Here We Go

This will be my first substantive post. I suppose I need to catch up on what I've been up to for the past three weeks, so I don't know how organized this will be, or if I'll even get it all down right now. Probably not.

Anyway, I arrive here in Cabarete on the evening of June 20th. I was picked up at the airport by Freddy, the husband of the director of the organization. Freddy is a local Dominican so I took the opportunity to have my first conversation in my broken Spanish. I'm not sure that all of my comments made any sense and I definitely know that I didn't understand everything he said to me, but you have to learn by trying. That's something I'm constantly telling myself.

Freddy dropped me off at my new digs here at the Residencia Dominicana. This place is, more or less, a hotel with various people staying for various lengths of time. There are probably 30 units with 10 or so of them being DREAM volunteers here for the summer, or possibly longer. My unit consists of one room with a double bed, small table, two chairs, two nightstands, and a closet. I also have my own bathroom with a shower, toilet, and sink. In the corner of the main room is a mini fridge and a two burner stove. The fridge has been used extensively, but the stove has not been used at all up to this point. Basically I need to buy a pot and/or pan to begin using the stove. I also have a little balcony that overlooks the quiet (except for when drunk Brits come home at 3am) street and unused land next door. Everything in my room was about what I expected except for the "kitchen." I thought that would be a little more extensive, but it's no big deal. One rule I've learned many times over already is to not expect a whole lot. I also briefly met the few people who were already here and then went to bed.

The next morning I got up and had the first of many cold showers. I assume the hot water in my shower works, but I choose to make them cold because they just feel so good. I feel that I'm constantly sweating in the heat and humidity so a nice cool rinse off works well about any time of the day. I usually take one before bed just to cool down as much as possible. I don't have any a/c as you might imagine, but I do have a fan mounted above my bed. Back to day two. I met some of the other volunteers and walked down to the DREAM Project office and checked that out and met a couple of the full time employees. Everybody except myself and one other person had been here for a while planning the summer camp and they had more work to do, so I walked around town a little with the other unoccupied volunteer, Lilly. Lilly is going to be a senior at Dartmouth and had actually volunteered here last year for 4 months. So she was able to give me the lowdown on various things in town and tell me about how things work. After a while it actually began to rain, which was to be a fairly common occurrence the first two weeks I was here (usually in the late afternoon though). So after slogging back to Residencia I worked on unpacking and getting settled. After that I headed down to the beach which is about a five minute walk from where I live. As you might imagine I've spent a lot of time on the beach in my free time.

The rest of my day was pretty lazy, consisting of sitting around, reading, and making my first trip to the wonderful Janet's supermarket. Janet's has a pretty wide selection and it was a bit overwhelming at first trying to figure out what these new brands were and also deciding what was a good deal since everything is priced in Dominican Pesos. 1 dollar equals roughly 30 pesos. So I bought some water (essential because the tap water is not good for drinking) and a box of cereal and called it good.

I think that's a good start for now, and I'll pick it up from here sometime soon.

Adios.