Earth Day and Murals

This past Wednesday was Earth Day as I'm sure most of you know. For Earth Day here we trainees had a competency. This meant that we had to go into local schools and give environmentally friendly themed presentations to a class of students and do some activities with them. In addition, we had to have them help us with a mural.

I worked with Cliff and Alexis. We decided to do a presentation on basura (garbage) because it is a huge problem here. I'm not sure I have any pictures of it, but there is garbage everywhere. It's on the streets, it's in the water, in people's yards. Just absolutely everywhere. So we chose to do a charla (chat) about garbage. We worked with 8th graders. It went really well. The kids were helpful and really responded well to us. After the charla we had a garbage clean up that went really well. We picked up 28 bags of trash, although a few of them had an awful lot of leaves in them. We had made it a contest so of course the kids wanted to win the prize by having the most garbage so in the end we awarded the prices to the ones that hadn't put leaves and sticks in their bags. We also had the kids do a poster contest. They did an awesome job. Here's the posters they did about garbage clean up in their community.

These were our winners! On the left is the school director and on the right is their teacher.












As another part of the project we worked on some murals for the school. We did one of the water cycle that we worked on with the 3rd graders and then we touched up an old world map (and I mean old, it still had east and west germany and the soviet union on it) that some previous Peace Corps volunteers had done.


Okay, so I just like this picture of myself! I think I look pretty so I figured I'd share it with all of you!

Juan, me, Kevin, Andrea, Cliff, Yudi, and Alexis with our water cycle moveable mural.


Alexis, Kevin, me and Cliff with our world map mural!

Another view of the world map mural.

The Beach!!

Last Sunday all 5 of us that live in Kilometer 15 of the La Cumbre area lucked out. The host moms of our friends Andrea and Alexis said they would take us to the beach. We rented a guagua (which was really only a little pick-up truck) and we loaded 11 of us into the truck. 2 in front with the driver and 9 of us in back. I have to say it's my favorite way to travel. It was a bumpy but beautiful hour and a half drive to the beach. And the nice thing about being with Dominicans is we go to the Dominican beach. It was kind of a cloudy day so I don't have any good pictures from the beach. It was a nice relaxing day on the beach though. I enjoyed it a lot. I talked to mom and dad on the phone for awhile and sat around and chatted with my friends in my group. It was kind of nice to feel like a tourist for a day instead of a Peace Corps volunteer. On our way home we stopped by a river to rinse off the salt. It was really a pretty spot except for all the garbage in it. I don't know what it is about this country, but they sure have a hard time getting their garbage in zafacones (garbage cans). More on the garbage later!

Here's some pictures!


Yameli, Jonas, Alexis, Yudi, and Yoelsi in the back of the truck on the way home from the beach.


Me, Cliff, Andrea, and Kevin in the back of the truck on the way home!! It, of course, rained on us on the way home!


A distant view of the beach on the way home! I need to steal some of my friend Andrea's pictures from the beach!

Wedding

So I went to a wedding with my host parents and host sister last Saturday night. Now weddings here in the campo are not the most common thing. Many people never get formally married from a justice of the peace or from the church because it's just too expensive and most people don't have the money to do it. This couple had actually been together for 20 some years and decided to get married finally because they had the money saved up to do so. There were a ton of people there and a ton of food. I'm not sure what most of the food was but it was pretty good. It was a little strange because I didn't know anyone except my host family until the very end when my friend showed up with her host family. But it was fun. Here's some pictures of my family at the wedding.


Maria and Arsenio my host parents

Maria and Lizbel.

My little host sister Lizbel and I

Stoves

So last Friday and Saturday we did the stove projects with a Haitin family in the community. It was really fun, although a lot of work. I was glad there were 8 of us and a couple of extra hands on deck to do it. The guy who taught us how to do it has made more than 120 stoves already. He was trained a couple years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer and is still using the grant money the volunteer brought in to construct stoves in his community. I'll explain more in the pictures that follow. Oh, papi, there's some special ceramic pieces that they make here in the country that are required for them so we might have to be creative! But we could probably fashion them out of clay.


Mixing cement for the blocks.

Yuli, the expert, laying in the first blocks.

Some of the kiddos where we were working.

Kevin and Juan cutting rebar.

Andrea and I mixing up the mud.

Mark, Yeni, and Cliff applying clay to one of the ceramic burners so we can put it in place in the stove.

The Dona is on the right and her neighbor is in the front and then all of us hard working trainees and others.

