Just a Walk in the Park

One of the nice things that we do a number of mornings in the week is to go over to a park just across the street around 6:15 to go walking.  This park used to be a zoo and I can’t find out why it was closed – perhaps it was too small.  Anyway, there are a lot of walking trails and wonderful trees growing. There are guards here, so it's perfectly safe for me when I have come walking alone in the morning.

  

These lovely little bushes are all over - so pretty.

They are adding new curbing - this is some of the debris that they cleaning up.

 Remember the old house plant the philodendron.  Well, there is a giant 

philodendron plant growing up this tree.

A fountain that they are updating.

Look at the size of these leaves - magnolia - the

national tree.

A funky table and chairs.

We don't know what animals were here, but can you see the beautiful tree in the background?

It's called a flamboyant tree = perfect name, huh?

Here is a closeup of the blossoms.

When they fall, they also are pretty on the ground.

 A very unusual tree.

Can you see that there are sort of roots hanging down from the branches?

It is called the Caucho tree and is from India.

Rob's "hiding" in the vines of the tree.

A Book Fair Sequel

One of the things that was bothering me throughout the Book Fair was that thousands of dollars were spent on our pavilion, only to have it torn down when everything was over.  This is what happens to all of the places.  Then I learned that our materials are all given to a needy family which I think is wonderful.  The family is responsible for taking the building apart and transporting the materials to their home.  Here are some photos of that process!  The family who is getting the home has five children in a little two bedroom home.  The father is a builder, but is unemployed right now.  He carefully supervised the dismantling with a friend and a Haitian helper, and they even took every screw and nail and put them in a bucket to reuse.  I felt a little sad when it came down...

The deck and sidewalk boards are removed. 

 Each board was carefully saved.

 The front door and windows are gone.

 The porch is nearly gone.  It was kind of scary when the helper was sitting on top of the tile porch roof removing the screws with an electric drill - I worried that they would all just come off and he'd go sliding to the ground.  Notice the ladder which was made on the site.

 Back doors and railings all gone.

 Drywall all gone.  At the building next door, the workers just took hammers and smashed the drywall and glass windows - I can't imagine that clean-up mess.  Our guy carefully removed as much drywall as possible, I guess to reuse...

 Sorted into piles of wood, metal roofing, plywood flooring and aluminum sidewalk supports.

 All gone - you can see the surrounding rubble.

 Here's the Monteros' home.

He is building the new home around the outside of the old one and then will remove the inside walls. I don't know if you remember the windows from the front of the Noche de Hogar building, but here's one now in the front wall.

 Here is Brother Montero, his wife and one son.  Can you see that she has a beauty parlor in her front room, but no windows?

Here's a back view of the house.  The wood wall was once the decking from the pavilion. Can you see an old crib-sized mattress propped up as part of the wall?  You can see how much larger the finished house will be. (By the way, they live on a dirt road that appears to be getting curb and gutters before getting paved which will be nice for them, but their lot is still pretty ragged.)

I don't know if we will visit the site later for a further update.  It just made me so thankful for our lovely apartment here and our home back in Atlanta, and a little ungrateful to the Lord for His bounteous blessings.  

Note:  This blog entry is dedicated to Ben and Jaclyn who have purchased an older home in Dallas which will be torn down for a new home to be built on the site. Good luck!

La Feria del Libro

The Book Fair – ah, how to begin to describe this whole experience.  Every year, Santo Domingo has a big book fair held on the grounds of the Ministry of Culture.   The fair runs 18 days, and around 40 different organizations, including our church, build booths.  Last year, ours had around 38,000 visitors.  “Booth” is really not a correct word.  All of the buildings are at least 12 x 18 or so, but most are much larger, including ours.  They are all constructed in less than three weeks.  Here are some other booths:

The theme this year is “Noche de Hogar” or Family Night.  

Under construction - these booths have electricity, air conditioning, etc.  

Our booth under construction

Our booth, as you can see, has been designed to look like a house.  The fair is open every day from 8 am until 10 pm, with two different shifts of families from the congregations here to welcome folks and share the information. It has been a tremendous amount of work, and we are so happy to have it opened. 

Our finished booth

So in less than two months, we have helped design the structure, helped write the script and supervised the filming of an introductory video, sent out invitations, approved and paid the vendors who built the structure, helped film the process and the daily activities, opened it every morning at 7:30 and then trained the day’s volunteers (about 150 have been involved), ran on errands for more materials, designed a website, designed a Facebook and Twitter pages, prepared gifts for the invited guests at the launching ceremony, prepared a press package for local newspapers and television stations, etc. Whew!  It has been mind-boggling.  We still need to prepare gifts for the volunteers and wrap up information for the planning committee.  Tomorrow is the last day (although we learned today that those in charge of the Fair are considering extending it another week which could bring about my demise!) 

Some of the volunteers who help run the booth

 A picture of the sign-in mural where folks sign that they want to have a family night.  We have used up four murals which are just covered with signatures.

 Inside the booth

On the positive side, we have had over 22,000 visitors and our booth has been featured in several TV broadcasts and print information.  We have also had some fun times meeting people and getting to know the Dominicans better. However, we are going to suggest that we start working on this next year in October and not have so much required and done at the last minute…

Doctores y Accidentes

This post is kind of dedicated to our sons Clay and Ben who work in hospitals, to our son Matt who has spent a bit of time in hospitals with his chemotherapy these last few months, and to my dear daughter-in-law Emily and grandson Peter who have spent a number of weeks in them (and to all the rest of you folks out there who have visited a hospital recently).  A couple of weeks ago, we went with a Senior Missionary couple who are over Humanitarian service to a little town in the west part of the Dominican Republic.  Here the Church has donated a number of x-ray supplies etc. to help a little hospital.  We went there on the Thursday before Easter and were surprised to find that there were no patients inside because of the coming holiday!  Including expectant mothers or babies in the nursery.  

