Day III: Mucha Drama

Waiting for the school to be unlocked

Day III started out rather auspiciously. It had been raining on and off all day with varying degrees of intensity. As we were walking to the school, a light drizzle was falling. (There. I have set the appropriate mood. All further literary pretexts will henceforth be abandonded.)  When we arrived, the school was locked. So we waited and waited and waited some more. Around 2:30, the principal showed up to let us in. We found out later from
Tanya´s uncle Julito, who is the school´s guard, that he is only paid to work in the mornings, which goes a long way to explaining why there are so many more kids hanging around the camp this year. There are little kids, who peek in the windows and hang out in the doorway and then there are older kids who are much more distracting. More on that later. I suppose I should be excited that there is so much interest in our little project here. And we would love to be able to accomodate more children, but the problem is that we´re trying to establish a camp environment conducive to learning and it´s rather difficult with so many distractions. I think though that once again I am bringing my gringo sensibilities to this situation and should just welcome the increased attention that we´re getting.

Watercolor painting

In any event, once we got going, we did lots of great activities. At one point we split the class into an older group and a younger group. Tanya read the book, A City Garden to the little ones, and I led a group read aloud with the older ones. It´s still shocking to me how many of the eleven and twelve year old campers have such weak literacy skills. But the stronger readers helped out when the weaker ones struggled  and they were all very supportive, which was nice to see.  Because of the rain, we had to have indoor sports and luckily (though really there was no luck involved whatsover as my lovely bride is always prepared) Tanya had brought down some games to play. So, the kids played chess, checkers, Battleship, Blink, and Sorry for a while.  You ever try to explain rules to a game like Battleship in a foreign language? I mean I took years of Spanish and never once did the phrase, ¨You sunk my battleship!¨come up.

In any event, we finished up with a nice watercolor art activity in which the kids painted their ideal gardens. What was striking to me was the lack of imagination that many of the campers showed in painting their gardens. Most of them just drew a tree and a few flowers, and some clouds and a sun. Back home, we have done a lot of thinking about how creativity plays such an important part in learning. These kids just haven´t had the opportunity to be creative in school and, as a result, aren´t very good at it. Of note, is that they are amazingly creative when it comes to play; inventing games to play with little or no props at all. I would write more here as I don´t feel that I have completely expressed what I wanted to, but Tanya´s bugging me to finish so that we can head off to the market in town. So, I need to get on to ¨the incident.¨

It was during the aforementioned indoor recess when ¨the incident¨ occurred. Two of the girls innocently enough asked to go to the bathroom. When they didn´t return after ten minutes or so, Tanya went searching for them. She found them in back of the school hanging out with their boyfriends (now do you see why I set the ominous setting at the beginning of this post?)  Tanya  gave them a severe verbal lashing and sent them packing for the day. She warned them that if their boyfriends were hanging out again, she would kick the girls out of the program. Maybe we should be filming this whole thing and turn it into a reality show: ¨The Real Children of Madre Vieja¨.  This would go really well with my product placement idea, don´t you think?

A Thousand Words

Not really. Just a bunch of pictures from days I and II.

Monster Basketball

Boys listening to Doña Yolanda

Art on Day II

Doña Yolanda

Doña y Evan

Don Montilla

Las muchachas listening to Don Montilla

Days I and II

Don Montilla with the campers.

I´ve decided to use Roman numerals this time around so as not to confuse these days with the days from season 1. Heh! Heh! In any event, days I and II of season II are in the books. I was going to write about the first day of camp last night, but there wasn´t much electricity over the last couple of days. As a side note: We take for granted a lot in the U.S.. Take electicity for example. We take for granted that we have unbroken access to electricity (as long as we pay for it). And if the electricity goes out, even for a few minutes, we´re on the phone to the electic company, demanding that we get it back as soon as possible. It just
doesn´t work that way in many developing countries. Here in the D.R. at times the electicity goes out for hours at a time. The reasons for this are complex, to say the least (in a classic Catch 22, the electic company shuts off power because they don´t have the funds for keeping it going round the clock because people don´t pay their electic bills (or simply wire in to someone else´s electricity) and the people claim that they don´t pay their electic bills because the electicity goes off all the time). As Camila and I were sitting in the dark last night, we had a long talk about appreciating what we take for granted in the US. This is a powerful lesson that Tanya and I hope are children absorb.

