Hands-On Activities

On Sunday we returned from a weekend conference of Brigada Verde, a national environmental youth group, on the top of a mountain not far from my current home of La Cumbre. The site of the conference was called Diego del Campo and was absolutely beautiful. The theme of the conference was Eco-tourism, which I just gave a presentation on last week to my fellow PCVs, and the attendees were Dominican youth ages 13-18 generally. We organized fun activities and games for them, and they attended talks about ecotourism and presented the work they have done in their own communities, such as beach clean-ups and planting trees. On Saturday we climbed the highest peak in the Cordillera Septentrional (a beautiful mountain range in the DR) and now I'm looking forward to climbing Pico Duarte, the highest point in the Caribbean, sometime in the next two years!

Training is going very well. We've gotten to the very hands-on stage of learning, which keeps things interesting. Yesterday we dug up the earth on the grouns of Trujillo's old mansion (the infamous dictator of the DR from 1930s-1960s) and prepared the beds to plant seeds next week. Today we started construction on a stove for a family that will we finish tomorrow. The house is a small wooden structure with dirt floors and the stove, made from concrete and cement blocks, is outside the house as there was no way to put a chimney through the zinc roof. The goal of this project is to prepare us to build stoves in our own community, and I feel pretty confident that after watching/helping with a few, I'll be able to lead my own stove building projects.

This weekend I'm going with my family to Bonao, another nearby mountain town, to stay with my host mother's family. They're having an Hora Santa, which is a ceremony to remember the death of an important family member. Next weekend (my birthday!) we hope to go to Puerto Plata, a beachtown not far from here, for a little relaxation. In two weeks it's back to Santo Domingo for a few days, then a visit to our ACTUAL PERMANENT PROJECT SITES! I still don't know what mine is or what I'll be doing as my primary project, but I'm getting excited!