Homecoming

1 year, 2 months, and 14 days ago, I ate a tomato and onion pizza for lunch at the Coast Guard Headquarters along the Potomac River, where my dad had spent the past decade working. I had spent most of the morning’s boring hours just feeling anxious. I passed the time by meeting my dad’s coworkers, drinking very strong coffee, and exterminating the poorly hidden muffins from the lounge. Afterwards, my dad drove me across D.C to Georgetown, where he dropped me off at my Peace Corps staging event, held in the same conference hall where, four years beforehand, I had won a garter toss, and given the best man speech for my older brother’s wedding. As I was arriving to the hotel, I could feel my stomach churning, the pizza tried to pry my mouth open to redecorate the car’s interior. I remember every little inane detail about that Tuesday morning, because it was the first day of a new life.

In my first hour with my training class, I believe I had memorized close to 30 out of the 40 volunteers’ names and faces. The first new face I met was Kati’s, standing in the sign-in line- damn her teeth were white. The staging event was a long, vain attempt to give us an idea of what to expect in the DR. It was an exhausting day, and our alarm clocks were buzzing at 2 in the morning, so early that we weren’t actually tired. The tiredness overtook us as we waited for hours in the airport, and as we fought to stay awake on the plane so we could stare out the windows. My first thoughts after arriving were how beautiful the palm trees looked along the waterfront, and how I would barely notice their beauty upon my return trip to the airport.

In these 15 months, I have bathed in a shallow creek bed several hundred times, actively ignoring how many chickens and pigs were upstream of me. I have had to Skype with friends back home by candlelight on numerous occasions. I have eaten over 150 pounds of rice, and passionately despised each and every grain. I estimate that I have carried over 400 gallons of water to my house up a 40 foot vertical climb between the creek and my house. I have fallen down that slope at least seven or eight times. I have killed a tarantula with a machete, but only chopped my foot once. I pretended I knew what I was doing when I was making the design for the village water system, and feigned confidence giving orders during its construction. To date, we have around 4 kilometers of pipes in the ground, two pipe bridges constructed, an intake structure, and a sedimentation tank. I don’t think I have ever accumulated so many unique, valuable experiences and wisdom in such a short period of time.

Alternatively, I could have spent those 15 months in a more traditional way. I estimate that I have successfully avoided 12 hours a week of rush hour commutes on DC’s infamously clogged roads. 12 hours of driving each week for 60 weeks is 720 hours of my life, a full MONTH of life, that I did not spend in a car, cursing the red tail lights in front of me. I escaped 60 full, 40-hour work weeks that I avoided, a full 2400 hours not spent in an office, three months of life, not trying to force myself to stay positive about my work. Three full months of life not wondering when I could quit my job and do something I really wanted to do with my life. Instead of earning $60,000 selling my soul and happiness to an engineering cubicle for 15 months, I earned and spent $4,500 of my volunteer stipend. Maybe if I earned a little bit more I would buy a couch, nice beer (oh wait, they don’t have that here), a monthly internet plan, paint my house, or learn to scuba dive. I can’t think of anything else I would want if I had the extra cash. In my mind, the $60,000 I could have earned would not have been worth 720 hours in rush hour traffic, 2400 hours in a cubicle, and sacrificing a dream. I believe most of us would agree that the things that make us the happiest in life cost very little or are free: friends, family, a night out once a week, a nice beer, running water, TV, gas money… What we don’t spend immediately, we invest for retirement, money to support kids, money for a nice vacation, or a nice house. None of that is what we actually want- it’s an illusion. We don’t need friends, we need time with friends. We don’t need money for retirement, we need time to reflect on life, we don’t need money for kids, we need time with kids. Time is all that we need, and sometimes we have less of it than we think, but we work away, dreaming of those moments when we will have time to do what we want.

I have no regrets with my life thus far, especially in the last 15 months, because I have had a surplus of free time. In that time I have perfected my Spanish, seen beautiful beaches at no cost, wooed a lassie, and tried to help some forgotten villages. With that said, I am dying to come home. I miss time with family and I miss time with friends. I can’t lie, I’m planning on taking three hot showers on my first day back, and telling the server at the fancy restaurant that I want the most expensive thing on the menu. I miss spending time with people my age, so badly. I won’t mind a break from the awkward silences in conversations with ancient, toothless farmers who grew up using torches instead of flashlights. Can you imagine me watching Game of Thrones with them with a few brewskies? I am positively ecstatic to go home. Rather than spending a full paragraph explaining how excited I am, I’ll just show you in person on Thursday.

I have been in a little bit of a psychological slump the past few weeks, that coincided with one-year in country mark. I guess I realized how long I’d been here and become aware how much more time is left. I miss socializing with the people I want to socialize with. For the first time in my service, I have actually admitted that this is indeed a sacrifice. I am happy to admit however, that I am out of my slump. The realization came to me on a particularly fantastic day.

The day started with a meeting that I had coordinated with all the foreign aid workers in the Cotui area, so that we could spend more time together as friends, and work contacts. After all, we are all working towards the same broad goal- development. In attendance were four Peace Corps volunteers, three Korean KOIKA volunteers (Korea’s Peace Corps), and two Japanese JAIKA (Japanese Peace Corps Volunteers). All of us have similarly structured programs, and are at various points in a 27 month adventure in the Caribbean. We had lunch in a Peruvian restaurant with two Dominicans, while the Peruvian owner who I played soccer with once, cooked us filet mignon. Two new arrivals (one from Korea and one from Japan) could barely speak Spanish, and didn’t speak any English. My heart felt for them because I know exactly what they were feeling, even though we couldn’t communicate beyond smiles and the occasional translated questions. I had called the meeting so that we would not feel like a disconnected group of foreigners working on individual projects, but realize that our scattered lives have been running parallel for months, and it was time they collided. Aside from making new friends, I received promises from all of them to help me out with the UVA students when they arrive in June, in case I need to be in two places at once.

It was a rather inspiring, and annoyingly productive start to my day. In the afternoon, I participated in one of Dos Palmas daily, heated volleyball games, which have been the new rage for the past 2 months. Afterwards, several muchachos came to my house to play chess. They have been coming off and on for the past two or three weeks, and now can play full chess games while I cook, and I only need to come in to resolve minor disputes every now and then. The day ended with two long chess games with Octavio, while we sipped on the leftover whiskey that the Canadians had left me, along with a bag of dried squid. We joked around, got overly philosophical, discussed questions of the heart, and each won a game of chess. By the end of the night, I felt extraordinary. I had spent an entire day surrounded by people that made me happy, and they were all part of my community in Cotui and Dos Palmas. 

Traveling Tales

I spend long days awaiting that joyous moment when the guagua flashes its headlights at me, and with the wave of my hand, I bring a piece of metal flying down the road at 60mph to a screeching stop. It will carry me away from this unchanging, wearisome village to a place that changes, where comfort takes the form of a 35 peso Krispy Kreme, devoured in a hotel room, to the sound of campo war stories.