Here’s the outside of the hospital.

Here’s the waiting room for the emergency department

(and yes, it is outside)

 Here's the empty emergency examination room when we arrived.

 Here’s some of the equipment that the Church has donated.

 Here’s the pharmacy – lots of supplies as you can see J.

Here’s the doctor taking the blood pressure from a man who complained of feeling faint who came in while we were there.  Apparently, it wasn’t elevated because the doctor sent him home right after.

One of the things that the hospital realized after receiving the xray equipment is that it is all located on the ground floor, and the patient rooms are on floors two and three.  Now that wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, but there is no elevator!  So patients will have to be taken down the stairs on gurneys - now that should be fun.  I really did feel badly that they don't have the supplies and things that we just take for granted here.  The doctor said that ordinarily the hospital is full except when there is a holiday.  

And now, fast forward to this week.  Rob was showering and noticed that one of the glass doors on the shower had come off its track.  As he gently lifted it up into the track, the glass totally broke all over everywhere.  I came running in when I heard the noise and was shocked to see him standing there surrounded by glass (it was the safety kind, but it was everywhere, including all over the room which isn’t clear in these pictures).  In addition, he had cuts on his hand, knee, and foot which were dripping blood everywhere!  It was really a mess to clean things up enough on the floor, so that I could hand him flip-flops to get out and into the bedroom where I put Band-Aids on the cuts that were worse.  Fortunately, he was safe, but we still don’t know what will happen with the repair of the shower.  And luckily, we didn’t have to take him to a Dominican Emergency room J.

This photo was after I cleaned up all the glass all over the bathroom, 

so that Rob could even get out of the shower

Just a few cuts are showing in this photo.  He has band-aids on his knee and 

should have had them all over his hand that was closest to the door!

La Comida (What we eat)

As I think about things to post, I thought that I’d share a little bit about the food that we eat. We can get lots of American food here, such as Rob’s favorites – Hellman’s mayonnaise, Heinz ketchup, and Vlasic pickles – plus other things such as Betty Crocker cake mixes, Tide, etc. But we have been trying to eat a little more of the Dominican food. The fruits and vegetables are quite interesting. Yes, we get Gala apples and strawberries from the US, but there are some unique foods here. We, of course, have mangoes, papaya, pineapple, and giant avocados, but I didn’t put them all here in detail because I thought you would know about them.

Milk

Milk comes in cartons and just sits in the cupboard until you chill it to drink. It doesn’t taste like Kroger milk, but it’s pretty good. In comes in 2% and 3% boxes (Hey, what’s not to like at 3% milk, right?)

Eggs

I have not seen eggs refrigerated since we have been here! They are just out in the stores. We, of course, always cook them, and we wash them before cracking, so we haven’t had a problem. But it still is a little scary, and I try not to think about it. Here’s a man walking down the street with his eggs to deliver to some store…

Vegetables

Carrots – enormous but really sweet no matter how big they get; these are about 2” in diameter, but most of them are about 3”.

Tayota or Chayota– a totally unknown veggie in the US; after you peel it, it reminds me of a pear, but you slice it and cook it until soft. It then has the consistency of a cook pear, but we can’t describe the taste. Sort of like a cooked zucchini…good even if it is a little bland.

Pumpkin Squash – sold year around in large slices at the store. I use it in a great Caribbean stew recipe that I found.

Batata – Dominican sweet potato; looks just like a giant potato, but it is really hard. You peel it, cut it into pieces and then boil. It is sweet, not as sweet as our sweet potatoes, but looks like a potato inside. I found a recipe for Batata pudding which was pretty tasty, but really sweet even with half the sugar. 

Green Beans – very tasty and thin; they cost about 50 cents a pound here. A can of green beans is around $1.50.

Mango - they sell these on the street corners for about 50 cents each.  Nummy to add frozen ones to a smoothie.

Papaya - oops!  I didn't take a picture of one of these open. They have all these little black seeds that you have to remove.  They are ripe when the valleys between the ridges are yellow (I had to learn that!).  They are wonderful as well.

Fruits

Guanabana – interesting fruit that’s round and has a little spikey-ness (is that a word?) When you cut it in half, there is a core that has large black beans. You remove it and then scoop out the rest. It’s pretty bland, so I add it to our morning mango smoothies.                                                                                                                                                            

Avocados

I don’t seem to have a picture, but they are huge – around the size of a small cantaloupe and really tasty!

Los carros son locos!

For my blog entry for this week, I thought I would try to take some pictures of some of the cars and taxis here, so that you can understand why they don’t seem to care if they weave in and out of cars or get in accidents. "Los carros son locos" means that the cars are crazy. I've made up a little song that I sing while we drive to work in the morning that goes to the tune of "Cielito Lindo" ( and begins "Ay, yi, yi, yi. Los carros son locos...") It goes on to talk about the stupid taxi drivers and motorcyclists. It helps me not get upset when everyone is driving to crazy And, of course, because that was my plan, I didn’t see as many as I have in the past. I hope that you can tell from these examples below.

Note, the multi-colors, missing rear lights, etc.

We see a lot of cars that have multi-colors from either mixed parts, or something?

The bus' right fender has been hit, but then notice the big dents up higher - I wonder how those happened?

It's very typical to see taxis missing parts.

A nice car that someone read-ended (and that they probably won't repair.

Now you would think that because of all the accidents that no one would drive a nice car in the city. But the other day, we were stopped at a light, and Rob remarked that there was a new Maserati sedan (probably retailing for $125,000) right next to us. We also pass a Porsche/Ferrari dealership on the way to work every day. So I guess that it's not an issue for some folks...