Let’s Do It!: Site Assignment and Wrapping Up CBT

This past week I was lucky enough to visit my first Dominican beach, find out my site assignment for the next two years, wrap up my women and youth groups, and spend time with my host family and friends. On Monday the seventeen peo

ple in my health sector found out our site assignments for the next two years! Waiting to be called

back, we waited in a cluster, anxiously trying to distract each other from our antici

pation. We cheered each volunteer as they passed through the doorway only to return with one of the most anticipated decisions of my life and a little bit of information about what the

next two years will hold for us. I was the third to last person to be called. Trying to keep my ex

pectations and nerves in check I was sat down and was told a small campo near Halto del Padre and outside of the city San Juan was where my new adventure would begin. Okay, so even though I did try to keep my expectations in check, I really had wanted a mountain region and had wanted a campo, and guess what I got it! Even though I know only a little bit about my new home, it is exactly what I had imagined and hoped for. I am so thrilled; I was on such an emotional high following my assignment. This site will be official, official on the 20th, but it is nearly set in stone and as such I’ll share the little that I know about my site. I was told my campo feels very rural, but has fairly good access to San Juan. To get to my site I will take a gua-gua ride from Santo Domingo (the capital) to the city of San Juan and then take another gua-gua ride and eventually a 20 minute motoconcho ride to my site. My site has no paved roads and is in a hand-like set-up with a town center and fingers roads branching off of this center. I will likely get a bike to get around my town because I have been told it will be a lot easier for me. Much of the rest of the information that I know is not as sure and so I will update you more following my first visit of my site, which is in two weeks.

On Tuesday, following my excitement high from finding out my site, I traveled to the main public hospital in Bani (the city near to the campo I am staying now). Even though we only had a couple hours to spend at the hospital, tour, and ask questions, I found this tour extremely interesting. The hospital was a lot cleaner than I expected. I have seen public hospitals in India, Ghana, and Jamaica, and so it was inevitable that I compared much of what I saw here to those experiences, but I will try to solely describe what I saw and not draw opinions. The hospital was very open, the doors, the halls, the windows, were very open and outside air and bugs were able to move freely throughout the building. The building itself was very clean. There were many beds to a room and often many patients without sheets. There is a stereotype that was voiced to me that the classic treatment at this hospital is simple give an IV and send someone on their way. For example, I was told a story of a young man who had visited this hospital due to extreme chest pains and he was given an IV (I am not aware of what) and he died at the hospital. Due to the extreme chisme I have experienced so far, who knows the real details of this story, but rumors spread quickly here and everyone takes rumors and other’s advice very seriously. As a result I was told not as many people from his community come to the community for example. I also heard another example of a campo community that had an incident with vaccinations. One of the doctors at the UNAP (the first response small clinic often in rural areas) had at one point vaccinated a young girl and beause of improper technique the girl was partially paralilyzed because of this. As a result, until this doctor rotated out of the clinic no one in the clinic vancinated any of their children.

Following the hospital visit, the whole group of us volunteers and Spanish professors piled back into the guagua and rode off to a beautiful beach. This was the first beach I was able to see in the Dominican Republic. It was empty except for us and looked like something out of a magazine. The water was a light robin’s egg blue and rolling green mountains nestled the ocean between them. The sky was clear and palm trees lined the shoreline. For hours I sat in the warm water, saturated in salt, allowing to easily float on the surface and attempting to avoid the sharp spikes of sea urchins. At one point I borrowed a friend’s goggles and was able to stare at the fish and plant life beneath the ocean surface. Fish I feel like I had only see in aquariums were swimming right beneath my feet, diving in and out of the dead coral reef below. I played, the card game, extreme spoons, with some friends except we played with coconuts, burning our feet on the hot sand as we raced to grab the victorious coconut. A perfect day all around still jittery from my emotional high of finding out my site.

On Thursday and on Friday we had to close up our Charlas with our two groups in this campo. The participants of the Hogares Saludables gave a speech of their thanks to us volunteers, blessed our futures, and even blessed our future children. I felt so loved and appreciated and even though these two groups during CBT were mostly for our training and did not consist of the full course (because we did not have enough time and many of the women had already completed the course) I still felt so accomplished and infinityly more prepared for what lies ahead of me than when I step off the airplane in Santo Domingo two months ago entirely resembling a deer in the headlights.