Higueros

I´m a big dummy and forgot the video of the harvesting of the higuero, I´ll post it next time. And will hopefully have lots more posts too. I´m way behind right now. Lots of love to all.

I had heard from the previous volunteer that she had made lamps out of higueros which are some sort of gourd looking thing. I was curious. So I was out walking one day and ran into my friend Francisco. Now we were chatting and I was looking at this tree behind him and there were these huge fruits hanging from the tree. I asked him what they were and lo and behold they were higueros. Needless to say I was excited. So Francisco and I climbed the fence into the yard of Rosini, the owner of the house. My friend Santa was there too with her kids and Rosini's kids were there too. I asked Francisco to get me a gourd which he tried to do but they were quite high so it broke when it came down. Which was actually cool because I wanted to see what one looked like inside anyway. I think it personally smells like an apple although the textures is more like a sponge. However, one of my other volunteer friends thought it smelled like some sort of cleanser but I think he's wrong. Well, then I saw another higuero tree that had these immense higueros so we went to check it out. Francisco called over one of the muchachos to climb the tree and toss down the higuero. Now this thing was huge and heavy and though the muchacho did his best the higuero came hurtling towards the ground and almost hit Francisco on the head. I was sure it was going to break, but it didn't and luckily I got most of it on video for you all to enjoy. Then the muchachos had to pose for pictures with the higueros which was equally entertaining. Well, I was trying to figure out how to get these huge higueros home by myself when Francisco offered to help me. So we wandered taking the long way home, stopping to throw rocks into the mango tree to knock down the ripe ones, which we washed in the river and ate as many as we could. We bagged up the rest in a bag we found tied to a stick in the fence to take home to my doñas.


higueros in the trees


The muchachos holding the higueros


This is what a higuero looks like inside


Rosini the owner of the house and the trees too I suppose


Here´s how the higueros measured up to my size 9 1/2 Keen sandals!

Now I had these higueros sitting in my room for a couple of days before I could find a saw. I finally borrowed a saw and was cutting one open in the yard as I talked to Santa the neighbor and her kids when my friend Tony wandered up and decided to show me how an expert does it. He was the one who helped Adriana do the higuero lamps with the group of girls she worked with. I wasn't doing too bad a job, but he sure made it look a hell of a lot easier. I think I did the hard part though. So now I have one higuero cut open and drying in my room and another one that I haven't cut because they needed the saw back to cut tubo (pipe) for the llaves (faucets) that they're putting in now that the acueduct is finished (another story I'll get to eventually). Apparently I need power tools to drill a pretty design into the higuero to make a lamp on top of trying to figure out where and how much it will cost to buy a lamp fixture. But I'm going to get it done because I want to use them in my house.


Here´s my friend Tony cutting out the insides and the neighbor boy Muñongo (that´s his nickname and I don´t know what it means) clowning around.


Here´s Tony again working intently.


Man this kid is photogenic, but he´s kind of a brat too and you should hear the bad words that come out of his mouth.


The neighbor Santa helping me scrape out all the little tidbits from the higuero. That´s her daughter Mari Estel walking beside her.


If I were to marry a Dominican and have children, they might very well look like this!

Thunder and Lightning

The thunder and lightning storms here are intense. I'm still not sure I've got the loudest ones but I got some of them on video that I wanted to share with you guys. They are definitely a little scary sometimes. Particularly when the thunder booms so loudly it makes the house shake and you can see the lighting strikes hit close by and everyone has stories about this person getting hit by lightning or a mule that was killed. Enjoy the videos.

Snails

A bunch of caracoles (snails) came out after the rain in Juan de Herrera when I was visiting Ruth.

Visiting Ruth

I went to visit my friend Ruth a couple weeks ago (she lives about 45 minutes from me) to see where she lives and hang out for a bit. I headed over to lunch at her house and then her family wanted to go to the river to swim. So we headed over to the River Mogollon to a little dam that they have. It apparently is a common make out spot judging from the number of couples that were there making out when we showed up. The dam is kind of cool and there were a bunch of little fish jumping up it. A couple of guys came by with their teams of oxen. We tried out the underwater setting on my camera. We slid down the damn into the water. It was great. Then later on that night, her host brother and his friends took us out in San Juan. We just hung out and chatted but it was fun to be out in the city for a night. The campo is a generally very mellow place to live so it's fun to go out and do something a little more exciting every now and again.


Ruth's host sister, Ruth, Ruth's host mom, and me!


Playing underwater. These are Ruth's host brothers.


Climbing up the dam was the scary part. It wasn't very tall, but it was slippery and really there were just little grooves where you had to try to get your footing.


Ruth, her host sister, and host brother sliding down the dam.