One more word on electricity. The people here have named electicity Juanita. So when the power goes out they shout: ¨Se fue Juanita¨and when it comes back, ¨Llego Juanita¨ I just love that they have personified an electrical force. There´s something poetic about that.

But I digress.  The first two days of camp, all in all, have gone quite well. We had about 20 children who had registered for the camp, but we really weren´t sure how many were going to show up, especially considering the late time change.  And when we got to the camp on Monday at 2:00 and didn´t see any campers there, I was a bit nervous. (You´d think I´d learn about Dominican time by now) But, by about 2:30 24 campers ranging in age from 8 to 14 had arrived. And today, we had two more, for a total of 26.  Word´s out I guess!!

The first day we spent getting to know each other. Nothing really to write about, though we did introduce the idea of community as the theme of the camp. Then today, we invited two community leaders to come to the camp to speak to the kids. The first was Doña Yolanda, Tanya´s mother. She is the president of all the neighborhood groups in Madre Vieja. She spoke about the history of Madre Vieja (the name of the community) and told us all how the community got it´s name. Turns out that when Trujillo was in charge of things, he controlled all of the farms in the country. This community, back in the day, was a farming community and Trujillo sent all of his older cows here that had passed their calving days and were thus only used for their milk. Hence the name, Madre Vieja. Tanya didn´t even know that story. I find Doña Yolanda truly inspiring. She raised seven children here basically on the little income that their farm provided. She made sure that all of them stayed in school and then sent most of them to the U.S. to get a college education and a future. And over the years she became the leader of the community. When she speaks to them about how the neighborhoood association can help people, the campers listen, because they know. And because in all likelihood the association that Doña Yolanda leads has helped some of their families in one way or another; paying for needed medicine, helping a child, who was detained by the police, get released, providing drinking water. We speak of community activism, Doña Yolanda is the model that we should all follow.

Anyways, the second visitor was Don Montilla, Carmen´s father in law. He grew up on a farm deep in the Dominican countryside, moved to San Cristobal to go to private school, became a teacher and then in his twenties got turned on to chess, eventually becoming the President of the nation´s chess society. He spoke of his life and his travels as the Dominican chess ambassador and was a very powerful speaker. He told this wonderful, if apocryphal, story about the origins of chess. In this version, chess was invented by a Hindu slave in 6th century India. The slave invented the game and brought it to his cruel king. He explained to the King how each piece from the pawns to the knights, to the rooks have their purpose and that without them, the King had nothing. The King was so overjoyed by this game that he told the slave that he would grant the slave anything he wanted. The slave said that all he wanted was freedom for all the slaves, which the King then granted.

The moral of this story, though completely unintended on our part, since we didn´t have much of any idea about what Don Montilla was going to talk about, fit right into our lesson of the day: that everyone in a community has an important role to play and that anyone motivated to do so, could become a community leader. It almost sounds like we know what we´re doing here.

Of course, I could share what happened during Sports, which was a complete mess, with the campers basically running around doing whatever they wanted and shouting at each other a lot, but I think I´ll keep that to myself for now.

One final note, in the picture above, check out everyone in their fantastic green or white camp t´shirt. We have Hector Estrada, a friend of Nelly and Samuel´s to thank. He donated all the funds for the
t´shirts and created the design. Then Nelly and Samuel found a place here in San Cristobal to print them and we got them on Monday morning, just in time for the camp to start (No need to worry about that at all.)  This gives me an idea though: product placement. Maybe we should buy the kids gatorade, for example, take lots of pictures of the campers drinking their gatorade and post them to the blog. Do you think Gatorade would then sponsor the camp and send us lots of money to donate to the community?  Just a thought.

Nirvanah

When I was in college I took a course on Eastern Religious Thought in which I learned a little bit about Buddhism. What I remember is that Buddhists believe that all Earthly pursuits, no matter how pleasurable, ultimately lead to pain because eventually they end; that the way to reach Nirvanah is, thus, to forsake all worldy pleasures.

It´s hot here in the DR in July. No news there. One thing we like to do on these lazy hot days is to walk to Sirena, the DR´s version of Costco, and hang out in the cool, air conditioned space for awhile. The problem with this plan, I find, is that eventually we have to leave. I think the Buddhists have it right.

Parenthetically, we also go to Sirena to get ice cream; a worldy pleasure that I would never give up as Nirvanah without ice cream is not a place I would like to spend eternity.