The finished product

Making Torta with Maria

For Spanish class last week we went down to my house to make a torta (cake) with my host mom Maria. We made it using the fogon (woodfire cooking stove, you'll see in the pictures). It was made with harina de maize (corn flour), azucar (sugar), coco (coconut), leche evaporada (evaporated milk), and mantequilla (butter). Basically you mix everything together and cook it on the fogon for awhile. Then you cook it from underneath for awhile and then you cook put a metal sheet on top and put the wood on top of it. Here's the pictures from the day below. As you can see, my friend Cliff did most of the cooking, with a little help from Juan, our professor, and Kevin. Andrea and I mainly watched and offered our moral support!


Maria and Cliff mixing the ingredients


Andrea eating some coconut she stole


Cliff stirring up the torta over the fogon (which is amazingly hot and my doña Maria can stick her hand in the fire like it's nothing)


My professor Juan stirring the torta


Kevin stirring the torta


Cooking the torta from the bottom


Cooking the torta from the top

The plaza and los primos

Plaza Hilario is a the top of the hill in La Cumbre. It's a gathering place for the whole community on the weekends to hang out and have some drinks with friends and dance. We went up there this weekend to do some dancing and relaxing. I danced a few times with some of my friend's host brothers although I must say I still feel like a complete idiot when I dance. Here's a couple pictures (not of me dancing) of my friends and one of my professor when we're hanging out at the plaza.

Cliff, me, and Andrea


My Spanish professor Juan Lopez

Also during Semana Santa all the family members that can come home from wherever they may be. That meant that my friend Kevin who is my neighbor and cousin here had his host brothers come home (which means they're my host cousins). They came from Santo Domingo where both of them are studying civil engineering at a university. They kept us quite entertained taking us to the plaza, teaching us bad words, and in general making fun of each other. It was nice because they're around our age and there aren't many people around our age in the community that aren't married with kids. I don't have a picture of my cousin Juan Carlos, but here's some pictures some pictures of my friend Kevin and I with Yoel and my host brother/cousin Daury.

Hiking to the Rio

Hiking may be an exaggeration to what we're were doing but the walk back up the hill was pretty hard. My friend Ben suggested that we (Andrea, he and I) go down to the rio. So I was imagining a nice little walk down to a decent sized river. First a little walk was a long downhill trek to the bottom of the mountain we live on. Then we had to jump through this muddy area to get down to the river. And river would probably be an overstatment, it's more like a little creek. Although it was quite pretty down there and we walked along the creek for quite awhile and found a cool looking frog. The walk back up was long and arduous. Luckily, my neighbor was visiting her mom and invited us to stop in for a break and some water so we survived! Here's the pictures from the walk!

Habichuelas con Dulce

So we had last Friday off from class. I was imagining sleeping in a little and having a nice quiet day at home. I slept in a little, but when I got up I found out that my host mom had decided that I was going to make las habichuelas con dulce. Which literally translates to sweet beans. Now, I've been hearing about this dish since I got here. It's a traditional dish that they make around Easter or the Semana Santa here. Easter isn't just one day here it's a whole week long process and all the kids have the week off from school. So after I had breakfast my host mom had the fogon (wood fire cooking stove) all set up and going and Yameli, my friend Andrea's host sister was there too. My mom had already cooked the beans and blended some of them up so it was more like a bean soup. We put this in a big pot, then added some whole beans and some pieces of sweet potato and some water and brought it to a boil. Then we added cloves, cinnamon, sugar, vanilla, ginger, evaporated milk, regular milk (I guess some people use cocunut milk), raisins, and some little round cookies. It looks kind of like thin chocolate pudding although you come across chunks of the sweet potato and beans periodically. I was pretty skeptical but it's actually really good. I like it hot better than cold, but everybody has their preference. My host mom made me take a little thermos full with me when I went out visiting so my friends and their families could try it. And when our training director stopped by on Monday to visit my host mom had saved a little bit for him so he could try it. Apparently I'm now ready to get married, now that I know how to make habichuelas con dulce! I think I still need to learn to make some other Dominican dishes first!


Here's my friend Andrea's little sister, Yameli helping to cook.


Here's my host mom Maria.


And here I am!!

Later on in the afternoon my friends Andrea, Cliff and I also went up to Doña Ana's house to learn to cook some other things. Well, really we watched her cook but they were little meriendas (appetizers) that I think I could make again. She made chulitas (which are fried yucca that she had shredded up with a cheese grater). You can make them with whatever you want to toss in; she had put in garlic, onion, salt and pepper. They were yummy. Then she made a dulce de coco (cocunut sweet). First, you boil some water and add cloves and cinnamon, then you add the sugar and dissolve it in the water, then you add the coco and you cook it until the water evaporates out and you're left with these absolutely delicious cookie like thing.

Ok, enough about food. I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it!

My new house and a wheelbarrow