Ruth helping to wash the oxen.


Fish jumping up the dam.


Ruth and I

Hanging out with the boys

More to come soon!!

Hey all, as I said, there´s a lot more to come hopefully soon. My doña accidentally washed my power cord to my laptop so I had to rush order one and have ´Leners send it to me. This means that I haven´t been able to use my laptop to write out what I was going to say and to organize my pictures, which is how I was able to stay roughly up to date before. However, the cord has arrived and I´ll be in the capital the next couple days so hopefully I´ll be able to get some good posting done because it´s been an exciting last 10 days!! Lots of love to all and more pictures and adventures to come soon!!

Rice Fields

I´m way behind in my updates now. About a week and a half to be exact and this is going to be a short entry because I have some more errands to run before I catch the bus to Santo Domingo. Here´s some pictures of the rice fields around here. Rice is a major crop in this area which I had no idea of before I arrived here. However, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he was telling me what the reality of rice farming is like around here. First the farmer has to buy the seed to plant the rice. Then he has to hire the labor to plant the rice, and later on to harvest the rice. Then he has to sell it to a company that can process it and make it into the finished product. Then he has to buy it in the market to feed his family. In the end he ends up spending more to produce it and buy it than he earns selling it. However, the rice fields have to be one of the prettiest things in the world when the rice plants are mature. They are a particular color of green that just jumps out at you. Here are some pictures for you to enjoy of the rice fields in various stages of production.

La Fiesta del Espiritu Santo

So this past Monday was the Festival of the Holy Spirit in my little campo. They had told me that a lot of people came, but the truth of the matter is that it´s insane!! The roads were completely full of cards. My doña counted 24 vehicles in front of our house, and that´s not counting all the motorcycles and horses that came through. This included city trucks that came full of people to medium sized tourist buses. The center of town was crazy. There were groups of people playing the drums and dancing palo. Check out the video below. There were people cooking everywhere and selling food to the masses. There was perica ripiao which is another typical music from here that was the basis for the merengue. See picture below. I should have taken video of that too but I was slackin´. Another time. There were venders selling candles and rosaries and crosses and all other sorts of cheap (plastic) religious symbols. The church was so crowded you couldn´t get into it and you could hardly walk down the streets. Craziness!! I could go on and on but time is short and I need to go get lunch. So here´s the pictures and videos. I´m working on my cinematography skills on the videos still. Some of the cooking that was going on. This is how they make a delicious pot of grits here in the DR. With lots of butter and salt. It´s super yummy. Soup a.k.a. Sancocho (which roughly translates to boil) Perico Ripiao A horse that someone rode in on!
Drumming and dancing palo.
The road in front of my house.
Another example of the road in front of my house. It was madness!

More tomorrow!!

So I was going to write more today but I´m feeling a little worn out today. Another not so fun part of being a Peace Corps Volunteer is constant bathroom issues of which I´ve had a few. Anyway, probably nothing to worry about, but I´ve had the runs for a few days now (yes, I know, that´s more information than you wanted to know) and so I just called the medical doctor and she wants me to give a poo sample. Yes, I´m as excited as you are, but it´s common procedure here. So I´ll probably be back in town tomorrow to turn in my sample. So more stories then!! Lots of love to all!!

Motoconchos

So Sunday I headed back to el campo (the country). I finally got some pictures and video of me on a motoconcho so here they are for your viewing pleasure. I hope this will allow you to appreciate my life as a volunteer a little more. Despite some pictures to the contrary it's not all sunshine and beach, there's also fun rides on the back of motorcycles down dirt roads, oh, and I'm coming to the festival next.

Santo Domingo

So as I mentioned I went to Santo Domingo last weekend. I had to get a shot and needed a break for a couple days from campo life, which thank goodness Peace Corps understands and allows us a couple rest and relaxation days every now and again as long as we don't abuse it. I went out to an Italian restaurant with a friend on Friday night. Saturday I went with a friend to the beach. It's the local favorite for capitleños (capital dwellers), although a friend told me it's also one of the most polluted coastal areas in the country. I personally thought it was pretty, thank goodness my friend didn't tell me that until after I returned. Here's a few pictures from Boca Chica.


Yes, I swear I´m in the Peace Corps!!







Further than that, Saturday night was the despedida (farewell) of a volunteer who had to ET (early terminate) because she couldn't find a buyer or renter for her condo back home and couldn't afford to let it go. It was unfortunate because she was a good volunteer and didn't want to leave. But we had a good time sending her off. We even went to a casino. They look the same here as they do in the states. Probably owned by the same companies too.

