The first day of my journey toward Peace Corps Volunteer status began with me somehow managing to negotiate my 100 pounds of luggage, not including my two hefty carry-ons, down a ramp, in heels, to the shuttle which would take me to my hotel. It was only after I had met my roommate, whose presence to me in the room was a complete surprise, and settled in that I realized I had left my absolute favorite nalgene water bottle with a sippy sports top and my brand new and much anticipated, blank paged travel journal on the SmarteCarte kiosk. FML, right? Not off to the best start in the world, but moving on. My roommate’s name happens to be Elise and she’s even had Little Bear’s Ice Cream in Montana! Crazy small world.
Yesterday, the first set of Dominican Republic volunteers for 2010 gathered at Holiday Inn Georgetown in Washington D.C. where we were given a crash course on the mission of the Peace Corps and our role in it. Director Aaron Williams, a previous DR volunteer himself with the charisma of Obama and Morgan Frieman rolled into one, also privileged us by attending our staging event. He spoke of the Dominican people and how the experience changed his life – all what I would expect the director of the PC to say, yet inspiring nonetheless. Our activities that day were meant to and succeeded in helping us to realize that we, the 18 men and 21 women in that room, are each other’s best support, that we share many of the same anxieties and aspirations, and that the next twenty-seven months will change the way we see the world. That said, we, or at least I, retired early for the night.
At a quarter till four the next morning (today), thirty-seven of us were herded onto two buses and driven to Regan Airport, where after a good three hours, we finally boarded our flight to the DR (stopping in Miami, of course). Upon arrival in the Dominican, we had a very basic welcome training where they sketched out what will be presented to us in the coming 10 weeks, the different ways in which we should be preventative in terms of contracting malaria or other such unnamable diseases from the water, and shot up with our first of the 10 vaccines we will be given over the course of a very short period of time. We were given malaria pills (which supposedly bring on Technicolor dreams), sunscreen, and mosquito nets with instructions on how to hang them – the canopy bed I always wanted.
Apparently, the language training we are about to receive is worth a good chunk of money, upwards in the six digits, they tell us. And we’re promised to be fluent by the end of our stay here – something I greatly look forward to. The humidity is indeed a force to be reckoned with – the 77 degrees felt like a million. And supposedly, this is relatively cool. The poverty is as expected, though the litter lining the streets is a bit more than I had envisioned. From north to south, it’s about a four hour drive to cross the island. My fellow ICTers (Information and Communication Technology volunteers) and I will be traveling north east in a few weeks to begin our CBT (community based training) which will total about half of our total training time.
That’s pretty much all I know as of now – but much much more is sure to come rather swiftly. Tomorrow we meet our host families after another day of primary training and introductions.
As you can see, I’ve decided to keep a blog (in part because of my lost journal), but that does not mean that I don’t still hope to correspond on more of a personal basis. Although… I would love to have a more personalized blog/web page in which I can arrange text and images in an aesthetically pleasing manner… Sooo if anyone would like to build one for me :-D… say after Carnaval ;-)… I’d be ever so grateful.
Until next time, this is Elisa Paltenghe updating you from Santo Domingo, DR.
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