Progress

After meeting the Sec. of Public Health twice and a trip to Santo Domingo, so progress is being made.  

 

First, hospital project.  I've met with the Public Health Secretary for my province twice and at first she was very confusing and her ideas were very far fetched, but the second time she seemed much more open to starting with opening our hospital in the Los Cacaos center first before trying to bring NINE doctors (while we currently don't even have one) to the area.  It also sounds like she is very optimistic about being able to find two part time doctors (one for the week and one for the weekend) and at least two part time nurses.  My job is still to bring in the equipment and the trip to Santo Domingo proved fruitful as my boss gave me permission to use his a special mail-box to bring down the supplies=lots of $ savings for mom!  Hopefully the stuff will be here fairly shortly and I can start getting the hospital open for business.  At first they didn't want to use the equipment without a permanent doctor until I explained we should at least let this doctor do the best job he can for the time he's here.  

 

Ecotourism project:  Me not being here for 4 days because I was working in Santo Domingo gave my ecotourism counterparts time to get some thinking and work done.  I got about half of what I wanted, but that's half more than I expected and I should get the rest in a couple days.  Then it's on to the bigger project, in Spanish, and much more in depth, the 2nd pass of the grant writing project.  Even if we don't get the grant, we'll at least be on this organization's radar and can apply again next year and use this year to get up to speed.  I also found out our tour is being advertised online!  http://www.tequiaexperiences.com/  Go to full-day tours and pick the coffee experience, that's a picture of a street in my town!  We are only the part of the coffee picking, processing, and tasting, the meal is at a restaurant on the way to town that I can't afford to eat at...and it's also a German restaurant...talk about your Dominican Experience.

 

House:  It's official, I've found one!  It's tiny compared to what other volunteers can afford for the same price, but I'll take what I can get considering the housing in my area.  It's three "rooms", a living room, bedroom, and a room I will turn into a kitchen.  It doesn't have water inside, so I have to carry it in from the outside, but it's not that bad.  I have to share my outside toilet and shower area with my neighbors, but that won't be that bad either.  I am paying to get lights installed and the locks changed and then I will move in, hopefully next week sometime!  When they are finished cleaning it and I'm moving in, I will take and post pictures.

Ups and Downs

On Monday of last week one of my project partner's sons and I (see last post) went to a training for Peace Corps.  We presented my diagnostic, which went suprisingly well, and then did two days of planning for my first year-ish of service.  This went really well and I was glad that I ended up taking this guy instead of my real project partner, and all the other volunteers wished they had someone has smart and interested as my partner.  We decided that my two main projects would be the hospital and the ecotourism project.

The Hospital:  We have this huge hosptial building that is not being used.  We don't have a permanent doctor, but we are a zone of 10,000 people.  The plan is to equip the hospital building by in-kind donations (thanks Mom!  if you've got some medical equipment or supplies lying around, give me a shout...) and using an organization called Infante Sano (Healthy Baby).  While the government has $ (or so I've been told) to equip this hospital, they have yet to do so.  We are going to talk to the Office of Public Health in our province and try to get her to sign a contract that if we equip the hospital they will finally fullfill their obligation to staff it with a permanent medical staff.  The best part about this was when I suggested this to my project partners they were super excited and said, "If she doesn't say yes, we'll go straight to the capital office".  It's good to know they are 100% behind me on this and really want to make it work.  Long term vision:  medical mission in our now open hospital with my mom, step-mom, sister, and others in March 2010.

Ecotourism Project:  There is a brand new USAID project in the DR to help local, community based ecotourism projects.  These projects are great because they provide the most money directly to the community (ie, not huge, foreign owned hotels) and sustain the environment and share the culture.  Developing my site's ecotourism project is the reason my site wanted me.  I was a little skeptical because they have somewhat unrealistic expectations for this project.  Thankfully, with this new project, someone in authority will tell them how it is and they will realize what I've been telling them all along.  It's a great idea, but you're not going to get enough tourists to warrant 20 full-time guides.  In reality, we don't WANT enough tourists to warrant 20 full-time guides, for how small our area is, that would take away from the essence of ecotourism, and I think they are starting to see that.  Hopefully this USAID project will help with that and we could get $50,000 to develop our site (I have yet to tell them that, as money tends to blur people's visions.)

So, that was the ups.  Now for the downs:

Sadie died.  I did get to see her the day she died over SKYPE, but it's not the same.  It sucks to go through that here because they don't have pets like we do and no one really understood why I was crying.  When I explained that it was my dog, my Dona asked me if it was really something else, like being homesick, and that she really didn't want me to go home (they know we can, technically, leave whenever we want and not stay two years).  So, mourning my beautiful princess was kind of a loss.

Then, my project partner told me they found me a house for RD$1500!  Perfect price.  Plus, it was right next to the association, great location, and it was in really good shape with a bathroom inside!  They were going to change the blinds and I'd be set.  This was yesterday.  Today, he tells me that the person who's renting it has family that wants it now and I can't move in there and we're back at square one.  I'm not a happy camper about this.  

It's been raining straight in the entire country and we are all on flood and landslide watch.  Telling people you enjoy watching the rain here is like telling someone in the US you like watching their house burn down.  With all the damage rain and hurricanes bring, they don't see the beauty in it, understandably, anymore.

Huelga

So, I went to my 3-month In-Service-Training today to present my work of the last three months...here's the story of getting here:

On Saturday, when my host brother was explaining to my project partner, Juan, how to get here, Juan told him he had no idea there was a training and was too busy to attend.  This is after we've been discussing it for 2 weeks and he has a formal hard copy invitation.  Needless to say, I was livid.  I tracked down my other project partners son and asked him to go, without talking to Juan, who was gone.  The next day, Juan tried to "coordinate" the training, I guess suddenly he remembered.  I told him I already found someone else, and he could just forget it, he's been standing me up for our last 5 meetings, so obviously he's too busy to work with me.  

So, my new project partner, Angel, came over to talk to me about logistics.  Then my Dona tells me there is going to be a strike in Cambita, a town I have to pass to get to the Capital, and that public transportation won't be running because they can't get through that town.  We go to the one guy who works in San Cristobal to see if we can ride with him to work.  He informs us we have to leave at 5:30AM (about 4 hours earlier than we were going to leave), but we don't have a choice.  We leave at 5:30AM and when we get to Cambita, the strikers have already blocked the road with burning trash.  So we turn around and take this back "road."  Road is a gross overstatement.  This would not even pass as a ATV trail in the US.  It took us 3 hours to go the distance that would take us 20 minutes on the normal road.  We found the center of our training (and when I say "we" I mean Angel) and were still there 2 hours early, but after that adventure, it was nice to relax.