American Time

Just a quick little story for you...

So we're about to leave for a baseball game with our "Mom", "sister", and "brother" and our Mom just asked Steve what time we wanted to leave. He suggested 6:30 since we are meeting a friend there at 7:15 (the game starts at 7:30). She was fine with leaving at 6:30, but was concerned that we were meeting our friend so close to the start of the game, "7:15 is really late to be meeting your friend. 7:15 turns into 7:30 and 8:00 and 8:30". Steve casually responded with, "Oh, he's American". To which our Mom replied, "Oh, OK, nevermind."

Lol.

As an update: our friend was late. And our "Mom" said, "Told you so." We told her he must have lived in the DR too long.

Us with two of the kids and our host Mom. Obviously, they are more interested in the game than the picture!

Starting Over

I've never fired anyone before. It's a strange feeling. I guess it's more like firing a consultant though, not an employee.

It just wasn't working out. There is some chemistry needed between teacher and student who will be together four hours a day, covering the equivalent of practically a year of high school Spanish a week. Without chemistry it is an insurmountable challenge. Put more simply, wanting to cry every day of class is not the best emotional environment for learning.

When I told my 16 and 14-year-old "sisters" tonight that I don't have school tomorrow because I have to wait until Thursday for a new teacher, they were particularly supportive. The 14-year-old launched into a sassy make-believe dialogue of what I should have said to my teacher, adding at the end, "with respect of course". Then she excitedly ran and told her Mom that I'd be home tomorrow. I wasn't sure what to make of that - if they'd be happy to have me around or sad to not have more alone time. Sometimes I have to remind myself they're teenagers though (but they're so smart....they speak Spanish) and to not over-think their actions too much. Either way, their kindness meant a lot.

You know how a lot of people travel for a few weeks somewhere and come back saying, "The people were so nice. They were so wonderful."? And you think, "are they really that different from everyone else in the world? Probably not." I think it's because as an outsider you don't expect kindness and grace. You expect that you will feel like an outsider and stranger, and when you don't, because of someone's small act of kindness, you feel like it was a HUGE act of kindness.

I know we feel that way every time we take the bus here. Buses here don't have "stops". You just have to yell when you want to get off. But oftentimes you're standing and can't even see where you are to yell that you want to get off. Add to that, that for a long time we couldn't figure out what people were saying when they wanted to get off - so you can imagine the pickle we were in. So we'd just say the name of our neighborhood to someone near us or to the cobrador (the man who hangs out the door of the bus, yells the bus route, and tries to convince people to get on) and hope that they would remember us even with the seeming chaos around us. And you know what? They always do. Even when you're in the back of the bus and have to climb over everyone to get off and you think, "they all hate me. I am slowing everyone down", the cobrador gives you a hand to help you off the bus and then a thumbs-up when you say "gracias". It's times like that I find myself saying the same thing..."These people are really nice".

Being a stranger makes me think of Hebrews 11, the chapter of the Bible where it talks about people of the past who had great faith and who were strangers in this world. It's not so bad to be a stranger. Verses 13-16 say, 

" All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." 

I welcome being a stranger and "alien" here in Santo Domingo...and in New York...and in any place that I find my home to be. Because really it's only a temporary home anyway. It won't last forever - 60 years at the most, right? So I will look forward to that heavenly city and pray that God will give me grace to live by faith like those men and women in Hebrews 11.

Life in Santo Domingo - Part 1

Five weeks is a short time to understand what life in a city is like. Ours for sure isn't a typical life in Santo Domingo, but it also it not at all the experience of a tourist. For the most part, we live like our family here - the kids go to their school and we go to ours.

Again, our goal in being here is to learn Spanish. Or at least as well as we can in five weeks. Whether it's talking with our host family, taking taxis and public transit, or taking classes, this experience of immersion is helping us immensely. It's giving us a strong base for which to build on when we arrive in Peru. It's a head start to learning there, with the hope that we will be more useful there faster than we would have been without these five weeks. To give you an idea of what a typical day is like, read on.

When we get up around 6:45, our little "sisters and brother" have just left for school. Yanelis, the Mom, sets breakfast out for us and makes coffee. Around 8 AM we call for a taxi. The first few days she would call for us, but now we call and she provides "back-up" when our Spanish fails us. Usually it works out. It seems like they know us now - the Americans who call at 8 AM and say, "¿Como?" a lot . The last time I called and said (in Spanish of course) "I need a taxi at Don Greggorio" (our neighborhood), the operator said our address before I could say it. I just laughed.

We head to school in a taxi since it's only $2 more than taking public transit, which would involve a lot of walking and take a lot longer. On our ride to school yesterday we had a conversation with the driver about how wonderful rice is. We seriously talked about the wonders of rice, i.e. rice with beans, rice with milk, rice with corn, plain white rice, etc. etc. for five minutes before moving on to other Dominican food we like.

For four hours each weekday we have Spanish class. We were told before coming here that four hours is considered "full-time" since you can't absorb much more than that. It is definitely true! Four hours is almost always completely exhausting.

At 1PM, class is over and it's lunch time! Our favorite place is a little comedor, a simple, no-nonsense lunch spot. Minimal decorations, plastic chairs and tables, and a small counter where the food is served from. We get the bandera, a typical Dominican lunch of a mountain of rice, habichuelas (the most popular type of beans here), meat in sauce, and a side salad of pasta salad or cabbage and other vegetables in a vinegar base. It's about $3.50 per person, huge, and delicious! $3.50 per person for a meal here is not at all typical; we've been surprised to find the food to be very similarly priced to food in the U.S.

To be continued from 2 PM on...