Views From Cabarete: December 2006

Well, my time home was short and sweet. It seems like I just got here and now I'm picking up and heading back to bizarro world. It would be nice to have about another week here, but it'll also be nice to not be cold anymore. You can't win 'em all I guess. Here I am with some of the fellas on my unofficial last night in town. See y'all in six months.

A very Harkins Christmas

Well, Christmas has come and gone and my time here is quickly coming to an end as well. Here are a few photos from the recent festivities. These are mainly from Christmas day/evening which included the 3rd annual gift exchange.

It better not be a puppet...

The annual re-gifting of the Santa toilet seat cover.

The Polar Express is still available. Any takers?

Hmmm....I don't know about this family. It's still not too late to back out.

Keep refilling my glass with Scotch and you too can be my favorite aunt.

2005 Harkins family holiday MVP handing the trophy off to the 2006 winner.

The day after at Teddy's, always a good time.

Remember me?

Again, this may all be solely for my own amusement. It reminds me of the old philosophical question, if you make a blog post and nobody reads it, does it really exist?

First time I've seen Saren in about four years.

Home

I don't know if anyone is reading this, and if you are reading it, you might want these 15 seconds of your life back when you're done. I guess I'm just a little bored waiting to go out for the night and thought I'd post some mostly nonsensical pictures. What have I been doing while I've been home? Mostly playing nerf basketball on a Sponge Bob hoop.

Here's Ryan's Patrick Ewing esque turn around.

One thing I can do, is finger roll.

As of tomorrow, I'm outta here.

Check you later!

This place never ceases to amaze

So yesterday I´m standing outside the computer lab and hear a commotion coming towards me and see a 10 year old girl, along with two others guiding her, running toward the water faucet holding her forehead while crying. I then see that she has blood gushing from her forehead. What I quickly learned was that she was hit in the head by a stray rock thrown at someone else. This must have been a decent sized rock, and thrown pretty hard because there was a lot of blood.

Throwing rocks is a favorite pasttime of the kids here, largely because they are widely available and there is not a lot else to do during recess. Most of them also do not see, or do not care, that it is not a particularly safe activity for everyone in the school yard. The thing that was most disconcerting yesterday was the fact that, while the teachers were tending to the injured girl, other kids were nearby throwing rocks at each other (separate incidents) as if nothing were happening 15 feet away. This just blows my mind.

20 seconds ago as I was writing this, I see a student pick up a handful of rocks and absentmindedly toss them a few feet away at nothing in particular. While this, in and of itself, is not anything to get upset about, it is symptomatic of the larger problem. How can this problem be solved? I´m not quite sure, and it will probably require changes in a lot of areas. One thing I would like to see, however, is the teachers here actually take a stand on this issue and actually try to enforce some sort of rule against rock throwing because nothing we say seems to make much of a difference. Unfortunately, most of the teachers don´t do a whole hell of a lot during recess. OK, that´s my rant for the day.

8 out of 9?

Now that seems to be a trend. Well, I guess at least it wasn´t on national TV, which seems to be the reason UW is cancelling/interrupting the series. Anyway, I did catch the game even though it started at midnight my time.

My new hair aspirational peer.

Derek Raivio - the best 14 year old looking player in the country, four years running.

Oh you silly Huskies. When will you ever learn?

Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa.

Since there aren't a lot of options for entertainment down here, I do a lot of reading. I've long run out of books that I personally brought here, so lately I've been borrowing a lot of books from other volunteers. There's also a bookcase in the lobby of my building, which I recently perused and found a book I'd always meant to read: Shoeless Joe.

For those that aren't aware, this book, written by W.P. Kinsella is the story that the movie Field of Dreams is based on. The book is very similar to the movie's plotline, but had some interesting differences as well. Most notably, in my opinion, is the famous writer Ray Kinsella goes to visit is J.D. Salinger in the book, whereas in the movie it is the fictional Terrance Mann. This fact doesn't really create any major plot differences, but I just thought it was an interesting sidenote. There are some additional scenes and angles in the book that are more significant, but the main thrust of the narrative is the same as the movie.

So, for anyone that enjoyed Field of Dreams, I definitely suggest picking up this book sometime. Anyhow, just thought I'd pass this along since I didn't have anything better to write about at the moment.

Drawing a blank trying to think of a witty title

Due to repeated requests, I´m trying to get photos up more frequently. These are just some pictures I took Friday during the day and later that evening.

Anthony and one of his reading group members

Some kids actually doing something useful on the computer.

My amigitos (little friends) that come in to play with the toys

Some students that often use the computers in the afternoon

This job´s a piece of cake right?

Hey, somebody actually wants to read one of the books!

Tito, giving me his boxing stance for some reason

Not sure if this will show up, but here´s six year old Jasmine Mabry who is one of the two daughters of Jeff and Julia Mabry, fellow volunteers. Jasmine likes to use me as a jungle gym.

Anthony and Jen from my balcony Friday night

Tanksgivin

You may be wondering what a Thanksgiving in the DR is like. To be quite honest, it´s a bit strange. To start off with, the weather hasn´t changed much since I got here in June so it´s always a little difficult to grasp that it should now be cold and gray and time to eat some turkey. Also, they don´t sell turkeys in the grocery store around here so we had to find one, kill it, and slaughter in ourselves. Also, the only acceptable way to kill a turkey in the Dominican culture is no tear it´s neck out with your own teeth. So that was a bit interesting to say the least.

Actually those last three sentences were completely made up, started by Anthony as he was reading my post over my shoulder, and finished by me. Back to your regularly scheduled post.

Of course, Thanksgiving is not a Dominican holiday, and we did not get the day off, so in a lot of ways it was a normal day for us here in wonderful Cabarete. The only difference really was that we had a nice large meal to top it off. What was nice was that one of the other volunteers invited us all over to the resort where her parents were staying to have a nice group meal. A couple of them did a lot of cooking (including a turkey) and everyone else brought at least one item. I brought a bunch of rolls that I slaved over for 2 minutes in the supermarket isle. The meal turned out really well, and we had so much extra food that we took all the leftovers to one of the local neighborhoods to distribute. Here´s a few pics from the evening:

Candid shot of the post dinner scene