On the camp front, last night a neighbor of Doña Yolanda´s (that´s Tanya´s mom for those of you new to the blog) came by the house at midnight knocking on the front door. La Doña went to speak with her. Today, we found out that the neighbor, whose older daughter will be one of our campers, really wanted her eight year old daughter to go as well. Wow! If our little camp is yielding late night requests such as this, we must be on to something, right? Of course, the pessimist inside me, striving to get out, would say that the mother just wanted some alone time.  But we´ll keep Mr. Pessimist on the wraps for now.

It´s 7 O´clock on Sunday night. The camp starts tomorrow and only about half of the campers have been contacted and told of the new camp hours. No worries. I´m sure it´ll all work out.

Best Laid Plans

As you may recall, we were told yesterday that we wouldn´t have access to the school in the mornings next week. So, we´ve decided to hold camp in the afternoon, from 2 to 5, the first week and then go back to the original morning plan for the second week of the camp. It turns out that will work out just fine for all of the campers. This could´ve been anticipated by someone wiser than myself. No one bothered to check if the school would be available knowing that if it wasn´t, we would just adjust the plans and everyone would be flexible enough to make it work.

It´s all about the Dominican state of mind: Don´t worry about things too much cause it´ll all tend  to work out in the end. For an eternal planner and worrier like myself, it has always been difficult for me to adopt this state of mind. But if I could, I think I would have a lot less stress in my life, no? I´ve always envied this very Dominican state of mind.

Boxes of Materials

By the way, here´s a picture of all the boxes we sent down for the camp and for the school. The larger ones are filled with supplies. The smaller ones are filled with bilingual books that Brookline donated for our project. We´ll use them in the camp, give some to the campers and then donate the rest to the school.

Grano a grano se llena la gallina al buche. This is one of my favorite Dominican proverbs and the first that I learned during my first visit with my then fiance Tanya 16 years ago.Literally, it means, ¨grain by grain, the hen´s beak will be filled.¨ Sounds better in Spanish right? To me, it means that even though those grains that the hen is eating are tiny, eventually the hen will be full. These boxes might not seem like much, but little by little...

¡Hemos Llegado!

Evan on the school´s new hoops court

 Here I am reporting from the DR for the first time in a couple of years. We arrived yesterday without incident, as they say. The DR is a wonderful place populated by caring and gregarious folk. I make that statement as a disclaimer because many of my observations may come out sounding more critical than intended. My intent really is to describe what I see from my own gringo sensibility and not to criticize. I hope I succeed in finding that balance.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, our arrival. Tanya always says to me that the DR tries so hard to be an accomodating tourist site, but doesn´t always get it right. Case in point. When we got off the plane we were greeted by a nicely dressed man, offering free cuba libres. I shant hesitate to report that Tanya and I enjoyed this ice cold welcome freely. Things were off to a great start. Then, when we got to security, we found out that the computers were down and they were having trouble issuing tourist cards. The line to enter the country quickly snaked through all of the turnstyle ropes, and drastically slowed down our entry. As much as I welcomed the cold libation, after 10 hours of travel, I would´ve preferred being welcomed by a functioning computer system I think. But that´s just me.

So, on to our project. This morning, Tanya, Carmen, Evan and myself walked over to the school to meet the principal and confirm the arrangements for the camp which is to start on Monday. When we arrived, we ran into our first stumbling block (is that a mixed metaphor I see?). The principal told us that they are holding national exams on Tuesday through Friday of next week and that the school would be completely occupied. Oops! Or in Spanish, ¡Oops! She did say that we could run the camp in the afternoon, but we´re not really sure the students are free in the afternoon. Best laid plans as they say. (I think that the expression ¨best laid plans¨ may be used quite a bit. So, I think an abbreviation is in order. How ´bout ¨BLP¨.)

The newly remodelled kindergarten building

The other thing that was striking about our visit is that the school has been completely remodelled since our first version of the camp two summers ago. They refurbished all the classrooms, built a kitchen and new bathrooms, installed a computer room (which necessitated the building of a barbed wire topped wall), refinished the basketball court and beautified the whole place. I´m really excited about the new facilities that we´ll be able to use at the camp. One thing though. See the building pictured to the left? That´s where we planted all of the plants two years ago. You remember those plants right? I guess they lay concrete all around and moved the plants somewhere. I have two hopeful thoughts here.
1.  I hope they donated the plants to local families and that they are thriving in their new homes and providing some beauty in which people can surround themselves.I have to believe that is what happened.
2.  I hope that the beautification project that we undertook two years ago had something to do with the inspiration that led to the remodelling of the school. I know this is hubris, and comes from the place inside me that hopes that we are making a difference here. It´s also a fool´s hope as I saw a plaque stating that the rennovations were funded by the government of Leonel Fernandez, the former president of the country. But, maybe I´ll hold on to that hope anyways.It makes me feel good.  That´s all for now.

