I moved!

For the last month I have been living in a nice home about a fifteen minute walk away from the office. A single, middle-aged woman named Lucia, who works in the same office as we do owns the place. In traditional Latin style with the family staying close by, her brother and their family live upstairs in the front section of the house, and her sister and their family live upstairs in the back section. I enjoy Lucia’s company for the most part, except for her occasional outbursts and harsh tone with her niece Elliani who lives with us as well. Elliani is absolutely adorable. I don’t think I’ve ever met a six year old with quite as much spunk and personality as her. Every day that she comes home in the evening from school or daycare she comes running in and gives me a big hug and kiss and yells, “Encargame encargame!”, which means pick me up or hold me. Occasionally, she can be a bit much to handle with all of her energy (I don’t know why she doesn’t just want to relax and read for a couple hours), but she has been so fun to have around. About a week ago she left to go live with her mom for some unkown amount of time while she’s on summer vacation.
Elliani struttin' it

Communication here is interesting. A lot of times, they’re OK without it. For example, Elli’s mother, just shows up on the doorstep unbenounced after driving halfway across the country and tells Elli to pack her bags. When I asked Lucia how long she’d be gone for she just sort of shrugged. I can’t imagine that would fly in the US today with child custody matters. Mom, who has gone of the deep end, just show’s up on at the home of the legal caretaker of the child and takes off with the kid for some who knows how long, but that’s perfectly fine. In the states we like to have all of our ducks in a row. Things planned perfectly, legal issues in order, we know when this or that will happen, but not here. People just kind of go with the flow and suppose that things will work themselves out as they go. Well, I suppose there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Anyway, with Elli gone it left just Lucia and I at home. And since Lucia is a “Christian” that means that it is just me at home. Whatever evangelical Christians pioneered the way here in the Dominican certainly put a strong emphasis on church attendance. Unfortunately, that has become the major factor about what makes you a Christian here. Everybody knows that every time you go to a service God puts a chalk mark next to your name. If you help set out chairs, participate in the worship band, or are a dancer on stage you get two. So what we get is five services a week (I’m not even kidding, these people live at church) with lots of chairs, a stage packed with neatly dressed, dancing girls, and a rockin’ worship band with too many keyboards (you get three chalk-marks if you play the keyboard here). I’ll save most of my ranting about my church experience here for another entry. But, things around the Lucia casa were starting to get lonely. The cute neighbor girls from upstairs who loved to come down and play games with me or look at photos on my computer had left for summer vacation as well. When the opportunity came, I jumped on the chance to move in with our manager Noberto. Noberto is a great young guy from Dominican and he’s really fun to be around. He speaks decent English but is kind of hard to understand so our conversations are usually a mix of Spanish and English as we switch back and forth from sentence to sentence between the two languages. It’s pretty fun, but can be a little difficult sometimes when you don’t know what language is going to come out so that you can be prepared to listen for the right words.

The new apartment is great. A bit outside of the city, it is about a ten minute motorcycle ride to get there from the office. The extra distance is well-worth it though, as our third story perch allows me easy access to the roof, my new morning spot. It also gets really nice and cool during the evenings and early mornings as it picks up the sea breeze. The ocean is only about a half mile away too! Noberto likes to cook, which is a definite plus. Just having somebody else to cook with might inspire me to go beyond the tuna melts, boiled veggies, and baked beans that compose my typical dinner. There’s also a couple of fun projects to do at the new apartment. Last night, we worked on making this cool, white leather couch (I say we, but in reality I just painted a little table and then sat back and ate delicious mangos and guacamole while watching Noberto
do the hard work). We are going to
design a dining table this weekend if we have time.