Random thoughts...

A few things on my mind...

- We completely underestimated the ubiquity of social media. A number of the Dominican teen leaders followed the Fundación Las Margaritas Facebook page-and posted pictures and thoughts about their camp experiences. I have posted all of those to the page thus presenting a different perspective of the camp. Based on these posts it seems that the relationships they developed with the campers and with the gringos were very powerful.  Here's one such post:

And now that I've shared all their posts with the Fundación page we've got a nice record of their thoughts.

- One difficulty I've always had with the Dominican language is that their Rs sound just like their Ls. For example, the word for pan (as in pots and pans) is either "sarten" or "salten" as those two words are pronounced almost exactly the same. Usually it doesn't matter so much as I just say the words as I hear them. If I ask Doña Yolanda for a sarten or salten she gives me a pan. However, there is one instance that really presents problems and it has to do with politics. The two major political parties here are the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana(PLD) and the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano(PRD). But since Rs and Ls are interchangeable in terms of their pronunciation the "pe-ele-de"(PLD) sounds almost exactly like the "pe-ere-de"(PRD) - at least to my ears. So, I have to be very careful when I talk politics with Tanya's family because they are all "pe-ere-distas" and "pe-ele-distas" are looked upon with a certain, shall I say, disdain.

C la M: Wrap Up

We dropped the kids off at the airport yesterday, picked up yasi and oscar and then drove up to.Samana for some needed R & R. We are staying in a small beach town called Las Galeras. To get here you take a small road from the town of Samana that goes along the coastline and then just ends at the beach here. So we're literally at the end of the earth. Quite a peaceful place.

And a great place to reflect on the camp experience and to share some random thoughts:

The taller de baile:

The dance group met on Thursday afternoon at the house for a final practice before the show on Friday. Based on what I saw, I was skeptical that they were going to be able to pull it off. The girls were doing fine but the boys just couldn't get there act together and yini was still trying to add new steps. But my new Dominican self needn't to have worried so much because it turned out great. They even added a piece at the last minute - never having rehearsed it at all - in which the boys imitated a baseball game. Just another examples of how things here - amidst a sea of chaos and uncertainty - tend to work out in the end.

Bargaining:

Tanya really wanted to give the teen leaders the full Dominican experience so when we took them to el Conde to buy souvenirs she taught them how to negotiate. The problem was that the store clerk was eavesdropping while tanya was explaining to the kids that they should offer half the original price and then pick a price that they would settle on. She was good natured about it though and played along ... to a point. And I think the lesson was a great success. Luc's reaction was the best. He excitedly shared with us that  "I got the price of a pair of sunglasses down to 400 pesos from 650. But then I decided that I really didn't want the sunglasses so I walked away." A born negotiator if I've ever seen one.

Soccer:

An unanticipated development surfaced around soccer. Tanya somehow got in contact with a coach of a local girls team and convinced her to allow Camila and then Bailey to practice with the team (I think some back door negotiating took place allowing the coaches daughter to participate in the camp but I was never too clear on the details). Then it turned out that the team had qualified for the national championship and was going to play in the Olympic stadium in santo Domingo. So off the girls went one day(don't worry stefanie, we sent Yasi along to watch out for them.) The  girls got to play the whole game - apparently against a much older team - and came back all scraped up and smiley. 

And then super disappointed the next day when we told them that they couldn't play in the finals because they had to go on the camp field trip. Ah, the ups and downs of teenage girls.

Green shirts: 

Have you seen the photos of al the campers with the green shirts? Well ... One afternoon a man from town came over to buy some clothes from Doña Yolanda - she has a small clothing store in the house.

He said to her, "give me one of those green shirts that all the kids are wearing. I'm going to the beach and it would go perfectly with my green sneakers." So, apparently, in addition to helping kids become agents of change we've created a new fashion trend.

I feel like I should end this entry with some profound thoughts on these last two weeks but I can't get my head wrapped around that right now. My ideas and emotions are just to complex right now to put into words - given my limited ability to do so. I'll just end with this picture and sort everything out later:

Now It's off to the beach...

