Photos from the DR

Remember, you can always see more photos from the DR here at my flickr!

After Hurricane Isaac, a school chair left outside is found in a tree on the school grounds.



Eupa and Beatriz, both in Second Grade, pose for a picture on Christmas Day.


A cow joins the school during a parade through the village.



From left to right: Huwilda, Yuraidi, Betania (me!) and Lorenny, celebrating Christmas Dominican style.



Christmas morning, PT volunteer style. 



Beatriz in her school uniform, waiting for the school day to start.



Sobilenny, a fifth grader, during our parade through the village on the international day of no violence against women. 

Day in the Life

A typical day in my life as a PT English teacher in La Hoya.

7.00am – woken by my phone alarm. I’m curled up in the blanket I’ve thrown around myself while sleeping. My mosquito net has partially fallen down while I was sleeping but I’m too comfortable to move. The temperature in the morning is just right, one of the few times when it’s not too hot. Becky gets up to shower, which I take as my cue to fall back asleep.

7.30am – woken by children shouting and screaming as they walk past our house on their way to school. Realise I have to be at school in15 minutes and drag myself out of bed. Throw my dirty laundry into our laundry basket, throw on something clean, pull my hair into a pony tail and slap on some bug spray. Becky and I try to take turns carrying the laundry to Mota, our laundry lady, so I take it today. Then I stuff my planning notebook, chalk, pens, keys and phone into my purse and get out of the door bare minutes before I need to be at school. (Thankfully, it is literally a ten second walk away.)

8.00am – ‘fila’ at school. Students line up by grade and gender in front of the school gates. We say a prayer, sing a song and hear any announcements before singing the national anthem (of which I now know all the words) while the flag is raised. 

9.40-10.20am - It's a Monday, so I have my first class of the week: the dreaded 7th graders. 40 moody 7th graders shoved into a classroom barely big enough to contain them. I try to by turns to subdue them or cajole them into learning some English, which they manage about two thirds of the time. I feel sorry for the few kids who are trying to learn while being entertained by the jokers in the back who seem to see me as something of a personal challenge. 

11.20-12.00 - The morning shift of 5th graders. I call them a swing class. Some days are great and some days are classesare from hell. They're smart but hyper-active and even the slightest game or activity can send them into paroxysms of excitement. 

12.00am-2.00pm - Lunch break! Known variably as siesta or almuerzo, everyone goes home, eats a large lunch, usually of rice and something else (beans or veg) and then sleep. If there's electricity (and therefore hot water) I'll shower or try and get some work done and maybe manage to cat at 20 minute catnap before going back to school.

2.10pm - I teach 4th graders English in the nearby village of Hato Viejo on Monday afternoons. The school in Hato Viejo is a parnership school with my charity COPA, meaning that while COPA is not involved in the running or administration of the school, COPA does help out with materials and certain types of tuition: namely Art and English. My collegue, a Dominican woman called Rosemery, teaches Art to all grades in Hato Viejo (pre-school through fourth) while I just teach English to fourth graders and help out with the art classes. The class is small and well-behaved (they're less used to Americans and their teaching methods) but they are seriously further behind then my fourth graders in La Hoya and take much longer to learn the same materials. We play a lot of games and repeat topics over and over again. I find them adorable.

3.20-4.00pm - Sixth grade B. While the nicest of the two sixth grade classes, they're also the slowest and come form the poorest background. They are the only class to ever have attempted to steal school materials from my classes. 

5.00-5.40pm - The afternoon shift of 5th graders! The most disadvantaged students, they feed into COPA La Hoya at fifth grade, from the partnership schools of Habinero and Hato Viejo, which both terminate at 4th grade. They're enthusiatic, desperate to learn and adorable. They struggle with complicated topics but I find their classes the most enjoyable. 

5.40pm - School finishes with the ringing out the bell, singing of the national anthem and the lowering of the flag. Becky and I rush home and I start dinner, hoping to finish cooking before the sun sets and darkness sets in at 6.30pm (tonight it's stir fry). On Tuesdays and Thursdays we go to church but on Mondays we have the option of staying in or wandering down into the village, probably being forcefed a second dinner and sitting outside a house of a friend on plastic chairs. The verb for "hanging out" in Spanish is "compartir", which translates literally as "to share". Dominicans love to talk and hang out with their friends and I have to say, I've developed a taste for it myself. (although not for the mosquitos that bite at you throughout the night!)

10.15pm - our curfew is at 10.30 so time to go home! Someone with a motor (a run down motorbike that acts as the favored mode of transport here) will usually give us a lift back home, avoiding the dogs that hang around La Hoya during the night.

11.00pm - asleep by 11! If there's no power (there usually isn't), going to bed is a confusing mess of flashlights and oil lamps that we move around the house as we brush our teeth with clean drinking water (NOT TAP WATER) and set up our mosquito nets.

