week 9: crazy cab rides and tropical storms (august 11-17)

adventures with rolando: so all that stuff i talked about last week how i wasn’t stressed kinda went away this week. i wasn’t feeling stressed per say, but just more frustrated and almost disillusioned by everything here. it’s just hard because sometimes my job is hard in the special needs home… and we are in the process of getting a new physical therapist for the kids… and i don’t always know exactly what i'm supposed to be doing. like there’s a lot to do, but i just sometimes don’t think the people here know exactly what is the goal for the special needs home, therefore i don’t know and plus it just takes so long to do anything here... and we still don’t have internet and i don’t have my computer so i haven’t been able to talk to anyone back home. but i did call my mom on wednesday for her birthday, which ended up making me homesick. so, basically i was just feeling a little down, but on thursday night i think God knew i needed a little boost… and i got it.
so…every day there is a bus that leaves the school at 4:00 with all the office workers and teachers who live in san pedro. so, we can get on it if we want to go to the grocery store or whatever, we just have to find our own way home. so three of us from the orphanage went into jumbo (the big grocery store) to get some food and check our email and the internet café. and kelly, who is teaching esl here needed to get a white board for her class. so, when it came time to leave there were three of us, groceries and a huge whiteboard. you always have to negotiate a price for rides here… the most popular form of transportation is moto-conchos (see week 1)… but i prefer taxis, especially when it is dark. so we bargained this taxi driver down to a good price under the condition that he was allowed to make two stops on the way home, to pick up some things for his wife. so we start driving and the three of us are sitting in the back with this huge whiteboard sitting across our laps, with only our eyes are coming out over the top of it. we pull over at the first corner store and he runs out and grabs something really quick. then he says we are going to get fried chicken for his wife for dinner. so he drives a little more, stops in the middle of the road, puts his hazards on, and proceeds to walk across the street to the fried chicken place. so we are just sitting here in the back of this cab, chilling in the middle of the road, cars racing all around us, and our driver is standing in the fried chicken line for 20 minutes (there is no such thing as fast food here). at this point i lost it, i just started laughing… i couldn’t help myself. i'm just like where i am and how on earth did i get here?! so he finally comes back… and he was really nice, very thankful that we let him stop… but then he started driving really fast… i think he was trying to make up for lost time… but he was driving like crazy and we almost hit all these cars, then he went over a bump and my head smashed into the side of the car… and i just started laughing even more. then we pulled up to an intersection and he is trying to ask me if everything is ok and in the midst of my uncontrollable laughing i'm trying to explain to him in spanish that my head hit the side of the door in his car… to which his response was “don’t hurt my car.” and then he turned on the little light on the roof of his car to make sure everything was ok… but this was no ordinary little light… he had changed it out for a florescent blue light and all of the sudden i felt like we were in a club… and at this point i completely lost it… i was laughing so hard i was crying… and then he just started laughing with all of us and i think we all laughed all the way back to the orphanage. so he dropped us off and gave us his card so we could call him again. so next time i'm having a bad week, i'm definitely going to remember to call “taxi rolando".

tropical storm fay: so i guess we had a tropical storm… i say that because none of us had any idea until after it was over and a volunteer had a text message from someone back home about it. don’t get me wrong we definitely experienced it. it was crazy! it rained so hard with some of the loudest thunder i've ever heard in my life! and the wind was crazy. i accidentally left my laundry hung up outside on the clothesline and i have video on my camera of it blowing around like crazy… luckily none of it blew away too far. and we don’t have real windows… we just have these metal blind-sort of things.. and they close but water can still get in… so we had water all over our kitchen and living room floor. and our power got knocked out for about 3 days, so that was fun. but there is no like national weather service here and we don’t have tv or internet and the people who do have phones barely get reception… so we really had no idea it was coming and didn’t even know it was a tropical storm until it was over. it’s kinda just all part of this dominican lifestyle i've been talking about… you just kinda experience things as they come and learn to go with the flow.

padre wasson: this saturday was the anniversary of the death of padre wasson… the priest who started nph 50-some years ago in mexico. it was cool we did a little program in the morning with everyone from the home. father wasson’s two main things were “family and sharing” (familia y compartir)… so they had all the kids give bags of food and gifts to the tias so they could share with their families. i thought it was pretty cool because they are teaching even these kids that have nothing the importance of sharing. then kelly and i organized some activities for the afternoon… we played soccer, basketball, had a big baseball game, wrote with chalk on the sidewalks with the little kids and made kites with the bigger kids (which is like one of their favorite things to do). then the bishop came for mass. overall it was a good day. it’s cool to think about how big nph is… and all the nine different homes all over latin america… and how it all started from one man caring for one little boy in mexico (see the story of padre wasson and how he started nph @ http://www.friendsoftheorphans.org/s/769/innercol.aspx?sid=769&gid=1&pgid=272)

“the will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot sustain you.”