week 4: in over my head (july 6-13)

patience: well my first full week of working full time in the special needs house has taught me that i am certainly going to need patience this year. we have another volunteer here from haiti for the summer who is going to help me out (wonderful!) so we worked out a plan where she takes care of four of the kids, i take care of four of the kids and one is participating in the summer program that the rest of the kids are participating in. i work with the kids for an hour each in the morning, then take a lunch break, then take one of my girls to the summer program in the afternoon (she can participate as long as i'm there to help her). my kids are all very different. rosali is 8 and is very sweet and happy and laughs all the time, but she has about a two second attention span, so doing any activity with her is very interesting. genesis is 7 is very quiet and tiny (she must have been very malnourished). she loves to be held, but that's about it... you can't do many activities with her. paolo is 14 and she is my biggest emotional struggle right now. she is the most capable out of any of the special needs kids, but she only does what she wants to do and she's very difficult to deal with. kaki is my 8 year old boy and he is my biggest physical struggle. he is very aggressive, not in a malicious way, but just because he doesn't have much control over his body. he's always running around and breaking things and he bites and he doesn't talk. it's very challenging. my mornings have been, needless to say, interesting. i'm still working on getting to know them so i can find more effective ways to work with them... but it all takes time... and lots of patience. and then on wednesday, i had a surprise meeting with a bunch of the people from the house, including sister fanny (the spiritual director of the house). i'm not sure if i was supposed to know about this meeting... but i didn't... so i was a little caught off guard. like i said, my spanish isn't that great, so i usually like to write down everything i'm going to say before i have to say it... but obviously didn't have time for that this time. anyway, i was a little stressed out during this meeting, but i tried to pay attention and get the main points of the conversation... and add a few comments... so hopefully i did ok. welcome to my life of never knowing what the heck is going on!!

and a little more patience: adjusting to the different lifestyle here has also required patience. the main thing is everyone's sense of time here. now for those of you who know my family, you know we typically operate on "popa time", which translates to late. it can vary from 5 minutes to several hours, depending on the day or activity. however, i have discovered here something that may be worse than popa time... and it is dominican time. people here just have a very different attitude about time and life. nothing moves too quickly (except for the crazy cars and buses)... but seriously, i have just had to learn that things get done when they get done. when you want to go to the store, you have to expect that it might be a three hour adventure. when you want to take a gua-gua somewhere, you have to know that when you get to the gua-gua station there are no schedules, so your gua-gua could leave two minutes after you get there, or you could wait 30 minutes. when you are standing in line any where, it's probably gonna be a while. and there really isn't any such thing as "fast food". it's been weird to get used to, especially coming from our efficiency obsessed culture, but sometimes (when i remind myself to be patient) it can actually be kind of nice. i've noticed that i have a lot more time to think here... more time to take in my surroundings, and when i stop being stressed about how it's taking so long, i actually find that it can be quite relaxing.

a break through: despite the testing of my patience, i always seem to have those couple moments each day that remind me that i should be here... this week it happened on thursday night. the way meals work around here is this... there is a kitchen who cooks for all the houses. before meals, kids go down to the kitchen and pick up food for the houses, then they bring it back and eat at their houses. volunteers are assigned to a house and they join them for lunch and dinner everyday. this has been really amazing because i got to be in salomon's house (my god-child), so i've had time to get to know him and he has thirteen other 11-13 year old boys in the house and they are so much fun! now, i've learned this week that there are a lot of discipline problems here... which i assume is to be expected from a bunch of kids that grew up in families with no parents, or parents that couldn't take care of them. and my house in particular has some tough boys... and its hard for me cuz i don't always know exactly what is going on. but, anyway some of the volunteers have been reading to their kids before dinner and i have tried to avoid that because i'm not very confident in my spanish reading, plus i didn't know how middle school aged boys would respond to me reading a bed-time story to them! but anyway, on thursday night after dinner one of the boys, ernito (one of the toughest boys in the house) asked me if i would read to them. i got really nervous and tried to think how i could come up with an excuse in spanish... but i didn't and told him to pick a short and easy one. then we went into the bedroom and i tried to explain to them in my broken spanish that i am not very good at spanish and if i say words wrong i want them to help me. i was given the response "no importa" and then all gathered around me on the bed to see this five page story about some random cartoon character. it was really cute, these tough little boys all came around me like little 5 year olds and helped me get through the book. it was adorable. afterwards we had a conversation about arizona because they are very interested in where i come from and then they taught me all the english words they know... they were so proud! then the little boy brought me this like 75 page chapter book and asked me to read "only until page 28"... and i was like i think i've accomplished enough for one night, so we made an agreement that on monday night we would pull out the chapter book and i would read one page and then each of them would read one page... we'll see how it goes. but i just left their house feeling really good that night... like i'm actually making some progress with my spanish and just that as tough as these kids can try to act sometimes, they're still all just little kids at heart that just want someone to love them.

the two sides of the dr: sunday was my birthday and it was my goal to see the "postcard picture beach"... not that the one we went to the other week wasn't nice, but it wasn't what you see on the postcards. so on saturday, two of the other volunteers and i headed to punta cana (on the east coast), which is supposed to have some of the prettiest beaches on the whole island. we decided to splurge a little and stay in an all-inclusive hotel, so we could stock up on food on our day off! it was really great to relax, eat good food and see the beautiful beach (we even got up early to watch the sunrise on sunday morning). however, something about it was weird. it was almost as if we were in a completely different country. everything i've seen so far here is terribly poverty stricken (i haven't talked much about the poverty here yet, but i will soon), but here at this resort, you would have no idea how most of the people here live. sometimes it's hard because i tend to see things like that and get bitter about it and just start to think that it's not fair... and maybe it's not. but i've been reading this book called "chasing daylight" and it's all about taking advantage and seizing each moment... not worrying too much about the past or the future, but being in the present. not that you ignore the fact that there are problems in the world, but that you realize that you can only control what you do in this moment. so if anything, being at this hotel (after 4 weeks in the rest of the country) it just made me realize that there are so many blessings in my life everyday that i take for granted (i.e. hot water, air conditioning, food that isn't rice and beans, fountain soda, etc) and i was reminded this weekend (when i had them all again) that not everyone has these things and i live a very blessed life.

well i can't believe it but i've been here a month! i was telling my family that sometimes it seems like time flies by and other times it's like, "oh my gosh i can't believe i'm going to be here for 11 more months"!! i'm sure there will continue to be ups and downs, but i keep reminding myself to take advantage of all my time here.

"there may well be many moments waiting behind this one, and though the most significant moments of your life may still be moments away, the moment you're in right now waits to be seized." - erwin raphael mcmanus (from "chasing daylight")