Fogon Training at Benjamin´s

In late January Thony and I went up to my friend Ben’s site which is a couple hours from here to teach him and his masons how to make the improved wood stoves. It was a fun week. The first night when we were there, we went down to Ben’s local colmado and hung out and played dominoes with young and old. Ben and I particularly enjoyed it because we were beating the Dominicans pretty regularly. Dominicans are notoriously good at dominoes so whenever you can win it’s exciting.

The next day we were up bright and early to work on the fogon at his doña’s house, which luckily is right next to his little house because they are actually the owners of his house. We had two masons that we were training and Thony leading the training. It worked really well; so much easier to have a Dominican man telling other Dominican men what to do instead of trying to get them to listen to little old me. Don’t get me wrong, some men are very open and willing to work with me and take my instruction but there’s a lot who aren’t. Their machismo gets in the way sometimes. Day 2 we worked over at Ben’s neighbors’ house. It is three boys ages 22, 17, and 14 whose parents died suddenly within a few months of each other since Ben arrived in their site. So the 22-year-old, Freilin, is trying to take care of his little brothers so that they can finish school. Ben is super close with them and they come over to his house every day throughout the day to hang out and visit.

In the evenings, Ben would cook us up some dinner and we’d have a couple beers and relax and enjoy the cool evenings (Ben’s up at a higher elevation so it cools down more there than it does in my site). I actually slept with a sleeping bag on the second and third nights because I was so cold on the first night. Although other than the cool nights and the fact that there’s more hills it’s virtually identical to my site. The same thorn trees and living fences of euphorbia. It was nice to see that at least someone else is living in a similar site to me!