My last months of Peace Corps passed by quickly, as I finished training other volunteers, their masons and health promoters on Ecological bathroom construction and behavioral change with USAID funding. I feel confident saying that masons have really loved having a construction manual to take home with them after training to refer to as they begin projects in their communities. After saying my goodbyes to Villa Clara, Los Miches (my two sites), friends and Peace Corps staff in the capital, and purchasing some more beautiful larimar, I arrived at the airport 2 hours late. I'd never missed a flight before, and I suppose it only meant that after 33 months of living in the Dominican Republic I was officially on "island time". It's definitely not the first thing that I wanted to have to spend money on in my state of unemployment. I guess thank you Peace Corps for the readjustment allowance, but you should have reminded me that I needed to show up to the airport on time! Kidding..sort of.
I arrived in Chicago to be greeted by my roommate from college, Mel, who is a P.E. teacher and volleyball coach for the Chicago Public School district. I took a run along Michigan Avenue that next morning when I woke up, and things did not feel too much different. It felt like the Santo Domingo Malecon and looked a lot like it too. It was not until I entered Target and was dumbfounded by the card swiper thing at the cash register that I realized there was a thing or two I would need to brush up on besides my English. It had been awhile since I'd swiped one myself and was a little caught off guard. This is when Mel decided to nickname me FOB, "Fresh Off the Boat". That nickname would stick for the entire weekend.
Mel had to coach a game later that afternoon, so later that day we headed over to Kenwood High School to load the team onto a school bus and head to another high school. First day back in America and I get to ride a school bus through Chicago! I was absolutely thrilled. I felt like a little kid in a candy store. The boys on the bus are all chit chatting about their girlfriends and where they want to go to college and how they are going to pay for school. We arrive at the other school where our competitors greet us. I head into the bathroom, choose one of the eight bathroom stalls and then wash my hands with the warm water. I am probably thinking to myself, "Dios Santo, agua caliente, inodoros, yes I am at a school in America."
I am not quite having a "reverse culture shock" moment yet. I walk out of the bathroom and am asked by a few boys from the opposing team, "HEY..is our school nicer than yours?? Is it bigger??" I look at them and do not really even know where to begin. So I don't. How can you begin to explain that they have eight stalls in their bathroom and somewhere to wash their hands after they use it when there are schools that do not have a bathroom, let alone an indoor bathroom with eight stalls? How would I even be in the place to decide whose school was bigger or better. They both had swimming pools for crying out loud! I responded "Oh, I am just a friend of the coach and I honestly really do not know whose school is bigger or better."
This is not the only situation that I have found myself in where I have no words to describe the different mentality that I have gained by living in a developing country for the last 2 1/2 years. It happens everyday. I have only had a few break downs since coming home and every day my normalcy is returning more. Things that made me sad the first week make me smile now because I do have a whole other world to compare ours to. Sometimes it all feels like it was a dream and I am saddened in a way that slowly America is growing on me, although I am happy to be home.
2.24.2012
.Home sweet home.
At the beginning of February, many returned Peace Corps volunteers from 1962 forward came down to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps DR . Above is a video I made to present for part of the Appropriate Technology sector presentation at the celebration at the beginning of February. It gives a good idea of what the construction of the project entails.
We had a little fiesta at the end of the week and Gaby, the volunteer in Las Galeras, surprised her masons with cake and certificates. They went home and cleaned up after we had finished our 2nd latrine and came back looking sharp. Muy Dominicano.
Next stop, Isla Saona, in a small touristy Dominican village Mano Juan. An environment volunteer, Colleen, used a mixture of community fundraisers (selling Empanadas and movie nights) and a grant funded by Water Charity to plan for the construction of 2 ecological bathrooms at the school. Below are the materials being loaded up in Bayahibe.
After traveling to Isla Saona from the capital with a 20 pound toilet bowl fiber glass mold and arriving soaking wet, a few destroyed items (my phone!!) that were completely swimming with water, we were exhausted. Some community members showed up soon after our arrival and helped to carry the materials to the school. Students whom had volunteered to carry materials ran hiding so that they could get out of the work they had promised. That was our first red flag to stopping the construction this past week. The community showed little to no support in the construction of the bathrooms. Before my arrival, Colleen had made a schedule of volunteers for the week. After no one showing up to work on the first day of the project, the teacher tried to pay a Haitian to help us with the construction. He ended up bringing us sand that looked like dirt and then he said he would not bring any more because the teacher had only paid him for what he had done. We told the community that they had to send us a list of the volunteers (who really would show up) for the week so that we would be ensured that we would not have to stop mid-construction. This could be partially because it is for a school and not for an individual, but in all reality--why would parents not want a bathroom for their kids at the school? Why would they not fight for changing the sanitation and habits of the youth in the community? Beats me. I was pretty bummed that we couldn't build, but I know we made the right decision to not dump a bunch of resources on a community that just wasn't ready. If they were not willing to work, how can we be sure that they will remove compost from the toilets in a few years and keep the bathrooms clean?(Below: picture of the school).
(side note: I found it very weird that tourists go through here in their bikinis and look through the windows..I would find that a bit distracting if I were trying to learn...)
Although trying to be a volunteer on this isla "atrasada" is somewhat impossible, it is still paradise. I felt grateful to be able to make it out there before I close my service in April.
1.25.2012
and the journey continues.
These last few months have just flown by, partly because I spent 17 days in America, partly because my work is finally starting to pick up.
