Hi Everyone!

Happy Easter! I hope my family is doing the Japanese Easter Tradition and that I get to talk to them today. I’m going to try to send this from an internet café and find a phone. They don’t call Easter Pascua here – it is La Resurreccion but it doesn’t seem like my family is doing anything for today. We’ve had a bunch of family over this whole weekend though. I’ve heard that some other volunteers have gone to really long church services and processions but I haven’t seen anything. I wish we could do an Easter Egg hunt. I love Easter Egg hunts. Especially when the giant egg is involved and my mom doesn’t make it so that I have to let Jim find it. I think if I ever have kids I am going to throw spectacular Easter egg hunts. I wish I could do it for the Dominican kids here but I don’t have the materials plus I’m pretty sure this would further promote the fact that I am a crazy gringa. It was great – last week I was doing interviews with three families in the community to learn more about La Cumbre and a 2 year old who I had never met before asked me in the middle of my interview if I was crazy in reference to my scattered Spanish. I said no, I’m learning Spanish but I can speak English and then I told her that her braids were pretty in English and she looked at her mom in a way that was like who is this person? Hahah. She was really smart. Not as smart as Maddie but really smart.

I hiked with a bunch of volunteers and a group of our Dominican friends to this awesome waterfall this weekend in Yaroa. I call the waterfall ‘Sabana de agua’ because it was like a sheet of water coming down this semi circle of a cliff. I’ll try to put up a picture if the computer will let me. Also a picture of the awesome Auyama pie that I made with the help of my Aunt Jenna's crust recipe and our director's wife pie recipe.

I wrote a song about La Cumbre for our upcoming presentation on Tues. I’ll show it to you when you come visit me! I have also been learning some songs to play in Spanish to help me practice Spanish and also because the Dominicans dig it when you can sing in Spanish. I am also learning the songs I like for my own sanity because you can only have so many hours of merengue tipico. I’m trying to learn Silvio Rodriguez because those songs kill two birds with one stone since he is a well known artist here and also I really like his music.

My friend Ben and I started teaching the kids in our neighborhood how to do a compost pile in Arturo’s conuco – conuco is like a little plot of land that can be incredibly productive for gardening (someone told me they were in a conuco once with more than 50 different types of crops). We started to build a pile with the kids and now I’m asking my family to save me the guineo peels and coffee grounds to add to the green layer. We also started prepping the soil to plant crops up at the Mansion (it was really silly the location they picked though – like previously that land parcel was used to throw construction rocks in and so we spend like ½ the day double digging and removing rocks). I was really impressed though on our hike because we walked by a parcel of land that was all hand dug and was at least 20 times as big as the parcel of land that the whole group of volunteers spent the day working on. We’ve also learned how to make organic pesticides using different common plants including peppers and garlic, a Piperaceae plant named guyaya, and Egreta or Castor Bean! The Castor bean plant is invasive in California and I thought – well that’s good that it can be used for something at least…maybe we can utilize it? I want to research more on it now because they didn’t give us very much info on it. Also – my friend Malia and I are going to do a presentation on Weds on Environmental outreach strategies to implement at schools and help the volunteers get ready for earth day. It’s just basically going to be us showing different arts and crafts and hands on activities that have an environmental theme – we are thinking about doing plant presses, nature walks, recycled material instruments, decorated switch covers that remind people to turn off their lights when they leave, and maybe recycled material hummingbird feeders. We’ll see how it goes. We’re both not sure which materials they are going to give us. Also Malia is great – she’s a peliroja from Wyoming who rocks your socks. I went over to her house this week to meet her family and gave them a tea and chocolate party. Oh tea and chocolate! Malia gets a lot of attention because the Dominicans haven’t seen very many redheads – and we’ve had many discussions about what they consider to be a rubia. There is no set rubia apparently.

Hello to Mark and Yeni’s family also! They say hello and are doing fine.

Ok I gotta run to visit Nenita and then hopefully make it to the internet café with this note to upload. Hope all is well and Happy Easter!
Love,
Sarah

La Cumbre

Hi! So the internet situation in La Cumbre is more like what I expected for the Peace Corps. I have to go to Santiago to check my email and the little internet café was sort of frustrating because the keyboard I was using kept sticking…so I basically spent my hour backspacing. Anyways – my apologies for taking so long to write but thanks for writing me. Ok so here is the update so far and this might be long because there are large spurts in between internet access.

It was a wild ride to La Cumbre. I went with my friends Cliff and Mark with a GIANT backpack that I would have packed much differently from what I know now. We took a jam packed gua gua down the highway to the tour bus. When I say jam packed it is an understatement. The greenline in boston has nothing on this –people are literally hanging out of the open door. They had to stuff our bags as hard as they could into the trunk which wasn’t closing properly and I stood there telling them I needed to see it close or else I wasn’t getting on. Anyways – long story short is that my stuff got there safely but it was slightly stressful. We took the gua gua to a tour bus to another gua gua, the directions were really bad, and then I get off in the little mountain town of La Cumbre with my giant backpack and walked down the hill asking a bunch of curious Dominicans where is la casa de Amor y Hector. I am then led to a very steep hill/driveway (it is a geometrical feat) and then yell out, Amor esta alli? And then a very energetic, stocky 45 year old woman with lighter skin and peppered hair meets me outside and points to herself – I am Amor, this is my house. She then hugged me tightly and grabbed my stuff, threw it in my little room, and then took my hand and tugged me into the back patio to meet about 10 family members all of which I promptly forgot their names and relations. There are a lot of babies – she has 3 daughters and each of them seems to have several kids and also just had a baby (I’ve met Johnson – a blue eyed baby boy who is 5 months and Leslie who is 20 days old). Amor’s daughters are also all my age or younger so they might think I am an old maid (Jamona). Generally you are considered a Jamona if you are 25+ and have never been married and have no kids. I want to meet a Jamona, I hope I get to talk to one and see what she thinks about life.

