Update Number Three

Cantar, Orar a Dios

Looking back over this week to try to write the highlights is overwhelming. We pack so much into them.

Friday at school is Oansa (Awana), so there´s no teaching, just kids playing games and singing and memorizing. It´s nice for us to have a day off of teaching, it also starts an hour later! It was really cool to see how excited they were to do the games and I loved the singing.

We left early to go to La Vega. It´s around a two hour drive to the fertile agricultural center of the country. Four squished in the back seat makes it longer : ) Alberto´s parents´ house was a wonderful retreat. There was a huge fan in our bedroom, so powerful! There was a sitting room with some orchids perfect for reading in the mornings. Their family is so welcoming.

Saturday we got up early to go to the Mueso Hermanas Mirabal (the reason for coming to La Vega). Lindsey and I both read a book called In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez about four sisters who were revolutionaries during the Trujillo regime in the 1940s-1960s ish. Three of them were murdered, but one is still alive. They´re all national heroes. It´s an amazing story, and the book really helped me get familiar with the geography and the culture of this country. The museum is the house that they lived in for a period of six months I think. It was incredible to see all their things, it made the story more real. I got chills. We bought some books, then Alberto took us to Ojo de Agua, the location of the other house and where the fourth sister, Dedé, lives now. We drove up, and Dedé herself was standing in front of the monument talking to a group of kids. We got to hear her talking to them, and afterwards she came over and talked to us, asked us what we were doing here, volunteered herself for a picture, signed our books. I could not believe it. We got to walk over to the house and one of her guards showed us the cacoa they grow. We got to taste some. (Allison, I wanted to call you so badly!!!) Meeting her was like the equivalent of meeing Anne Frank. Talk about ´´immeasurably more than all you could ask or imagine,´´ that´s how I felt.

Vic, one of the Kids Alive guys from Jarabacoa who´s in charge of things, came to our site on Monday and it was great to see him and speak Enligsh. He helped us with all of the questions we had about cultural things, house visits, other things. It was just very reassuring to see him. We had been craving pizza, and he told us how his family does it-- with tortillas. So we made pizzadillas: a giant tortilla, tomato paste mixed with canned tomatos, a little garlic paste(?), two kinds of cheese, ham, fresh tomatos, onion, pepper, and jalepeños for the Rachels. Amazing.

The past two days/nights we were without power in the house, which sometimes seems like an adventure and sometimes seems like the worst thing that could ever happen to you. It´s only bad without power because there are no fans at night. It bothers me because it´s hot, and it bothers the Rachels because you can hear the music from the gym across the street from us beginning at 6am and also the roosters and other animals. But it is now fixed! Gracias a Dios! Today was the third day they were working on it.

Class this week was good. One of the main problems we see in the school is violence. If the kids get mad about something, they start punching each other. There were a couple incidents this week with that. Also, it´s challenging to engage them. Once you get their attention, it´s great, but if there´s a pause or a distraction, it´s hard to get it back again. I feel like I´m getting better at knowing what are good activities for each class, what´s appropriate for their age and knowledge base. In Geography Tuesday I got to teach on the Mayans (Guatemala), and I drew a Mayan man and woman on the board with their average heights, and then for every characteristic that I read, I drew it on the person on the board. The second graders loved that. Wednesday was volcanoes (Nicaragua), today was Central America/Costa Rica and I drew a map of Central America on the board and all the names of the countries and then we went over it. I pointed with a ruler and they said the name, and then after a while I erased the names until they could name all the countries by looking at the map. I really enjoy the challenge of presenting the material.

