this is me with bunny pelt on my bunny farm. the other is the goodbye rave party.

These couple weeks have been pretty boring. I finished CBT with a rave party, spent a day at the US Embassy, got locked out of my house, received a cell phone (a call would be really sweet), and lastly got my site placement. The place where I will be living for two years is… [cue favorite dramatic movie theme music] well, I’m not supposed to say exactly where it is for security purposes. If you really want to know, email me. I spent most of this week visiting, however, so I can say it’s a great little pueblo in the north-central part of the country with about 1000 people. I have electricity (sometimes) but there is no water in the tap, so it magically appears in a large bucket in the bathroom every time it gets low. This is terribly confusing as the bucket looks like a big trash can, which is where you put the used toilet paper, since you can’t throw it down the toilet like at home. This clogs the already mostly water-less pipes. Messy indeed. Anyway, it seems that this bucket-water originates from the sky and is transferred through drops and a bigger bucket placed outside under the gutter, but I wonder what they do when it doesn’t rain. Besides the water, my host family is great, the town is only a couple minutes by moto from bigger towns with internet cafes and other volunteers, and only 2 hours from the capital. My host dad is a platano/ yuca (potato-like tuber) / batata (sweet potato-like tuber) farmer. Finally, my primary project is working with a youth group, their upstart bunny farm microbusiness, and other family/microbusiness finance. More on bunnies: have 60 of them in my backyard. They come in many different colors. Adults weigh 4ish pounds, 2.25 meat. Saturday I watched my host brother kill, skin, and disembowel a rabbit (white with black spots and big brown eyes), which we ate for lunch (not kosher, but delicious nevertheless. I’m thinking we make an addendum to let them in).
I’m back in the capital now, swear in on Wednesday, celebrate Thanksgiving Thursday, and return to my site for two (2) (!) years this weekend. This is where you make your plans to visit. Bring mosquito repellent.
The picture is the goodbye rave in training.

It looks like The Dominican Republic has survived Tropical Strom Noelle, but just barely. I went to bed last Sunday night to the fiercest rain I have ever seen, made healthier by the tin roof, and woke up Monday to find Noelle here. No one in the country knew about it until maybe 6AM that morning. People are just a little pissed about that, especially now with dozens dead and missing and billions of dollars in damage. Dominicans tend to love their weekends, so it seems like some people might have been off when they should have been watching the radar or Weather Channel. I wrote this entry Thursday night. I had not seen the sun for seven straight days. Think about an entire week without even one ray of sunshine – it was bizarre, and really does affect the human spirit. By the end of the week, pretty much everyone was at least a little depressed. Anyway, it rained for about 48 hours straight, from Sunday through Tuesday night. Some parts of the country got 35 inches. The creek behind my house flooded it banks and washed out the road that fords it (a bridge would clearly just be too much) but my house was fine. Supposedly there was a countrywide blackout, but we don’t have electricity during the day normally, so that didn’t matter too much. Class was cancelled, so we played domino all day. In case you were wondering, as I’m sure you were, I’m OK. Breathe again.

In other news, the other day, my host sister showed me a bird that her uncle had brought over. He had done this once in the past; my family kept the bird as a pet until a small child visiting one day decided to experiment with his foot and the bird. His foot won. My family decided to keep this new bird in a small bowl covered by a towel behind the refrigerator. It ate nothing and squawked all night. During my breakfast of sugar with coffee, my host mom showed me the bird – dead, found in the kitchen earlier in the morning. I think Uncle Fabio (his name has not been changed to protect his identity) should maybe think again about giving my family live animals.

We went to a Dominican baseball game last night. At the end of the season they are apparently like a World Cup soccer game, but this one was pretty tame. By the end it was just the Americans screaming for the home team (the Aguilas, ie Eagles, who lost 5-3 but scored 2 in the bottom of the 10^th thanks to us).

Lastly, there is a foam party scheduled at the one bar in town tonight. It will undoubtedly be, shall we say, interesting.
the picture below is of the normally really quiet creek behind my house during the storm.you can see the road washed out in the middle