Category: Uncategorized

Today Ariana got to head out with her classmates to a day camp. The original plan was for Nicole to accompany the class, but when the original bus never showed up and they decided to stuff everyone into a bus half the required size she realized this wasn’t going to happen.

As you know Nicole and I have always enjoyed celebrating Valentines together, not only because of its common meaning, but it is a reminder of the date I originally asked Nicole out on (Dec 14, 1994 if your counting). For this Valentines day I did something extra extra special for her…..

When it rains, it pours. And I mean the literally and figuratively. For the past 5 days it has been pouring here. Not your typical tropical downpour between patches of sun, but non stop rain. If you’ve followed the news you’ve probably heard of a number of mudslides. Although some have been in the same province as us, our location is doing fine. There is a warning out for the city of La Vega due to the river flowing through it, but we are far from it and protected by hills on three sides. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had some problems.

It’s to not try and joke around with people in a language I can’t really speak.

With exactly a month left till we jump back on a plane for North America we’re going to try give our cultural and language learning a boost by eating lunch and dinner with a local family 5 days a week. Starting next Monday we will (hopefully) have one family each week cook us both meals in their home. Not only will this help out some families that are having a very difficult time getting work right now, but it should give us much more time to get to know some others as well as practice and correct our Spanish.

For only the second or third time since arriving hear there is no music playing tonight. It’s an erie sort of feeling like the calm before a storm. Surprisingly, even the animals are being pretty quiet as well. I guess it should be a really good nights sleep. And we need it after last night.

Today we finally got to put our muscles to work helping one of the local TEARS volunteers move to a slightly larger apartment. The weather co-operated by avoiding any rain, and keeping below 30 degrees. I have to confess that by the end Nicole said I looked like I had jumped into a pool with my clothes on.

Given the excitement and noise around the Christmas celebration here, which is a pretty quiet celebration where we’re from, we weren’t really sure what to expect at carnival. A celebration known for its parades, celebrations, and all that goes along with that.

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.