Let me start with my trip to America. It was so nice to be back to Iowa to visit my family and friends over the holidays. It'd been 3 years since I'd been home during the winter months and I was more than slightly disappointed by the good weather. I had hoped for some serious snow/ice storms so that I could cozy up in my basement with a book or movie by the fire. Well, no storms meant that the roads were not bad and that made it so that I was able to drive and be extremely busy trying to see as many people as possible in my week in Iowa. I love being home, I love all of you friends and family and seeing you but being home just doesn't feel like vacation to me because to me vacation should be relaxing.
So, knowing the person that I am at home (constantly on the go making plans with back to back and maybe even breaking plans with people because I make too many plans), I knew I needed to make plans for a real vacation which is why I ended up in Denver/Copper Mt. with a few friends from college for the last part of my vacation. Good choice on my part because it really did feel like a vacation, and I wouldn't have even seen snow on my trip if I wouldn't have made these plans. Even if it was man-made snow because there hadn't been any snow, it felt real. Part of my reason for choosing Denver as my vacation spot is because I have always had it in the back of my mind that I would end up there someday.
So that leads me to my current situation. I spoke with a fellow volunteer friend that is back in the States now. Turns out she has an excel sheet with 71+ jobs that she has applied for in the last several months of being home. Only a few interviews and nothing. The good thing is that I know how to live on bare minimum if needed. I know how to not buy things when I don't need them. But....that doesn't mean I don't want a job that I can get some get some new shoes..a ski pass in Denver..and real vacations and this and that and yeah that's my mind telling me it's time to find a real job. Because I deserve those things, I'm a hard worker and 27 months (well I guess 30 something months now) not making enough to even get what I need (sorry Peace Corps..but I can hardly afford to eat what I need and neither can my friends as we have both lost some poundage and LUCKILY you are giving one of my roommates protein powder so we can survive at the end of the month when things are tight). I have friends here that literally things are so tight at the end of the month that they eat oatmeal everyday until pay day 3 meals a day for the last 4-5 days of the month. I shouldn't have to rely on a friends protein powder with a splash of carnation milk to feed myself. Nor should volunteers have to survive on oatmeal for so many days.. And I don't want to live like that anymore. I want a steak and potatoes with a side of brocolli and cauliflower with cheese drizzles over it or something and some birthday cake or something here and there to make me feel human dude. Like a three course meal. I am not saying I need that everyday.. but it'd be nice to feel like I could splurge a little to widen my food options.
So..the job search has begun. I am looking at some teaching fellows in Denver where you can get your teaching certification while teaching elementary Spanish in an under-served community. My heart kind of flutters and it is the first application since my applying to Peace Corps that I actually feel excited about. So I think to myself, am I going to have to feel this way about 71 jobs like my friend or is there someway that I can continue harassing people where I am applying and convince them that yes, I am awesome and will blow you away once you give me the chance to. and the kids will love me. Actually, if I don't get this job or a job like it I think I'd be a good photographer for kids. I always can make them smile for some reason for pictures. That's a skill for my resume, right?
Work here..well, my to-do list is longer than it ever has been. I am excited about my work, but would be more excited if the Appropriate Technology sector wasn't being done away with. My director of AT, Tim, is being let go because of budget cuts to Peace Corps. It makes me sad because I've never seen someone so passionate about their work, so passionate that it has also made me passionate about bathrooms, composting ones at least. So passionate that he took his last week of vacation time that he hadn't use to spend it at the office working. Working because he loves it and working because he knows we need him and he wants to make sure we get everything we need from him before he leaves.
My USAID grant (US$5,200) is finally here. I will be planning 3 training conferences on composting latrines in the Samana peninsula. I already went out to Las Galeras and started planning for our first training conference. My friend Gaby lives out there and has funding to do 20 composting latrines. I am helping her smooth out her budget and figure out where to order her materials to make sure that she will have enough funding for at least her planned project. Her budget is looking great, and it looks like she may have funding to do even more than originally projected.
Budgets don't always work that way I have found out over the last few weeks. My other friend is doing a composting latrine project in Monte Cristi and when I had originally planned for her budget, it was before all of the changes that occurred in our design, and her budget ended up being slightly off. Also prices of materials have gone up even more because her grants were applied for much longer ago than my friend Gaby on the peninsula. She is hoping to score some materials for her project from some politicians, city hall or some local NGO's to balance those miscalculations. It wasn't too terribly off and if she gets a few bags of cement and sand donated the project will be completed. It isn't such a terrible thing after all and it gives opportunity for a little local funding to happen. Afterall, if local people have to step it up to make this happen, maybe after my friend is gone the community could do another small project with the help of politicians/NGO's/ect. Thankfully there are always solutions when things don't go as planned, which is what Peace Corps is all about is learning how to work around problems and find the best solutions to get things done in a most of the time disorganized, running around with my head cut off kind of environment.
Besides helping other volunteers get things off the ground and planning the training conferences, I am still working on perfecting the construction manual and have taken quite a bit of video footage for a video project. I plan to have a mini-video for the AT sector presentation at our 50th anniversary presentation that is coming up in a few weeks. I want to show how this project has grown and developed over the last 3 years. Many Returned Peace Corps Volunteers from the States are coming down to celebrate the 50th and want to hear about each sector.
That is all. =)Ohh..and I may be getting a few more visitors in March--my dearest friend Erin and her boyfriend Gabe are trying to plan a visit. I hope it happens.
Cuidanse mucho!
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