Hello everyone.
I hope you all are enjoying your summers. Whether or not you get some vacation time, it is always nice to go out into the heat and soak up some vitamin D and UVA/B rays. My skin is so tan that I look like I use a bottle of that spray-on tan. Which of course I don't, because I'm a volunteer and I'd rather spend the money on good food.
To get on with the updates...
The past few days I have been getting up early in the morning to go running. The road is terrible, but the views (when I'm not staring at the ground because I've tripped) are incredible. One day, after running with a friend(I leave around 6, get back around 7:30; there's a considerable amount of walking and talking involved) I was so tired, I just wanted to sleep again. Which I can do, because it's summer. It just so happened, though, that the faucet outside of my house had running water. Not one to let a good opportunity go by, and also because I had absolutely no water in the house, I decided that I would collect some water, and then take a nap. During the process of water collection, however, my next door neighbor Dariel poked his head in and asked if he could color. He's such a nice helper that I said yes, thinking I'd kick him out when I got the water. But then his mom said "Alicia, I'm leaving, he'll stay with you for the morning." Great. So of course all the other kids see Dariel and come in to play too. Fine; one of them helps me wash my dishes, which is cool.
This is when the fun begins. My mom had suggested that I let the kids convert the jungle behind my house into a garden. Behind every house in my neighborhood is a large plot, and many families use that area to plant plantains, yuca, and other food. I have not done so because I don't really have that much free time during the school year and when I do I'd rather do something less productive, like watch Glee on my computer. Previously, I had ran the garden idea past the kids and they were super excited. So we're playing in the house and one of them asks when we can start on the garden. Figuring I'm not going to get to sleep any time soon, I suggest that we begin then and there.
Me and the kiddies all stomp out to my backyard. Recently I had paid some guy to machete everything (because my neighbor told me I had to because there were snakes living in my backyard and she didn't want them near her baby). He chopped most stuff down, but left all the clippings. In the US, we'd probably get big trash bags, fill them with the clippings, and leave them on the curb. In the DR, you make piles of the clippings and burn them. Well that is easier said than done, considering the huge amount of clippings, the fact that it rains every day, and the fact that the people working on this are me, who knows nothing about this stuff, and a bunch of 11-year-old kids. So for the past couple of days we've been burning for a few hours, and I hope to finish this week. Anyways, it's all good, dirty fun. The kids decided who would pick up the horse poop for fertilizer (there's plenty lying around) and that we'd plant black beans, corn, plantains, oregano, and avocado. It's their garden, really, so we'll see how it works. I also think I'm going to try to get ahold of a swing or something; that would be fun.
Anyways, that day I did get a little nap in after lunch, but was woken up by a kid who I'm tutoring during the summer. Really though, I'd rather a kid know how to read than me get a nap. And that's the end of my no sleep story.
You all might remember that last year I took some boys to Camp Superman. I took them again this year- 5 days sleeping outdoors, bathing in rivers, peeing on trees and doing other stuff in latrines, learning to say please and thank you and wash dishes and play nice and work together and generally to be little supermen. The camp was going wonderfully until the last day. It started raining in the afternoon; some of the boys were painting masks they had made, and others were playing sports. The boys finished their painting, and it started raining a little heavier. As it was the last day, and the boys were loving playing in the rain, we let them continue playing. Since the camp site was largely dirt, soon we were surrounded by mud. Of course, the playing evolved into mud slinging, which was also fine; they were dirty anyways, and they all played nice (we had worked hard on discipline and respect that week). Then the rain turned into a torrential downpour. We handed out soap, and we all showered in the rain, which was cool, when we, the volunteers, realized that the boys' tents had all flooded, and that a lot of their clothes were wet.
Uh oh.
There really wasn't a section in our training labeled "What to do when you're running a boys' camp and it starts pouring and you only have one partial shelter and no dry clothes and don't really know much about camping in the first place." Luckily, some of the volunteers had had experience camping. We crowded all 42 kids under the one covered area (sticks holding up a tin roof), after telling them to get all their stuff out of their tents. We set up a tarp and a foot washing station under the roof, and hung up their wet stuff in the rafters and on clotheslines outside (still in the downpour; we assumed the stuff would dry during the night). The kids were awesome and really just waited huddled under the roof for awhile; we taught them to play Heads Up 7-Up and Simon Says. When the rain FINALLY stopped we ate dinner (the campo had killed 2 pigs for us), and had a reflection ceremony about the camp. In the meantime, camp workers nailed rice-sack cloth to the sides of the "shelter," making it a big tent. We congratulated the kids, telling them that in camp superman history, no group had ever been able to sleep all together in one big tent. One volunteer read them a good night story, and we all went to sleep (well, the kids did, and we were kept awake by the thunder and rain and fear that the big tent would also flood).
All in all, it worked out fine, and I was very grateful for the fact that PC volunteers are some of the most creative, flexible, energetic people I've ever worked with. And for all the kids know, we planned the rainstorm, and it was awesome.
That's all for now; soak up some rays and keep it real!
-Alicia
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