i spent a good deal of last week in washington DC attending what I found to be a federal grant writing workshop. there were people from nonprofits interested in working with AIDS from around the world there. so the people were interesting. it was also a good introduction into how the federal government gives out money and functions (well a small part of the federal government). overall a pretty cool experience. i then decided that chicago was going to be too much, so i am staying here in canton for about a week doing some work from home and then venturing on to cincinnati for a week before returning to the DR.

somewhat hesitent to write this seeing as i'm tired, and sometimes i talk to much when i'm tired i'd like to share some of my weekend.

i've been at the christian community health fellowship conference. i've been able to meet and talk with lots of interesting people: an ex-world health organization sociologist, missionary doc in ecuador about how the oil companies affect his community, a cool activist doc, etc. i've also been to some interesting sessions: david hilifiker talking about the histories of urban issues, a discussion about legal and illegal immigration, a history of the emerging church and new monasticism movements, and a talk from sojourner's call to renewal on how to involve people in political issues. this weekend has been an interesting crossing of faith, politics, poverty, and healthcare. overall, makes you think.

at this point i'm tired and kind of socialized out. i'm really feeling like a stereotypical engineer...ready to just disappear into a book in private somewhere. man, i'm a nerd. so i think that might be my afternoon. tomorrow morning i speak at a baptist church composed of a slightly older audience about my time in the DR. interesting.

week 1: philadelphia

so i'm jumping around the next month. i had a very sad goodbye at the airport with milagros and hector. i found my head spinning as the plane flew back to the states. the man sitting next to me on the plane asked if i was going home, and i sort of had to pause for a moment before responding "yes". for me home is such a weird concept. i know my parents hate the thought of home being any place but canton ohio (it's still it's own sort of home), but because i've been on the move for so long i've found that home easily becomes the place where i come back to the most often for any set period of time longer than a few weeks. i found myself this past week talking with someone and saying "when i go home...." in reference to the DR. i found myself laying in bed the second night i was home wishing that i was back in the DR. don't get me wrong, i'm LOVING seeing everyone. it makes me really happy...but it's sort of a weird i miss the DR but man do i love seeing my friends and family here. especially this next month with me jumping around so much i think the DR will keep home status until august. i've actually talked with milagros/hector a decent amount since being back. i've been in some form of contact with them almost every day. i got a phone call from milagros the other night to say that all of the water had again disappeared in one day.

my time in the states has been interesting. my first day back i had a series of meeting at school which all went very well. i then had a retreat with UCC which was such a blessing. a lot of the topics being discussed were topics that i've been sorting through myself recently, so it was great to be able to come back and discuss the topics with friends and people i felt comfortable with. also, the coolest thing of all was that on sunday i spoke with the church about a woman that i know in the DR who has cancer and has been struggling financially to complete chemo. by the end of the day i had about $2700 for the woman and her treatment. such a cool thing to see.

i spent the beginning part of this week staying with my boss' pastor in philadelphia. i visited esperanza health clinic here in philly. it was crazy to find such a large spanish speaking patient population. i was excited to find that i can understand other spanish speakers better than i can understand dominicans....so in the morning when i was less tired i had a pretty good idea of what was going on most of the time. my second day at esperanza i went out with an outreach person to see the neighborhoods they go looking for patients in. i felt like iw as back in the dr with reggaeton pumping and spanish signs everywhere. the neighborhoods were different than any i'd seen before....stolen cars which had been set on fire, these garage things that people sell stuff out of. the weird thing was that i found that in philly they go looking for patients to treat....in the DR we've got the patients...we just don't have any way of treating them. weird how that works.

i arrived at eastern university this morning, and i'm here through the weekend for the christian community health fellowship conference. well, that's all i've got right now. hope all is well with everyone.

something i remembered. my last trip to samana i bought pastries for two girls in a breadshop who were with their mom who said she had no money to feed them. i then watched the girls devour the pastries. i've never seen two kids look like they had been so hungry while they ate. these two girls tonight ate in front of me. they didn't appear as hungry....they didn't scarf the bread down. but it's a weird thing watching little kids eat food when they need it.

as i sat right outside my front door on my steps reading two little girls started to cut through the lot in front of the building. they saw me and smiled and then changed their path jumped the fence and walked up the steps and sat next to me. i'd never seen them before. the older of the two started talking to me. she asked me questions about myself and milagros. she asked questions about the united states. she asked me to sing in english. she asked me if it was cold there. she then started talking about how she was hungry. how she lived with her younger sister and her mom. she started talking about women taking money from men. she was talking fast, and i couldn't understand what she was talking about; however, i think it was prositution. she was talking about how money here is hard to come by. i was pretty sure she wanted something from me. i ended up giving her and her sister bread. we then talked about school....she told me she couldn't go because she needed notebooks that she didn't have and that they were expensive. again i got the feeling that she was hinting at something. i tried to figure out what i should do. my money was in my bedroom further into my apartment....if i did anything, i'd want to go with her to the pharmacy a few doors down and buy the notebooks. but for some reason i felt like i shouldn't leave an 11 year old and a 5 year old in the doorway of my apartment with my computer and camera sitting right there. and i didn't like taht i didn't trust these girls. they eventually decided to go....i never bought them the notebooks they said they needed. who knows if they were lying.....

i feel like maybe i should have. what is even worse is that there are 11 year old and 5 year old children who randomly talk to strangers in hopes of food. after they left i wished i would have given them more. i saved enough for myself for dinner.....i could have given it to them and gotten more when they left. i could have given them a little bit of ham. hrm. i guess there's nothing i can do now....except say a prayer for them. pray taht tonight they are safe. i wonder why they are wandering around alone at night. i pray that they don't resort to things they feel they need to resort to in order to procure food or money....things that will harm their bodies and minds. just a sobering moment in this last night. tomorrow to the land of plenty.