We have Spanish class every morning in a beautiful little enramada (kiosk) that overlooks the valley - above is the view of the valley. It is beautiful. La Cumbre means the summit and we are surrounded by fairly lush jungle (full of Cecropia trees to the appreciation of my Study Abroad Costa Rican readers). There are actually loads of wonderful trees – I’ve learned a handful of new ones. There are also bright red and black butterflies and a light green version of a monarch. I haven’t seen very many birds yet but I have some seen some sweet Coleopterans and unfortunately the noseeums (maji) are bad here – I have tons of bites. The mosquitoes are also here and I use my mosquito net while sleeping but I haven’t seen many and was told that at this altitude the species isn’t the one that carries Dengue or Malaria…but I’m still going to sleep with the net regardless. Oh yes and I have a good story - I was walking on Cliff’s farm and was bit by some ants – it stung but not too bad. Then I got home and my ankles were the size of toronjas (grapefruit) and it was crazy! I couldn’t walk and I had to get to class up that giant hill so that basically sucked and everyone was like, Jeez your ankles look huge – it only scared me when Amor also looked at them and was like, Dios Mio. All is well though, my ankles are much better after elevating them, putting a lot of menthol on them (they put menthol on everything by the way) and then covering them with a leaf called Mata de dolor which is a little ironic if you translate that. Good story though eh? Haha. We unfortunately see a lot of small fires occurring on the hillsides and there is trash that is scattered all over the place, but it is not as bad as Pantoja. La Cumbre is much preferable. It is still not as rural and remote as some locations in DR – like I actually have running water (from a little tiny hose which is ice cold) and my house does have a toilet (there are a lot of latrines here though).

I do miss Dona Roma and the ICT group. Mark and I talk about how much we miss Jean – How are you Jean?! I wish you were here! Also – hello to Mark’s parents! He told me that Jean and I are giving you updates on him – besides technical difficulties with his travel bag, he is doing just fine and is actually the best dancer of the gringos in my opinion. I was also told this by Jared’s homestay sister so it has to be true if a Dominican says it. Que orgullo! We have Spanish class generally in the morning and then we have skill training usually in the afternoon. My typical day so far has been wake up at 7, say hello to Amor and get ready, eat breakfast (today was bread, cheese, ketchup, and the typical highly sweetened café), walk up the crazy steep hill to Spanish class which is actually quite close to my house luckily, Spanish for 3 hours with our teacher Claribel (23 and a total sweetheart, she’s very soft spoken, very patient, and I’m really glad we got her for our teacher because I can understand her very well and she’s very easy to talk with as a friend) – our class is intermediate advanced with Jared, Ben, Jasmine, and Kiri, -- entonces, I go home for lunch which is the largest meal of the day and generally includes rice, beans, either pasta or veggies and some sort of meat (btw I changed my mind about it being easy to be a veg here because they don’t recognize that idea well in the rural areas so I am a carnivore until I am on my own), then I walk up the hill again to La Mansion where we have class with our director Tim learning some theme of the day (we had our first test today which I think I did fine on but am a little disappointed with how the way they are going about testing us – I don’t know if I will ever escape pedagogy), and then we get out of class and I have been going over to the other trainee’s houses to visit their families because Amor works until 7:30 at the Banca which is actually a place where they sell lottery tickets and take bets, then I go back and eat dinner and talk a bit/play music and then I jump under my mosquitero and sleep.

I really like Ben and Jared’s homestay families – I think I have spent more time at Jared’s house than I do at my own because his mom (Nenita) and sister (Litbeth) are incredibly warm. They have a farm and whenever I go over there I am immediately offered a snack/coffee/dessert. I found out that they also collect honey and offered to buy a bottle because I really wanted some for the tea that mom sent me. They told me that they wouldn’t be able to collect any for me right then because it is a belief that you shouldn’t harvest during certain stages of the moon – there are a lot of beliefs like that – but then two days later they gave me a giant bottle of honey and insisted that it was a gift and wouldn’t let me pay. I gave them a chocolate bar in exchange because it was too nice. They have also overfed me, do my nails, taught me how to use the greca (which is the device they used to make coffee) and are wonderful to sit and chat with. We talked about Juandules, Jasmine’s surprise birthday party, and about the problems with Haiti yesterday – it is interesting to see how all over the world people seem to have problems and negative names for their poorer neighbors (U.S. and Mexico, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and Dom Rep and Haiti).

This weekend was full of birthdays (Kevin, Jaron, and Jasmine). They were all fun and I got to practice dancing with Bachata and Merengue. I was really pleased to find out they were calling me Tiguera this weekend - that means a girl who is really sharp. I played baseball with a bunch of guys the other week and they were calling me that and I was like – mental high 5! It is funny though because you have to be careful with that word when you are using it with a guy because it can mean 1)Sharp guy 2) Gang member more or less 3) Player who basically is after all the women. Yep - it’s a fun word. Ok!! That’s all for now. Lets see if I can send this. Hope you are all doing really well. I heard about the shootings in New York and that is upsetting. I’m going to try and find a newspaper that gives me U.S. updates more often. I hope that you are all doing well and keep writing! Happy Easter!! Love, Sarah

TOBY! I GOT YOUR PACKAGE THIS MORNING! THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH FOR THE WONDERFUL NOTE AND CHOCOLATE.

THANK YOU ALSO TO NANA AND GRAMPS FOR THE GIANT BOX OF CHOCOLATE. You guys are great!!!! I am stocked up for the next year...or week haha :)