My sister came a couple weeks ago, and it was wonderful to see her and show her around my Dominican life.  I took her to a couple of my classes, and she was a big hit with the little brother.  When she arrived at the airport, she had stuffy sinuses and looked like winter, but we soon fixed that with a couple trips to the beach.  On Thursday we went to the southwest part of the country, to Las Dunas (the dunes), which were amazing and deserted.  They were about the size of the dunes in Michigan if you have ever been there, but without the forest behind them, so at first it looked like we were hiking through the desert.  It was an amazing site to reach the crest of the dune and find the Caribbean ocean and the beach, totally vacant of people or any signs of them, and to look out the other direction and see the mountains.

Semana Santa, which is the holy week before Easter, was like our Spring Break in the United Sates.  Me and a friend went up to the Peninsula Samaná, a beautifully green mountainous area in the northeast side of the country.  We hiked through tropical forest to abandoned beaches, opened coconuts that had fallen from the trees and drank the milk, and other magical things like that.  Our friend Dena came and we went to Playa Rincón, which is 3 km. of continuous beach, with a beautiful view of the mountains looming up to the north.  We stayed in an apartment sort of place and cooked our own meals, which was very fun and a nice break from the Doña’s food.

The second half of Semana Santa I went with my host family to Santiago, where the entire extended family of my host mom lives.  We passed the hours “tranquilo” as they call it, talking and eating habichuelas con dulce, which is a drink kind of like hot chocolate except its made with beans, with sweetened condensed milk, cinnamon, and raisins.

Its getting into crunch time as far as school goes:  all of my classes were fairly light on the workload throughout the semester, but they all have end-of-semester projects which are a lot of work.  So this may be my second to last blog post before I go back to the US.

On Friday we went with the program on an excursion to the Haitian border and to see the border market culture.  It was a very interesting experience.  Basically, the border opens during Fridays for the market and other trading, and people can pass through the two countries without getting stopped during that day.  There was a small river separating the two countries, and on the Haitian side a UNICEF tent was set up.  Supplies have been going to Haiti in great amounts since the earthquake, but a lot of goods that are sold in the DR are also passed through Haiti because Haiti does not have any taxes on electronics or home appliances like the DR does.

A couple weeks ago I accidentally ran into the President of the DR in the hotel where the gym I go to is.  Elections for congress are happening in May, so there are politically rallies and politician advertisements all over the place.  I walked into the hotel and saw a bunch of camera people and the National Police, and then a few hours later a entourage came through with the president in the middle of them.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.  I am more comfortable than ever now with my life here, but I can feel the transition of moving back to the US looming, and I find myself thinking about summer in Portland often.  I was thinking the other day that after this semester is over, I will know this city of Santo Domingo more than any other city in the world, save Chicago.  Isn’t that an interesting thought?

I hope you are all well.

Love,
Jonah

1. My sister is coming on Saturday!  She is staying a week, because she has spring break from her prestigious private college in the capital city of Minnesota.
2. My little brother is playing a handheld Tetris game right now.  He is holding it upside down, but has no idea how to play anyway.
3. I just had a tuna fish sandwich for dinner, and am about to go bowling with friends.
4. There was a student strike at La UASD (the big university) today, so no classes there.  These strikes happen frequently.
5. The last two weekends have both been Carnival events.  Last weekend was a big parade down the Malecòn (the waterfront, like Lake Shore Drive) of Santo Domingo.  There were lots of costumes, including some very not-PC ones of Spaniards beating black slaves.  There were the traditional costumes to, of people dressed in colorful baggy suits with masks with horns, carrying whips and/or inflated things attached to string to hit people with.
6. The weekend before that we went to the famous Carnival in La Vega, which is a smaller town in the interior.  This Carnival was crazier – more drunkenness, more people trying to hit you with inflated pig bladders, but otherwise the same as the one in Santo Domingo.
7. I went to Santiago, the second largest city in the DR, with my friend and explored the city, hung out with a Dominican family that my friend is close to.
8. Went to San Pedro de Marcorìs, a port town in the southeast.  Explored.  Bought French fries and shared them with a homeless boy.
9. My host dad thinks that all of the recent earthquakes have been happening because we are extracting oil and mining the earth, and when you take things out of the earth, bad things happen.
10. Got a haircut, bought some new clothes.

That’s all for now.  I must be off.  I hope you, the reader, are doing well.

Love,

Jonah

First off, this is my first time studying abroad in another country.  Which means that coming into this, I had a well-defined set of beliefs and ideas about what this experience was going to be like before I got here, none of which were based on a past experience.  My ideas about study abroad were influenced largely by my Lewis & Clark friend’s and how they related their experiences, what my professors said the DR was going to be like, and what I had gathered from traveling in Central America for a month.

The amazingly funny and painfully truthful blog “Stuff White People Like” lists “Study Abroad” as #72 in the long list of things that characterize a young white urban liberal’s existence.  And coming from a largely white college where 60% of the undergrad students study abroad at some point in their college careers, I knew that coming into this I was not attempting anything unique in the least.  Encouragingly, half of the American students in my study abroad group label themselves as something other than white, although I will venture a guess that statistically study abroad in general is primarily a upper-middle class white experience.  Regardless, study abroad is, on the surface, a chance to experience another culture, maybe learn another language; underneath it is seen as your chance to party and go crazy.

There are two sides then to the large silver coin that is the study abroad experience.  One side is a sincere desire to experience and learn from another culture, to widen one’s own perspective and worldview.  This side might even see studying abroad as a chance to use one’s skills for the betterment of a developing nation, to do a little work fighting poverty or hunger or homelessness.  At the very least it is a sincere desire to study in a different setting with new challenges, a chance to build one’s own character and to test one’s own moral fiber.