The Hardware Store

Been falling behind a little bit here. Partly because so much has been happening (trip to the botanical gardens, overnight in the zona colonial etc) and partly because of fights over iPad time. Nevertheless, I want to try to relate our experience at the hardware store the other day. So here goes:

One day not too long ago (3 days to be exact) tanya, Carmen, luli, and I went to the hardware store to buy the materials we needed to build the garden for Doña Chucha. Tanya put me in charge of getting the wood needed for the frames for the plants so I headed over to the lumber section to find two by fours. I noticed that they had lengths of 10 and 16 feet so I figured for simplicity sake that we could use one of each for each frame and just cut them in half. Here are some tidbits of how I was able to realize this plan:

Getting the wood: So I told the worker that I needed three each of the 10 feet and 16 feet boards. The guy looks at me, looks way up to the top of the pile of 2 x 4s -- looks back at me, points up to the 16 foot boards. I thought to myself , "Yes, I see that the 16 foot boards are way up near the ceiling and yet I still need them." Rather than share that thought I just shrugged my shoulders and pointed to the boards ... Fifteen minutes later they found someone to climb up and get the boards. Here is a recap of what ensued...

Measuring the wood: 

I explained to the guy that I needed the boards cut in half (after fumbling around for the correct wording for a while until I learned from the guy that cut in half is "mitad mitad"). So he takes out his measuring tape and begins to measure the 16 foot board. The problem was that his measuring tape wasn't long enough so he just put it out as long as it would go (leaving a couple of inches leftover) and divided the measurement in half (The mathematician in me was screaming for him to attend to precision). 

          Josh: You can't just divide the tape measure in half because it doesn't reach the end of the 

                    board.

           Guy:  But the tape measure ends here ( pointing to the end of the tape -- a good two inches

                    from the end of the board)

            Josh:  But the board doesn't.

           Guy:    Oh.

He proceeded to just estimate the middle, which turned out to be not very close to the middle at all. Don't I remember something about measuring twice, cutting once? It turned out that that was the only board he cut because ...

Cutting the wood:

The guy cutting the wood didn't actually work for the hardware store. He was just a customer who happened to be in the store and offered to help. When he started cutting the wood tanya offered him 50 pesos (about a dollar) for his help. He said he wanted 500 pesos. And then everyone started arguing. At the end of it all he just walked off and we ended up cutting the wood ourself at Doña Chucha. Honestly, I really don't know how that happened. Somehow a saw turned up -- a new saw at that -- and we were able to get the job done. Really that's how things seem to work here. There's confusion and lots of people arguing about the plan to get done whatever it is you're trying to get done and then changing the plan at the last minute and then somehow it all works out in the end. It never ceases to amaze me every time this happens and I don't really work this way. At least I didn't used to work this way until my recent conversion to dominicanism.

Paying for the wood:

So I get the bill and am told to go over to the cashier to pay. I head in the direction that I was pointed to but I see no one there. Then this disembodied arm reaches through a small window in a pane of tinted glass and I hear a voice asking for the bill. I then looked (I know I'm switching tenses here but I don't care to go back and fix it and suddenly it seemed that the past tense would be better) through the tiny window and I saw a real person attached to the arm; a real cold person since she was sitting in a tiny air-conditioned office.

Delivering the wood:

So once we got all this settled we loaded the wood, hardware and a hammer (though it turned out that a rock was just as useful) onto a horse drawn cart and sent it off to the school to await our arrival. Nothing too interesting here I guess. I just wanted to bring up the fact that a lot of business like this is still completed with horse drawn carts here.

So, that was our adventure at the hardware store. Real shame that we didn't have any camera with us to record all of the action, especially watching Carmen ride off with our wood.

Camp 3.0 Día 7:Doña Chucha

So... I usually don't like to share too many details of the day to day activities of the camp because I actually want people to read the blog but I've got lots to say so bear with me here. Yesterday ( cause it's actually Wednesday -- another reason I have lots to say) was quite a day. It's really been my favorite camp day in the past, the day that Anin (Maria Victoria Carreño) comes to teach the campers about poetry. She wrote this poem on the board:

                Ayer las estrellas se acostaron sin cenar

                Y el sol tenia un nudo en la garganta

And then she explained how she wrote it the day of the earthquake in Haiti as a way to express her emotions as she thought about the children of Haiti, going to sleep hungry that evening and the whole world unable to do anything to help. She explained imagery and then had the kids write poems about the same theme using their own imagery. Such a well-structured and powerful lesson. Even my group, usually , shall we say, rather energetic, was captivated.

Later in the afternoon we all went over to La Escuela Doña Chucha, a local school and did some real life service learning. We had shipped down (remember all those boxes?) tons of school supplies that Tanya had got at Savers and yard sales and from donations. So we had the leaders organize all those supplies, as well as the books we sent down, for the kindergarten class at the school. At the same time, the leaders built a garden for the school. That's right ... A real live garden. I think the pictures would really tell the story here:

Campamento 3.0 día 6

This first day of week two was certainly full of excitement. The theme of the day was water (as we moved from personal health to the health of the community) and Kelly led the campers through an experiment testing water samples from the river, the faucet, and from a bottle for E. coli and other bacteria. The kids really got into it -- probably the first time they'd done any type of experiment at all I would imagine.

