Camp 2016: Day Zero

I'm always amazed with air travel. We left our house in Brookline at 6:15 this morning and 12 hours, two flights, a quick layover, a couple of hours at immigration and an hour bus ride later and, poof, we're in a different world. As you may surmise I'm a bit tired so this will be a short entry(thank goodness right?)

We're trying to be a bit more organized this year (a request from the teen leaders) so we had a meeting with all the teen leaders tonite to talk about the plans for the camp in general and specifically about the plans for tomorrow. And now they're all just hanging out which doesn't do justice describing what is actually happening. There are 40 teenagers here in small groups chatting or playing soccer or basketball. And we didn't engineer any of it. The kids just picked up where they left off last year as if they just saw each other last week. And all the new kids are joining in seamlessly.

And now before I sign off my diatribe about technology. As soon as we arrived today we took all the kids cellphones. You could make the argument that one reason they're so willing and open to participate in all these fun and games is because they don't have their technology to fall back on. On the other hand one reason that all the teen leaders hang out together so easily is that they've been communicating via Facebook and/or snapchat all year. Hmm. This technology thing is complex ain't it?

One week to go

Campamento 2016 begins in one week. Actually, if we speak in specific terms, exactly one week from this moment our first day of campamento 2016 will be in the books. And, if we follow our intended plans (which if you've been following this blog is not guaranteed) we will be at the beach with all the Dominican and North American teen leaders. Last year the trip to the beach is what cemented the relationships among the teen leaders and we are hoping that that happens again. though part of me worries that we are trying to recreate exactly what happened last year, ar least with the teen leaders, which is impossible since some of the players have changed and thus the dynamic will be different. We will see.

But that's not really what I wanted to write about. I just wanted to share our to do list in this final week of preparations. Here goes:
1.  Send email to parents with last minute reminders( we were supposed to do that yesterday but plans change even here in USA )
2.  Contact credit card companies that we will be out of country for 2 weeks. Considering how long you have to wait on hold when you call, this could take all day )
3. Make sure all our passports are up to date. JK. Did that months ago. I really wish all our passports expired in the same year so we could take care of them all at once.
4.  Buy travel size contact lens solution.
5.  Make sure the blog is all set up on the ipad(as you may surmise I'm doing that now)
6. Make sure Facebook is set up with our foundation group
7. Buy khakis for Evan that fit him. Seems like we do that once a year and he wears them exactly one time.
8. Did I mention calling the credit card companies?  Add the bank to that list.
9.  Call the airport or go online to figure out how long the security lines are at Logan these days.
10.  Pack

That's about it. See you in a week.

Solar Cars

And the countdown continues: 42 days, 12 hours, 29 minutes

Camila and Leon doing some soldering

to go until Campamento IV.  We had a little event last weekend to begin the summer activities. Kelli did some research (online of course) and found some plans to build solar powered cars out of household goods. So we got to talking and decided this would be a great project to do with the campers. And then we got to talking some more and thought about how electricity, or the constinsten lack thereof, is such an issue in the D.R..  Last summer the electricity (locally known as Juanita) would not be working pretty much all day. It then came on at night when lights and, even more importantly for this over-heated gringo, fans were needed. "Se fue Juanita" (there goes Juanita) was a constant refrain. So, as we were talking, we came up with the idea of using renewable energy as this summer's environmental theme. Seems like a good fit right?

But ... before we built these solar cars with the campers we thought it might be a good idea to see if we could actually get them to work. So, Kelli dug up the needed household items: a juice carton, some rubber bands, plastic bottle caps, straws and glue sticks, bought little motors, solar panels, and wires and brought everything over to our house last weekend along with her friend and co-worker Leon and his soldering iron. We invited all the teen leaders over to see what we could come up with. Leon showed the kids how to solder the wires to the solar panels and while some of them worked on that the rest worked on building the cars. Meanwhile Evan took notes on design decisions that were made as well the vocabulary needed to explain to the campers the steps for building the cars (always a good idea to work in a little Spanish when we can right?)

After some tinkering we got the car to work so I think we're in business. 

Here's what the prototype looks like:

Pretty cool huh?

2016 Teen Leader Orientation

So, it's been awhile... No blog entries since the end of the camp last summer. But, that certainly doesn't mean that there hasn't been a lot going on. It just means that once school started blogging fell down towards the bottom of my 'things to do' list just above 'recaulking our shower' (which I still haven't done).  In any event, here's a quick update to get all twenty of you followers up to speed.