The other side of the coin can be summed up by the title of a great Onion News article: Semester Abroad Spent Drinking with Other American Students.  Especially in a country such as the DR, where beach/resort tourism abounds and the drinking age is 18, it is hard not to be swept up in that euphoria.  Being in a foreign country, away from your regular friends, far away from family, away from your home institution, gives you the sense that you can do whatever you want: your actions seem to be without consequences, and even the consequences adhere to a convenient rule of What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.

Here then, is a short list of the things I’ve learned so far during my short stay in the DR:

1. First off, it is important to step back and think, why am I doing this?  Simply questioning your own motives and talking about what it means to study abroad is a great first step.
2. Studying abroad is in and of itself a seemingly “simulated” or “fake” experience.  You are living in a foreign country, but with an assistance network behind you that no new immigrant has.  You have a family, but they are not actually your family, just for the next for months.
3. Its OK to hang out with Americans.  Its OK to speak English.  At the beginning of the trip, I found myself often not wanting to hang out with my fellow American students, wanting only to speak Spanish.   But then I realized that connecting with these people was just as much an eye-opening and learning experience as connecting with Dominicans.  Besides, wanting to only hang out with Dominicans and only speak Spanish is perpetuating the false idea that you are actually assimilating into some kind of Dominican identity for 4 months.  Just think, if you were a Polish immigrant coming to Chicago, you would want to connect with the people who you could communicate and relate to the most:  other people who spoke Polish and were culturally like you.  There’s nothing wrong in wanting to connect with people like you while you are abroad or anyplace else.
4. If you are coming to study abroad in a developing nation and looking to “help” in any sort of way, make sure you take a step back first and question your motives.  Read Ivan Illich’s speech To Hell with Good Intentions.  Remember that an under-skilled college student is not exactly the type of person to solve that nation’s problems.

Well, those are my thoughts and feelings so far; they will most likely change as February turns into March, March into April, and April into May.  Let me know what you think in the comments.  ¡Que tengan buen fin de semana!

Love,
Jonah

First, let me give you some background.  The Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean, on an island called Hispaniola that is southeast of Cuba.  The DR is the second largest country in the Caribbean in land area.  The weather right now is like Chicago in the summer – hot and humid.  January is their coldest month, but it wouldn´t be considered cold by any stretch of the Northern American imagination.  The city has around 1 million inhabitants, lots of palm trees, tourist hotels near the waterfront, and crazy traffic.  The majority of people are of mixed Spanish and African descent, and the country´s language is, of course, spanish.

Some interesting tidbits of information:

• Because so many Dominicans emigrate to the US and because of the country´s relative proximity to the US, there are many words they use here that are actually hispanized english words.  For instance, the word for security guard is ‘guachmén’ (watchman), the word for breakfast cereal is ‘cornflé’ (corn flakes), and the word for tape is ‘téipe’. 
• Although our host mom´s wash our clothes in the washing machinefor us, everyone, especially women, have to wash their own underwear.  Usually this is done in the shower with a special bar of soap.
• They have more kinds of fruit and vegetables here than I ever thought imaginable.  Every meal I learn about a new food that does not exist in the US.
• Because of the Trujillo dictaturship which brought on a general dislike of Haitians and people of Haitian ancestry, many people in the DR claim that Dominicans are a mix of Spanish and Indigenous ancestry and deny any influence of African ancestry, even though the native Tainos were wiped out within 50 years of Columbus´s arrival.

So, what have I been up to this past week?  Well, on Tuesday I met my host family:  I have two parents, I believe they are in their early thirties, and a 4 year old brother.  My mom´s name is Carolina and she works in a stationary store. My dad´s name is Jorge and he used to work for some company but was recently laid off.  My brother´s name is Jorge Davíd, he goes to preschool and is a whole lot of fun.  I think I´m going to learn a lot of Spanish hanging out with him.  We live in an apartment complex that is about two blocks from the ocean and four blocks from my host institution, which is called FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, or Latin American Fellowship of Social Sciences).  I´m going to be taking 2 or 3 classes there at FLACSO, one of which includes an internship with a social development organization.  I´m taking 1 or 2 classes at a college called Bonó, which is a Jesuit institution, its all male and they are all studying to become priests.  I´m also taking 1-2 classes at ‘La UASD’ (pronounced La Woss), which is the big public university.  It has 160,000 undergrad students, and is also the oldest university in the New World.

There are 31 students on our program, all of which attend American universities.  Most are originally from the US, two were born here in the DR, and 3 are from Jamaica.  We have spent the last few days together learning how to take public transportation, selecting classes to take, and hanging out.  The public transportation is a little crazy here, but its fun.  The basic buses are called Guaguas, and have semispecific routes and semispecific stops.  Conductors hang out the door and yell where they´re going, and try to get people on.  There are also Carros Públicos which are like taxis but have specific routes and pick up passengers along the way.  There are also normal taxis that will take you anywhere.  Finally, there are a few newer buses that are like the ones we have in the States, and there is a very new underground metro train which has one line running north to south through the city – I have yet to see or ride it.

What else?  On Saturday we went to the ruins of a colonial sugar plantation, saw where Trujillo was shot, and went to a women´s house who practices a syncratic Dominican religión that is basically the combination of Catholicism with African gods, beliefs and customs.  We then spent the rest of the afternoon at a beach, and I swam in the caribbean ocean for the first time.

This next week classes at Bonó begin, and Im going to a few of the social development orgs to see which one I want to intern for.  Classes at FLACSO start on the 18th and Las Uasd doesnt start till the 25th.

Well, that was a big blob of things I´ve done and thought about since I got here.  More later of course, and feel free to ask about or discuss anything by leaving a comment below.

Love,

Jonah