Post Camp Processing

So, we've been away for a week or so travelling around the country. I've had a lot of down time to process and reflect upon what went down this year at camp. I didn't actually use a lot of the time thinking about the camp as I preferred to use my down time reading or running, but I'm 3/4 of the way through the last book that I brought with me on this trip and with a couple of hot nights and a long day of travel ahead I'd like to make the book last. As well, my joints could use a break from running. So I've mentally returned to the camp for a bit.  Here goes.

I think this year was much improved over our first effort two summers ago. We had almost twice as many campers and, although, that presented some management issues, especially with some of the campers who were more interested in boys than in cacao, overall the brain energy was much greater, enabling us to have more interesting conversations. I think also that the diversity of activities we did this year (cacao, botanical gardens, engomado, etc.) made for a more enriching experience for the campers. So, there´s that.

Before the camp began this summer, remember I wrote that post wondering about the benefits of this camp? I'm sure you're wondering what my thoughts are on that front now that camp is wrapped up for the summer, right? Well, as much as I would like to report that my thoughts on this matters have sorted themselves out in my head, I don't really think that would be accurate. As people responded earlier, the effect we teachers have on our students can't really be measured right away. We have to wait and see how our students develop and hope that someday they will realize how they benefitted from us. I think that's where I stand with our campers. I hope that deep down inside of them we ignited a spark of creativity, of social conscience, or responsibility, of environment concern that will someday grow into a fogon (bonfire). Maybe someday they will find themselves with the opportunity to be creative in school (or out of school, I suppose) and will recall all the art activities we did this summer. Or maybe some day they will look at their streets filled with garbage and actually see the garbage and will then be able to do something about it.

Or maybe they will simply fondly recall some nice, well-intentioned Gringos who, for a couple of weeks, took a few hours out of their hectic lives to spend with them. And if these Gringos cared enough about them to do so, maybe they will care enough about themselves to make themselves great, or something like that.(I think Elon replied to my earlier misgivings with that thought and I think he's right.)

To close, I would take you back to the beginning of this adventure. Two years ago, Tanya and I looked for a camp to send our kids for a couple of weeks while we were here visiting her parents. The idea was for them to maybe make some Dominican friends, get immersed in the culture, and learn some more Spanish along the way. When we couldn't find such a camp, we decided to create one of our own. That was the origin of Campamento Las Margaritas. I don't really think we've been all that successful with our own kids as they haven't integrated with the other campers nearly as much as we would've liked. However, the learning atmosphere we created I think ended up being of benefit to the local community. The message I take out of this is that often when you set out to do one thing, you often end up doing something completely different, but, perhaps much more valuable. That's the real meaning behind "best laid plans of mice and men" as I take it even if Mr. Steinbeck had something completely different in mind.

Out of juice, so I better post now. Plus I don´t have anything left to say.

It´s All Over

Well, Season II is now in the can, as they (who?) say. And I´m happy to report that after six days with a head cold, I´m finally feeling better today. Last night, I gave in and accepted and ingested any and all medicines that were thrust in my direction. I´m not sure what they all were, and I´m still feeling a little woozy, as if my head had spent a few minutes inside of a wachine machine. But, I think   whatever was clogging up my head has been excorsised.

Williams and Joriel planting a manzanilla tree

In any event, today was a marvelous finish to the camp. Over the weekend, Dona Yolanda was able to procure about 20 saplings of fruit trees that are very rare on the island these days: manzana de oro, mamon,granadillo, guanabana, mandarina. And today we planted them. After the mysterious disappearance of the plants that we planted two years ago, we decided that this year we would plant the trees at people´s houses. So, a couple of days ago Yasira led a group of campers going door to door around the neighborhood looking for nice and caring homes for the treees. And today, we followed Don Tilo and his pickaxe around, retracing Yasira´s footsteps, and planted about 20 trees in gardens around the school. Not to get too worked up about it all, but there´s something about planting trees that really hits me deep inside. I don´t know what it is exactly, but putting something into the Earth that will provide nourishment for both people and the Earth itself satisfies some primal need. When Don Montilla came to speak to us last week, he said something that struck a chord in me; that to live a fully realized life one should do three things: have a child, plant a tree, and write a book. So, now I´ve got two out of the three. And if you count this blog as a book, then I´m all set.

