Week 10

Good afternoon!

I’m officially a Peace Corps volunteer!

After 3 days of Peace Corps events (Swear-in, a 50^th anniversary party and a “Unity Day”) which were all fun but rather troublesome I am in my village for good!

Sunday was exactly what I imagined life as a Peace Corps Volunteer to be like, save for the fact that I’m not living in a mud hut in Africa. I woke up at 5:30 am to prepare breakfast and shower before walking down the road to mass for 7 am. I finally know enough people at church that I can walk in alone and find someone to sit with. Mass lasts two hours and each week(I’ve attended 4 times) something new surprises me. Two weeks ago the “Our Father” was set to music reminiscent of a training montage in a movie about karate. This week I noticed that the offering includes toilet paper. I also think I missed out on my only opportunity to celebrate my birthday Dominican style: at the end of church they call everyone having a birthday to the front and sing a blessing to him/her. I was too nervous to go to the front (being that I’m not Catholic) and now am too embarrassed to tell anyone that it is my birthday.

After mass I hitched a ride home (it’s uphill and about 20 degrees hotter than when I walked down) with a woman who is friends with my host mom. I spent the rest of the morning washing my clothes, my washing machine is wonderful but still much more labor intensive than the ones we’re used to. I fill the washing basin with water, laundry detergent, and clothes and then it shakes everything up for 15 minutes. Then I manually drain the basin and refill it with clean water and repeat to rinse. Finally I ring the clothes out and hang them out to dry. My clothing line is on my porch and very visible so I have been given strict orders not to hang any under garments out. I have started washing my personal items in the shower with me like the Dominicans! (After noticing that my underwear were the only ones hanging out at my host mom’s house I adjusted my routine.)

I made myself lunch, scrambled eggs with fresh eggs from my counterpart’s (i.e. the person who requested a Peace Corps Volunteer) poultry farm and bread from my host mom’s bakery, and one of the eggs had 2 yolks! I assumed this was incredibly lucky. My counterpart came over while I was eating and asked, “Erin, aren’t you having any food?” When I responded that eggs and toast are in fact food he informed me that they are not- rice, chicken, salad, provisions (starches) and bread would be food. What I was eating was not.

Luckily I visited my neighbor to drop some plastic forks to donate for the Catholic World Youth Rally (which I am helping with, I’m loving the Catholics here) and she gave me “food.” It’s called banana pie, which is green bananas (which are provisions) mashed up with butter, milk and cod fish and covered with a delicious cheese sauce and baked. It was a win. We limed (hung out) on her porch for a while with her sister from St. Thomas and they told me about why Salisbury is better than any other village on the island.

Then I got fresh and went to a meeting about the Salisbury Reunion beauty pageant. Everyone else arrived in true Dominican style between 35 and 90 minutes late for the meeting. Waiting gave me time to be questioned by many passerbys “why they are never seeing me.” One woman told me she thought I had gone back to America after not seeing me on Thursday or Friday. This, confusingly, is a sign of being integrated, that people notice your absence and assumed you have left forever.

When I came home from the meeting my landlady, Ma Clem, gave me a beautiful bucket of papaya, mangoes, peppers, grapefruit and fresh corn from her family’s farm. I boiled some corn on the cob for dinner (which was again critiqued as not food) and settled into my porch to watch the rainfall and drink my fresh squeezed grapefruit juice.

Pretty idyllic, huh?

I made a home video of my home but I can't figure out how to use technologies to make it load. Hopefully I will by next time!

This is my training class at swear-in with the Eastern Caribbean Director and the Dominica Director.