The war stories are great! You hear about that friday night when a tiguere dancing in rubber work boots drew out his machete? Hah- you think that’s bad? My neighbor threatened to kill my dog if I didn’t pay him 2000 pesos for his missing chickens. Well MY dona says she knew a guy who died eating spicy food. Yep, just had a heart attack the moment it entered his mouth. My latrine caved in after the hurricane’s floods… Quit complaining, at least your community has latrines! Yeah, well I saw an exorcism at a funeral- they needed 15 people to hold the guy down. (All of these are real campo war stories.) After the traditional Peace Corps greetings like “Hi, how are you? How’s your project? How bad is the diarrhea these days?”, we bond through laughter exchanging these stories. I’m at peace there, among friends, but it never lasts more than two days. You start to feel guilty after two days. You start to worry about work, the progress you should have made but didn’t, and the obstacles that you will surely face in the coming weeks.

The enjoyable adventures you have traveling with friends are paid for with a high price. Public transportation is a brutal, exhausting affair, characterized by sweat stained shirts, overstuffed backpacks with broken zippers, and a motorcycle helmet glued to your hand for many inconvenient days so that you can use it for a grand total of 15 minutes to get back to your site. You are constantly trying to make sure you are not taken advantage of by carro public drivers who never seem to have your 5 pesos change (you can buy 5 mints with those pennies!). The city sidewalks are riddled with Gringo Traps- gaping holes that lead down to the place where unprepared gringos go to die, in sewers or eroded caves beneath the concrete, which collected bones as quickly as trash.

Music and motorcycles are deafening, and crossing streets necessitates a substantial pause in an otherwise fluid conversation. If you are lucky enough to get on a carro publico going the way you want to go, you find yourself scanning the roadside with a fearful eye for corpulent dominicana passengers who will most certainly clamp your thigh’s main artery shut. Remember- a carro publico is only full with 7 adult passengers, regardless of their weight class (an additional 4 kids can be included when they sit on their parents laps). I have never seen a seat belt in a carro publico.

Last Monday, I was traveling back to my campo with Tal after a weekend with friends. I was immediately distrustful of Tal’s idea to take the new metro system to our bus stop. Bad things happen to volunteers who try and cheat fate and take air conditioned charter buses or trains. You know that you will come down with Dengue as punishment for finding air conditioning when most of your friends arrive home covered in the collective sweat of all the passengers in your carro publico. I was also worried that if the “luz se fued”, that I would be stuck in a tunnel somewhere in the dark. In any case, we ended up taking the metro. When those doors opened up, a flood of joyous obscenities left my mouth. It wasn’t a train- it was a refrigerator, and I loved it.

Before getting to the bus stop, Tal and I made a detour to give our final farewell to Gabe- our Peace Corps Volunteer Leader (PCVL). We had already had a formal goodbye party for Gabe at his original site, somewhere yonder beyond a whole lot of green and a hole lot of hills- where there be dragons. There was a teary eyed dona, drunken campesino merengue, wood fired pizza cooked in an oven Gabe built himself, and breath taking views down mountain valleys that made me envious, despite the fact that this site had no luz.

Our last quick visit with Gabe took place in the Agora mall, which is a four story, air conditioned dream world where you can find a Cinabon store next to the country’s only Krispy Kreme shop, and of course, an annoyingly pink Hello Kitty shop that some how manages to stay in business- despite God’s will. “Welcome to America,” was Gabe’s amused greeting for us when he saw the disbelief in our culture shocked eyes. Despite the fact that only hours before, I had eaten a vanilla ice cream topped funnel cake doused in chocolate syrup (from the only Funnel Cake store in the country), I treated myself to a Krispy Kreme as well. I am still not sure about the rumors that there is a roller coaster in the mall. No seriously, I saw a sign… and I heard a rumor. It was a big mall- big enough for false hopes.

I have called Gabe hundreds of times with questions about my project design, water committees, and funding issues. Gabe has spent almost four years working in this country as a volunteer, but I told him that because of his selfishness, thousands of people in our villages will not get water because he abandoned us in our hour of need. Gabe will be sorely missed.

Last week, Peace Corps took over Juan Dolio beach en drunken masse- our response to an act of gratitude from the one hostel in the country that hosts Peace Corps volunteers for free- for one weekend, once a year. They even gave us free lentils for lunch! It was the courtesy of the hostel’s owner, a cheerful Indian woman who runs a non-profit back home. She told us that she thought we should be rewarded for our hard work.

Our hostel was only a five minute’s walk away from the crowded, but beautiful beach. I realized that I had been in this beautiful country too long when I turned down an afternoon at the beach to have a LAN party in our room, where I teamed up on Kati and Alex in a strategy computer game that devoured whole weeks of my life, as well as opportunities to woo potential girlfriends, during the dark days of middle school. I was frightened at how quickly that game became addictive, and vowed never to play it again (my vow lasted two hours). The nostalgia, along with my justified gloating as I laid ruin to my girlfriend’s virtual armies and farms, made it a memorable, albeit horrendously nerdy afternoon.

Earlier in the month, I learned the word, enjuagar, or “to rinse”, in Spanish. My mid-term dental appointment was more exciting than it should have been. Although my gut told me not to drink the pink mouth wash the doctor gave me, a doctor in a lab coat told me to drink it, and doctors are always right, so I did. It turned out that she had used a more ambiguous verb that presumed that I had some common sense. She told me to “take” the “pink water”, which 99% of the time would translate to “drink”. A half glass of it was enough to keep me up at night, I ate my pride and told her it wasn’t a big deal because I’d had liquor that truly tasted worse. (South African village moonshine is only slightly more palletable than what I imagine urine might taste like.) In the process of making a fool of myself by drinking mouth wash, I learned a valuable lesson. As I sat in the lobby with Kati sharing my story, another client overheard my story and laughed out loud. I started talking with my new friend as Kati went in to impress the dentist with the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. She soon returned to find me with a new friend, a business card, and a free stogie from one of the Caribean’s more prominent cigar distributors. Moral of the story is that if you eat your pride and tell the world that you drink mouth wash, you can get free cigars at a dentist’s office.

At least one of my trips this month was work related. I went with Tal to an old Peace Corps community called Los Guineos to draft up a solution to their poorly functioning water system. Of the 200 houses in the system, 160 houses are fine, 20 houses get water sometimes, and 20 houses never get water. The problem? All viable water sources were too low, forcing the storage tank to be placed too low, and the houses at the end of the line struggle to get water because they are too high up. We spent the night in a vacant house, and drafted an addition to the project involving a water pump. The project’s original donors (Rotary Club) agreed to fund it, we just need to come up with a budget.

 

I will be back home for the first time in almost 15 months in 2 weeks. Needless to say, my mind is already back home while may body is held hostage in the campo. I’ve tried to stay focused on my work, especially because the UVA team is coming to work in El Corroso the day after I return from my trip. That means that all of my prep work for this team needs to be done before I leave for vacation. I spent an entire afternoon doing something that I never dreamed I would do. I created a color coded, anal retentive work timeline that was seven weeks long, complete with dates, tasks, number of workers needed, and number of mules needed. I then made an organizational flow chart that would expedite the team’s instructions by sending them to people with specialized tasks. I looked at my flow chart, which looked like it had been written with the shaky hand of a seven year old, then I started to laugh. It’s funny how the work could all logically come together on paper, but realized that nothing would happen according to plan because we are in the campo. Why even bother? In any case, I presented the information to El Corroso’s water committee and got them to work.