i hate those days where everything goes smoothly until one phone call.

milagros got a call today saying that a pastor in samana died in a car accident today. i'd met him and his family once before. his son was one of my favorite kids the night we had a picnic on the beach. cute kid that followed me around the whole night, adrian. if you look at the samana pictures he's the kid running around in his underwear. so a young guy died today leaving a wife and three kids. and people who loved him. he helped milagros a lot at the clinic where she worked. it's a hard thing for her. she leaves tomorrow morning for samana...so i might be spending my first time "alone" here tomorrow night. alone is in quotes because with the number of people around here who know me, etc....i'm never really alone. but anyways, it's a sad day here. say a prayer for adrian and his family.

rachel

bah! agua!

turns out some kids or someone broke one of the pipes that brings us water....so once again we had to buy more water and get hector to help us fix the pipe. frustrating. the next few days are going to be spent preparing for the end of my first trip here and my return to the states for a while.

let's see....this week we went to samana. milagros, hector, and i. we started out tuesday night preparing things for the week, and it seemed as though nothing was going right. i took the guagua by myself for the first time back home from downtown. milagros was spending her day in santo domingo helping a cancer patient. tuesday night nothing seemed to be going right. i discovered a weird rash on my body earlier that day that had started to blister. so i tracked down the infectious disease docs that i know here from cincinnati, and they took me to their house to look at it. unsure of what it was completely they prescribed me a medicine for shingles (just in case type thing) and the husband and i went searching for an open pharmacy that would have the needed medicine. we eventually found one after try three. i then returned home. we were trying to print skits for the youth in samana, but we kept having problems at the computer center. eventually we gave up....and after much frustration i cooked dinner around 10pm. we left the next morning around 5:30 for samana. we went by guagua this time....i think there was a rooster on every bus that we rode on. when we arrived in samana we spent more time trying to print the skit only to find that once we had arrived to the village we work in rincon...i had screwed up and we had the skit printed, but we only had one copy and we needed five. we borrowed a motorcycle from someone to send hector into a nearby town to find a copier, but that mission was unsuccessful. we ended up copying the five page skit by hand. the guagua from the city of samana to the town of rincon is a truck that sits three in the front...four in the back and then other people in the truck bed. along with things. i think the guagua stopped every ten minutes. everyone knew each other...and we stopped so people could run errands along the way. we eventually arrived.

we eventually got around to practicing that night. it was really entertaining to watch. hector, milagros, and three of the young people from rincon were going to be in the skit. milagros was also going to present some information about hiv/aids. after the skit we got some kids to track down the community doctor to find guaze from the clinic to put over what had been the blisters. earlier that day i had bought some really cool antibiotic/anti-inflammatory stuff. so...an update...the rash has not gotten worse and the blisters are healing. according to milagros and someone from the guagua we think that i was bit by something in the ocean...like little swimmer things. we then went for dinner at the house of a guy that we'd run into on the guagua. dinner is so weird. a lot of times they'll serve you, but the family won't eat with you. at the house i met a girl from switzerland. i was confused when she started talking to me because i thought she was a dominican practicing her english....so when she told me she didn't speak spanish i was shocked. everyone speaks spanish in the country. we talked for a while and i found taht she was a dominican adopted by a swiss family, and that she had come back to study spanish and her culture. it was relaly weird to get a different perspective on all of this. and from a european as well.

the next morning we went to the school to present the skit and information to the students. we saw two groups of students...around 200 students in total. i think things went well. it was really cool to see the students being able to help teach each other. the school also seemed much different....much more casual and much shorter. we spent that afternoon cooking weird foods. most of which contained coconut. we went further into the country where we all gathered in a kitchen room of sorts. with open fire as stoves. we used burning coconut shells and palm tree leaves in the cooking process. it was all very interesting and different. i kept looking around very confusedly and everyone laughed at me some. that and when they discovered that the one thing i'm afraid of (not spiders, not snakes) is birds. and their were chickens walking all around. they kept pecking at my feet.....i didn't enjoy it. when this was discovered they laughed some and some chickens were thrown at me.....literally. watching this family in the country go about daily living stuff was interesting.

the next morning milagros and i went to the local hospital in samana. we went to see about 20 possible patients, but it turned out that our message was never delivered. we ended up seeing one patient and talking with a doctora there. the hospital was interesting as well. there were some rooms with very sick looking people in them. also, there were long benchs with people waiting. the hospital pharmacy was a room with a bunch of boxes of medicine stacked somewhat haphazardly. all was incredibly interesting. hector had become sick with a fever and cough, so we bought him some medicine (milagros has injections for lowering fever and pain....we joked that i needed to learn on someone, and hector would be the perfect person). we spent the rest of the afternoon just sort of relaxing. i helped milagros with her english for a while. we left samana this morning around 5:30. we returned here where i had my spanish class. i then took the guagua by myself to the salon....i was able to yell "a la farmacia" with a horrible accent...but good enough that the driver could understand and stopped at the pharmacy to let me out. oh, also today i ran to the local colmados to get food. appearently when i say "platano" at the colmados i'm very hard to understand. milagros listened to me and couldn't figure out why people couldn't understand me. i've decided i really like the family that runs the new colmado on my corner. they are very friendly. i think i'm going to start shopping there more. it feels much more communitylike. we were supposed to go to the disco tonight...milagros, hector, and i...but hector was sick again, so milagros and i ended up going downtown to eat pasteles (a really weird dominican food) and talk with a friend of hers for a while. we just returned.

there are new pictures posted under the second photo link in an album called "samana education trip"