Day 4: Plantas y Poesia

Hoy si estuvo un buen día! The morning broke sunny and hot. Well, every day dawns sunny and hot in the d.r. in August. Our numbers were almost back to normal as Alaila and Carlos returned. Carlos said that his grandmother wouldn't let them go on yesterday's field trip. Melanie and Mariele were still missing but a new camper, Gorge Luis arrived.
María Victoria Carreño, published poet and unpublished cousin of Tanya came to the camp today to discuss poetry with the campers. First she wrote the following poem on the blackboard:
"...Ayer las estrellas se acostaron sin cenar
y el sol tenia un nudo en la garganta."
She explained that she wrote this poem when she first heard about the earthquake in Haiti. "Las estrellas", she explained were the children of Haiti that didn't get anything to eat that night and "el sol" was the rest of the world that had a lump in its throat. Maria V.'s lesson was about personification: how different objects from nature can be used to represent people. So she asked each student to replace "las estrellas" and "el sol" with their own imagery. The kids loved this and did a great job using such imagery as "planetas" and "la luna", "flores" and "el jardin", "hojas" and "el arbol" and even "Red Sox" and "Yankees" (That was Carlos, our baseball fanatic. But based on the imagery I'm not sure if he's a Yankees fan or a Red Sox fan.) Here's a video of Eduardo Luis reading part of his poem:


Even I, not much of a poetry aficionado was insipired. Here's what I wrote:
"Ayer los pajaritos se acostaron sin cenar y el aguila tenia un nudo en la garganta." Hmmm... Don't think I'll ever be a published poet.

So, that took up the first part of the day. We finished the day planting the seedlings that we bought yesterday al vivero. The campers were really into it. There's already a small garden area at the school and we decided to add to the garden rather than create a new one. We let Carlos decide where we should plant our seedlings and then all the campers got to help. The principal came over at the end of the day and we got a nice photo of her with the whole camp. She seemed pleased with our efforts, but somewhat indifferent. I wonder what that's all about. Once again, I'll choose not to share my intuitions at the current time...


-josh

For more photos go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanyaparis/sets/72157624536195627/show/

Day 3: Al Vivero

Today we were off to el vivero -- plant nursery -- to buy some plants for the school. We hired Fonso -- a cousin of Tanya's who happens to own a gua gua (a small bus)-- to pick us up at the camp at 9:30. So, at 10:15 Fonso came to pick us up. Four of our students didn't show up and we don't know why. Perhaps their parents didn't want their children to go on this "field trip". Carlos, our super "energetic" 10 year old camper, told us that he got lost on two school field trips and his teacher couldn't find him. Apparently the school takes huge groups of kids on field trips and not all the kids are necessarily accounted for when they get back. Don't get me wrong, all the kids end up getting home eventually. I'm not really sure how though.

In any event, our intimate group of 10 headed off to learn about plants. When we arrived at the nursery, the owner showed us around and explained how they used seedlings of one plant to create many plants -- a splicing technique that I didn't hear because I was busy taking pictures. We saw lots of fruit tree saplings -- avocado, carambola(star fruit), lemon, sweet orange and regular orange. I later learned that sweet oranges are for eating and regular oranges are used to make juice. (And they're not really called "regular" oranges. Those ones just don't have a descriptor like "sweet" so I call them regular. At first I was going to call them "non-sweet" but that didn't seem to make sense as they are still quite sweet.)

But I digress. We also looked at lots of different flowers and bought four to bring back to the school (Tio Tomas, Tanya's uncle who works for the department of agriculuture, is hopefully going to bring us some more to plant next week.) And tomorrow we're going to plant them. If we can find a shovel, that is...

-josh


For more photos goto:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanyaparis/?saved=1