But the real experiment came from the Easter egg hunt. I'm not exactly sure what this activity has to do with our camp ( I overheard tanya telling her campers that we brought the teen leaders with us to learn about Dominican culture and this was a chance for them to learn something about US culture - even though almost all of the teen leaders are Jewish) but we've done this activity both times that we've run the camp and the kids love it. In any event, from my room I saw Tanya's group heading out first to look for the plastic eggs that the teen leaders had filled with chocolate and hidden I earlier in the day. A few minutes later one of her teen leaders called me into Tanya's room. I followed her in and she told me that an ant was stuck in the eye of one of her campers. What?! Maybe I didn't here her right. But then I looked down at the desk at which the girl was sitting and it was swarming with ants attacking a melted piece of chocolate. Ay at ay.. Qué revolú! Have you ever tried to get an ant out of a child's eye? I certainly haven't and really had no idea how to go about it. So, I took stock of the situation and decided that my best course of action was to focus my attention on the ants that were now spreading to other desks and other pieces of melted chocolate and to call my wife in to provide medical assistance for the girl ( she did want to be a nurse once upon a time) Fifteen minutes later tanya was successful at removing the offending ant and the girl was fine.

But then we checked all of the eggs as the students returned with them and most of them were filled with ants and melted chocolate. I guess an Easter egg hunt in the middle of summer in a tropical climate was not such a good idea after all. Ah well. We called all the kids in and gave them other chocolates that we had saved for just such circumstances and they were happy. Another fun and exciting day at Campamento las margaritas.

The water testing experiment:

Charlie's drawing lesson:

Making bird houses in el taller de arte:

Campamento LM: Día 5

Hard to believe that the first week of camp is in the books. Really it couldn't have gone any better. When we started this camp five years ago it was our goal to expand at some point so that we could help more kids because it was hard for me to believe that a 2 week camp every other year with twenty students would make any difference whatsoever. And now every day I look at all the campers and teen leaders milling about and wonder ... How the $&@?!&$ did this happen? When it comes down to it I  think it began when Sophie and Lydia (the Paris primos) expressed interest in coming down with us. That was all the impetus my wonderfully energetic and creative wife needed to imagine what the program could become. At the same time Samuel and Nelly pushed us to become an official non-profit organization and took care of all the paperwork to make that happen. So with the means to gather funds we were able to put into place Tanya's vision. And here we are...

I have to fess up to the fact hat one reason we began the camp was a very selfish one. We wanted to find a way for our own kids to become connected with Dominican kids. Although our kids participated in the camp that we created they didn't really interact with the other campers... until this year. I've been amazed at how much the gringos and Dominicanos have been hanging out together. I've already spoken of the leadership of the Dominican teen leaders but today the gringos stepped up especially in the taller de arte. All the teens led the campers in various art activities but it was especially moving (to me anyways) to watch Evan (our Evan) explain in Spanish how to do origami. Did I mention that it was in Spanish? 

Alright, that's all I got. We're heading up into the mountains for a weekend camping trip and then three more teenagers are coming down on Sunday. We'll see what next week brings.

CM 3.0: Day 4...La lección de las Abejas

So have I really been Dominicanized? Today was a true test. The plan for the day was to learn about bees from Tio Thomas (Tanya's uncle, who had brought one of his bee colonies down from Cambita for the camp). We started the day with a KWL (know-want to know-learned) to prepare the campers for the bee lesson. As we were finishing that up tanya informed me that Thomas would be late so we had Charlie, Jacob and Evan teach each class how to draw a bee. But... Half way through that we were told that Tio Thomas had arrived. Back to the original plan it was (as yoda might say) so we all marched over to doña Yolanda's - our home base - where Thomas was waiting with his bees. At this point we only had 20 minutes left for the activity. Thomas began by seeing what the campers knew about bees and what questions they might have. Apparently our prep activity was pretty successful because the campers jumped right in with all sorts of question and ideas. Then Thomas showed the campers the bees but they only could see them in groups of 10, so 20 minutes became 40 minutes which meant that we didn't have time for Los talleres today. 

'Twas quite a hectic and ever changing day and it sounds like a mess right? But in the midst of all this the students learned a lot about bees and got to see up close and personal a real and functioning bee colony. As well, we talked about how bee colonies relate to the ideas of community and cooperation-- the two themes that we had previously discussed. So, at the end of the day it all worked out. And throughout it all I was my newly created calm cool Dominican self. For real mom.