Tomorrow it starts all over again!

Sports In La Hoya

I’ve had a very busy couple of weeks. A group of American volunteers have been visiting La Hoya and running sports camps for the village’s youth: basketball for boys and volleyball for the girls. (I’ve developed the bad habit of referring to them as “The Americans”, not because they’re more American than others but because that’s what all the Dominicans here call them.) The volunteers didn’t speak Spanish, so all the COPA volunteers have been working as translators to help them run their camps.  I spent a Friday and Sunday working with Suraya, the woman who was running the girl’s volleyball camp.

I’ve also started practicing with the woman’s volleyball team, after their coach and one of the school’s PE teachers invited me to play. On Sunday, we all went to the nearby town of Cabral to play against Fundacion and Cabral

Practice was an interesting experience. Our warm-up lap is simply two loops around the central park in the middle of the village, with whoever’s outside watching. Not a lot happens in La Hoya, so volleyball practice tends to attract a small crowd of children and even adults who sit outside and watch. We warm up a little, do a few stretches and a couple drills, all in a semi-organised fashion while the team shout cat-calls and insults at Ares, the man who is nominally our coach, although whose control over the “team” of about 24 women seems tenuous at best. Then we’re split into four rough teams and play a rotating game, with the winner staying on and the losing team going off.  I say “rough teams” because women come and go as they pass babies around or lose interest. Play is regularly suspended as men, children, dogs, bicycles and babies wonder across the court, which is little more than a badly laid square of concrete in the parque. Everyone is inconsistent skill-wise. Most women are pretty good but don’t try particularly hard. I can see why, because while jumping high might get you the point, if you fall wrong on the concrete you could break your ankle and an injury like that could be life-threatening and very expensive here. Few women have had anything like consistent coaching. The games are regularly interrupted by someone who’s not on the team randomly joining play. The sides of the court aren’t equal in size and electrical wires hang over one end, making aiming your serve extra difficult. There are no painted lines, making disputes over in and out particularly fervent.

For younger girls, finding a ball to play with is a constant struggle. I often see girls attempting to play volleyball with semi-flat basketballs, an experience I find traumatising on my wrists.

There’s one basketball court in town, called “la cancha”, a big grass field called “el play” and the central parque near the town’s largest colmado. The women’s volleyball practice is held in the central parque, basically a flat area of concrete vaguely in the centre of the village. Practice “starts” at 4 and “finishes” at 6, but these numbers are lies made up by Dominicans to trick foreigners, as are all times in this country.  Practice actually starts at 4:30 or 5 and usually doesn’t finish until 7, although different women play throughout practice, as different people show up, are called away to look after babies or simply wander off. Our practice on Wednesday was paused momentarily when a 7^th grader stole our volleyball and Ares was needed to go chasing after him. Although Ares referees our games, we occasionally have to pause when his phone rings or a friend of his drives by. To serve from one side of the “court” you have to step off the parque and into the street, keeping a wary eye out for motorbikes, children on bicycles and dogs.

People play sports in whatever clothes they think might work, which can be anything from a dress and flip-flops to neon green leggings and a tank top. Most women play in hairnets, although some play in curlers or head clothes. Most seem to just play in their normal day clothes and although Ares expressively forbids wearing sandals to practice, he’s mostly ignored.

Even with all these difficulties and problems, sports are really a passion here. There’s also a men’s softball team and baseball team here in La Hoya and a men’s basketball team. Boys spend their spare time playing basketball, girls volleyball and both genders basterdized versions of baseball, called “pelota” (literally translating as “ball”) here in the south.

I’m really looking forward to playing more with the woman’s volleyball team. Although practice is not nearly as demanding as I remember practice being at ISA, it comes with its own share of dangers!

Some Stories

An Assortment of Stories from the Dominican Republic

I wasn’t sure what to theme my blog post this week, especially since I didn’t update last week and so much has happened in that time, but Becky suggested that I tell a few of the interesting stories that have happened to us since we arrived here.

Meeting Jorge

Within our first few days of arriving in La Hoya, we met our fair number of new people but I love the story of how we met Jorge the best. Becky and I were cleaning up Becky’s classroom, which had sat empty for the whole summer. While pulling rolls of paper out of her cupboard, we found a tarantula that had set up home at the end of one of her long rolls of paper.

I, being slightly braver when it comes to tarantulas (although not by much), grabbed the other end of the roll and made speedily for the classroom door. At the same time, Jorge, who had come by the classroom to meet the new volunteers, appeared in the doorway, only to have me rush past him, saying “permiso!” (excuse me), roll of purple paper complete with tarantula in hand. I threw the paper out of the room but the tarantula seemed to take this as an invitation and quickly scuttled back to the classroom door. I am not that brave and quickly jumped far out of the way. Jorge, knowing neither of us, literally leaped to our rescue but taking a typically Dominican approach to bugs: kill it. He jumped on the tarantula until it died and we left its corpse outside the classroom as a warning to other spiders. The ants ate it and we met Jorge because he jumped on a spider for us.

