closura: well this week was the end of summer program for the kids. the summer volunteers will be heading home tomorrow and the kids will have one free week until school starts. we had a really fun "closura" on friday. all the kids had been in different classes over the five weeks of summer program (dance, theater, teakwando, etc...) and many of them had been preparing things to present to every one else. so we had a whole day of presentations which was really fun for all the kids. they were all dressed up and got to show off everything they had learned. we also always try to keep my kids from san pascual involved so they feel a part of everything. so, we led off the morning with a little "skit" we put together. i dressed all the kids up like chefs (with aprons and hats) and then we created paper ingredients for all the things that you need to make cookies ("galletas"). so we had paola as the head chef and then all the other kids from the house would bring her over an ingredient and put it in the bowl. then we made this oven out of newsprint and the plan was to stick the bowl in the oven and then pull out real cookies, and it was supposed to be funny. so, it went pretty well but the kids weren't really getting the concept of putting the things in the bowl and they were just kind of scrunching them in their hands and ripping them. then one little girl found the real cookies behind our fake oven so she started eating them before we pulled them out... so it was really funny. the tias and i at least got a laugh out of it. stress is a luxury: so i've been thinking about the way people live here and it has been really weird for me because it is just so different from everything i am used to. the biggest thing is the relaxed attitude people have here. it's like no one has any stress about anything or any sense of urgency about anything. i mean obviously this has it's positives and negatives, but from the perspective of someone who is trying to work in this culture and make some sort of progress, i have just been getting really frustrated. my roommate kelly is from boston and has been equally as frustrated and the other day she said that she just wished we could go visit an emergency room to see if anyone there has any sense of urgency! but we started talking and kind of came to the conclusion that stress is almost a luxurgy if you really think about it. at home we are able to get stressed about things because all our basic necessities are taken care of. but here you can't get stressed about not being able to check your email five times a day because there isn't even electricty most of the time. i guess i should know this from learning about maslow and his heirarchy of needs in all my psychology classes, but it makes sense. when you don't have food or a home, it's hard to get worried about much else. (except cell phones... oh my gosh i didn't think i'd ever see people more obsessed with cell phones than americans, but dominicans might win... it seems like no matter how poor anyone here is they all find a way to have a cell phone!) so, like i said it has it's positives and negatives. sometimes it just drives me absolutely insane how slowly people move here and how nonchalent they are about everything. on the other hand it's kinda nice sometimes just not getting worked up about things that don't really matter. and really, most of the times here there is just no sense in stressing about things because there is really nothing you can do about it. for example, we haven't had internet in a good 3 weeks... and it doesn't look like there's any end in sight. plus, for some reason last week my the delete and spacebar (two pretty important keys) stopped working on my computer leaving it pretty much useless (i've been typing my blogs on a friend's in hope that one day i'll get to post them). so after about a week of looking for solutions, i found out that there is a radio shack in the capital that is an authorized mac dealer. i guess they take the things and ship them somewhere to be fixed, but they are going to honor my warranty, so that is exciting. so i handed it over to them and now my computer is hanging out somewhere in the dr and i really don't know if i'll ever see it again. plus, i have 9 edge sessions that are supposed to be written in 5 days and i have no computer. so, i'm thinking if i was at home, i would be stressed. but i think the dominican way is starting to affect me because for some reason i'm not. like i could be, i feel like i have every reason to be, but there is really no sense in stressing, because there is absolutely nothing i can do! "dominican megan" is just going to wait and hope everything eventually works out...
a new concept of time: so i talked before about how we just finished up our five week summer program. after the first week we were sitting around and one of the volunteers said, "well, monday's over." and we're all like, "what?" and he's like, "well if you look at the five weeks of summer program like a work week, we just finished monday." we all thought it was pretty funny of looking at it and at the end of every week we've been saying, "we made it through tuesday... wednesday... etc." so i started to think about where i would be in my year here... and i did the math and figured that if i consider my year here a 7-day week, i would have finished monday this week. it's kind of weird to think about, especially on the really hard days when i can't wait to get back to family and friends and "reality"... but it also reminds me that it is actually going by really fast and i'm sure before i know it it's going to be "saturday" or "sunday" and i'm going to be wondering where the time went! "what a glorious day...
what a wonderful day...
today."
-dcb
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