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.