Dead Lizard Child

On a Friday morning, when I don’t have class, the helper (ayudante) in the pre-school failed to show up for work and I became the new substitute ayudante. The pre-school teacher was there, so my job was basically to supervise and try to keep the kids quiet (as much as Dominican children are ever quiet!).

After playtime, One child, who had been misbehaving all day, kept showing something in his pocket to his friends and giggling, putting it in his hand and keeping it, quite obviously, hidden from the teacher and I. With my best no-nonsense teacher face (which I’m having to perfect very quickly here!), I stuck out a piece of paper and told him to give me whatever he had.

“Da me lo!” (Give it to me!)

What fell out of his tiny pre-school hand? A dead lizard. Of course.

The lizard had probably been alive when he’d clumsily picked it up during playtime but by then it was quite clearly dead. Normal teachers confiscate mobile phones and other contraband. I confiscate dead lizards.

Motorcycle Accident

A few weeks ago, school was cancelled without warning when  two young men from the village were killed in a motorcycle accident the previous night.  Motorcycle accidents are common here; the roads are dangerous, badly lit and everyone drives motorcycles. To rub salt in the wound, the boys had been killed while racing on night when there wasn’t electricity, meaning the streets wouldn’t have been lit. To race, Dominican youth lie on their stomach on their motorcycles and hold on to the handlebars to stay on. It means they can barely see where they’re going and when the motorcycles collided during the race, they spun out of control. One boy was pushed into a ditch and died in the ambulance when on the way to the capital. (The capital has the only decent medical care.) The second boy hit a tree and was killed instantly. They were 16 and 17.

When someone dies in the village, especially COPA students or children who used to be students, the whole village shuts down. We didn’t have school and a lot of high school students wouldn’t have gone to school in Barahona. Everyone, including COPA volunteers, are expected to visit the house of the bereaved and take part in the visitation, where everyone sits around the house and wears white. The bodies are laid out in caskets and the family grieves for the day, before the funeral actual later in the day.  All of the COPA volunteers went into the village together and paid our respects as best as we could, though none of us actually knew the boys who died. It was a very present reminder of the dangers that come with living here. 

Teaching in La Hoya

Teaching in La Hoya

I’ve only just begun teaching this week but I’m already enjoying it. It’s hard work but the kids here are so enthusiastic and so happy to be learning English that I can’t help but be enthused as well.

My first lesson was what could probably be termed a nearly-avoided disaster. I had my first English class with the very large and very rowdy Seventh grade class, who became excited to the point of distraction when I tried to get them to play a simple name game with me. The game quickly descended into chaos, and I was forced to draw the game (and the class) to an early close. Some quick editing to my lessons plans and my second class, with Fifth grade, went significantly better, as I now understood how to control the class.  Class with the fourth graders is probably the most interesting, since Fourth grade is the first year of English tuition. They’re very excited to be learning English but really struggle with every word.

I think I probably enjoyed teaching the fifth graders the most. They know enough English to manage the material but it’s still new enough that they’re enthused and excited.

I’m really jealous of my partner Becky, who teaches art. Art is taught to all the grades here in La Hoya, so Becky has the first and second graders, who are so small and adorable.  I did have the chance to substitute for one of the pre-school teachers on Friday. Daisy, the main pre-school teacher, and myself, worked with the pre-school together and I was forced to confiscate a dead lizard from a student. Teachers I know back home are busy confiscating phones and video games, while I find myself confiscating dead lizards from pre-schoolers!

At the close of my first week of teaching, I’m really looking forward to the rest of the year. Discipline is difficult to enforce but kids here are incredibly enthusiastic and really desperate to learn. I have high hopes for the forthcoming year and hope to be able to regale you with some success stories as time passes!

La Hoya

Beginnings of my life here

My new home is a small village in the Southwest of the Dominican Republic called La Hoya. The nearest town is the small city of Barahona, the regional capital. La Hoya is about twenty minutes away from Barahona by car and ten away from the nearest village, Habinero.

La Hoya has a population of just under 500, several churches, a handful of colmados (local corner stores that sell anything from paper to groceries) and a central ‘parque’ that is more just an open area with some pavement and a few trees. COPA has built both a health clinic and an elementary school in La Hoya. Primary education in the DR is from pre-school (pre-escolar) to eighth grade (octavo), so there are ten different grades in attendance at COPA’s school in La Hoya. School runs in two shifts: a morning shift from 8 until 12 and an afternoon shift, from 2 to 5. Only grades four through eight have English classes and I see each grade twice a week for 45 minute lessons. However, I haven’t seen any of my classes yet! School started on Wednesday the 22^nd but English and Art classes don’t start until next week, so my partner and I have been keeping busy planning our lessons and helping the other teachers. We’ve also been exploring La Hoya and getting to know the people here.

