Archive for: January 2009

What does life look like for us now? During the week we send Ariana off to school in the morning. I use the time to get my work done, and Nicole looks after Ciara and cleans the house. Ariana is home to join us for lunch, often with some other friends as well. The afternoons we usually use to study some Spanish, take the kids out in the field to play, take care of the household errands, pickup some food for dinner. We often head out on a walking tour around our house and try to use the time to interact with some of our neighbors. It’s nice to be able to get to know them a little and it gives us good practice of our very limited Spanish.

We’ve now had a couple days since our last visitors left and life is beginning to return to normal. Slowly we have been able to integrate all the additional stuff we asked them to bring; I’ve been catching up on my work, which has gotten a little behind; and we’ve all returned to our original sleeping arrangements. As you can imagine our little home, by North American standards, really doesn’t have enough space for 6 people to live.

I’m not going to say they didn’t have some good times, because I think they did. But this last week will most likely go down as Nicole’s parents worst vacation ever.

I guess that our second guests didn’t technically arrive at our house today, but most of the fun getting them did!

After almost three weeks off, today was back to school for Ariana. A little later than the other kids due to our travels up north. We weren’t really sure what to expect, but were hoping that we wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

Today we headed up into the mountains to visit a nearby town called Jarabacoa (pronounced Hara-bacoa) and the local Young Life camp, Pico Escondido (Hidden Peak). At home Young Life has a reputation for great camps, but we weren’t sure what to expect here in the DR. It was of interest to us because of our connections with YL in Calgary, and also the fact that the TEARS school will be taking a group of kids up to the camp next month (unfortunately not Ariana’s class which is too young)

Well we’ve had a very enjoyable, relaxing, and quiet few days at the beach. It will all end tomorrow though as we head back to La Vega. We have had a couple amusing trips on the gua-guas while here that are worth sharing.

Since we’ve been here a month, it’s now time to travel like the locals so we introduced Mom and Dad to the guagua’s. Our little bit of Spanish seems to help with getting more reasonably bus fares, and taxi fares back at night. Otherwise, not much to report other than great beaches, good food, warm weather, and clear blue ocean.

With a damaged fridge, little to no Internet, and no lights when the power was out (almost always at dinner time) today turned out to be a pretty good day to head to the beach for a short break with my Parents. You might be suprised how tired one feels when the sun goes down at dinner and you live by flashlights for the rest of the night.

I didn’t even mention that on Sunday night (Jan 4) we had some wierd electrical issue. During the night, just after I headed to bed, I noticed the christmas lights flashing. That’s odd I thought, considering I had purchased the only non-flashing Christmas string in all of La Vega! The thought did cross my mind that perhaps someone tried to “fix” my lights by adding a couple flashers, but not this time. In retrospect I should have clued in to how bad the electricity was since these particular lights were connected through an electrical inverter and regulated by a pack of 8 large batteries and yet they were still flashing very noticeably.