Mercure Comercial Sto Domingo Santo Domingo

... this Peace Corps experience; ups and downs. Fortunately, there are much more ups than downs, but last week was kind of a downer for me. I tried to start my English class and only three students showed up so I ended up postponing it until the beginning of March. I also had spoken with a representative from Plan International that was going to come to a meeting (that he scheduled) and did not show up where we were going to start a youth group, community ...

... and today he enlisted Santiago and I as his project staff. The contest is in honor of Google's 10th birthday and the company is seeking ideas that will change the world (http://www.project10tothe100.com/). In January, the public gets to vote on the top 100 entries, and the top five finalists will receive funding to turn the idea into reality. Mark's idea is to take plastic waste (the plastics that currently can't be recycled since they are undesirable to turn into ...

... Jews from Curacao, Canary Islanders, Germans, Italians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Lebanese, Syrian, Jewish refugees, Japanese, Hungarians, Chinese and many others. In fact, Chinese immigrants were the second fastest growing immigrant group in the Dominican Republic. I arrive in Zona Colonial, one of the historical districts in Santo Domingo, by taxi and quickly settle into a very cheap hotel that borders El Conde (a popular street for ...

... idea to go to the local beach area for some real RnR, We asked for directions to Boca Chica. Haha. Directions. After an hour and a half of trying to find the bus station which apparently was just around the corner we finally found it smack in the middle of Chinatown. Yes, they have a Chinatown. Why the directions didn´t include that vital piece of information I´ll never know. Anyway, we boarded a 25 seater bus and settled in for the, supposedly, 30 - 40 min ride. Well ...

... was surprised at the size of the city - I think I'd always imagined the Dom Rep as being another Guyana. Instead it's a Guyana 50 years in the future where there is in fact some infrastructure. We got stuck in traffic jams which I wasn't expecting, plus the scale of the place is gigantic compared to the rest of the country. Debs pointed out the giant holes in the ground that were going to become the subway system as we moseyed on through red lights in a particularly Caribbean ...

... in any big city, be it Camden, NJ or Santo Domingo. Who wouldn't cheer on a settler of scores bent on cleaning up the riffraff? Ask any Christian in the Heartland (Trashcanistahn) how he'd feel about some anonymous person setting fire to all the meth-addicts and dealers in his town and he'll say, "We're all sinners in this world, though some of us have strayed from the Good Lord more than others," before asking ...

So I thought I would take advantage to the fact that I am in Monte Cristi once again and have internet access, and update my travel pod entrys. I just got done typing up a 5 page long report on my community diagnostic! One thing less to worry about now. I went to visit one of my other communities on Wed. and discovered that doctors where visiting for the day to see the people in the community. So I go to check out what is going on in the school and I see a whole bunch of white people ...

... lungs at 3 im the morning. Everybody refered to him as the crazy man. 3. playing dominos with my family in the kitchen, using my headlamp as light. 4. chickens running around in the house, and begging for food when I would eat dinner. 5. watching mexican soap operas with my host family 6. comming home from santo domingo, and having our buses brake fluid tube burst open. Then having to get on the back of our trainers pick up truck, where it ...

... end (due to rain and trouble finding the dirt) it took about three days. The kids were determined, and didn't stop, even when I was exhausted from heat and wanting to call it quits, they kept on. The project was so rewarding, I am hoping that we can do other gardens around the neighborhood for our neighbors of flowers and vegetables. I realized not only am I planting seeds of veggies, I am planting seeds in these estrellitas that I hope will last a lifetime.