, like in offices in the US minus the fancy stand) water until the water system is built. The water system will bring water directly from a spring source so it will be potable. My house has a latrine but many houses that I’ve visited just have buckets.

I’ve spent the past two weeks getting to know everyone in my new community so it’s been pretty low key. I sit on people’s porches drinking juice or coffee and just talking with them. I’ve also been working on a map of all the houses in my community to design the distribution system for the aqueduct. Next week we’re doing the land survey using an Abneylevel so measure the elevation changes from the water source to the storage tank site and all the way through the distribution system. I’m not sure exactly but the future pipeline will be quite a few kilometers long so it will take at least a week to survey the system. I’m looking forward to finally getting out there and doing some measurable work! Once the survey is done I can start designing the system and I’ll also spend a lot more time visiting houses in the next couple months to complete my community diagnostic.

So that’s about it, just eating mangos, fighting off amoebas and living a pretty rustic lifestyle here in La Guamita. Hope all is well back home!

The End of the Beginning

Training is over and the real deal has just begun! The last few days of training were crazy hectic, including our Swearing In, ceremony, the All Volunteer Conference, Volunteer Prom, and one last lazy day in Santo Domingo with friends before we parted ways.

Swearing In was a really nice ceremony to officially initiate us as full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers. It was conducted primarily in Spanish and our training host families all came and the Peace Corps staff was there. Our Country Director (who sadly is retiring at the end of this month), our Training Director, a representative from the US Embassy, the head of the DR Department of the Environment, a member of the DR Department of Education, one of the host moms and one of my fellow volunteers spoke. Another volunteer from my group sang the US National Anthem beautifully and as a group we sang the Dominican anthem. Then the director for each sector welcomed us up individually to share where our sites are and receive a certificate and shake hands with all the important people who spoke. Then we had cake and lots of pictures! A pretty standard graduation, but it was really nice and I felt so proud to be part of this amazing group.

After the ceremony I was reflecting on how lucky I’ve been my whole life to be surrounded by so many extraordinary people. My family, friends from high school and friends from college are all brilliant, unique, and inspiring people and I’m glad that I’ve found that in this Peace Corps group too. I’ve got a pretty diverse and impressive group of colleagues here in the DR. At the beginning of training, our Country Director shared this summary with us:

You are a group of 52 U.S. citizens who have made a commitment to dedicate 27 months of you lives working in Community Environment Development, Appropriate Technologies, and Education. You come from 29 different states. Your median age is 23, but thanks to a specific few, your average age is bumped up to 25. Between the 52 of you, you hold 60 college degrees.

You dabble in or speak fluently 16 languages, including: English, Spanish, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Japanese, Quechua, Italian, Portuguese, Attic Greek, French, Latin, Hebrew, Mandarin, American Sign Language, and Twi Asante (Ghana).

Prior to today, at least two of you have already been to the DR to work on community development projects. As a group you’ve worked with over 138 NGO’s and Development Organizations.

You have studied of worked on all 7 continents and in over 40 countries, including:
Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, England, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Morocco, Tanzania, Ghana, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leon, Kenya, India, Afghanistan, Israel, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Australia and Antarctica.

Needless to say, I feel very humbled to be part of a group like this and it was really an honor to swear in as a volunteer with each and every one of them.

The next day was the All Volunteer Conference where we finally got to meet almost all of the other 150 or so volunteers. It was a long day of meetings and info sessions but it was fun to meet the rest of the volunteers in my sector and in my region. That night was Volunteer Prom. The volunteers rented out a bar in downtown Santo Domingo, appropriately called Frat. Another girl who also went to Maryland commented how much it felt like a night at Cornerstone and I thoroughly agree: crowded, hot, and crazy with loud American music but a great time all around! We stayed in the city that night instead of with our Pantoja host families so the next day we were able to take advantage of some of the benefits of working for a US government organization: the US Embassy! After months of viveres and rice, a bacon cheeseburger from the Embassy cafeteria was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. We followed our delicious lunch with an afternoon of lazing around at the ambassador’s pool and then continued our all-American day by seeing a truly terrible movie in English: The Fast and the Furious 5. The screaming, laughing, cheering and yelling Dominican audience only emphasized how hilariously bad the movie was. I couldn’t have asked for a better last day of training before starting my real Peace Corps life!

Drumroll please…

Today is official site announcement day!!! I already had an idea of where my site is but I didn’t want to share it with everyone until it was official. My site is a small community called La Guamita just northeast of the pueblo of Cotui. It an hour and a half north of Santo Domingo and about the same distance southeast of Santiago, the other major city in the DR. There is another water volunteer who will live just on the other side of Cotui, which will be a great resource. There are about 150 homes in La Guamita and therefore somewhere around 550 people. I will be working with them to build an aqueduct to supply their homes with water. Peace Corps generally designs gravity-fed water systems but 3 of the 7 water volunteers in my group, including myself, will be working on systems where the water source is below the community and therefore we will have to use ram pumps to get the water uphill. After three months in my community I’ll have a training session on ram pumps to learn more about it but for now all I know is that I’ll shoot the water up a big hill where I’ll build my reservoir tank and then I’ll use gravity to send the water down to the houses. I’ll know more specifics after I visit my community TOMORROW!!!

Tomorrow is Project Partner Day. The project partner for each of the 52 volunteers in my group is coming to Santo Domingo to meet us and then we’ll each go to our community for a 4 day visit. I’ll meet the host family that I’ll live with for the next three months before I move out on my own and I’ll be “presented” to the community at a big meeting. The water committee will also take me up to the water source and we’ll walk the line from the source to the community so I can get an initial idea on what the system will look like. During my first three months I’ll work with the water committee and the community to survey the land and design the system but this week should be a good glimpse into how it will all work and I can’t wait! I’m also really excited to meet my family and all the neighbors. Since I applied to the Peace Corps last fall I’ve imagined what my life as a volunteer might be like and while training has given me a much better idea of what campo life and my job will be like, tomorrow will be the first real look into my next two years. I’m nervous and excited and filled with anticipation right now. I look forward to telling you all about my site in a few days when I get back to Santo Domingo!

Peace Corps Jackpot

I’ve felt pretty lucky with my Peace Corps assignment since I found out where I was going but yesterday just sealed the deal: I hit the Peace Corps jackpot! Not only do I get to live in the Caribbean, but I also got assigned to a really exciting project and I’m working with amazing people. And in my free time I get to travel to incredibly beautiful places like Isla Saona! After returning from 5 weeks of technical training and reuniting with the volunteers from other sectors, a group of us went on a day trip to a beautiful island in the southeast and got to spend the day catching up with each other after being out of touch for so long. We took a bus a couple hours east of the capital and caught a motorboat out to the island where we swam in a piscina natural, which was a shallow, calm area in the ocean pretty far from the coast where we could swim in clear blue water enjoying the Caribbean sun and Caribbean rum. Then we went up to the shore of the island and spent a few hours lounging on the beach, playing volleyball, swimming and enjoying the unlimited buffet and bar. That was quite a treat after weeks of campo food! Then in the late afternoon we got on a catamaran to head back to the mainland. We lounged on the boat and listened to meringue while reminiscing on our amazing day.

Midday, as we were out in the water tossing a Frisbee around, a friend of mine joked, “Life as a volunteer sure is tough.” We all laughed because even though we have plenty of hard work in our futures for the next two years, we’ve got it pretty darn good here. I think I can handle campo life if I have vacations like this mixed in!

Beautiful Isla Saona

Like I said, I hit the Peace Corps jackpot. Now come visit my paradise!