Kids know when I am tired because I am grumpy, quiet, incapable of speaking Spanish, and have purple, peeling fingers. The PVC glue and cement have me wondering how many layers of purple, dead skin I can pull off before I find bone. Even still, despite my work-induced reclusiveness, some brave, twelve year olds have been consistently wandering into my house after work this week. Normally, I wouldn’t be too happy to receive visitors when I am that tired, but they have been coming consistently the past several days, and they always want to play chess or soccer. I can sit and watch them play chess for an hour, and forget how tired I am. I found myself smiling like a fool when I saw Octavio teaching them- so intently focused that I could leave them alone in my house so I could run errands. My old chess student was teaching my new students, and he loved it. I find myself sincerely inviting the kids to come back. I feel like I’m on the verge of new, young friendships, and it feels inspiring. It feels like hope. 

Closed Doors

I spend my evenings behind a closed door, savoring every selfish second that I can manage away from the responsibilities on the other side. Sometimes I cook and wash dishes by candlelight for hours, and I still feel no compulsion to leave the darkness in my house to socialize with neighbors. I feel guilty acknowledging this, but still don’t open my door. The curtains fly inward through my front window, knocking over the dusty pieces on my chess board one more time. I set them up again, and consider washing the dirty dishes. Through the window, I hear the now unnoticeable sounds of farm animals and passing feet crunching down upon the gravel road. I’m accustomed to the world beyond my door very well now- well enough to realize that I can be at peace with it, and can admire it, but I will never blend into the painting. How could I belong to this world in the same way that my neighbors do? They have generations of family members resting in this earth, and I have amused faces when I try in vain to machete the high grasses in my front yard like a real campesino. I can never be one of them. The laughing and music out front of colmados at night might as well be as far away as the moon. You don’t see the biggest differences, you feel them when a group of people your age is laughing, but you sit quietly with an emotionless face, off to the side.

Perhaps these more cynical sentiments have always existed to some degree, washed out by my willful optimism, but they seem to sneak out more easily when work has obliterated me physically and mentally, as it has now. On nights like these, I feel like I did soon after arriving to this village, where the constant battle to socialize with people in a foreign language seems like a losing battle, and you just want to roll up in a ball and escape it. I just want to go into my room at 8PM and shut the door. Rather than using all of my energy to fight to speak Spanish, my work steals all of my energy, and I just want a release with friends. I stop feeling the constantly nagging obligations volunteers feel to spend with their community, and just want to spend time with people that I truly want to be with. With a few exceptions, none of them live in this village.

Comfort eludes me beyond my door. Following the same, tiresome formalities that are always exchanged with passing neighbors, an uncomfortable silence will ensue or more unwanted questions about the progress we are making on the water project. I hate talking about the water project with my neighbors because my mind never has time to rest. Sometimes, I think they ask me questions about the water project because they don’t know what else to talk about. I would try to change the subject, but we have so little in common that my words run dry. We smile sincerely, grasp each others hands in friendship, and keep walking down the road. It seems that this job, or rather this mission, is so large that it has gobbled up my social life. I want to talk and laugh with them like I did with my friends in college, but instead I am always excessively polite and cautious.

On this side of my door, I cook food that they will not eat- a foreign concoction of vegetables that they stare at with open mistrust and won’t even taste. I listen to music that confuses their bachata biased hips. I marinate in gigabytes of movies that sound like Gibberish to them. Internet nights are heavenly nights when I sometimes forget what country I am in. My heart sinks every time I hear a neighbor whistling to me, or calling my name to come let them in and interrupt my internet buzz. Sometimes, I think about pretending like I am not home, but have never been able to overcome my feelings of guilt.

During the morning and afternoon, I work. The work brigades joke around with one another, but my mind is always far away. My smiles are wide, but often forced, and disappear as soon as their faces are looking the other way. Did I even understand what they said entirely? The daylight hours drag on as we carve our way through the earth- surrounded by miles of trenches yet to be dug, and nagged by the countless incomplete tasks scattered across the scarred roads behind me. I am tormented by the inescapable inefficiencies that unite against me to make me feel inadequate, or the project impossible. When the nighttime comes, I want to pretend the world outside doesn’t exist. I want the night to never end. I want my laptop battery to go on forever. I avoid sleeping as long as I can because I know that only minutes after closing my eyes, my watch alarm will be summoning me to the trenches once again. When I wake, I don’t want to get out of bed because there are dirty dishes to be cleaned and oatmeal to be prepared. Sometimes I don’t eat breakfast because I spend every last second of the morning hiding under my bedsheets, avoiding the fact that I need to go back to work for the seventh day in a row. The work is never-ending.

I am sad to face my feelings and write this post in the same way that you are troubled or disappointed reading it. You want me to love my village and neighbors, to share my culture with them and never shut my door to them. You want me to form friendships that cross this cultural divide, so that in 20 years when I return to my community, I will be received with open arms, like a long lost son. You want me to feel truly welcome, happy, and loved in the world beyond my door- because that’s what life in the Peace Corps should aspire to, right?

Volunteers feel much the same way when we arrive. We tell other volunteers that we’re going back to “my site”, or “my community”, with the same mental association as we do when we say that we are headed back to responsibility and work. We love to get out of site as often as we can, without exception. Then we all feel guilty once we spend too much time away, feeling like we are skirting our social obligations as volunteer diplomats. Why is it that none of say we are headed back home unless we mean the United States?

You will not be best friends with your entire community. Hopefully you will find a best friend in your community, although many try and do not succeed. I am lucky that I have a friend like Octavio- most do not. But when night time comes, many times Octavio drives down the road without me to spend time with Dominican friends. He invited me once to a party down the road, months ago. I socialized as best I could; I tried to dance and make friends. I ended up leaving the party two hours early to walk home on foot because I felt too overwhelmed. I think Octavio felt obligated to spend time with me, to watch after me, and to drive me back home when I wanted to leave, despite the fact that I refused the gesture. We have accepted that we are friends, and acknowledged that our friendship exists outside of the world in which we live.

As I was visiting Kati this week, I listened to the ruckus beyond her closed door. I heard a cacophonous blend of deafening motorcycle engines, overwhelming colmado music, and the collective incoherence of large crowds of bored people sitting outside their homes on plastic chairs. It was a slum that foreigners would be frightened to find themselves in when visiting Puerto Plata (she’s hard core). I had an epiphany. I regarded the noise on the other side of the door and suddenly exclaimed, “We will never belong to that world out there, will we?” Kati literally can’t open her door at night, or even leave her apartment without putting herself at risk.

I don’t feel at risk in the campo, but the same sort of divisions exist that make it difficult for me to belong to this culture. Instead of an overwhelming mass of people and noise swarming in the streets, I have the opposite extreme. I have deafening silences. With the exception of my host family, any conversation ends in silence after five minutes. I know that my neighbors do not discuss the same things with me as they do with their family and friends, just as I do not discuss the same things with them that I do with other volunteers. There is a wall between us that a year of proximity has not been able to breach. I don’t know if 20 years here would make a difference.

Construction is moving along, but slowly and brutally, fighting for every single meter of rocky or muddy earth. The gold mine sent us our backhoe which did in a week what my brigades could have done in five weeks. Even with this godsend, I am in awe of how much more work lies before us. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I want to take a two month long break back in the United States and returned refreshed, ready to work. Even if Peace Corps did allow me to take a break that long, I can’t think of something more irresponsible and selfish that I could do than abandon this project for two months. 