So the sindico (kinda like a county commissioner) Felix, my project partner Nivin, and I were talking one day early last week and we decided it would be a great idea to have a meeting with all the community leaders of El Batey. They were in charge of organizing it since I don't know that many people yet. We set the date for Thursday at 4:00 pm, which is not too bad a time considering most people are farmers and out of their fields by then. Well, by 4:00 we had Felix, Nivin, and Santo Suero, a farmer from the area who went back and forth between Santo Domingo and El Batey. So we chatted and waited. After all, we all knew things here worked on Dominican time. Felix and Nivin both told me they had invited a bunch of people, which may or may not be true. Dominicans, like the rest of us to some extent, like to save face so even if they hadn't remembered to invite anyone they would say they had. Needless to say, no one else showed up so I did my presentation of the projects to these 3 gentlemen. Turns out Santo Suero has a group of organized farmers that wants to work with deforestation and growing alternative but locally feasible fruit crops that they could market as well. So after hearing about his organization we all loaded into the inginiero's car to head out to Santo's farm. More about the inginiero another time. We got there and walk out onto the property that is behind his house into this field with these little trees with these GIANT purplish mangos. It was a thing of beauty let me tell you. Check out the pictures below. And the cool thing was that he had started with the local variety of mangos which are tasty but super stringy, i.e. not very marketable and had found starts from this other kind and grafted them onto the original rootstock. And he was using sawdust and cow manure as mulch around the young trees. These are pretty saavy practices for the DR. Not that people aren't intelligent, the vast majority just haven't been presented with different ways of doing things since the advent of chemical agriculture. I was excited to say the least! Even better than that, is that we made plans so that I could attend the meeting of his group this coming Sunday, and we're going to invite some other community leaders. And even better than that, we're going to make plans with his group to go for a horseback ride up into the lomas (hills) so that I can check out the conucos they have up there and also the deforestation that happened years ago and that this group would like to work to fix. And yes, there's still one more thing that's better. Santo's brother, Fredy, brought me some mangos last Friday. Unfortunately I had left for the capital for the weekend. So needless to say a few of the six mangos got eaten before I got home on Sunday, not that I blame anyone because who can resist. Anyway, I was kinda sick Monday and Tuesday so I didn't eat a mango until today (Wednesday) and I wish I had eaten one every day since I got back. It was the best mango I think I've ever had in my whole life!! It was like a meal in itself and I was eating it for dessert!! But I somehow managed to demolish the whole thing in no time flat by the light of my headlamp no less because se fue la luz (the light left, a very commonly heard phrase here) right as I was eating dinner. So I was being dive-bombed by moths as I was munching on this spectacular mango!! I can't wait to eat the one remaining one tomorrow! And hopefully I can snag some more this weekend when I see Santo again. Keep your fingers crossed for me, mine are definitely crossed.

Adriana visits!

Last week was a busy week for me. A good week but a busy week. After updating y'all on my blog last Tuesday I ran some errands in town and met up with Adrienne, the health volunteer who was in El Batey until last November. She was getting ready to head back to the states and stopped by to say some last goodbyes. It was great to have her in town for a couple days so I could pick her mind and she could introduce me to some people who had been helpful to her. Plus, she's a cool young lady anyway! Wednesday we went walking around and I got to see a lot more of the community and meet a bunch of people she had worked with and/or knew in the community. Also, on the walk she showed me a little swimming hole she used to come to with some of the young people in the community when she needed a little dip. It's not super deep, but deep enough to dunk yourself which is more than can be said for most places in this river. With all the rocks and stuff in that area it totally reminded me of creeks back home, although not nearly as cold.


The swimming hole. I´m excited to go try it out someday soon. It´s been freakin´ hot and dry here for the last several days and I think it gets worse before it gets better.



Me, Francisca and Adrienne (a.k.a. Adriana) on the morning that she left to head back to the capital before heading off to the states.

Random Pictures

This is another view of my valley from a different spot. There is corn and yucca being grown in the field in the foreground and the mountains in the background are the foothills of the Cordillera Central, the biggest mountain range in the country.


So I know I´ve mentioned these cactus fences before. But here´s a close-up of how they look so you can get the picture. They may not even be a cactus technically, maybe more of a succulent.


Here´s another picture of the framboyan tree. It´s in full bloom right now and is just gorgeous!


Here´s the little neighbor girl Mari Estel. She´s a little rubia (blondie). Not sure where that came from, but she´s cute. She´s a year and 8 months.


And here´s Mari Estel´s mom Santa. Santa is 25 and married to Manuel who is almost 80. I´ve found it´s better not to ask questions about that. Anyway, they have a 5 year-old who is a handful to say the least. They call him Miñongo (I don´t know what that means)and Mari Estel. I´ll put up a picture of Miñongo if I ever catch him with enough clothes on to be able to post it safely.