Anna's Blog from the Dominican Republic

An intense couple weeks

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:36:00 GMT

These last couple weeks have been some of my most stressful and thought provoking yet. As a group we made a trip to the Dominican-Haitian border to see the market that happens two times a week. A bridge in the DR is opened and Haitians are allowed into the country from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. to buy and sell any goods they may possibly need to survive the rest of the week. The sense of desperation these people gave off was heart breaking. Not only were they rushing into the DR but as soon as they had finished their business there, they were in just the same rush to get back. The poverty we experienced was eye opening, it was like nothing I had seen before.

As I have mentioned before my service site is at an elementary school in a barrio called Cienfuegos, a poor area of Santiago built right next to the city dump. Last Wednesday for the first time I was able to visit the dump. Many of the people in Cienfuegos work at the dump, many of them are just children. At the dump people would swarm to where dump trucks of trash would dump their loads of garbage. The people would rummage through the garbage, breaking open bags and digging through them with their bare hands. They were looking for plastic, cardboard, or metal, basically anything they could sell for a little bit of money to feed their families. An administrator at the school informed me that some of the students who attend classes there, work in the dump after class. I cannot imagine living that type of life.

I have had a lot of things to process over last couple weeks and to top it all off I have a 20 page paper due next Saturday. I am feeling a little bit of the pressure and stress but this is still an experience I would never give up. I cannot wait to see what the coming weeks have in store for me.

What an Experience

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:07:00 GMT

I have just recently returned from my immersion in a Campo (a poor rural villiage) and had the expereince of a lifetime. I keep thinking that I could be in Omaha right now but instead I am hiking mountains, going to the beach and living in an entirely different culture. The Campo I lived in for 10 days was in the mountains on the northern coast of the DR and from where we were the scenery was amazing. We could see more mountains and valleys and the ocean on the clear days. The people were amazing also. They brought us into their homes as if we were family. We were fed so much food, we didn't even know what to do with it all. Luckily though we were able to work most of it off while we were building an aqueduct to bring running water to them for the first time ever. Before they were using rain water they collected in barrels to drink, cook with, wash themselves and to clean. When they rain out of that water they were forced to travel very far distances to a river to get water. This water in order to be good enough to drink or what not needed to be boiled first. They will not have to worry about that any more. It really is amazing.

Besides building an aqueduct we did a whole lot of hanging out with our families and learning to do things the way they do. Each of us had a little different experience but some of us learned how to cook, harvest cacao (which looks nothing like what you think chocolate would fresh), look at cattle and a number of other things. I had an amazing time and will never forget those 10 days.

This experience has also allowed me to improve my Spanish. Although I am no where near fluent, I am much more confident speaking, not to mention I understand a whole lot more than I ever did before. I am really excited to see how much more I will improve during the rest of the semester.

Hola from the Dominican Republic

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:56:00 GMT

I have now been down in Santiago, Dominican Republic for three and a half weeks and I am having a great time. The culture is completely different than back in the United States, everything is a bit more relaxed and easy going. I have been getting used to power outages, hurricane season (we are pretty protected by the mountains so all we really get is rain), bugs and roosters crowing at all hours of the day. I have been volunteering at an elementary school in a poor neighborhood helping teach kids English. It is amazing how lacking their education system is, classrooms don't have the suplies they need but they are making the best of what they have. The kids are so much fun and are full of questions and although I'm still just learning Spanish they are very patient with me. I have helped teach the kids but they have also helped teach me about their lives. Next week the other 12 students and I will be living in a campo, which is a poor rural town, for 10 days and living the true Dominican reality. I am super excited because we will be helping build an aqueduct so they will have running water for the first time ever.