Camp 3.0: Day 3

So, if I were asked to state the goal of el campamento (which I have been on many occasions) I would say that it is to empower the children of San Cristobal to be agents of change. Based on what I saw from the Dominican teen leaders today I would say that we have most definitely made some progress towards this goal (I actually think that we've had quite an effect in this area, but my overall humility prevents me from saying so). For example...

At recess Ashley (Dominican teen leader extraordinaire) led about half the campers in a sack race. I realize that that doesn't sound like such a big deal but tanya and I have tried and completely failed to organize recess for five years. I vividly recall our first recess years ago in which we tried to get a soccer game going. It lasted about three minutes before one team "perhaps" scored a goal and the game devolved into a giant argument. For the most part "recreo" hasn't really ever been much better than that. But this year has been different and today was stupendous. It looked like this:

And like this:

Then, after recess the teen leaders divided into groups to run three workshops: Art, music theatre, and dance. They were all really good. I spent a lot of time watching the dancers work through a choreography that the leaders put together last night. Loraine (previously mentioned as yini - her first name) is shown below leading the group. This wiped Loraine out so much so that she basically fell asleep later that day at the beach (more on that trip soon)

Taller de arte:

Taller de musica y teatro:

So... There you have it. These teen leaders, many of whom attended the camp in past versions, have blossomed into the leaders we hoped they would become and are taking over the camp. 

Another of the goals of the camp was for the gringo and Dominican leaders to make real connections. T form their own community as it were. Miraculously, considering the communication challenges, this seems to be happening as well. We all spent the afternoon at the beach. Hmmm... I took about a hundred pictures with my "real" camera. Let me work on getting the pictures here............Okay took a bit of work but here you go:

Well, you can probably guess the work around that I used. Pretty creative huh? Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all

Campamento 3.0: Day 2

Gary, I hope you're reading this. The theme for today was "community". As I do often in my math classes, I decided to divide the class into groups of 3 to talk about their community, it's leaders, the responsibilities of the members of the community, how to improve the community etc. So I had the students count off by sixes and I then pointed out where each group would meet and told the students to move to those areas...no one moved. Silence. And then the students just started talking to their neighbors about the community. So I asked a student what was his number and he had no idea. I asked another student and she had no idea.  

It was then that it dawned on me that they had never worked in groups like I wanted them to. Or at least they hadn't been divided into groups like that. You know I've been doing this long enough you would think that I could've anticipated this development -- especially after claiming yesterday that I have been dominicanized -- but I guess not. These little differences in the educational experiences of gringos and Dominicanos keep on popping up when I least expect them to. The teachers just don't put kids in groups here to learn. It's as simple as that. On the other hand maybe I just don't speak Spanish all that well.

In any event, I'm not easily deterred from my plans so we counted off again and I worked harder to explain what I wanted the kids to do and it all worked out. We even did some pair shares and some wait time work; pretty advanced stuff but manageable once I learned that I needed to be precise and explicit in explaining what I wanted to happen. Again, after teaching for 22 years you would think that I would already know this.

Here's what one group wrote about community:

Students working on their journals:

Doña Yolanda talking with the campers about community organizing:

Campamento 3.0: Day One

Day one is in the books and was a great success. We arrived more or less at 9:00 (well some of us did.   Our teen helpers were hanging out upstairs unbeknownst to us as we thought that they had already headed over to the school.) and there they were ... A lhorde of campers waiting for us -- which was a relief because we're never quite sure if they will show up. The problem was that there was only one room ready for us so we had to squeeze into that one room while the others were being.cleaned. Here they all are:

No worries. Yini -- one of the teen leaders, and a future teacher if I ever saw one -- took over, taking roll and organizing the distribution of the camp t-shirts with Carmen . By then the rooms were ready so we divided up the kids and got to work:

For me the hi light of the day was recreo(recreation). One group of younger boys got together and played baseball using their palm as a bat and a pair of rolled up socks as the ball. But I truly realized we had done something good when I saw that Camila, Eric, and Jacob had joined the giant game of banderita that was being organized:

I feel like in the past I have shared my gringo observations of a Dominican camp but today my observations are more directed at myself. Basically, after 17 years married to una Dominicana I think I have at long last become Domicanized. In the past I would've become a tad flustered when our plans didn't go off as expected. But today, it was like water off a duck's back (I was going to use the expression "cool as a cucumber so I could contrast that with the oppressive heat but decided that that expression didn't fit as well) I just laid back and waited for things to work out as they always tend to do ... eventually. We'll see if my cool, calm, collected new self (don't laugh tanya) lasts the two weeks. I'll keep you posted.