I realized that my job is not about directing the brigades to prevent problems from happening, it’s about solving every single problem that I am confronted with on a daily basis. Nothing ever goes according to plan, or happens on time, and it all falls on me to resolve.

With all of this said, we have made progress. Even if we are working at 30% efficiency, I try and remind myself that we are moving forward. Apart from a storage tank, Tres Bocas has all of the main pipelines and structures installed from the intake in the mountains to the farthest house. If we were to focus entirely on Tres Bocas, they could have water in a month. It is hard to explain, but I feel almost no satisfaction knowing that I have lead us to this point. I can’t feel the slightest sense of accomplishment knowing that I have many more months of work ahead of me.

I want a vacation, so badly. In the next two weeks, there’s a volunteer wedding, two water inaugurations, a volunteer beach party, and a going away party for my volunteer leader. I want to attend all of these events, but that is impossible. I will likely go to one or two events, and try to have fun, but constantly be wondering how work is going without me. I am not free to do what I want. I know that there is a snowy place where I can sip on hot chocolate on a couch by a wood fire, and I truly will not feel the weight of my responsibility on me anymore. I’ve seen enough paradise beaches.

I will be home in a month for my first vacation, to celebrate Pat and Kim’s long awaited wedding. I need this vacation more than anything. This is my dream job, and I wouldn’t do anything else, even if you paid me to, but I still need a vacation. 

A Long Awaited Visit

Somewhere beyond the unceasing cycle of 9 hour days that start and end with red tail lights and drooping eyelids, there is an escape. A place where your hammock sways softly with the palms in the breeze, as the rolling sea below you attempts to redefine your conceptions of what ‘blue’ is. You see the ocean’s deep blue, wrinkled fabric- speckled with turquoise shades closer to the shore. The sun pries open the clouds in a few parts, leaving golden streaks across the more distant, darker waters.Powerful waves produce an infinite supply of milky foam that rush upon the white pebble beaches, full of stones that time and water have smoothed for your enjoyment. You see tiny fishing boats, hundreds of feet below you, so far away that you can’t actually notice them moving, but you can still imagine the locals pulling in their nets. The cliffside house is as comfortable as it is simple, and you realize that you have never opened your morning eyes to a more awe inspiring view.

 Donna chilling out in a hammock by our beach/cliff house at Playa San Rafael 

Pathetic attempts to capture the heart of the beauty before you just won’t suffice. Cameras would only tease you with a mutilated fraction of a place that can not be experienced with eyes alone. And as you write about this experience, you spend minutes on a single sentence trying to describe this beauty vividly with words, and realize that they will be read by others and forgotten in a matter of seconds as a new tab on their browsers opens up a world of senseless status updates on Facebook. You realize that you are writing more for yourself than anyone else, because in those moments when you struggle to find the words to describe what you saw and felt, you dissolve in a greatness surrounding you. You become a grain of sand on a beach, but somehow you see that every grain of sand has infinite value, because they’re all part of something larger.

Greg, Mani, and I- true uhmerikans if I ever saw one

At least a few fearless travelers who partook in this adventure with me will understand better than most the indescribable experiences that the Dominican Republic’s southwestern beaches have to offer. Seven of my best friends from my college glory days came to explore the more remote corners of this country with me, where most tourists will never set foot.

The beaches, mountains, and postcard blue, paradise views will fade in time, but it is the more specific and ridiculous stories that my close circle of friends will never let die. How could we forget Mani ‘getting silly’ on Los Patos beach? He spent more time on the ground for our jump kick group photos than in the air. Maybe he was weighed down by all of the rocks we put in his swim trunks. Trust me, he deserved it! We finally fulfilled Chris’s dream of five years to have a candlelit taste tripping ceremonies with Miracle Berries, where a few red berries from a bush can mask a lime’s sour nature, leaving only it’s natural sweetness. When Chris went for the hot sauce though, his eyes lit up as if he were possessed by some sort of devil- albeit a very happy devil. Kim’s triumphant cheers after mastering the art of bucket flushing toilets will echo in our mind for eternity, as will her screams when I sent my arachnid amigos scurrying up the wall. Patrick bathed with a pig in the river, and ever since, we were afraid to pull his finger. Donna would kill me if I revealed the secrets of a very “cheesy” story (I win, that’s like three puns in one), but among friends, we will never see her or her big toes with the same eyes. Greg tried to get deported by breaking into a 500 year old crypt that is rumored to hold Columbus’s remains, but I will better remember him wandering out of my house with a broom at 5 in the morning, grumbling something about “rosters”, and slowly the roosters’ obnoxious shouts died away. Macho’s two days with us went by quick, but we will all agree that they were his best used sick days from work that he ever spent, riding in the back of a pickup truck through forgotten, curving roads along the beachfront, as we sang the Good Old Song of Wahoowah. He will need to explain to his boss how he got such a nice tan at his dentist appointment. Kati was Kati, so the long awaited encounter with my friends went perfectly. I never had any doubts.

Super gross photo

I am not sure that I can convey the importance that my friends’ visit to my community had for me. When my friends bathed in the creek with the pigs, heard the roosters crowing in the morning, and saw water flowing in pipes that I glued together- I felt the fabric of my two, very dissimilar lives, being sown together. This creates a consistency, a continuity of significant, shared memories, that let me feel like my friends were there with me through it all. I realize that most people that I will meet in this world will never see my work here, and will never truly understand what this journey means to me. I am comforted in knowing that a few good friends have experienced a snippet of my life here- a gesture that will not be forgotten.

Our last night in Santo Domingo was spent in an open air restaurant by the sea, where I inhaled a luxurious, guinea hen stew for supper with some sort of mixed drink that I was peer pressured into buying. The evening began well, but by the end I started to get quiet. The problem with being extroverted is that when you are quiet, everyone can read your mind like a book. What’s wrong, Dan? They would be gone soon, they would continue to laugh together, and I would toil in red clay with PVC glue hardening on my fingers, for many more months to come, while they continued to build memories together. I felt like I was about to be left behind again, and it was a direct result of a choice that I made. I still hadn’t even seen Jimmy in over 19 months after living with him for four, very important years. It weighs down on you when you think about it. Greg seemed to read my mind, and attempted to comfort me. He said that this was the first time that many of them had seen each other in a year, and that I was the reason they were brought together. Rather than feeling like I had abandoned the group, I started to feel proud that I could bring people together once more. The encounters are less frequent, but when we are trying to open a wine bottle with nothing more than a sandal and my own teeth, a year of separation is condensed into nothing. And yes, if you must know, I opened the bottle.

I opened a wine bottle with a sandal and my teeth… after about 20 minutes

It was a beautiful vacation, but the work started as soon as I got back. I had visitors at 9AM the morning after I returned, from the Rotary Club in Minnesota, a major donor for the project. I must say that I have never felt worse at communication as I did when the Rotary Club was in the mountains with me working. The problem with Spanglish is that the only other, poor, confused souls who speak this language are other volunteers. I don’t think I have had to transition languages as quickly as I did with Rotary at any other point in my life. Not only was I translating quickly, I was busy trying to find things for my visitors to do, while simultaneously doing work that I barely felt qualified to do. It’s a miracle my brain didn’t explode. It was an exhausting few days of work, spaced too quickly after a vacation, but I survived. Despite my lack of energy, I will always enjoy teaching someone who is enthusiastic to learn. I did enjoy getting to be the tour guide for such a friendly, enthusiastic group. This project would not have gotten off the ground as quickly without their support.

This weekend, my social life suffered a devastating blow, which coincided with the accumulation of many handy, albeit heavily biased, facts and fabrications about Canada, in a legendary trivia game. The Canadian interns from Enda Caribe, Adam and Elisa, are on the road traveling and will be back home in the frozen north by Saturday. Life will not be the same without them. They will be sorely missed, as will my tasteless jokes about a certain disputed territory- a place where maple syrup and the blood of rioting hockey fanatics freezes together in the streets. We blaze many trails through life, and every now and then those trails cross, or run parallel for a while. It is amazing to see how such a short encounter can change you. They have left me with so much.

Thanks to the Adam and Elisa, I gained the courage to try a frying pan flip, and have been losing juice filled onions ever since. I cleaned my toilet for the first time in seven months, and in doing so have possibly saved my relationship with Kati. I learned where Canada was on the world map. My Macbook has been branded by a well known, red maple leaf. I acquired various spices that I don’t really know how to use, including Turmeric, lemongrass, and ox tail. I also snagged a bag of dried squid from them which I will probably never use, but it’s good to have, just because it was free… I planted my first tree, a mandarin orange tree which is currently dying in my front yard. Thanks to them, Kati now owns a dangerously pink, love potion that was supposedly made in Argentina, entitled “I dominate my man”. And best of all, I have received my identity, along with an authentic, olive green marine’s cap from Cuba. I accepted the gift on the sole condition that my workers would call me, “El Comandante”, or rather, The Commander. I call it love- my workers call me El Comandante, and I, in the most endearing manner, call them “mis soldados” (my soldiers). A man’s worth is measured by the brim of his hat.

I am slowly learning how to be in two places at once. Currently, I am in a food court in a grocery store in Cotui, and I am also directing ditch digging efforts in the streets of Tres Bocas. Yesterday I was gluing pipes together in Tres Bocas and on a nine kilometer hike through some ungodly high mountains in El Corroso. How do I do it? I have learned how to manufacture leaders through the clever use of a large tape measurer. As the workers in Dos Palmas gather around the village club house at 7AM, I grab the 8 meter long tape measurer and approach one of my hardest workers, Junior.

Junior might be 20 years old, and can frequently be found stroking a fighting cock outside his family’s house, and can always be found with tobacco under his bottom lip. He comes to work about three times a week, and always says “positivo” when I tell him to do something. He’s got a spark about him that seems to double the amount of energy in my work brigades. A natural leader if I have ever seen one. I hand him the tape measurer while he is surrounded by 15 other workers, and announce very loudly, “Junior, you’re in charge. Everyone else, do what he says- respect him.” With his tape measurer in hand, Junior grows twice as tall, and his enthusiasm surges. I know he is doing a great job right now, and I will meet up with him around lunch time to oversee his progress.

My nine kilometer hike through El Corroso began with me biting my lip, feeling like I might have made a huge mistake in taking on another project, but ended with me feeling like I could take on the world. The UVA engineering team will be coming to live in El Corroso in June, and we hope that by the end of July that they will have constructed a water storage tank and be able to fill it with water from the mountains. This goal assumes that we have a water source that has enough altitude and water to service 1000 people. I had seen two potential options in the wet season that gave me enough confidence to say that this goal could be achieved, so I invited the team to form their grant proposal.

Adam and Elisa had helped me do land surveying on one of the sources a few weeks ago, and a business volunteer named Josh helped me with the second one. When I arrived to work yesterday, Salvador, my principal contact with El Corroso apologized to me and explained that he had led my American friend to measure the wrong sources, and their work was all in vain. Mistakes like this are all too typical, so my mood barely changed. What a great start to the day.

I went to find the first source that Josh should have surveyed, and found that it had dried up to the point that it was unusable in the dry season. I had one option left, a promising source several kilometers away that was essentially a waterfall in November. It was my last real hope. When I arrived at the waterfall, I was devastated to find dry rocks faces. What had I done? The UVA team would be arriving in two months, and I had promised them that we had a good source of water that could be used. At this point, Salvador told me that the source Adam and Elisa had measured was just further down stream from the dried up waterfall. My hopes were alive again. We went down the dried up creek, and slowly started to find water. We reached the point where Adam and Elisa had begun measuring, which had plenty of water for El Corroso, but which was 15 meters too low to be usable. I crossed my fingers, and began climbing up higher to see if we could get the extra 15 meters we need without going too high to dry up the source. We reached the 15 meters I needed, and still have 100,000 liters of water a day in the dry season from this source. I started glowing with hope. In that creek bed, I saw the future of El Corroso’s aqueduct. They will have water by gravity one day, and this was the only place that was possible within 10 kilometers.

One Year Abroad

I have always been a huge supporter of shameless chivalry. Holding a door open, frequent, but earnest, compliments, and of course heart shaped pancakes are all wonderful gestures to woo young damsels, but they are only small milestones along the path to the legendary victory awaiting those with a true lack of discretion and a few guitar chords under their belt.

About a month ago, as I contemplated new and exciting ways that I could win at life, a dangerous thought entered my mind. At first I laughed at the outright ridiculousness of it, then I imagined its colorful details, and finally I felt a pang of fear in my chest. It was as terrifying as it was brilliant, and I realized that there was no way I could spend the rest of my life knowing that my own weak knees robbed me of a potentially mythic memory.

One day in the future, as I down a morning cup of coffee and read flavorless newspaper comics, I would think back. I would remember driving across a third world country in the back of a bus with a guitar. I’d remember the anxiety as my moto arrived at the most boisterous part of her slum- her front door. I would awkwardly set up the three white roses on my guitar case. Then there would be curious neighbors’ eyes on the back of my head as I knocked on the door and braced myself. And all at once the door would swing open and I completely forget that there was anyone else watching. She would be shocked, I would sing a Dominican bachata favorite to her, and within two minutes we would be on a moto leaving the slum in search of tourist-priced ice cream. Afterwards, she would never be able to be angry at me- ever. I’d finish my cup of coffee and remember that along time ago that I had set the bar high, and if life were ever less ridiculous or passionate than that day, then I would have truly lost my way.

Things did not quite go that way, but perhaps that is for the best. I was able to pluck my way through a melodious intro, but had to stop short of singing the song’s chorus, which literally translates to, “I brought roses, my guitar, and a bottle… to get drunk and sing to you dark girl.” Yes, it’s indeed for the best that the end of the introduction coincided with a slammed door- this is the real world and not a Monty Python skit. I am glad that I did not mount a helmet camera to capture the moment because it would have been hard to edit out the desperate pleas for a ceasefire behind a closed door. “No! Don’t sing, please don’t!” But, as the talkative neighbors tell this tale, which is well documented on wikipedia (just kidding, Kati), she was crying in the streets with joy. In another year, the story will include a stallion and a sunset. The more time that passes, the more I seem to remember riding towards the sunset as well. As I had anticipated, the excessive attention wasn’t very palatable, but the chocolate milkshake three miles down the road was. The moral of the story is that life should always have back up plans, and those plans should always include chocolate and a beautiful girl.

