Stepping Out of the Boat

We've been so busy lately that we haven't really had much time to blog. One week from today, we'll be in the middle of nowhere climbing the highest mountain in the Caribbean. We're excited. This has been a crazy week at school... stay tuned for the details.

So, last Saturday, the seniors at school had a fundraiser called "Easter Fest". They invited all the kids from school and their families to the school on Saturday for food and fun. We decided to go over and take a look to see what was going on. We were somewhat surprised to learn about some commonplace Easter practices here that would never fly at home. Even though we don't have any pictures of this, it's a perfectly normal thing to (animal rights activists please skip to the next paragraph) sell live baby chickens and bunnies to the spoiled little children at Easter time. In fact, at school, they had boxes and boxes of baby chicks and bunnies just waiting to be snatched up by the greedy sticky fingers of the kids at school. They sold the chicks for 20 pesos
each, which is about 75 cents. Basically, all of those baby chickens will end up dead in a few days. Who knows about the bunnies. I saw one fat little kids squeezing his little chick so hard... well, the chick was making quite a bit of noise.




Spirit Week

This week at school, as mentioned in a previous blog post, is Spirit Week. That sounds perfectly harmless, I'm sure; however, that means that all the students pretty much run rampant for a week. I (Claire) have been assigned a duty post during the festivities that is luckily out of the line of action. I mostly read a book at my assigned post while the soccer games and other chaos goes on in other places. You see, the whole school day is smooshed into the hours of 8-12:30, and any teacher can tell you that students generally go nuts on any school day in which the schedule is different. At 12:30, everyone is supposed to change their clothes and cheer for a particular color team during a soccer game. Students can buy food and drinks while they watch the games and cheer. Today was the second day of this. John gets the pleasure of trying to keep track of his unruly students from 12:30 - 2:15. I'm happy with my post.
The whole school is covered with banners, posters, and ribbons of different colors. Each color represents one of the high school grades. It really is a fine idea - but not for a whole week. Here, if you haven't noticed, school is not really about class time and learning. It's about all the extra stuff like Spirit Week.

The Doughnut of Doom
This week, Rebecca, Sonya, John, and I decided to steal and use a great idea that a good friend of Rebecca's used during his time in Antarctica this past year. Chris, the friend, didn't really enjoy his time in Antarctica and wanted to count down the days until his time was done. So, he and his buddies down on the south pole decided to make a pie chart showing the time that had passed so far and the time they had left. They affectionately called it "the doughnut of doom". We have decided to take their idea and make it our own. Sonya was having a particularly bad day, and she exclaimed to Becky, "I think we need a wall-sized doughnut of doom!" So, we made one.
John figured out how to make a perfect circle on a shower curtain by making a compass out of string and two pens. Then, we did some math to figure out that there are 46 weeks in our stay here in Santo Domingo, but we could only really figure out how to make 48 sections in the circle. We made the divisions using John's compass and then labeled each one with the dates of each week we've been here.

Then, we took it over to the girls' apartment and colored in all the sections we've already lived through. We wrote down significant events and relived our time here until this point. From now on, we're going to ceremoniously color in one little section at the end of each week. We're counting down to June 23rd... that glorious day of homecoming! We also had a good time making the doughnut of doom. We're probably going to hang it somewhere in the girls' apartment. They have much more wall space than we do.

It always seems that we're making comments on the weather, but here, the weather really matters. In fact, sometimes it makes or breaks our day. The rainy season seems to have started, which means that it's cooler when it's raining, but it's also extremely humid when it's not raining. With rain also come mosquitoes. Huge ones. Mosquitoes like people who live in Indiana have never seen.

In other news, I thought we were going to be able to go on a field trip Friday to go whale watching in the north eastern side of the island with the 9th and 11th grade, but because of the the way our school works - or doesn't - we aren't going to be able to go. We may be happy we didn't go because it is likely to be a big mess. A friend of ours here says that everyone she knows who has gone has spent most of the time vomiting in the bottom of the boat because of seasickness. Instead, John will spend Friday participating in March Madness! He's excited. I will probably read a book - although I filled out a bracket predicting Ohio State as the national champs... we'll see.

We got tried of our living arrangement during the weekend, so we decided to change it up. Pretty much, we're cramped into a tiny space, and nothing will change that, but we decided to turn the spare bedroom, which doesn't get used much, into the dining room, making the "living room" bigger. The truth is, we have one common area in our apartment that serves as kitchen, living room, and until recently, dining room. It seems to be working well so far. I really like the dining room now because the spare room is the sunniest and breeziest room in the apartment - and now we're actually using it for something.

Life continues in the way it has since we got here. The weather is getting hotter, and since this is "high tourist" season, the resorts are way too expensive for us. We're looking forward to our mountain climb that's coming up in the next couple weeks.

A special hello to Mom Pontius and Grandpa Verch who are spending the week together in Chicago! We love you.