Busy weeks

Today we started our second to last week of the summer program.  It feels like not that long ago I had just arrived and now I will be leaving soon (although not for long).  This past week has been filled with activities.  The mornings have been running pretty smoothly with quite a few kids coming. There haven’t been many kids coming to my office for discipline, which is a good thing since that means they are behaving in the classroom, but that means I don’t get to interact with the kids as much as I would like.  I try to make my way around to the classes and spend some time in there, and I also make sure to spend recess with them.  We play dodgeball, tag, tickle tag, “baseball” (we use a soccer ball for the ball and our feet for bats), and many other fun activities like hanging upside down from monkey bars.  If you were to look at recess from the outside you would probably think it is pure chaos, but if you look closer you see a lot of kids getting there energy out in fun and safe ways.  The kids will also ask us to walk home with them, which is one of my favorite parts of the summer program. I don’t know why the kids like it so much, but they ask us pretty much every day.    We will rotate them through with piggy back rides until we get to sweaty to take any more.  The kids live a pretty good distance away from the school, and it is really hot here, but it’s a great way to spend time with the kids.

We had a team here for the past week doing some construction work on the wall around the school in the mornings, and then in the afternoons they had a VBS program for kids in the surrounding neighborhood. They had asked us to help out with their program, so that dominated our afternoons.  They didn’t have very many Spanish speakers so they asked me if I could translate for them.  It is surprising how mentally taxing translating is.  Having to think in two languages and communicate it takes much more energy and focus than just speaking in Spanish.  Most days it was not too much translating just basic things and they usually had their Bible stories already translated and ready to go except for on Thursday.  They asked me to translate the story of the Prodigal Son, which turned out to be a two and a half page typed story.  Needless to say my brain was pretty much mush by the end of it and my Spanish was the quality of a six year old.  God taught me a lot of humility through that experience and reminded me that He is the one who softens hearts and it’s not about the words or eloquence that I have, it’s about what He is doing.  It was a really good experience overall.

On Friday we got on a bus and traveled across the island to meet up with the other interns from around the island in Jarabacoa.  We did a fun waterfall hike on Friday afternoon and then all had dinner together that night.  In the morning, we piled into vans and took off for Santo Domingo to do some “tourist” stuff.  On the way, one of the vans had  a tire blow out, so we had to pull over to the side of the road in front of a store that had an entire pig (head and all) roasting, so they could change the tire.  After that fun experience we started again for the capitol.  We went around to some historic locations that I have visited many times before in my previous trips.  Everyone did some shopping and I did some bartering.  We found these straw hats that looked pretty touristy and the guy was asking for 150 pesos. I said we’d give him 100 to which he accepted.  I thought it was a great deal and some pretty good bartering skills on my part only to later walk into a store and see the same hats for 80 pesos.  It was a good time being back with everyone and hearing their experiences and what is going on.  We returned home pretty tired, but the experience was definitely worth it.

The city I will soon call home (Santo Domingo).