Yesterday after school we went to one of the three barrios around the school. This one was built by an organization and the houses were given away I think to women with kids and no husbands (?). We got one of the teachers to go with us who lives there so we wouldn´t be wandering around aimlessly. I expected it to be like one of those TV commericals with depressing music and a tear stained child wandering around. I expected misery, but it wasn´t like that at all. It was peaceful. I actually felt more comfortable there than I do walking through the town here. People were sitting in front of their houses. The first group we saw was cutting some sugar cane to snack, and they offered us some, so we got to try it. We walked around to different students´ houses and stopped in or said hi and kept walking around. We made three longer stops, one in one of my teaching partner´s house, one in our tour guide´s house, and one in one of the student´s, and this was the coolest by far because there were around 7-9 kids and the mom and they swarmed Rachel Jones to get to her hair (blonde), the mom ended up braiding it in the end, a gorgeous inside out braid. One of the girls noticed I was wearing earrings and asked me if I was a Christian (we found out later that the church around this barrio doesn´t permit the women to wear earrings).
Si, y tu? ´´Yes, are you?´´
Si. ´´Yes.´´
Y que te gusta hacer en la iglesia? Can-- ´´What do you like to do at church? Si--´´
--Cantar, orar a Dios ´´Sing, pray to God´´
Me gusta cantar tambien. Canto en mi iglesia ´´I like to sing too. I sing in my church´´
What followed was a amazing exchange of singing. They wanted songs in English, we wanted songs in Spanish and Creole. They would sing a line of an English song and want us to sing the rest of it. We caught on to a few of the Spanish ones. We sang them ´´I Love You Lord´´ and the Doxology in three part harmony. That´s going in the books as one of the coolest, sweetest, most fun, most powerful moments in the trip. We´re going back up there next week, but we also want to go visit the other two barrios (everything here needs to be spread around evenly between groups, everyone needs to get the same thing, Dominican and Haitian).

I´m trying to think of some more funny things that have happened. A kid in Rachel Kusmer´s eighth grade class wrote her a note telling her he liked her and got someone else to deliver it. In adolescent/young adult Sunday school, they made everyone go around the circle and say if they were soltero/single, casado/married, o conpromitido/engaged, which I´m pretty sure they would not have done had we not been there. American women are silver bullets here, tickets to the good life. We have to be careful about how friendly we are.

We´ve had some good team bonding time this week too. Last night especially, just talking about how things are going, how we feel about issues in the school, what´s up spiritually. I think we are good supports for each other, we all have bad days on different days. We are all learning to be content.

Tomorrow it´s Rachel Kusmer´s birthday and we´re having all the teachers over to our house for pizzadillas. I hope they like them. We´re making rice and beans too, just in case. (For my birthday a while back- I forgot to say this last time, but- they surprised me with a cake and sang to me and all gave me hugs. I felt so welcomed).

That´s all from this side. Again, thank you for encouraging emails, they are so good. I love to hear what´s going on at home. And thank you for prayers for safety, for being equipped for this work, for the language, for strength, for kindness and love for each other in the team, to have wisdom for the issues we see, and for peace and contentment.

Some verses that have been made real for me while I´ve been here are Colossians 1:10-14: We pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, and being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Much love , till next week,
Sarah and co.

Second Week Update

From Montellano with Love

Greeting from Montellano, DR!

We are in the land of sugar cane, giant clouds- somehow the sky seems bigger here-- and friendly, welcoming people. This is a beautiful country, but that's not all it is ; )

We started at the school this week after spending the weekend with our Dominican family, Alberto, Lydia, y Jean Pablo. Alberto runs the school in Caraballo (Montellano and Caraballo are neighboring towns, Caraballo is more of a village). There was a work team in the missionary house, so we got to stay with them. I don't think any of us were very thrilled at first because we really wanted to get to the missionary house and set up camp, but it was so good to be with them. They took wonderful care of us. We got to go to the beach a couple of times, got to rest after orientation with the other interns and get used to the country a little bit (Alberto and Lydia are taking us to La Vega this weekend to go to the Mirabal museum!) I am grateful that we weren't just thrust into life here in Montellano because I don't think any of us would have been ready. We would have gone into shock! Our trip has been like climbing a mountain, a little higher everyday. We are in an environment that is so different from anything (I think) any of us has ever experienced before.