•  Many of the teen leaders (both Dominican and Gringo) expressed interest in working at the camp again so we decided to break with the tradition of running the camp every other summer and run it again this summer. At first I didn't love this idea since we like to use our non-DR summers to take our kids on other adventures and as Evan approaches his college years, those opportunities seem to be dwindling rapidly. But, when the teenagers spoke so passionately about returning I figured I should get on board (Then of course we ended up using the kids' February break to go skiing out west and then their April break to go even further out west, thus using up all of our vacation resources anyways.)

•  We weren't sure we had enough funds to run the camp so in the Fall we held a fundraising/ information event at a friends house and were awed at the number of people who showed up and contributed to the foundation, thus giving us enough money to be able to run the camp.  Wahoo!!!

• We then set about choosing the teen leaders for the camp. Last year we just gathered the teens by word of mouth basically and let everyone go who showed interest. But this year we wanted to make the process more formal - especially because we knew of at least 15 teenagers that wanted to go with us and we only had space for 10 (it always comes down to math am I right?)  So Tanya did a lot of research (she's the best, aint she?) about similar programs and created an application that the teenagers needed to fill out -- even including a statement of interest and a letter of recommendation. All told we got about applications and ended up accepting eleven of them. Seven return from last year with four newbies.

•  So, we had our Spring orientation meeting with the teen leaders and their families yesterday. The  Ribatt's were kind enough to host the event and it went off beautifully (at least in my humble opinion).  We wanted to explain the goals of the camp to the teenagers (especially the new ones), have the returning leaders share a bit about their experiences last summer, and, I think most importantly, provide an opportunity for the teen leaders to get to know one another.  Funny story ... there are two new teen leaders from Cambridge Rindge and Latin, who are in the same homeroom and didn't realize until Friday that they were both going to the camp.  In any event, turns out it didn't take the kids long to bond:


So, that's where we are.  (I just realized that I use the word 'so' a lot when I write. I'll have to work on that). Tanya and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the camp better (mostly just listening to the suggestions of the teen leaders) and there will be some changes. But, this post is getting too long so I'll save those ideas for another day. Hasta pronto!

Teen Leader Reflection

On August 23rd at 7:00 am (almost a month ago already...yikes) our plane touched down at Logan Airport. Yes, that's right, 7:00 am. So, if you do the math (which I always love doing) you would realize that we left the D.R. at around 3:00 am. We had decided that it wasn't worth it to get a couple hours of sleep before leaving San Cristobal for the airport so we had Carmen and Frank just drive us there around 11:30. But, we were so early for the flight that the Jetblue check-in area wasn't even open... but let me stop there because that surreal night wasn't really the point of this entry.

So, let me start again. On August 23rd at 7:00 am our plane touched down at Logan Airport. On the drive from the airport back to our house, as we all went through a little culture shock --augmented by our sleep deprived state -- Tanya and I realized that we hadn't really come to any closure about the camp. We felt a need to talk about the experience to make sense of it all and we also felt a real need to get all the teen leaders together again to hear what they took away from the whole experience.

So, yesterday, we had all the teen leaders and their parents over to our house for a debriefing session.  We had them sit on the floor in a circle, asked the parents to sit around them and then led (you hearing this Ms. Burchenal) them in a socratic seminar.  We asked questions like:
         -  In what ways were the campers' lives impacted by the camp?
         -  What different views of Dominican society did you see?
         -  What were your greatest challenges and your greatest successes?
         -  In what ways will your experience in the D.R. impact the way you interact with people from different cultural/racial backgrounds in the United States?
         -  How did your experience in the D.R. affect the way     you view your own culture/country?
Yet again the students amazed us as they gave thoughtful, articulate responses to all of the questions.
I learned that the teenagers had a newfound appreciation for the amenities that we take for granted here; that they realized that technology is not the be all and end all of personal entertainment and that often dependence on technology stifles creativity; that they had newfound respect, patience and understanding for immigrants to the U.S. who struggle to communicate in English; that the idea of "personal space", an unambiguous aspect of U.S. culture, is not universal; that there are many commonalities between the Dominican and U.S. cultures and that the Dominican teenagers are exposed to many of the same cultural references as are the gringo teens.

Wow! It seemed like the teenagers actually learned what we set out for them to learn. At least, in words if not actions.  We'll see what happens the next time I tell my children to put down their cell phones and go outside and play.

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: