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Roosters! Morning is a flurry of activity as we all try and get ready to head
out the door. Mao folks take precedence, as they need to leave first. Kathy and
I just need to walk across the parking lot, so no worries. Mao group was
supposed to leave at 7:30 – left at about 8:15. Didn’t arrive in Mao until 9:30.
They later told us that when they arrived, the kids were all waiting for them.
No problem – we’re on Dominican time!
Kathy and I reviewed all of our supplies for the day and started to get them
organized. As we were tying the yarn onto the nametags, the children started to
arrive. There were several young girls who peered in and were very curious about
us and what we were doing. I managed to formulate enough Spanish to get them in
the door and helping us with the assembly process. After a couple of minutes of
dealing with my poor Spanish, one of the girls sweetly said, “I know some
English.” It didn’t take long to figure out that her English was considerably
better than my Spanish. What sweet girls! They were very curious about us and
delighted to help. Olga came by and rounded everyone up to go into the church.
We sang several songs, most of which have choreography, and then she introduced
the teachers and Kathy and me. Olga and the teachers quickly broke the children
into three groups and they formed perfectly-straight lines and marched off to
their classrooms. That’s when the chaos began! Kathy and I started scrambling to
get the right number of nametags and booklets to each class. We have over 60
children participating at the VBS at La Anunciacion. There will be three
classes. Remember, the little kids get the big booklets and the big kids get the
little booklets. But what about the class in the middle? Executive decision –
they’ll get the little booklets.
A bit about the VBS curriculum that we are using. The curriculum is written by
Dottie, one of our friends at the Cathedral. She has done this for the last
several years. She selects the Bible verses and then comes up with appropriate
exercises, pictures to color, and a craft to do each day. After she puts
everything together, it is sent out to be translated into Spanish. As soon as
the Spanish translation is available, it is sent to the Diocese Office in the
Dominican Republic for approval. Upon approval, a master list of supplies is
created that will be needed to complete the exercises and craft projects. That’s
where the parishioners come in – donating either the actual supplies or money to
purchase the supplies. Before the trip, team members created 12 samples of each
of the four craft projects so that the teachers would have an example to show
their class. There is a lot of prep work that goes into this. I personally cut
over 2000 pieces of yarn to be used for nametags and the craft projects. I can
now cut yarn in my sleep … We heard from Dottie yesterday. She has discovered a
whole stack of paper plates, with holes punched in the center, which were
inadvertently left behind at the Cathedral. Ugh. That means that we will be
short on plates for the Good Samaritan craft project. Plus, even if we purchase
more plates, we’ll have to punch holes in the center of them. How could this be?
It seems that we have a huge stack of plates with holes in them. Oh well, if she
found them, we must have left them. We’ll have to do a count and figure out how
many we actually have.
Now that we know how many classes there will be (and which classrooms they will
be using), I quickly went to each class and taped the day’s memory verse on to
the walls. The children learn by repetition. Listen and repeat. We have been
told that in school, there are often not enough books for all of the
students.
For some classes, there are no books at all. Thus, the teachers teach by
repetition – listen and repeat. The memory verse is printed onto a single piece
of cardstock, which gets taped up in front of the classroom. The memory verse is
also broken down into phrases, each phrase (or couple of words) is printed on a
strip of cardstock, and each strip is taped up around the room, in sequence.
When the children have memorized the Bible verse, they get a sticker on their
booklet.
After that flurry of activity, Kathy had plenty of time to glue the muffin cups
on the daily craft project “The Sower” and I started sorting supplies for each
class. Today's Bible lesson is the parable about sowing seeds. You know the one
-- Some seeds fall on the path, where they get eaten by birds or trampled on.
Some seeds fall in among the weeds, where the weeds grow up and choke them. And
some seeds fall on good soil, where they grow up healthy and strong. Thus,
today's craft is a paper rendition of a flower pot with blooming flowers. We
elected not to glue the muffin cups on before the trip, fearing that they would
be totally crushed in the giant suitcases. We want our flowers (muffin cups) to
look healthy and strong! The muffin cups will be the flower heads and craft sticks will be the
flower stems. As organized as we were, it was still hilarious to try and keep
track of all of this (and why are all of the green magic markers that we need to
color the flower stems always at the bottom of the giant Ziploc bags?) So many
new Spanish words to learn …
As Andi had predicted, the little ones finished first and broke out in song. I
think some of them are even younger than five because they are quite small and
are about two beats behind the other children in all of the songs. I brought in
some Play Dough and the teachers gave a small amount to each child (who
immediately got to work with it). There wasn’t a single complaint like “I want
this color” or “I want that color” or “I want more”… The children with white
dough (which I would consider the least fun dough color) didn’t seem to mind a
bit.
Kathy and I spent a bit of time going between the three classrooms to help with
the craft project. We are each wearing an apron with giant pockets in which we
have stashed yarn, scissors, hole punchers, muffin cups, etc. so that they will
be readily available. I noticed that the older kids have a system for sharing
the colored pencils. They’ve arranged their desks into three groups, with all of
the desks brought together within each group. Because the desktops are slanted,
they can’t rest the colored pencils on the desk, because they will just roll
off. Thus, one person in each group holds all of the extra colors in one hand,
while they color with their other hand. The other kids each have about three
pencils in their possession at any given time, and readily swap them out for
other colors. The amazing thing is that the person holding all of the extra
pencils doesn’t even look up as classmates swap the pencils in their hand. It’s
actually quite a system because it keeps all of the color options within arm’s
reach. You could hear a pin drop while they are coloring – even the older kids.
Apparently, they don’t like the magic markers because they bleed through the
paper onto the other side.
The children appear to be very intrigued by us, and the littlest ones aren’t
quite sure why we have a blank look on our faces when they ask us something. If
I ask them to repeat what they have said, only slower, they repeat it, but
softer.
Hilarious! They are clearly confused why Kathy and I, who are obviously
adults, don’t understand what they are saying. Day one of VBS ended with a small
drink and a couple of crackers for the children. Kathy and I headed back to the
supply room to organize our things for the next day.
Olga is allowing us to use the computer in the school’s office to check our
e-mail. This is comforting because it keeps me in contact with the world that I
am familiar with. I quickly read my e-mails from work (there are relatively few
since this is the day before the July 4th holiday) and am relieved to find that
there are no problems at the office with Oracle. I am a research scientist and
am responsible for Oracle database and application software at our research
institute. I have been a little nervous about this since the gal who works with
me had a baby last week and is out on maternity leave. I type up a message to
Rick and as per usual, run it through spell check before sending. Much to my
surprise, spell check comes up in Spanish, even though I am clearly logged into
Outlook at my office. Well, no sense spell checking in Spanish, so I go ahead
and send the email message which undoubtedly contains some bloopers. Oh well…
Sheree and Smith arrived shortly thereafter and said they’d had a great day.
They also have between 60 and 70 kids. Apparently, they have one gal in charge
at San Lucas who controls everything. Sounds like someone else has been in
charge there in previous years, who is not able to participate this time. Thus,
a woman named “Sergia” is seizing the opportunity and has emerged as the new
leader. Sheree, who doesn’t speak any Spanish, says that she is doing a lot of
smiling and getting Smith to translate for her, whenever possible. Sergia has
apparently expressed her unhappiness at not having Andi and getting saddled with
“newbies.” Sounds like they are in for an interesting week! Others returned
later from Mao – even better stories because they apparently have a cast of farm
animals at their VBS…
Afterwards, we were hanging out in the sleeping area, when we heard a car drive
into the compound below. We laughed as we heard someone singing Celine Dion’s
“Theme from the Titanic,” a cappella. The funny part was that this person was
singing with full voice, but clearly didn’t know (or understand) all of the
English words. Turns out that it was Olga, who arrived upstairs a couple of
minutes later. Someone decided it was time for a little “Salsa” dancing. Yvonne
had spied a CD player in the school office and had brought it into our sleeping
area. She and Karen had a couple of CDs with them. I knew it was getting serious
when Yvonne put on her special dance shoes. OK – why not? Yvonne and Olga showed
us some steps – Karen was way ahead of the rest of us, having already been
exposed to this. Olga was telling me to move my hips more. I responded in
Spanish, “No hay” – there aren’t any. She surveyed my figure and agreed. We both
laughed.
I asked Olga if we could hear Celine. She seemed a little embarrassed when she
realized that we must have all heard her singing earlier, but she went down to
her car to retrieve the CD anyway. When she came back upstairs, we popped the CD
into the player and all sang the “Theme from the Titanic” together, with full
voice. From this moment forward, it will be impossible for me to hear that song
and not think of Olga. I completely understand why Andi always speaks so
lovingly about Father Almonte and his family. I have known them for less than 48
hours, and yet I feel that we have all been good friends for a very long time.
The diocese only transferred the money into the church account today, so the
money needs a day to clear. Bottom line is there’s no money to buy paint today,
so we took the afternoon off and Olga took us downtown to shop. Similar to old
Cancun, only more people and cars. Went to the “Mercado,” a two story mall with
many vendors. Purchased three pairs of amber earrings. Andi was my banker since
I haven’t changed any money yet. In one of the department stores that we went
into, I noticed a woman waving at me “Hola!” – it was Ana – one of our teachers.
Unbelievable! I know about six Dominicans and here is one of them. We finished
up at the dollar store, where everything is clearly not $1. We headed back to
the car, following Olga. I couldn’t have found the car if you offered me $1
million in this maze of shops and people. The gentleman was there watching the
car (apparently he had pushed her side mirrors in for safekeeping and he was
hurriedly pulling them back into place and polishing them with his rag). We all
piled in (which was even more difficult than on the way over because we now had
packages). Andi and I shared one seat upfront.
Stopped at the super market on the way home and Andi, Karen, Yvonne and I hopped
out. Andi directed me to the bank line, where I stood for the next 45 minutes
waiting to change dollars into pesos. When it was finally my turn, the gal that
helped me was so pregnant that I feared she might not be able to complete the
transaction. Andi kept checking on my progress and updating me on which section
of the store the others were in: fish, produce, bakery, etc. Olga returned from
dropping the others off and we checked out. Definitely disturbing to hear a
grocery total in the four digits, but upon conversion, it wasn’t too bad. Made
it home and had dinner with everyone – they had waited for us, guess it was
about 8:30. After dinner, we were still all sitting around the table when
someone mentioned malaria. A nice after-dinner topic! To my surprise, Andi
declared that we are indeed in a malaria zone and, thus, we are all now
ineligible to donate blood for one year. (Flashback to the mosquito invasion
Saturday evening during the church service. I must have at least a dozen bites
from then.) Andi continues that if you get sick when you get home, you’ll need
to tell your doctor that you have been in a malaria zone. You’ll need to do this
for up to a year. Great. Then someone asked about the water. Why exactly is it
that we are unable to drink it? Response: because of the high parasite risk. You
need to take care that you don’t get any water in your eyes, mouth, nose, etc.
when you are in the shower. This keeps getting better and better! As I look at
the faces around the table, it is clear that several of us are hearing all of
this for the first time.
Same scenario for barking dogs, car alarms, etc. as previous nights … I heard a
mosquito buzzing and pulled the sheet up over my head … fell asleep eventually …