Part of our exploring has involved trying Dominican food! From what I’ve experienced so far, Dominican food is filling, tasty and there’s a lot of it. Dominican portions are larger than any I’ve experienced, even in the US, and Dominicans love their food!

My favourite so far is a totally new food to me, tostones. I had difficulty explaining that in English, there is only one word for banana and we only eat one type! Here there are at least six different types of plaintain or banana, all of which can be made into tostones. Banana or plaintain is cut into sections, fried, flattened into a small pattie and fried again. The result is a savoury dish, sort of like potato chips, only hot and slightly chewier.

Dominican spaghetti is incredibly filling; I’ve rarely been able to get through a whole portion but it’s very delicious. Made with tomato sauce, condensed milk, vegetables and copious garlic, it’s a staple food here. Another staple is rice and beans, usually mixed in what Dominicans call “morro”. COPA took us out for a Dominican meal at La Hoya’s only restaurant, Daisy’s, where I had my first taste of morro. Like all Dominican food, it fills you up quickly!

I only have internet once a week, but I will try and keep this blog as updated as possible. If you wish to contact by email, I can be reached at bethanyg93@hotmail.com. If you’d like to write to me here in La Hoya, my address is:

Escuela de COPA c/o Bethany Garry

La Hoya

Apartado 42

Barahona

The Dominican Republic

Look forward to my next blog post, which will be about my first experiences as a teacher here!

Hurricane Isaac

Hurricane Isaac came over the southern Dominican Republic on Friday evening and caused some damage in nearby villages. La Hoya and Copa were very lucky, apart from some felled trees and a great deal of water, there was no damage and school was able to start again on Tuesday. There's still some worries about possible flooding but the rain seems to have passed and we seem safe for now.

Aside from the excitement of a hurricane, Becky and I have been enjoying sampling Dominican food and exploring the village of La Hoya. Everyone has been very welcoming and my Spanish is fast improving with constant use.

To everyone who is reading this or has been linked here recently, I apologise profusely for the lack of long posts! Hurricane Isaac has disrupted all rhymes of normal life, so we're still getting back into the swing of things. I hope having power back after Isaac means I will be able to make some substantial posts!

Hope to talk to everyone soon,
Bethany

Early Days!

My First Week:

I dont have much time on the internet here, so I will try and be consise. Forgive any misspellings, this keyboard was nto designed for english.

It´s been a surreal couple of days. Everything is so different here, so I have been taking my time adjusting. I have discovered that I really like Dominican food and yesterday Silvia, who is the librarian at the COPA school, and her neighbour Keniya, came by our house to make dinner with us and show us how to cook Dominican spaghetti and tostones, which are friend plaintain or banana. I love tostones!


I am still getting used to the heat, although it is not too terrible because there is usually a breeze. Becky and I have been on a few short walks but we usually come back needing to take a shower right away! We´ve been lucky so far with the power outages and have gotten used to taknig advantage of power while we have it.

My Spanish is a little rusty after the IB exams but I´ve been using it every day now and I keep learning new words. Sometimes it´s hard to communicate but people here are very patient with new volunteers and have so far been impressed with the Spanish I do know, so I´m pretty happy with how I am progressing.

Since I´m almost out of time, I must dash. Don´t forget to check out my flickr under ptbrg to see pictures!

Training: The Start Of The Journey

Training: 18th - 22nd of July, 2012

I depart for the Dominican Republic on the 11th of August! In about two weeks, I and my board a plane in Aberdeen and by the end of the day will be in Santo Domingo, the capital of the D.R. After that, we board a bus to Barahona, and then are driven to La Hoya, the village we will call home for the next twelve months!

I met my partner Becky about a week ago, at training on the Isle of Coll. She'll be teaching Art while I teach English at a primary school in La Hoya. Coll feels more and more familiar everytime I go back. Selection a year ago was fun and a crazy whirlwind of excitement and the hope for adventure. Training was more serious, a time to meet my partner and learn about the work I'd be doing. I learned a lot and had a great time with Becky, which I hope bodes well for our year together.

I'm massively excited about my year overseas, although I would be lying to say I wasn't terrified as well. One of the parts I'm most looking forward to is teaching, especially the younger children.

I'll be updating this blog regularly with my news and stories from the Dominican Republic and my travels. I'll be uploading pictures to my flickr account ptbrg and there's already some from training.

I'm really excited and hope to stay in touch with everyone!

(Project Trust waves goodbye to us from the pier!)