We also had an incredible gift to help us feel more comfortable, one of the other interns who's been in the DR with Kids Alive the past three summers, Lindsey. She came with us to help us get set up at the school and make sure the curriculum was ready to go. She's fluent in Spanish, so she helped us to communicate. She went back to Jarabacoa yesterday.

We feel good being here. We're all glad to have started classes. The school is a really cool place. Last night we had wonderful team bonding time hunting mosquitos in the house (sounds weird, but is necessary haha) and talking about team dynamics and school and everything that's going on. Living with us in the missionary house is one of the teachers and her two daughters, one who's nine and one who's 13, both are in the school. We are so fortunate to be with them, we're like little chicks who need guidance. It's so good to have someone who we can ask questions and who knows how to cook and knows the culture. The younger daughter is so friendly and I play cards with her a lot. When we talk, she helps my Spanish.

Let me tell you about school. We heard on the front end that this was the most difficult placement in the program. The school is in a very poor neighborhood (barrio), there's a lot of tension between the Dominicans and the Haitians who come over to work in the sugar cane, people don't have the economic resources they need, so they resort to other ways of getting the things they need. There was an incident in the barrio last night that the staff found out about today and prayed about in morning devotions. I asked one of the teachers if the kids were going to be different today, if they would be afraid or anything, and she said no, that they were used to it. That was almost harder to hear.

I am teaching 2nd (morning) and 5th (afternoon) grade geography and writing, and I help out some with the other subjects. Rachel K is teaching geography, and Rachel J is teaching geography, math and science (her teaching partner speaks English, so she gets to teach more). Everyday with the kids is different in my classes, and there's a huge difference in the second and fifth graders. The second graders are crazy and fun and wild and adorable. With them, it's really hit or really miss. The fifth graders are much less rowdy, and I think they learn more. With the second graders, sometimes it seems like we spend more time distributing and collecting materials than learning. There have been some really cool moments so far though. Yesterday I got to work with one of the 2nd grade boys in math, finding points in a plane. It was a cool God moment because the night before I tried to teach one of the kids living in the missionary house with us how to do a sudoku puzzle, so she taught me all the words for row/line, column, square. I was equipped to talk to the boy about lines and columns and squares and all those things. It was great. When I did the sudoku with her, I felt a little anxious because I still had to prepare for class and do all these different things, but spending the time with her was the preparation I needed and I didn't know it.

All of us are in class with other teachers, all Dominicans or Haitians. I teach geography, there's a Bible lesson, science, math, reading, writing, maybe some other ones I'm forgetting. I can't really believe I'm doing it sometimes. It is exhausting to be between the languages though. Sometimes I forget what I'm doing. I like being at the school. The kids really are glad that we're there. They want to play all the time. This afternoon I played dominos with some of my 5th graders and one of the younger girls came over and just stood kind of leaning on me the whole time. They want love and they want to be hugged and valued and smiled at. They want to hold your hand. The school is like an oasis in the neighborhood, it doesn't feel safe outside, but inside, yes, it is safe and clean and nice. That's kind of simplistic, but...

Alright, it's time for us to go home (from the internet cafe).
I would love to hear from any/all of you and thank you to the ones who have emailed. All the words are encouraging. Thank you for the prayers, we need them.
With much love,
Sarah and co.

Adventures with Lightning

Today we went to the beach with our Dominican family and some people our age from the church. It started raining after we´d been there for an hour. The rain on the water was amazing. I kept trying to think of something to compare it to so that I could put it in a poem. Still at a loss. But then, it started to thunderstorm. Water and lightning don´t really go together. Some people saw a few bolts in the distance. I didn´t really see anything, but I could hear the thunder really loud and close. I wondered if I should get out of the water, thought I probably should, but everyone else stayed in like it was no big deal. Then a huge, huge bolt hit the water probably 200 yards from us, I´m not a very good judge of distance. Everyone, our group and all the other people in the water, started scrambling for the shore as fast as they could and then running for shelter. I saw it hit and I thought we were going to die. Maybe we should have. I´ve never seen anything like that before in my entire life. Never been so close to lightning. I just did a quick Google search, and there doesn´t seem to be much reliable information out there about lightning and what happens when it hits the water (the best I found was a kids page that said that the fish probably wouldn´t get hurt, only the ones that were really close). Hopefully that´s the most dangerous situation I´ll find myself in this summer...

