the word of the week is confusion

new foods tried in the past few days: the innard of a chicken that i didn´t think you could eat, fresh pineapple, tamarind, tamarind juice, fresh fish served head and all, amazing icecream....and maybe others but i dón´t remember right now.

so the past few days have been an adventure. much more of an adventure than i´ve ever had. the day before yesterday i went to the dance school. i showed the teacher my dancing and he liked it and wants me to be on tv. i´m trying to figure out a way to talk him out of that. he also wants me to start working with children on saturday, but that´s when my boss arrives so i have to figure taht out. i´m unsure of how to tell people taht i want to dance but it´s not the reason i´m here. when dr. gadea (my boss) comes he can help me.....

that evening milagros and i went downtown and then to the edge of san pedro where there´s a beach. it was beautiful. the water and the sunset. there were young boys practicing baseball on the beach. there was music coming from restaurants. everything was great until we were leaving. at that point i saw an older american man sitting at a table with a bottle of wine and beer and two young dominican girls. at that point i knew what i was looking at and i got goosebumps. i turned to milagros and asked, malo? (bad) and she replied muy muy malo. the man was paying for those girls for sex. i knew i might see this and i wasn´t sure what to expect but this wasn´t it. the girls were about the same age and looked similar to the girls that i teach ballet to. seeing taht and making that comparison was hard.

somehow that day things became not so foreign here. everything loooked much more like home. i´m not sure how that happened, but i´m glad. i also began to enjoy everything a little bit more...milagros (the doctor i´m living with) told me that the next day we had to wake up at 5am to go to samena. i thought she said we were going to look for medicine for a patient. when we left the next morning at 530 it was quite a journey. i´m living on the southern coast and samena is on the northern coast. the trip took seven hours in total. at one point on the guagua (bus) i realized that we were not coming back that same night because this trip was so long. the inner part of the country is beautiful. parts look very much like ohio because sugar cane fields look very similar to corn fields. other parts were very different and very beautiful. after the bus we jumped from the dock quite literally onto a motor boat which took us to another boat which took us an hour across the water to rincon. there were more tourists here than i´ve seen yet. then we took a truck which put our stuff in the back and lots of other people in the bed of the truck up hills to samana. i still at this point was completely unsure of where we were going or why.

at one point everyone seemed to know milagros. they would all yell hola doctora. we pulled up to a little store and she told me to get out. i thought maybe we were just stopping but when we went into a house i realized we´d reached our final destination. the house had a tin roof. a kitchen, closet with a toilet, a living room, and a room divided into two with three beds. there were three girls at this house. milagros then told me that we wouldn´t see the patient until the night. i realized at that point that we were delivering medicine. we began visiting with families in the area. milagros had worked in this community for a year, so everyone knew her. it was very small. one street really. we then walked a group of us nine dominican kids, myself, milagros and a mother to the beach. the beach was gorgeous. i was told that it is one of the five most beautiful in the world. the water was colder than i expected. we played in the water for a while. ate fish. there was a small area where water had come in to make a pond away from the ocean. i played there with the children for a while and then some boys who had gone wandering returned with a coconut....they cut some opena nd gave me some. some kids also found some tamarind and gave me some. then ten of us got in a row boat in the still water. it was a lot of fun. there was one VERy long oar. the boy that was steering did a horrible job and we kept running into trees. the children kept yelling to puerto rico! after the beach i played with the youngest girl dandyli. she talked very fast, but i could understand her if i got her to slow down. we went searching for flowers to make a bouqet. in the process i saw a peacock for the first time outside of a zoo. it was beautiful and a strange site in the wild. milagros and i visited more people. we were fed two dinners by two different families. then i was shown a bed in the first house that we arrived at that i was supposed to sleep in. this morning we left around 6am. it took us five hours to return home. it would have been faster except one of our guaguas had a flat tire at one point, so we stopped to have it repaired.

the past couple of days have been very interesting. dr. gadea arrives tomorrow which i´m lookng forward to.

alright.....i´m slowly figuring the computers here out. also, i was smart today and i bought myself more time.

i apologize if i repeat things. i forget between my journal, this blog, etc where i´ve written what.

san pedro is an interesting area. i´ve found the electricity goes out randomly and often normally for an hour or so. i woke up this morning with no electricity. i think the no running water thing is permanentñ however, i´m looking forward to my boss getting here so i can be more certain of the things i´ve sort of figured out through weird language barriers. the doctor i live with, milagros, and i are a funny couple sitting at the kitchen table both of us with dictionaries in hand.

yesterday i went to the grocery store and found that much seemed familar. they ahve small tiendas here similar to those in guatemala but also stores similar to meijers at home. a boy that i met here has sort of assigned himself to be my translator. he´s studying english and seems to be in love with everything american. everytime i spoke english his face lit up and he leaned forward to try and understand what i was saying.

the funny part of yesterday was visiting a dance school run by a friend of the family that i know here. the guy wants me to come back today to show him what i do, and then he wants to put me on a tv program. can you imagine? i´m kind of hoping it doesn´t happen. i think he also wants me to teach some dance there. this could be very interesting. i guess we´ll see what happens today. we also have many things to do to get ready for my boss and the group of people that he is bringing on saturday.

last night as i was reading i heard drums and singing coming from outside with a caribbean beat i looked out our window and there was a building across the street with the doors open and people singing. the doctor i live with told me that it was a church, but she wasn´t sure of the music. i think that here that kind of music is not for christians. i´ve also been told that christians here don´t dance.

yesterday we went to downtown san pedro. there was a small park in the center. also, there were many stores. a very large and beautiful catholic church....a beautiful fire station and most interesting to me was the city hall. it was very different. there were several very small offices with people doing paperwork in them. also two very large rooms with a table at one side with people working on paperwork. hperhaps the oddest thing for me was that anyone could just walk in. it seemed much more casual.

those are some of my first impressions of san pedro. the more i learn the more i am able to figure out which impressions are wrong and which are correct. it will be nice to have someone here soon who speaks english to help me sort through everything here.

i´ve got four minutes left and this computer is slow....

i was picked up yesterday by a young female doctor that i´m living with. on the way to our apartment they drove me out onto the beach which was beautiful. my house is in a somewhat urbanish area. not tall buildings or clifton, etc, but lots of buildings and motorcycles. the mix of housing is interesting. there´s no running water here. many people have plastic tanks for water on their roofs. the doctor speaks and understands very little english and me very little spanish. we sit around talking with our dictionaries. this afternoon we´re headed to the university and tomorrow to meet a patient in a neighboring area.

there are so many different things to get used to. i find myself enjoying all of this but missing the ability to communicate clearly with someone. i´m running out of time.....more later

here safe

i cant write much because someone is waiting on me. i made it here safe. its very different but interesting. biggest changes= lots of sun, being hot and cold at the same time, no running water, no electricity during the night, waking up to roosters, a combination of tin roofs and the wealth of tourism, beautiful beaches, lots of motorcycles....
rachel