A po' ta' bien: My First Visitor!

2 blog updates in 1 week! I am on fire! Or way way behind so I have a plethora of stories to write about. It also helps that we already have another storm coming through so I’m trapped in my house for the night and know I will have internet tomorrow.

So I also recently (although already not so recently) had my first visitor! Hurrah!!! Finally! I was openly getting jealous of other volunteers who have had multiple visitors already, so it was nice to get on the scoreboard and have a visitor from home! My brother, Sean, came out for a month to hang out. It was surprising how quickly the visit went, we weren’t able to get to a lot of what I was hoping for, but I think he definitely got a feel for my campo and some of the problems that are going on in the DR and a good view at Dominican culture. Also, especially in his first days here, I realized how integrated I am becoming, to the point that I am no longer surprised by what was previously unfamiliar. I guess I hadn’t really noticed before because it’s become so second-nature to me but traveling around with my brother, down to how I communicate with the bus drivers has become much more Dominicanized. So that’s cool. Unfortunately I also had a lot of work going on when he visited, and decided to not take any time off since he was here for so long. We had a few tours and even had a group come to film the tour to do a promotional video, which is very exciting!

Anyways, Sean’s first week and a little we were in my site, lots of meetings and tour activities going on, so a lot of times I would just leave Sean with a neighbor or host family member and take care of what I had to do. It worked out pretty well because then he got to know my community, when I was around they would tell my to translate, or we would start talking too fast, or about business that isn’t that interesting if you don’t know everything that is going on. Sean got to go to the farm a lot though, went to gather avocado for a day, went to milk the cows one morning, etc. Then we went up to visit my other host family that lives in the north for a few days. I hadn’t seen them since training (almost 9 months), so it was great to have an excuse to go see them. We did a lot of what I usually did there, went to the farm, hung out in the house playing around, lots of dominoes, and went to watch my host dad play baseball, it was perfect. I also almost killed a chicken. It would have died eventually, but I didn’t make the cut deep enough so my host mom had to step in and re-cut it. But definite progress.

Then we went and worked a kids camp in Caberete for a week through the Dream Project (Dominican Republic Education And Mentoring Project), which is a great organization here in the DR that works to better educational opportunities for low income kids here, they also do work in racism, documentation, etc. It was challenging at points (large groups of kids and lots of energy) but well worth it. It also gave Sean the chance to see a different part of the country, Caberete is like a little America compared to my pueblo, with lots of foreigners and foreign stores.

When we got back to my site I realized we only had a week and a half left and still had a huge list of things we wanted to do. One of my favorites was that one night one of the dons took us out to go catch river crab. It was us and our flashlights trudging through the river for like 2 hours catching these crabs.

The don helped me to catch 3 crabs, but Sean was able to get one without any help, which was impressive. It was crazy to watch the don catching them because he was just so fast! To catch a river crab you look for their holes on the riverbank and then dart your hand and have to catch them behind the pinchers. If you are too slow they see you and run into their cave deep in the hole. But if you are a don that doesn’t stop you and you throw your arm into the cave until you physically cannot put it any further and don’t worry about them pinching off your finger, it’s intense. Then the next morning he taught us how to cook jibah en salsa de coco (coconut sauce), it is so tasty. Then we feasted on all our hard work. It was cute he is already talking about when my dad comes how he wants to take my dad out too.

2 of my favorite doñas also had Sean come over to teach him how to make dulce de coco con leche and to roast and grind some coffee to send back to the family. We also had the chance to go and see a few nearby Peace Corps projects, talking to a girl about creating a water treatment center and another that is working with a women’s group to make jewelry, which was fun and good to show some of the variety of Peace Corps projects.

Sean and some of the muchachas, waiting as the dulce is cooked