Street-side serenades in a third-world slum, named Sewage, can be romantic, but they can also make you the most talked about couple in an entire country- adding pressure to the already suffocating social conditions that define Peace Corps experiences. Regardless, I stand by my theory that time will transform my escape vehicle from a motorcycle into a stallion, and that added attention and pressure into an unbelievable memory that evokes nostalgia and laughter. In the meantime, I will pat myself on the back for using enough discretion to not stop the colmado music and sing into a microphone.

I decided to conduct a random sampling of Dominicans in a colmado and on public transportation to see how many of them sympathized with my cause. It turns out that 13 out of 15 Dominicans believed that serenades were romantic and a really good thing, one shifty schmuck in my carro publico stated that it would depend on the girl, and the carro publico driver boasted with a straight face that he had once serenaded an ex-girlfriend outside her window with a mariachi band, and she let him into the house. I felt ever so vindicated by the survey results, but karma had other plans for me…

Fear not, lovers of justice and haters of impassioned, romantic serenades- I was repaid for my chivalrous acts with a kick in the ass. Actually, they were smacks in the ass, and plenty of them, with air filled pigs bladders swung by children dressed in colorful devil costumes. Ass beatings by feather flaunting, demon children is a venerated Dominican tradition in La Vega’s Carnaval celebration. Many other children that were not seeking out sizable booties were covered head to toe with mud baked onto them with the sun and searched for hand outs. All in all, a bizarre experience. La Vega’s Mardi Gras celebration is only a step down beneath New Orleans and Rio de Janero. There was loud bachata and merengue, a long walk down a street with costume covered assailants who would bruise any rear end they could find. I got a spray paint tattoo, a beer buzz, and made the mistake of raising my fists to a small horde of children attacking Kati. Raising your fists only encourages the little crappers. They swarmed me, and my height advantage, although minimal, was useless. My soon-to-be aching rear had learned its lesson, that if you drink more at La Vega’s Carnaval, you don’t feel pain.

Life must go on, so I carried my aching rear and maimed theories of chivalry back to the mountains to work. Writing this blog post is positively therapeutic for me considering the physical and psychological abuse that this ever so demanding phase of construction has subjected me to. I would say that half of the battle is actually directing the construction process, and the other half is worrying about the communities’ level of organization, budgeting time and money, planning out purchases, and somehow trying to willingly involve myself in a similar battle in El Corroso in preparation for the UVA students arrival in June to begin building their aqueduct.

All of this stress and lack of sleep has not so surprisingly coincided with the sanitary Apocalypse that has taken place across the muddy tiles between my moldy refrigerator and my toilet which I will not illustrate. All I can say is that when I am tired and have things that I deem truly important on my mind, I remember that I had a latrine for three months, and that no matter how bad my toilet gets, it will never be as bad as that the dangerously full, cockroach and tarantula infested cesspit that taught me to embrace outdoor urination.

At least for the past two weeks, I have felt very little balance in my life. Many days I would feel like I was just barely getting through. I would wake up at 6:15AM, crawl up and down a mountain trying to do useful things that I am not qualified to do, and get home just in time to receive my Canadian friends. No, it wasn’t a social visit, but rather a response to a desperate plea for help on my Corroso side project. Within five minutes of greeting my friends, I was telling them that I needed to use the last remaining 30 minutes of sunlight to train them to do land-surveying so they could work independently the next morning. I finally bathe in the creek just as the sun is setting, and afterwards, dishes need to be done, and food needs to be bought. Two days later, another Peace Corps friend arrives named Josh to help me do land surveying in Corroso, and the stress does not subside.

Amidst all of the mayhem that has overtaken my house and mind in the past two weeks, together with Tal, I was able to build my first suspended gully crossing, an intake structure, and get half of a sedimentation tank constructed. Perfect? Hell no, but they work. In addition to my growing technical capacity, I have learned that confidence, with or without justification, breeds success.

Josh’s experience working in El Corroso elaborates this point clearly. I invited him to do something he had never done before, in a village he has never seen, with people he has never met, in the mountains, of a foreign country with a foreign language. I’m sure he was a little bit uncomfortable, but he got through it with confidence. The more isolated you are when you confront these challenges, the stronger your confidence is after you succeed. The reason that this work is so hard is the same reason it is so rewarding, its because you work alone.

March 1^st marked my one year anniversary of my time in this country. I remember the drive over to my Peace Corps, pre-departure orientation, and how I felt like I was going to throw up the pizza I had just wolfed down. I tried to be brave but I was drowning in stress and afraid. Would I spend the next year in a wooden shack without electricity and water? Isolated with few friends, striving in vain to make a difference in peoples lives, but to no avail? After so much change, so many unknowns, I don’t feel that I could be scared of any major life changes ever again.

It was a year without reliable electricity, hot showers, and running water. Sometimes, I felt like buying meat twice a week was irresponsible budgeting. There was very little English during the year, and even less alone time. The days were rare when I had enough bandwidth to download a youtube video in less than 10 minutes. Apart from a Christmas visit from my family, every face that I have encountered in the past 365 days was unknown to me a year ago. I have had a 103 degree fever and amoebas from mountain water. I have not driven a car with windows down and music blasting. I have not had a great beer in a year. I have eaten half of one crispy crème, and have felt like crying when eating Domino’s pizza. I miss pick-up soccer games more than crispy cremes. I have not eaten home made cookies. I have not seen snow.

It was a year when I learned to travel across a third world country with nothing more than the name of my destination, a cell phone, and a bit of money. Constant exposure to arachnids shattered a lifetime phobia, giving me enough courage to touch a tarantula, or harpoon one with a machete. I have finally learned how to cook well enough to survive. I have gone full weeks without eating meat and not thought twice about it. I have made friends with old mountain men who grew up using torches instead of flashlights and conversations instead of ‘facebook likes’. I can dance bachata. I grew out my beard so long that my nickname was Bin Laden. I have played the guitar by candlelight. I can tell you which way the Orion constellation is drifting in the sky with each passing month. I have climbed mountains on a daily basis, with views that would make your mouth drop. I stop what I am doing and stare on the rare days when a plane flies over head. I learned to ride on the back of a motorcycle. I rarely bathe indoors. I am in the best shape of my life. I can wear knee high rubber boots with a machete strapped on my belt, and people don’t laugh. I am with a girl whose voice can make any hardship seem trivial. I have eaten honey from a bees nest in the woods. I have felt more thankful receiving a world map, beef jerky, and a plain wooden chess set for Christmas than all of the other Christmas gifts I have ever received combined. I have not doubted my decision to come here once. I have blogged more than 74,000 words.

There are so many things that I haven’t done yet though. I have not yet been able to peel an orange with a machete without Dominicans laughing at me. I have not planted a garden. I have not painted my house. I have not cleaned my toilet. My 13 year old neighbor who can only recognize seven letters still does not know how to read. I have not been able to teach English classes effectively. I have not launched a rocket into the sky with a group of kids. I have not installed a single tap stand at anyone’s home. I have not played weekly soccer games with neighbors. I have not seen the South or East of the country. I have not started a weight lifting or running club. I have not been able to capture a jaiba without being bitten. I have not hiked Pico Duarte. I have not been scuba diving through a shipwreck.

The joys have outweighed my sacrifices, and I know how to dream better than I ever did back home. All in all, a year of my life well spent. 15 months to go, hoorah.

