in cool happenings of the day. today we went to la romana to visit the clinic that a group of doctors from Columbia University have been working with. The clinic is funded out of USAID and the Clinton Foundation among others. We brought a patient from Boca Chica with us because we'd been told that they would run CD4 tests for us for free. Arriving at the clinic I found the doctor that I'd been recommended to. I went and spoke with her and she was very nice. She has asked for a copy of my resume and said that possibly I will be able to shadow there. I hope that works out. She also got our patient the tests he needed, and she also gave us tubes to get tests for the patients in Samana. That means free tests for them and instead of dragging them all the way up to Samana all we have to do is draw their blood up there and bring it down....which is pretty cool. So today was a cool day.

yesterday was a good day. i got my life sort of back in order for the first time in like six weeks. being back at "home" and having time to clean my stuff, etc. we once again have a water problem. it turns out that a couple days ago someone put a hole in the main pvc pipe that runs water to our house.....meaning that if we turn out water on at all we lose a lot of it. so yesterday by the afternoon i'd used up all the water we had in our spare tank, and right now there's someone here fixing it, so hopefully i can get a shower soon. also yesterday afternoon the little boys from the gomera (tire repair shack) started venturing up my stairs and right up to the door of my apartment. i started talking to them some. they were three little boys, shirtless, with pants that were too big that sagged to show their underwearless bottoms. they're aged 5, 7, and 10. the 10 year old they tell me can read. this was okay until i decided to go inside and they continued to stare in at me through the door. that got a little old, so i went deeper into my apartment hoping they'd go away. they then for like fifteen minutes started yelling "bonita" and "cosita" into my apartment trying to get my attention. they eventually left to come back a while later yelling to tell me that there was a man peeing at the foot of my stairs and around the corner. it was a bit awkward when he walked out from around the corner with them sitting there telling me about him. eventually hector came by and took me out to sit on the corner outside the colmado with him, his uncle, and his friends. this was a different experience just chilling with the guys. he kept asking if i was okay to which i said "yeah, this is like at home. i have a lot of male friends up there." i felt like i was hanging out with the engineers again. i also went with him to the complejo which is like a sports area and met some of his other friends and just sort of saw stuff. i figured out taht handball is played on what looks like a basketball court but with hockey like nets instead of hoops. all in all one of those days where you don't really do much but you feel like you learn a little bit more about life in these parts.

sorry i've sort of gotten out of the habit of updating this. this past week i had my parents in town. after this week the dominicans and i have decided that we need to start bringing people to new places when they visit because we are sick of repeatedly going to the same places. i went with my parents to altos de chavon, around san pedro, and up to samana. we stayed in a cool little hotel run by a group of italians taht give the profits back into the community. they're also super into ecotourism and such.

in exciting work news from this week. i keep getting good news from the cancer patient. appearently she's feeling much better. i also spoke with a dominican born american doc who's a cancer specialist. he knows her doc, and is going to talk to her to make sure we're getting her the best care we can. so that was cool to make that connection with him this week. i've also in the past week spoken with a guy from a human rights organization out of costa rica (www.aguabuena.org) who lived and worked with HIV/AIDS stuff here in the DR. he's hooked me up with a list of hiv/aids treatment centers around the country. i was able to make a map with the info he gave me (i think i've included a working picture here), and i've found there's nothing happening in either san pedro or in the samana peninsula both are places where we're working. he also gave me some good contacts for people doing advocacy work here. i'm also hoping this week to get to la romana to speak with some docs from columbia university who are running a treatment program there. then at the end of the week i have another group of friends coming to visit. then a week of preparation and then we spend a full week in samana. i will be completing a community health survey there which i'm very excited about.

it was good today to get back into the swing of living in san pedro. i ran errands with milagros this morning. i got a tour of the university here, and i found it is in ways similar to UC although it is much much smaller. i also ran into a group of american girls about my age on a guagua who are doing an internship with a baptist church. that was interesting. i then spent the afternoon catching up on work and talking to my boss. i was able to convince milagros that i would be alright alone here tonight while she went to boca chica. so i am currently spending my second night ever alone in this place. it's been really good to get caught up on work stuff and on contacting some people. i've also gotten some good reading done. that's all for now.

i am alive and well. it's been a busy week getting back to the DR. i came back this week with my brother and jenny and matt. who have since been renamed by hector: mike is ricky martin and jack (from titanic), jenny is j-lo, matt is chayanne (some singer...google him), and i am madonna. where these names came from we have no clue. i enjoyed the week and the others seemed to as well. milagros, hector, and i tried to show them all the best places that we could.

our journey became at six am last sunday morning driving twelve hours to new york. we did get a stop in at chocolate world along the way where mike managed to lead us on an adventure around the parking lot. we waited about five hours at the airport and then took a three hour flight arriving in santiago around 3:30 the next morning. we then made it to san pedro in an astounding two hours. we slept a little and then hector came over. he, milagros and i went to the store while the others slept. it felt good to be back. although, there's a lot to sort through in myhead with this going and coming stuff. that afternoon we went to our "second home" verizon to meet up with the verizon guy neftali. my friends got to meet him then we went to see malecon and then we ended up going to casa de campo and altos de chabon. very fancy places where people like j-lo have houses. we had some problems getting in and joked about telling the guards that i was shakira's daughter. somehow neftali got us in....something about us being american reps from verizon. the next day we went into santo domingo to look at the sites there. and then had neftali over for dinner. wednesday morning we went early to samana. we went to the beach where we got stuck under a cavish type thing where it rained for a while. it was cool for me to see hector joking and playing with mike and matt (boys his own age...well sorta). the next day we went to the waterfall.

yesterday was an adventure. we left in the morning to go to an island, but not far into our journey the axle on our rental car snapped going over a speed bump. luckily it was going over a speed bump, so we were going slowly. also, it was still in rincon where we have friends. we took the axle to some guys down the road for them to weld it back together.....so our broken axle ended up costing us a total of three dollars. we then decided it was best not to go to the island, so we ended up driving to santiago. we ended up finding a hotel attached to a casino which was entertaining. it was the diamond casino with a big revolving diamond on the sign. my friends left early this morning, and now i'm back in san pedro putting my things back in order, getting ready for spanish class, getting ready for some work, and my parents.

for anyone that is interested in knowing about wenscela the cancer patient she is doing much better, and says she doesn't know how to thank everyone enough.

that's the news in these parts. oh, that and we got a 10,000 grant!