First Update from the DR

Written Thursday June 18

Hola de la Republica Dominicana!

I am writing to you from Puerto Plata, a city on the north coast. We´re staying a couple nights at the house of the Dominicans who run our site, in transition between training in Jarabacoa, a town in the mountains, and our placement on the coast. I cannot explain how quickly the past few days have gone. Everyday is full of so many things that it seems like we´ve been here so much longer than we have. This is the end of the fourth day. I´m writing for my team, which includes Rachel Kusmer and Rachel Jones.

We´ve been introduced to the culture gradually. In Jarabacoa, the mountain air is relatively cool and there aren´t very many bugs. Most of the summer interns stayed in apartments together. The first day we had orientation with the other interns, who are great. We went on a scavener hunt in the town and learned about the mission of Kids Alive and got to know each other. The past two days we´ve been at training for all the summer volunteers. I love the worship times and singing the Spanish songs.

The three of us are all in different places with the experience so far, probably relating to how well we know the language. It´s good for us to be in highs and lows at different times so that we can help each other. Rachel K is very excited and loves to talk to people all the time. Right now she is helping to cook dinner. She´s thrilled to be here on her first trip out of the country. She has always wanted to come to Latin America. Rachel J is unphased even though she doesn´t know the language. She´s not easily discouraged, and is excited to work in Caraballo where there is a lot of discrimination and French Creole (she does speak French). For me, some parts of the past two days at training have been frustrating because it´s difficult to understand the language, other times I feel like I grasp it well. The teaching has been very good. We learned today about transformation, in our lives and in the lives of the kids. It´s really only through God that we´re going to be able to do this work with the kids. We keep hearing that Caraballo is the most difficult placement. I am learning how much I need God, even to keep a good attitude towards my teammates and in general. We looked at Galatians 5 today, the fruit of the Spirit. I hope that we are able to keep having that. As long as we ''keep in step with the Spirit,'' we´ll be alright. I am excited to get to our site and start working.

As a team, we have had really good times talking together and we´ve been very open and honest with each other about how we´re feeling and what´s going on.

I´ll tell you the first two things that I learned in the Dominican Republic.
1) I heard my first rooster crow. The first night that we got here, one was crowing outside the apartments. It doesn´t sound like it does in the cartoons.
2) they do not flush the toilet paper here. There´s a little basket that goes beside the toilet and you throw it in there. The toilet in our apartment ran continually, and we had to take the lid off and jiggle some things to stop it running. Yesterday, I walked past and saw it was running, opened the lid, pulled up on something to stop it running, and the whole top piece popped off and water started squirting out of the toilet like a fountain! I ran out to the patio yelling help! help! help! and the girls came running in to see what was wrong. They and one of the guys were able to get it under control. We all got wet. Thinking about it now, it´s hilarious, but at the time, I was mortified.

Tomorrow, we are going to our site for the first time to play with the kids in the morning and then start working on the curriculum, classes start on Monday. We´re each working with a different age group of kids. Rachel J with the youngest, me with the medium age, and Rachel K with the oldest. We´ll be helping with the summer programs, not sure exactly what that will look like yet.

Pray that our planning goes well tomorrow, this sets the tone for the whole next five weeks. Also, pray that we keep getting along with each other and communicating and remember that our strength comes from the Lord and not from ourselves. Thank you for your prayers so far, it does make a difference.