After finishing the planting we returned to the school and prepared for the end of camp celebration that we had planned. The campers´parents came and we had a little picadera. Then we presented the campers with a diploma and a gift of school supplies and seeds. Get it? The school supplies so that they can continue growing as learners and thinkers and the seeds so that they can grow trees. Then the campers read the poems they had written last week and it was over. I´ve got a lot going through my head right now about this experience. But I´m also hungry. So it´ll have to wait until I can process everything.  Buen provecho.

Day VII

Making Birdhouses

Lots of art today at Campamento Las Margaritas as we continue on the path to creativity.  The kids began the day with wikisticks and then they made and decorated birdhouses. At AC Moore, Tanya had found birdhouse kits on sale at some point this past winter and snatched up a whole bunch. She also packed some birdseed in one of the boxes that was sent down earlier this summer. But that particular box got 'misplaced' somehow and never made it.  I like to think that somewhere in the world, tropical birds are enjoying the birdseed and grateful for the unexpected gift.

Dr. Ismael Reyes

In any event, after the art projects and sports, we had a very distinguished guest come speak to the campers. Dr. Ismael Reyes, the father of Nelly, is a business and political leader of the DR. He spoke to the campers about the importance of studying hard and conveyed the message that poverty is a state of mind and the way to get out of poverty is through education. The campers were very respectful, attentive and well-behaved as he was quite inspiring. TTFN.

Dia VI: El Cacao

Cacao Vendor

Today was a lovely day at Campamento Margaritas. Though I am feeling quite run down with a cold that has stubbornly lodged itself in my head and sinuses for the past three days, everybody else was in fine spirits. And why not? For today, we made chocolate. But I should back track as the story really started last Thursday. On that morning, Evan, Camila, Anthony, Tanya and myself went off on a  great adventure to find cacao beans in the market in town. It was hot, superhot really, and muddy and the market was filled with people, which was great, and motorcycles, which was not so great. And vendors selling everything from passionf ruit, to avocados, to bluejeans to toothbrushes. We asked vendor after vendor if they knew of a man who was selling cacao beans. They all pointed vaguely in a certain direction and we went off until we found another person to ask. At one point, a vendor asked us to watch his stall while he went looking for the illusive cacao vendor. Alas, he came back in ten minutes with only the news that somewhere deep in the bowels of the market, was a stall that sold all sorts of medicinal herbs, one of which was cacao beans. So, we headed inside and followed a maze of very dark passages that led from one vendor to another. I felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie, searching for the illusive cacao vendor who held the secrets to everything. Finally, we found him. He did, in fact, have the answers to everything, at least in terms of medicinal herbs, of which he sold many. He gave Camila a bag of some mysterious herb and told her that when she had a sore throat she should boil the herbs and then gargle with the solution. And he had cacao beans, of which we bought 200 pesos worth.

Peeling Cacao Beans

And that brings us to today. Dona Yolanda toasted the cacao beans yesterday and today we had all the students help complete the process. Before we began, Dona Yolanda explained that cacao beans, along with sugar cane and coffee have been historically the major crops of the DR. She added that eating cacao is good for people with anemia and for women who have just given birth, as it helps to bring the mother's milk in.
Then, the students peeled all the cacao beans and Don Tilo placed them in a giant pestle and used a mortar to grind the beans into a paste. By the way, any day that you get to use a giant mortar and pestle is a good one in my book. All of the students got a turn helping out (I didn't help and feel like I should have. It seems like grinding cacao beans into chocolate is something that one should do in one's life and I can't imagine when I'll have another opportunity to do so.) and Dona Yolanda added some cinnamon and sugar to sweeten the beans. It was a magical process as the beans first broke down into small pieces and then, slowly reconstituted into an oily paste that, once the bitterness was cut with sugar, was delicious. Each students was given a small ball of the chocolate paste to take home to eat as is or to make into hot chocolate; a staple of children's breakfast here.

Making the Cacao Paste

Before today, many of the students had no idea even that chocolate came from cacao beans. When Tanya asked them how to make chocolate, they all responded: "Well, first you boil water, then you add the piece of chocolate, some cinnamon, a pinch of salt, some sugar and finally some milk."  They are completely correct of course, if the question were how to make hot chocolate but underlies an observation that Tanya has made; that children in the DR really don't have a great sense of where their food comes from. Perhaps in connecting the food they eat to the land from which they come, children will better value the need to protect their land.

Wow, that sounds wicked altruistic and self-serving. Perhaps it was just a great day making chocolate, as how could it be otherwise?

