After a wonderful “winter” break full of visitors, traveling, and exciting new year’s and birthday celebrations, I finally got my groups back up and running this past week.  My little engineers made amazing newspaper towers, which we had fun lighting on fire at the end (not part of the original plan).  My 8^th graders played jeopardy to review last semester’s material, and then gave their own presentations on various topics.  And finally my chicas helped plan their upcoming graduation.  All of these meetings were unusually smooth and lots of fun.  On more than one occasion, I found myself looking at these kids thinking about how much I truly love them.  Clearly, life was going far too well…

Someone needed to shake some reality into me (bad pun intended…). Thursday morning at 2:30am I woke up to my first earthquake. Technically not the first, but 2 weeks ago I slept through my first (lucky).  There may have been some yelling as my glorified playhouse shook, the zinc roof sounding as though bombs were being dropped. Thankfully Plum was tucked in to bed right next to me; we hugged it out, and I watched as she plopped back down and snored herself back to a peaceful deep sleep. I, on the other hand, laid there staring at the roof picturing the world’s next biggest tsunami sweeping in and taking out this whole island. Good thing I wasted 200 pesos on a hot pink blow up inner tube during my last escape to the beach!

Now for the grand finale of the week. On Friday I was invited to a trip to another campo outside of my site. I was told it was a Church event, where we would march around singing and dancing. “Dancing?! I’m in!” I say, as I’m screaming to myself on the inside, “No. No. No… Ugh, Idiot.”  So on Saturday afternoon, I began the journey with my host parents, walking about 40 minutes to the neighboring community, Los Ranchos. We were supposed to meet a guagua there to take all of the participants to where these activities were taking place. This being the DR, we waited over an hour, and no guagua showed up. So instead, we decided to pile into a pickup truck. I sat in the back with…17 people. I hear your gasps, but just wait, half way there we stopped to pick up two more fully grown women. Here, fully grown means grossly overweight. NINETEEN PEOPLE. As I perched myself on top of the gas tank, I thought to myself that this truck, which was older than me (and we all know I just entered ‘old’), would probably make it, as those 19 people included two priests. We were golden.

We made it, marched around in the afternoon sun, waving paper flags, and singing of the Holy Spirits powers. Next came mass. Fine, I can handle this, but the day is really starting to drag on. I’m not the happiest of campers. At the end, the priest called out for each community present to wave their flags, scream, etc. As he yelled La Plaza, I vigorously waved my yellow flag and gave a little wooo. That apparently wasn’t enough, because I got singled out in front of 200+ people.  “Hey Blondie! Where are you from?”…”La Plaza!”…”No, but really? Where are you from?”…”Uhh Carolina del Norte?”…At which point my host dad yells, “Canada!”  WHAT?!  Essentially it was a mess.  I sat there, swearing off every future invitation to some Church related event. Yes, I’m blonde. Yes, I’m white. Get over it. I shouldn’t be the show. Especially in Church!

On the way home, as I’m again perched on top of the gas tank, this time with the elderly priest essentially sitting in my lap, my community members were talking about how the priest should have taken La Plaza as an answer. I called out my host dad for saying I was from Canada, at which point my host mom said, “Yeah, I tried to tell him that you are from New York.” I took a deep breath, reminded myself that anything I accomplish here is clearly nothing other than a miracle, and said, “Yeah, close enough.”

We made it back to Los Ranchos, although not without a pit stop because of concerns that the back of the truck was on fire.  From there, those of us from La Plaza still had a 40 minute walk.  As I lit our way in the dark with my cell phone, we made our way through the sugar cane fields and successfully forged the river. With my house in site, I fell into a full out sprint, greeted by an overly excited Plum. I quickly shut myself inside, and traumatized by the day’s events, whispered to myself – never again.  Never again.