While my brain power has been leaking out of my ears here in the form of sweat, I have been thinking (along with the evolution of Dinosaurs into chickens) about all of the reasons my family and Swansboro is so much like where I live in the DR. I am from the country and here I live in the country. Everyone here fries food, greets each other, and speaks really respectfully and formal (m’am, sir, please, thank you, pardon me, excuse me), just like home.

After my careful strategic analysis Gramma wins as far as being most Dominican for the following reasons:

1. We cook on gas stoves
2. Everything is painted in bright colors
3. The base of any good meal: Garlic and Onions
4. 99.9% of the time God is the answer
5. Unconditional Love. All day every day.
6. We pray about everything.
7. Anything cloth can be used for a rug, blanket, towel.
8. Life without a fan in every room is no life worth living
9. We put up every single photo, framed or not
10. They save every little gift, creation, and display it with pride and love, just like Gramma.

Dad wins second place for this reason: There is no such thing as standing in line or waiting your turn. If I have less stuff than you, I get in front of you. If what I need is closer or easier to make, I get served first. It doesn’t matter what order or how long you have been waiting.

So while I am feeling anxious in these situations because I having flash backs of Mom fussing just quietly enough for our waiter to hear at restaurants about people coming in after our family and getting served before us (damnit). I think of dad’s response, “and just where (the hell) else do you have to be right now?” So true, the people here are mellow and patient, talking to each other about family, god and politics. (and they don’t even cut each other after!) Just living their lives this different way. I

At first this all made me want to scream (because I am my mother’s daughter), but after thinking WWWJDD (blaspheme? Sorry Gramma) I feel better. So what if I have to wait three hours to make 100 photo copies? (yes, that happened) What else do I have to do? I am going to go home and there won’t be power anyway.

So from my new Dominican life to my wonderful Dominican Family, thanks y’all for all the blessings and preparation. I love you.

One of the most endearing things I have encountered here in the DR is the use of the suffix –ita. Usually -ita means smaller. Mi hermana – my sister; mi herman-ita – my little sister. However,  –ita is sometimes used to describe things that are much bigger. For example having a problem-ita, which literally means to have a little problem “I struck match…” here it means to have a BIG problem “…and the wind blew it into your car’s gas tank”.

Kind of like how we say “bless your heart” in the South, when sometimes we really mean – “remind me to never let you watch my kids/leave you alone with my husband/borrow money/etc”

So one afternoon I was  teaching my neighbor swear words in English minding my business on my back porch when the wind picked up. My doña said “looks like we are going to have a breeze-ita!” (in Spanish of course) Meaning, to me, it was going to get a little breezy. I failed to remember the –ita rule and about 20 minutes later there was torrential down pour, the power went out, and our banana trees were snapping like twigs.

In all the hustle, My doña started sweeping the water off the back porch, which I thought was unnecessary because the porch has excellent drainage, but since the only thing sillier than sweeping rain was watching someone sweep rain I grabbed a broom and went two it! After another 5 minutes a few stranded kids from our campo came running into our house to find sanctuary. We made an intricate assembly line of water sweeping. I swept from the back on one half to one of the younger boys who passed the small wave the right to another boy who whacked the water off the porch like it was a hockey puck. This was one side of the porch; my doña swept the other side was faster than the three of us combined. After about an hour of sweeping, the rain let up and the breeze-ita passed.

Then my neighbor came over and painted my toes and nails, just because you don’t have power or water, doesn’t mean your nails have to go un-polished. Right? Right.

The next day while riding with another neighbor to a community baseball game, on the back of a motorcycle because I am SO badass here, I noticed DOZENS of fallen trees and our power line was down. The next day, day three without power and water, I finally asked, what the heck is a breeze – ita? (in Spanish, of course) ¿y mi repuesta? A tornado. . . Of course! How else could you possibly describe what knocked over all those trees and is the reason I am using the water I shower with to flush the potty*, a tornado –ita!

*I realize that other volunteers have to so this anyway, tornado or not, so for the record I thank God often for my flushing potty and am not taking that for granted!

So lesson learned. Breeze – ita = massive tornado. Hopefully, I will keep learning more without many problem-itas.

I now wake up in the morning to spiders as big as my hand next to my bathroom mirror. They don’t faze me anymore. I have been bitten by so many insects that my arms now resemble that of an 8 year old boy, full of battle wounds from the play ground. Some bites just itch, other leave a rash, and some seriously make you bleed.

Little harmless beetle looking bugs that make you feet feel like they are fire. Or these prehistoric looking ants with horns and pinchers that will seriously bomb dive you with their fangs unprovoked. Thank God my friends here are super quick to smash these ones into pieces before I am attacked. There are stealth bugs, that keep leaving their mark but I have yet to see. I even have holes in my clothes from moths.

The good news is that these bugs are not poisonous…well the spiders at least. The only truly dangerous ones are the truly universal bother, those damn mosquitoes. There are two types: The ones that carry Dengue Fever (or Break Bone Fever, a fever so strong that you literally feel like every in your body is broken) that bite in the morning, and the ones that carry Malaria that bite in evening, (or vice versa).

I take all the proper precautions to protect myself from these freaking things. Long sleeves, giant BComplex pills each morning, Chalk tasting Aralen with its psychedelic dreams every Sunday, jeans, sweaters and socks in this tropical weather, and of course repellant.

I would think they’d see me bundled up, itching, sweating, trying to roll my R’s and say “hey, this one’s really trying guys, let’s leave her alone besides, did you hear her Spanish? I think she might be a little crazy—we only want top notch sangre.” But no, let me tell ya, these mosquitoes have NO respect for effort. I have been bitten by mosquitoes, through my clothes even my jeans, and also on my lips, the palms of my hands, bottoms of my feet, in between toes and fingers, and God forbid I have to pee in the middle of the night.  Sometimes I get bit so much I just want to crawl into the fetal position and cry out YOU WIN!

People here assure me it’s is just because I have nueva carne and eventually they will get used to me and lose interest. So I will get used and then rejected. Who knew? Mosquitoes: the playaz of the insect world.

There is no getting around the Bandera, but fortunately for me, and those of you who I have cooked for in the past, the Bandera was already an integral part of my diet.

Plus I think that the only other place that KNOWS carbohydrates like the DR in the South. In North Carolina you can get fried spaghetti, but here it is mixed with corn, cheese, milk, and a side of fried platano. Mmmmm! And here they have Aripitas, which are like Hushpuppies but with like 5 other starches mixed in. For Breakfast. For those days that your blood really doesn’t need to move.

On a healthier note, I have eaten more mangos in Las Canas than I ever dreamed possible. I have munched my way through at least 5 different species ranging from the size of a common egg to the size of my head. All of them delicious. Just when I feel like I am harta de mangos, a vecino comes over with a fresh batch “se llama mango de Alibra? Dame por favor!”

And on a recent walk to the river, mis amigos y yo stopped at every other tree and ate all kinds of weird fruits that I had never seen…even at FreshMarket. I remember the names of two Pomo y Maraño, son delicioso!

The picture is of a typical lunch in Santo Domingo, yes all that food and all those plates are for me. Typically a meal takes 6-7 plates, one to eat from 3 to serve and 3 more to cover the food from moscas. Do I eat all that? Yes. Sometimes do I finish it off with a cup of yogurt? Yes. Comí sin vergüenza.