Before we can become real life volunteers we have to learn how to have real lives, so, I´m spending the bulk of my time in training. We train from 8am to approximately 4:30pm 6 days a week. During this time I´m in Spanish class learning about topics like public transportation aka "crazy phrases that will be shouted at you by the cobrador in the guaga" (the cobrador is the guy who hangs out the door of the bus, trying like mad to convice people to get on his guagua even when they`re packed in there like sardines, then he collects the sardines` money once they`re on the guagua and watches for the stops that are yelled out) or I´m taking in lectures/workshops--yesterday we had an awesome impromtu lecture about the state of Haiti from a Creole/French teacher from there or I´m getting vaccinated and hearing about the dangers of Dengue fever and eating fish and cabbage.
Those are generals that everyone attends. In addition, we have assignment specific trainings which have been interesting (albeit slightly overwhelming) thusfar. Some things I´m excited about specifically: they´re developing up a new IT education sector that focuses on literacy in certain sites, we´ve been learning about Dominican school systems and everybody knows I get worked up about education, and soon we´ll be doing diagnostics ( interviews, observations and surveys in our communities to figure out what the challenges are, where the opportunities are etc) and I love figuring out why people do things, primary research was always my favorite part of my advertising degree...
Right now I´m visiting a current volunteer at their site...more on this to come.
I had a great dream last night about you me and Katelyn! I don't remember if I had gotten in trouble with the law or if we were all bored, but we decided to just run and take off! We were at my house and it was night, and I guess I must have done something because we were being chased by the police and the fields were lit up with red and blue. We took off from my house and we started heading to Grand Forks but decided no! we should go into the country because its safer there! So we jumped into the dark country side and headed south. We must have been on bikes because we could travel through the fields but we were all getting very tired, and I kept urging us to keep going just a little further. We stopped for a bit either at my church or someone's barn to rest and also duck down. We could see that it worked! The lights were headed into Grand Forks and we were headed the other way.
ReplyDeleteWe kept traveling for a long time and finally came to a moderate sized town that was very greek-style with lots of people outside and the roads were open and completely paved in stones- very little glass. It was very bright during the day time. Now I had my car and we split up. I was very nervous about having my car, with the traceable license plates and all but I slept the night in it. You and Katelyn went somewhere better to sleep, I think you asked a house if you could stay there a night. There were lots of large pillows to sleep on. The next day I ditched my car.
We couldn't use our credit cards and none of us had much paper money but we realized that there were wanted pictures of us out! They were tracking me by my bright green hoodie. We decided to go to the store and get new clothes and dye our hair. I wanted to have blue hair but you convinced me to bleach it instead. Then we decided it would be easy to hide in college, so we went to a campus and I found my tree diseases professor teaching a large class about fungus and people or something weird but fitting.
When class got out we shuffled around with the kids and ended up in an experimental room with a large ship-wheel like contraption that had intelligence and the middle was a large eye. It was at least partly made out of rusty iron and hated and was evil. We had to put ourselves into the video arcade game contraption to do impossible moves to fight the eye and it's laser beams. We also had to answer questions it was asking us while we reflected its own laser beams back into its eye. It was very difficult. Then! Real evil people came down ropes from the sky and we had to run away. Eventually we realized that all of mankind was in danger and the only thing that could help us was the eye. We ran back to it and other people were still fighting it. By then the eye remembered us, and because we had a past history we were friends! I don't remember some stuff here... but we had to steer the eye and fight the evil people and we were good at it. We ended up being rock stars in a brand new city and everything was great.
Hope you are doing well.
That is an awesome dream! I just read it. Wow, I love being a rock star because I battled a giant eye but then befreinded him. It is the best feeling in the whole world!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the incredible dream comment Sarah, it made me feel like a super hero reading it
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