Soggy Underwear and No Oreos

Living with a hungry amoeba in my gut has been easier than organizing construction this week. Before delving into the details of my muddy adventures in the mountains without food, followed by a two hour horseback ride home, I’ll regale you with a tale about the birth and death of Andy the Amoeba, who terrorized my digestive system for 12 days before meeting his end. A faulty filter and mountain water brought him to me, but it was my own wishful thinking that delayed his demise. After a few days, I reasoned that I was already on the path to recovery because I was no longer throwing up and spending the entire night running between the toilet and my mosquito net. Progress to me was that I could eat half a pizza on my green card trip in the capital, even if I struggled to eat my fourth slice. The depressing truth was that I was losing weight and hadn’t felt hungry in almost two weeks. Two days after buying powerful over the counter pills that my doctor recommended, Andy was dead, and I was suddenly craving rice and beans.

Andy made everything ten times more difficult, in one of the most difficult weeks I have had on this Caribbean retreat. Despite the parasite, the first two weeks of construction were fantastic. All of the pipelines, clean outs, and respirators in the mountain section of construction were installed on schedule with no major difficulties. At times, however, the third and fourth weeks have been soul-crushing. My efforts to prepare the intake structure and build two pipe bridges have been repeatedly thwarted by communities feuds in which I have strategically placed myself on neutral ground.

The root of the problem is that prominent members of the water committee in Dos Palmas feel that Tres Bocas is not pulling their weight and Tres Bocas feels that they are pulling too much weight. While on the theme of he-feels, she-feels, I might as well take the opportunity to say that I feel that only two visits to the beach over the course of the past year is not nearly enough. This is especially depressing considering the fact that the paradise beaches that many of cold footed Americans dream of can be found 100 miles in any direction from me. The only thing separating me from those sandy stretches is the real Dominican Republic.

Dos Palmas claims that they had been spending their community funds for over the past year to secure the Peace Corps volunteer (I feel like a carnival prize), to secure the food donations (actually, that was me), the pipe donations, masonry blocks, the money from FOMISAR, and the backhoe which is still theoretically going to help us. They say that Tres Bocas joined this project at the last minute without investing much of their own resources, and to make up for it, they must now provide cooks and seasoning for the raw rice and beans that were donated when it’s Dos Palmas turn to work in the mountains. On top of that, they need to be responsible for finding my transport to Tres Bocas during Tres Boca’s work week. Finally, Dos Palmas is very far away from the current, mountain construction site, so it is only fair that Tres Bocas donates the majority of the mules and horses needed to lug the gravel, sand, and blocks up the mountain. When all of these conditions are met, the hostages will be freed, and we will be free to live in peace once again. Perhaps listing the conditions in bullet form might have been more concise. Oh, how subtly I sneak in my bias.

Needless to say, Tres Bocas is not very happy about all of the demands being placed on them. When it was Tres Boca’s week to work, and the only thing that we needed to do was lug the materials up the mountain, basically nothing was done. The people would not donate their mules and horses to travel up a muddy slip and slide with 200 pounds on their back. They said that this job is different from digging ditches, and the risk to their animals needed to be shared equally with Dos Palmas, despite the fact that it was Dos Palmas week to rest. The two communities agreed to move all the materials up the mountain on Saturday, but there were 11 mules from Tres Bocas and five from Dos Palmas. I heard that some angry Tres Boquerers went home early to balance things out.

Up to this point, I have been the point of contact for both of the communities, purely because I see them both every day. It is only natural that the water committee in Tres Bocas will explain their concerns to me, tell me that we need to find cooks for the next week, and X number of mules, and that Dos Palmas needs to transport me to work. Naturally, after spending 10 hours on my feet skiing in mountain mud, the first thing I want to do when I get home is start up a provocative conversation about mules and food with my neighbors. I realized I had made a huge mistake. Despite all of the progress that we’ve made, we had still not had a joint water committee meeting between the two communities. I had been conveying the main information back and forth between communities, and it had worked well – up to this point. It was time for a big, really uncomfortable meeting.

The most intimidating meetings are usually the most important meetings, and this meeting was the most feared one that I have had in a long time. Despite my concerns, they met, they argued, they sorted out their differences, and I thought we had all reached an agreement with respect to food and mules. I explained that I can not take sides, that I would barely say a word during the meeting, and that they needed to sort out their differences. We were in this together, so if we needed to stop construction for two weeks to reach an agreement, it would be necessary. I told them that under no circumstances should I ever have to seek out my own transport to Tres Bocas, look for mules, or discuss the seasoning for rice- while I am planning the construction of a $43,000 aqueduct. The presidents of the respective water committees needed to hash out those details on their own. As I said in my previous post, delegation is the only way I can survive. So when I tell the Tres Bocas coordinator that I need to move seven cubic meters of gravel up those slippery red slopes, he needs to figure out how to divide that work between his community and Dos Palmas, and I can go to to my house and continue planning construction for the next couple weeks (planning for construction usually consists of Kati and I taking turns venting on Skype).

The meeting ended with everyone agreeing that the problems we had had were just one big, painful misunderstanding, and that we should’ve been meeting on a regular basis months ago. It looked like Tres Bocas would help us more with food and that Dos Palmas would help more with mules. I left the meeting with high spirits and blind optimism (a perspective that one should always hold just to spite reality).

In reality, the trail up the mountain was paved in mud and fallen mules, and not in gold. We’ve slowly been getting all of the materials up the mountain, but Tres Bocas is still not happy about Dos Palmas commitment with the mules. When Dos Palmas showed up to work on Monday, there was no one to cook for us. On top of that, we had hours of rain. Not just a little rain – I felt like I had just taken a three hour shower. After a half day of work, I sent my 15 man brigade from Dos Palmas down the mountain without food. Barrick Gold mine had graded the ruts out of the road to make it more ankle-friendly, but they didn’t throw any gravel on it. This means that when it rains, a truck full of 15 men will most likely end up with its nose stuck in a ditch off the side of the road. There was no way around it, our guagua couldn’t retrieve us. We were on foot without food. From the construction site, we walked about an hour and a half to arrive to our houses in Dos Palmas. Being the engineer has its perks- such as getting a bola on the back of a horse, even if I was mounted on the horse’s sweaty, saddleless, bony ass.

I finally reached my front door, and couldn’t find my key. There, in the rain covered in mud, I grasped the metal bars of my door and fell to my knees with a quivering lip. I didn’t care about anything except the Oreos on the other side of that locked door. I have developed a frightening addiction to Oreos in the past two weeks. They taste like America, and they are the only thing that can drag me out of my pre-dawn slumber each morning, sending me to my kitchen like a zombie with a saliva filled mouth. I was at rock bottom. The only thing that separated me from this last little joy was my spare key. The spare key was in my host family’s house, which was also locked up. Tona didn’t realize we would be coming home early from work, so she closed the doors and went down the road to eat with a family member. I went into the village club with soggy underwear and no Oreos and knew what it meant to be totally defeated. Half an hour later, I found my missing key in my back pocket. I think I was more angry than happy. I finished the box of Oreos and went to bed without a shower.

In the Peace Corps parasites are probable, Oreo’s are few, and underwear is soggy (for one reason or another)- but perhaps the most overlooked difficulty in the numerous, exhausting trials you endure is the fact that you can scream and cry in your native tongue, and no one will understand you. The inexplicable twist in this story is that there is nothing else I would rather be doing with my life right now, and I am perhaps more optimistic than I was when I arrived here a year ago.

