Stepping Out of the Boat

Today, we went to "el campo," which means "the country." That's what Maria, our friend and fellow teacher, calls her country home that she is in the process of building. She has kind of asked us to come out to her country house several times on several different occasions, but has never really and actually invited us. Today was different. In fact, she ended up needing help painting some rooms in her house, so we went to help paint.

Yvonne and Nelson, some other friends, drove us there. Maria's house is about an hour north of Santo Domingo, close to the mountains in the middle of the island, so we had a nice ride there in the van with the Gutierrez family. We took the only highway that goes north out of the city for an hour, and then we turned off of the highway onto a dirt road. It was really lovely, but seemed like we'd left the world of technology behind. Maria's road splits an orange grove that occupies a plain just before the mountains begin. It was beautiful to say the least.

We drove back into the countryside by groups of small shacks where the poor live. Every so often, we'd pass a large gate where a larger and nicer house (we presume) is located.

Maria's house is not finished, not furnished, and not quite ready, but it will be nice once it's done. Here's a picture:

The lower level has a small kitchen, a living area, and a bathroom, and the upper level has two bedrooms, a laundry room, and two bathrooms. We painted the lower level and one bedroom. Here's Maria painting the wall by her staircase. Unfortunately, Maria didn't have enough tools for all of us to work at once, so we took turns painting and resting.

Maria has a little creek that runs by her house in the back, and we had some fun jumping on the stones and cooling oursleves in the water. We almost fancied that we were back home wading in McKormack's Creek at the State Park, besides the fact that there was a woman washing her clothes by beating them on the rocks in the creek bed.

We spent quite a bit of time outside in this little hut thing. It was very nice, although there were mosquitoes everwhere. We had to bring our own food because Maria doesn't have a fridge or a stove yet, so we had picnic style snacks out there during the day.

It was a nice day, but as we were getting ready to leave, Maria discovered that she was missing 5,000 pesos. She had 10,000 pesos in the house with her (about $300). Then, two other people who were there with us discovered that they were missing money, too. We were really not surprised because the gate had been open all day long, and the house is in an area surrounded by extreme poverty... of course the poor are going to be tempted to steal. Nothing was stolen from us, but we really didn't have anything with us worth taking. It kind of put a damper on our evening. Here's John looking grim while looking through our bag.