week 11: afraid of the rain (august 25-31)

hurricane gustav: well i'm sure gustav is big news in the u.s. right now because i think it’s about to hit new orleans, but before it got there it came up through hispanola. haiti and the western side of the dr got most of the damage, but we did get quite a bit of rain. school was canceled for two days because the teachers couldn’t be bused in, even though it didn’t rain at all on the second day. the people here are really funny about rain… they don’t like it at all! it’s like when it rains, everything is off… no one wants to get wet or go outside. and it’s funny because if people really have to walk outside in the rain, they wear trash bags all over themselves… on their heads to keep their hair dry, tied around their feet to keep their shoes dry… they walk around with umbrellas when it’s sunny to stay out of the sun and trash bags when its raining… so funny. for me, an arizona girl… i think the rain is fun! however, i'm sure if we are ever in the direct line of a hurricane, i will be changing my mind on that. we did have a “hurricane training” the other day so we’ll be prepared if that happens. so far we’ve been lucky, but they say that hurricane season continues until november, but hopefully they’ll stay away.

the italian: we had a new volunteer come last week from italy. his name is mario and he is this precious old man who is a baker from italy. he's here for three weeks and has come to teach the kitchen how to make bread, so that if it makes sense economically, we can start making our own bread instead of buying it every week. (which is really exciting because the bread here is really gross and his bread is delicious!) mario is staying in our volunteer house. he is really, really funny and he talks a lot! the best part is that he really doesn’t speak spanish, so he just keeps talking in italian and none of us understand a word he is saying, but he just keeps talking. it's really entertaining. he does however make really good food. he has made us pizza a couple times and pasta… it has been a welcome change from the rice and beans!

dime: another one of my favorite spanish phrases is “dime” (dee-may). which means “tell me”. spanish is a lot more direct of a language than english and they use a lot more commands, which is hard to get used to. for example in english we would say “can i borrow ….?, but there is no word in spanish for borrow, so they say “lend me …” they also use “dame” (give me) a lot when they want something. it’s kinda weird cuz i always feel rude, but everyone talks that way. anyway, whenever anyone calls one of the kids (or anyone for that matter) they respond, “dime”. i don’t know why, but i love it.

misa: going to mass here has been hard to get used to. my spanish is getting better, but i'm usually totally lost in the homily. (luckily… kevin… i have my magnificat, so i know the readings!) plus i don’t know all the responses yet, so i feel like i'm not really participating. also, going to communion is a rarity here… most people just don’t go and it’s not because they aren’t catholic. i understand it when we are at nph because most of the kids haven’t received all their sacraments and most of the tias aren’t catholic and i think i'm the only catholic volunteer, but even when i've gone to daily mass with the nuns in town at the cahedral, i would say 75% of people don’t receive communion. i was really confused, so i asked one of the nuns this week why that was. i didn’t understand everything she said, but basically she said that people will not receive communion if they haven’t been to confession, if they haven’t been to mass in a while, or if they don’t feel they are dressed appropriately, or a ton of other reasons. she said that they consider there are two kinds of catholics here, practicing and non-practicing. i think just about everybody here is “non-practicing”, but there aren’t too many “practicing” (even though they are going to daily mass). the other part that has been hard is most weeks we get bused out to go to a near-by village to go to mass, but there has never been a priest, just a deacon, so we never really have “mass”, but instead have a word service and communion service. i really like the services here though, because there are some cool people from the village that lead the music with their amazing singing and tambourines and other little instruments that i don’t know the name of… but it is definitely a lot different than sunday mass at st. pats! this week the deacon told us that he only had one host with him in his pix, so he asked how many of us there were that were going to receive communion… i think there were about 8 of us, so he broke the host into 8 tiny pieces and we all shared it. it was a very cool experience.

“there is something in humility that strangely exalts the heart.” – st. augustine