Days IV, V and V.V

Camila and Cailyn Sweeping Water

Pickin' up Trash and Mud

Rey and Company

Lots to report as the tropical storm that blew through the Caribbean this weekend knocked out electricity and  internet for awhile. Which is really just an excuse for me being lazy. Because I have so much to report, I think I'll work backwards from today. Tanya's friend Rey, one of the community and youth organizing leaders, led us in a neighborhood cleaning project. Rey bought some bleach, and arranged for water and trash trucks to come by. Jacoby, Tanya's nephew, bought some brooms and trash bags and we set out to clean the streets around the school. We being a whole bunch of people from the neighborhood and about 15 of our campers. Here's how it worked: The water truck came by and sprayed a bunch of water in the gutters of the streets. Then we all swept the water down the gutters along with all the trash and mud that was in them. This resulted in piles of trash that we scooped into trash bags with some shovels. Then the trash truck came by and picked up all the bags. We were at this for about two hours. Here's the thing. If you walked around the school right now, you would have a hard time seeing that a major cleaning project had just taken place. We did our best, but there was a lot of trash and mud and we couldn't get all of it. Camila was pretty frustrated as we walked back to the house, asking me what had we actually accomplished. I share her frustration as the act of cleaning the streets in the DR is quite sysiphisian (I just love when I get to use that word even if I can't spell it). But, somehow, I think it's the act of cleaning that's important and, not necessarily the results. I send that message to my kids all the time; that it's the road that we choose to take that's of value, not really what's at the end of the road. Even though we didn't make a huge dent in the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of the streets, the fact that so many people worked together on the cleaning project is meaningful. There is an expression in Spanish, "mano a la obra", which basically means, "it's time to get to work." It's the work that's of value as well as the fact that more and more Dominicans are beginning to care about what their streets are looking like.

Working backwards, this brings us to Friday, Day V. This was our big, field trip day as Samuel and Nelly made all of the arrangements for us to visit The National Botanical Gardens in Santo Doming. They rented a bus for us and made a reservation with a private guide. So, we met at 9:00 in front of the school (It's of note that everyone with the exception of Nicol had arrived at the school before we did. I guess they were just a tad excited.), loaded into the bus and thirty minutes later arrived at the gardens. We had a guide take us through a museum of sorts, had some lunch and then got on a train/car that would take us through the park. It really was quite beautiful as the diversity of flora on this island is quite stunning. Many of the campers had never been there before, even though it's only about 1/2 an hour away and were taken aback by what they saw (at least, I hope, deep inside, they were).

One thing I would add about the train/car ride: There was a driver and a guide that spoke to us via a microphone. She spoke extremely slowly, whereas the driver drove very quickly, the result being that by the time the guide finished telling us what we were looking at we were looking at something else. This is another example of  the vagaries of the tourist industry here. The government has been able to construct a beautiful park showcasing, as I mentioned, the incredible diversity of the flora on the island. And they even set up a car/train ride to give you access to it. Then they fly you through as quickly as possible, as far as I can tell, solely because that's how they drive here. I mean at one point we must've been going 40 miles per hour down a hill and around a corner. I think I spotted some bamboo at one point, but I was never quite sure.

Anin y Su Posia

Which, in this time travelling backwards post, brings us to Thursday. I think in the last post, I spoke of the lack of creativity of the campers; the result of their not having many opportunities to be creative. We took this issue head on on Thursday. We started off by giving each student a small tub of playdough (pictures to follow for that product placement idea I was talking about) and asked them to create anything they liked. Then we gave them a good 20 minutes to do so. Many of the campers started slowly, not really knowing what to make, but, slowly but surely they got going, eventually creating objects such as dumbells, fashion show walkways, a garden, etc.. Next up was Maria Victoria, Tanya's cousin known more affectionately as Anin. Anin is a published poet and she spoke to the campers about poetry and then had them create, and then recite, their own poems. What she did was write down a short poem that she had written and then asked the students to create their own poem by replacing some of the key words with images of their own creation. Again, the campers had a diffucult time at first, but, eventually, they did pretty well. Here's a student reading her poem:

Not that I'm used to doing such things, but I have to confess. We really just set out on Thursday to expose the students to poetry and to show them that they can all be poets. We hadn't really planned on a full day of creativity, it just kinda worked out that way. However, I do think the campers now have a different impression of poetry than they had before Anin's lesson. As Irene, one of our more "vocal" and controversial campers said after Anin's lesson: "This is poetry? I thought poetry was always about love."

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.