Broken Ground

The day of my imagined terrors came, but the sun rose once more. When the hour came to climb the hills with tools and pipes slung over sore shoulders, I was not alone as I had feared. And at noontime when 19 well deserving stomachs began to rumble, the food appeared rather than a mutinous gang of rice deprived Dominicans with sharpened metal. Today, we would break ground on the aqueduct. I had envisioned the moment in my head many times. Wearing my legendary white, wide-brimmed Tiley Hat, I would send goosebumps down many spines with some sort of inspirational speech on the summit of that massive hill with the gold mine on the horizon. Then I would clutch a pick axe and launch it into the virgin earth as my Tuesday work brigade raised their fists and cheered triumphantly.

The actual affair had very little pomp. I don’t even think half of our brigade had made it to the top of the hill before Arjao casually tossed the end of his pick into the ground to begin searching for the buried pipes of a five year old, failed government initiative. To make matters worse, my sense of compassion had overcome my viscous Napoleon Complex, meaning that Arjao had not only seized this glorious moment from me, but he did so in style, under the commanding shadow of my Tiley Hat. The hat would serve as a substitute for a sizable portion of skull that his in-laws had taken from him during the divorce. Seeing as Arjao is the president of my water committee in Tres Bocas, I saw it as a worthy investment to gift him one of my extra hats to prevent the skull-less section of his brain from cooking, but I made sure that this hat was smaller than my Tiley Hat. Instead of an inspirational speech, I just called Kati to announce “I’m on a #@#$ing mountain and I’m building a #@#$ing aqueduct!!!!”

Ground breaking felt much the same as high school, when you finally ask the girl you’ve had a secret crush on out on a date. You’ve built the moment up in your mind so much that its almost insurmountable. Everything must be right. You practice your one pathetic line a million times in front of a mirror (this was not my High School experience… cough), changing the word order and intonation. When should you do it? You want to catch her alone… The longer you wait, the more anxiety that floods your mind. What if she says no? Assuming you get the lucky date, you want to make sure everything goes perfectly, make sure the car has gas, get a haircut, study your google maps because you don’t want to make a wrong turn…

The vast majority of the 11 months that I have spent in this country have been spent wondering when I would possess enough technical competency and organization to do my job. I’ve spent the past three months wondering if my neighbors would ever choose their work brigade days and sign their user-agreements, and if that actually meant that they would come to work when we started. I’ve spent the past two weeks wondering how and when all of the supplies I needed to begin construction would appear. I’ve spent the past couple of hours wondering if I will be in over my head next week directing the construction of a sedimentation tank. The confidence that is driving me forward right now does not flow from knowing answers to these questions, but rather from a trust that things must work out because this story ends with water flowing in the taps. You don’t undertake a great journey when you are ready, you do so when it is time to travel. I needed to grow, so I began my journey.

After two weeks of construction, I can finally breathe. Rather than suffocating from uncertainty and doubt, I feel an overwhelming sense of confidence now. Interestingly enough, I know I would be a liar to say that this confidence stems from trusting myself. Instead I will say that this confidence comes from my newfound appreciation for the importance of delegation.

Here was the monster in the back of my mind. How can I keep track of worker attendance across 200 families to maintain sweat equity? How can I fill a truck of workers at 7AM when they show up an hour late to every community meeting we have? How can I be sure that my brigade of 19 men an hour away from their homes gets enough food and water, when they need it? How can I move 10 cubic meters of aggregate and 200 blocks a mile up a mountain? The answer is surprisingly simple to all of these questions. Search out peoples strengths and delegate. It is tiring to discuss the answers to these many questions with each person you put in charge of something. Instead, I find that I move much more efficiently by trusting that the person in charge will find their own solution. And of course we have failed from time to time, but to expect anything else would just be a vain delusion.

After two weeks of construction, we have 530 meters of pipes buried across an unforgiving terrain far from home. We have had laborers from 115 different households stain their jeans red with clay over the course of 8 days of ditch digging. We have fed every last one of those 115 men, made sure they have water, and provided transportation for over half of them. These are successes that I need to remind myself of so that they I do not forget to celebrate… because there are only 12,000 more meters to go! This is why the Peace Corps commitment is 27 months- because it took me almost a year to get to this point, and I have barely started.

Needless to say, these past two weeks have been extremely tough on me. There were some days when I was up in the mountains when I felt as if I couldn’t speak Spanish. I can think of at least two particularly brutal hills that my heart rate will consistently reach 190 by the time I reach the summit. After slipping ten million times in that god awful red clay, after sweating your shirt out again and again, and waking up five days in a row at 6:30AM to do this shit, you can barely keep your eyes open. People you can normally understand seem like they’re speaking Chinese, and you feel frustrated and stupid as they repeat themselves three times. How many years before you are truly comfortable with this language. This is why most days I barely touched the pick axe.

With such a crazy day running from one end of the trench to the other, it is easy to forget to drink the three liters of water you need to stay hydrated. I was almost certainly dehydrated, felt weak, nauseous, and then was just unhappy to have to taste my lunch a second and third time. I struggled to walk from exhaustion for the rest of the day, and spend the next two days with diarrhea and indigestion. My Wikipedia diagnosis was Giardia from the mountain streams and a lack of trust in my carbon filter water bottle. I don’t know what it was but the symptoms soon passed and a few days later the doctor said not to worry about it.

There has been more dialogue about the backhoe with the representatives from the gold mine. They seem very sincere in their desire to help us. They promised publicly in a community meeting that they would donate a minimum of 50,000 pesos, but that they would apply for 100,000 pesos so that we could finish the most difficult part of the trenches, the Dos Palmas Storage Tank Line, which is a three kilometer stretch of pipe far from home between the two communities.

The gold mine is not the only one trying to help out. Mariela was able to get three engineers from INAPA, the Dominican Government’s water resource institution, to visit my site so they could give their recommendations. They presented me with their design from 5 years ago and we discussed the differences. It appears that we both came to the same conclusion regarding the best way to get Dos Palmas water. The INAPA project that fell through five years ago had originally intended to give water to Dos Palmas, Tres Bocas, and 100 other houses down the road in El Maricao. We poured over their old design, which I found to be extremely helpful. I still stand by my decision to not extend the aqueduct further to El Maricao because it would reduce the quality of the system. I do not want Tres Bocas to have water on Mondays, Dos Palmas on Tuesdays, Maricao on Wednesdays… etc. There is not enough water to support all of these communities needs with my aqueduct.

The best news of the week is that the engineering students from the University of Virginia had their project officially approved, meaning that I will have five students coming to my site next summer with $15,000 ready to work on a water project up the road in El Corroso. By means of a very helpful professor, Prof. Bob Swap (also voted the state of Virginia’s top professor for 2012), I was able to round up the team and funding. Our goal is to build a storage tank and fill it with water from two mountain streams.

What’s my job in all this? I am trying to round up the troops in Peace Corps to prepare everything for this team’s arrival. I have many useful leads that I hope will prove fruitful. The students will need a place to stay, guides that can help them navigate the culture and language, and enough data before their arrival to make a good design. Maybe it was reckless of me to take on this added responsibility, but as I said before, this story will have a happy ending not because I will it to, but because myself, five engineering students from UVA, and 250 families in El Corroso will it to. Now all I need to do is prepare and delegate. Adrenaline and passion will get me through it, I hope.