1 year in country!

I feel like every month I have less time on the internet, and more to do every time I log in. I also spend far less time doing work on my laptop, which is both good and bad. My laptop time is definitely more dedicated to watching movies (mostly Spanish!) then work/writing emails and blog posts. But thanks to a few people mentioning the lack of blogging on my part, poof, an entry!

We are now well into mango season, huge mangoes for everyone!

Yesterday, the 17^th, marks my one year anniversary of leaving home. Tomorrow, the 19^th, is when I landed in the Dominican Republic and started this journey. It is pretty surreal thinking back from where I started from, and how much I have changed. For one thing, it is almost disgusting how much I know about cacao, especially considering how much I knew coming in…I find myself admiring the production when I walk through different farms and can talk about the entire cacao production from start to finish, so if you want to know, just hit me up! I’m also becoming very Dominican in my hospitality and Spanish. Which means I am successfully becoming immersed in the culture, it also makes me concerned about coming back to the States, considering I still have over a year over service, and already have changed as much as I have. We had a youth camp last weekend, so I spoke Spanish in front of many of my peer volunteers, and received many compliments about the development of my Spanish and how tiguere, which I guess you could translate to “street savvy,” it had become. Which is awesome that I really speak like a Dominican, but I am starting to speak like my campo host dad, who I love but is not quite the ideal Spanish to bring back to the States. A good example is that now instead of saying despues, I say with Dominican speed dpue and don’t understand why the other Americans look at me with a confused face. Needless to say, it will be an interesting transition back.

A logical update would be about my projects. One of my favorite activities right now is the business class that I am teaching. The structure is a basic class teaching youth how to writing and plan a business, it’s fantastic because I’m teaching so many basic skills that they have never thought about before. Here is one of the girls learning about fixed and variable costs:

Doing cost analysis, preparing a vision, marketing strategies, etc. It’s also a chance to review a lot of basic math functions, such as multiplying percentages, which they would otherwise go without. Given the low education level that is the norm in my site, this isn’t a project that doesn’t reach the majority of my community, but a great project non-the less. We are trying to get them to write a plan before the end of the month to enter a competition that will occur in October where the best plans receive funding to start their businesses, fingers crossed!

Here they calculated the point of equilibrium, it took them about an hour to go through all the steps, I was so proud!

I also am still very active in my primary project, the Chocolate Tour. It is slow going, which as an ecotourism project, it should be in order to have sustainable progress. My women are getting better every time we have a group at buying the correct amount of supplies, and getting everything prepared on time. We also have the guides slowly but surely getting better, getting them to study is a definite challenge, but pa’ lante. The biggest success that we have been having is that we are starting to get independent groups to come do the tour, slowly but surely, but that means that the promotions and conversations we have been having are working. We even had two guys just drive to the tour center in my site, which is fairly remote, just getting recommendations and directions in different towns, which is extraordinary. We also had a company come out and film the tour, to be shown on Dominican TVs all along the coast, which will hopefully be some great promotion, and definitely got everyone in my community excited that they got to be filmed. We also filmed going horseback riding to the river and then went swimming, which is a great afternoon activity. And when everyone left I convinced one of my muchachos to keep riding with me and we went for about 3 hours, until the sun set, it was awesome! I am getting respectable at riding now and can get the horse to run and not freak out, which is huge progress. Unfortunately we road for so long that I got huge bruises, so I haven’t been since, but now that’s all cleared up so I’m going to look for my muchacho to see when we can go again ;)

One of the other great things about Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic is that we are close enough and safe enough that we can get together and do camps and conferences with other volunteers and members of our community. Last weekend we had Celebrando el Este, Celebrating the East. Which is a cultural and diversity camp that any volunteer in the East can participate in. We bring two youth with us and do activities about the Eastern region, the Dominican Republic, the United States, and the world. We talk about history, geography, diversity, what culture is, discrimination, etc. It was a huge success. We had a great team of volunteers planning and all the activities worked out, not one was a miss. We taught them different dances and dips from around the world, here are some pictures:

Everyone painted a huge map of the world:

We also did an immigration charla and put up little green men for places members of our family have immigrated to, this is a green man for my brother and familyCousin Ben in Canada!

Teaching the kids to do an Irish jig:

These are our dips around the world: hummus, bruchetta, cillantro pesto, and we were going to do guac but the avocados went bad, all stuff they can repeat in their site too!

We also did this great activity on discrimination, they were in four groups and some groups received more materials and help then others, the lower groups were sent to “prison” for 5 minutes while we let the higher groups cheat and helped them build a city. It was impressive at the end of the discussion how well they grasped the concepts of corruption, inequality, etc.

Anyways, theres a quick update ;) I'll try and get another one soon because I also have lots of stories because I finally had a visitor with my middle brother here for a month!