This weekend was a jam-packed one. After a few weeks of not leaving my site, spending time settling into my new house and working with my various youth groups, I managed to steal a few days in the capital. I had a few things to do in the Peace Corps office as I haven’t been there in two months. Among my tasks; meeting with a few PC Staffers, picking up Multivitamins/protein supplement/anti-malaria meds, updating my housing information and eating candy from care packages.
A friend and fellow Health Volunteer, Ellen, was awesome and joined me in the capital for the weekend. We managed to sufficiently overload ourselves on empanadas, Presidente, dancing, free internet, laying in a hotel room doing nothing and sitting in the sun. We also happened to get stuck in a torrential downpour, flee to a nearby hotel where two men on a business trip from Boston bought us some beer and talked about football for three hours. Anyone who knows how I feel about sports can imagine how thrilled I was (note: sarcasm is really hard to get across via blog-post).
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- Caoba Cigar Maker that Ellen and I talked to for a good 45 minutes in the Capital
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- Enjoying a handcrafted Dominican Cigar (at a 15% discount since we’re volunteers)
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- This is after we got caught in the rain. We looked like this walking into a sports bar. No wonder everyone took pity on us poor Peace Corps Volunteers.
After our whirlwind two days in Santo Domingo, I embarked on a what I would soon find out was the longest day of travel I’ve experienced in my life. I trekked my way up to Santiago for a meeting with some other volunteers. Our meeting was to work out the details of our regional “Chicas Brillantes” conference. A three-day conference for young women to learn and share about gender, female empowerment and HIV/AIDS.
After our meeting, a fellow volunteer, Meg, and I hopped on a guagua to head back to our sites. The guagua from Santiago took about 2 hours, and in the last 15 minutes we noticed some confusion at the seat in front of us. It turns out that a woman was traveling with her elderly mother who had fallen asleep. When she attempted to wake her mother, she wasn’t able to. Now, everyone remained very calm, while Meg and I were exchanging well-deserved worried looks. We tried to show the cobrador (bus fare collector) how to check for a pulse. As we were 10 minutes from the bus stop, we took a detour to the hospital where the doctors carried the woman, who had apparently just died on a bus full of people, away on a wheelchair.
- Typical Guagua in the Dominican Republic. Now put 50 people in it.
Meg and I went on with our day, as there wasn’t really anything else we could do, so we ran a few errands (I had to stock up on Soy Meat, Bananas, Onions and a snickers bar) and then went on our separate ways. I hopped on what I thought would be my last guagua, but the driver informed me that he was in fact only going half-way down the route since he was just going to stop at his house. So I had to disembark and wait for another one. While waiting for the next bus, I used the time to call another volunteer whom I hadn’t spoken with in a while. While on the phone he freaked out because he was suddenly experiencing an earthquake. I thought that was crazy, and than I began to feel the earth trembling beneath my feet and watched as the bus parked in front of me began to sway back and forth. That’s the fourth earthquake we’ve experienced in the DR in the last 2 weeks.
Finally, after another 45 minutes on a guagua, and then a 10 minute motorcycle ride, I made it back to my house, alive and extremely exhausted. For those of you keeping track of what I fit into my 11 hours of travel: 1 Peace Corps Meeting, Grocery Shopping, 3 Guaguas, 2 Taxis, 1 Public Car, 1 Motorcycle, 1 Death, 1 Earthquake. I also had to visit at a few houses once arriving back at my site since I had been gone for four days.
The only thing I had left to do was have a brief conversation with my sister Zibby in the states. All I could do was laugh on the phone with her about my day, apologize for being so tired and then call it a day.