And we're off

Heading to the DR tomorrow morning. Nothing like a 6:30 am flight to get you going in the morning.  Add on a 4 hour layover in Ft. Lauderdale and it promises to be a super fun day of travel. The big job today will be to see if we can fit all of our clothes, gifts for the family, and snacks for the camp in 4 suitcases that each weigh less than 50 pounds.

That's all for now. Next entry from San Cristobal...

Miscommunications?

We just got an email from Carmen (Tanya's sister) earlier this week telling us that she had all the students lined up: Fifteen 7 and 8 year olds.  Um... the idea was to work with 7th and 8th graders - not 7 and 8 year olds. The problem is that 7 and 8 year olds in the dominican republic are emerging readers and a lot of the program centers on literacy and requires the students to be developed readers. Two years ago, we worked mostly with 9 to 12 year olds and it worked great. There were a couple of younger siblings that tagged along, however. They weren't solid readers yet and thus couldn't actively participate in a lot of the events. So, this time around we wanted to make sure that the students were of the appropriate age.  Best laid plans I guess (I feel like I use that quote a lot -- it describes very well how things work in the d.r., which has always been a struggle for me since I love to make plans).
In any event, last I heard Carmen is working on finding some older kids for us to work with.  Stay tuned.

Are we helping?

Just some angst going on inside my head these days. I read about projects in the DR that are truly helping the people there. Projects like the fundación Alta Gracia that Julia Alvarez helped to set up that promotes agricultural sustainability while providing work for farmers in the central highlands.(http://www.cafealtagracia.com/links.html) and the Institute for Integrative Medicine (http://integrativedev.interactivemedialab.com/Home.aspx) whose projects include one in which recycled grocery bags are crocheted into handbags and whose profits help to feed and educated dominican children (wow, that was a long and perhaps not even run-on sentence). And I wonder if our little camp is doing any good. I mean for two weeks we provide 20 or so children with an education that they wouldn't otherwise get. We talk to them about their community and environment in an attempt to instill in them a (what's the word?) sensibility about the way they co-exist. But can we actually accomplish this goal in two weeks? Do our actions result in any change whatsoever?

Tanya, forever the optimist, will say that of course we are doing good. That we are providing these children with a positive learning experience; one which, even if it doesn't lead to permanent, visible  change, will nonetheless affect these children. How, I ask? But I guess I know that the answer is the same as how I impact my math students here in Brookline, right?

Still... I think we should think bigger. Or maybe attach ourselves to one of the organizations that is already doing great work in the D.R. I don't know, I guess I always feel some angst as we pass the midpoint of the summer, regardless of what I'm doing.

Season Two About To Begin

Hi all,
Well, it's been a couple of years since my last entry. My intentions were to continue the blog once the camp ended 2 years ago, but, well you know. But, now we're back and getting ready for Campamento Las Margaritas Season Two.  Some of the characters will be the same -- basically the gringo ones, but we will be welcoming a whole new group of campers. Hopefully, we'll get about 25 to 30 youts (to quote Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny) to participate this year, thus doubling our enrollment from two years ago (you know I can't help throwing in math whenever I can right?).

Anyways, preparations for this summer's version are well under way. Yasi and Oscar helped to send down many boxes filled with the supplies we need. Doña Yolanda and Carmen have made arrangements with the principal of the school so that we can use the same space (though I hear the school has undergone many renovations and I can't wait to see how the plants look that we planted two years ago, but I digress). And they are also busily recruiting campers.

From our end, we have received the support of many people and organizations. The Brookline Public Schools donated about 200 bilingual books that we'll be able to use and then donate to the school and the campers. Samuel and Nellie have been working with graphic designers who have created a logo for the school and will be donating t-shirts for all the campers - I'll forward along their information soon. And Mr. and Mrs. Stephen J. Paris have made a generous cash donation that we'll use for supplies and food and then a big project that we'll undertake to help out the school and the community. If that sounds vague, it's because we haven't decided on a project yet and won't until we get down there in a couple of weeks to check out the scene.

That's all for now I guess. This will hopefully be much more interesting once we get the camp up and running.