We´re about to eat dinner, so I´ll go for now, they´re frying up the plantains... yum.

Much love y Dios les bendiga (God bless you),
Sarah

Dialogue on Market Values and Joy

I'm reading two books that are nicely dialoguing with each other. C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy and Cornel West's Race Matters. 

In the first chapter of West's book, he describes nihilism in black America, partly caused by corporate market institutions (25). Institutions want profits, and they convince people to consume. The goal of consumption is pleasure. Here's West on pleasure: 

"In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation... especially evident in the culture industries-- television, radio, video, music..." (26) 

"These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values-- love, care, service to others-- handed down by preceding generations" (27) 

Why is this "market-inspired way of life" chosen by so many people? Consumerism thrives because we aren't satisfied.  

In Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis tells the story of his growing up and conversion to Christianity, and in one of the chapters,  he describes getting Joy and pleasure confused. 

"At the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly nonmoral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a "lower" pleasure instead of a "higher." It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. The hounds had changed scent. One had caught the wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. I did not recoil from that erotic conclusion with chaste horror, exclaiming, "Not that!" My feelings could rather have been expressed in the words, "Quite. I see. But haven't we wandered from the real point?" Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. Sometimes I wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy" (170). 

I haven't finished the book yet to know how Lewis talks about finding Joy in the end, but I'm guessing it has something to do with God. When we're not with God, we become vulnerable to other things that promise to satisfy us. They all lie, of course. This lie fuels advertising and marketing and business and provides jobs, but it also keeps a lot of people miserable. The problem with a "hedonistically driven present" is that we lose sight of everything that actually matters. We forget who we are. The life that we were meant to life isn't about pleasure as it's described by West. 

Like Lewis says, we can go to any of those other pleasure givers, it doesn't make a difference which one we choose. Afterwards, we know it doesn't meet the need or the desire that we have. Sometimes we get stuck in the trap of going back over and over again because we believe that it will, if we only give it one more try. 

Are all pleasures substitutes for Joy? How would our bank statements change if we were finally satisfied? How would we spend our time? 

We can't live like the market tells us to live. We need to recover "nonmarket values," love, care, and service to others. 

The problem I see in pockets of the Christian community is the loss of Joy and the sell out to pleasure, the objectification of the opposite sex, and an obsession with consumerism at the expense of the forward call of God and discipleship. We've settled into the nest of our culture, and we've chosen its worst parts. 

To get back to contentment and life in nonmarket values, we need to address the roots of our deep dissatisfaction and identify the lies that we believe, say with King David, "Restore to me the joy of your salvation" (Psalm 51:12a). 

Restless Much

It's getting dull in the house, not for lack of doing things. Today I did three lessons in Rosetta Stone. In between that I did my laundry, wrote and recorded a song, watched a Star Trek movie with the fam. that was hilarious because of how old it was, well, it seemed like I did more than that. Today was a French toast morning with my grandparents, and I love those. Great food, great company. 

In seventeen days I leave for the DR, ready or not. We've gotten more of the details of where we'll be-- today I watched some videos online of the school and the town, it made it feel very real, and very overwhelming. All those questions came up, those doubting questions that play on fear, and I realized for the first time how hard it's going to be, how uncomfortable at first. I think I thought I would just fall right in without any difficulty (and maybe I will and it will get hard after two weeks like Biculturalism class says culture shock will do to a person). The other scary part was realizing that I have expectations- I want to like it, love it. I saw that I do want to get some things out of this trip- some direction. There's temptation to become anxious about all of the different areas like the teaching, the Spanish, the spiritual side, but I'm keeping it at bay for the most part. One day, then the next. I'm glad I'm not going alone! 

A Recipe for an Uprising

It seems to me like bad economic times unveil what was there all along, the flaws show up brighter, a bad situation becomes worse.   

Global Crisis 'hits human rights' 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8071347.stm#map

World Bank Warns of Social Unrest 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8066037.stm