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"