La Romana, wish you were here?

We enjoyed our time in Juan Dolio. We arrived early in the moring around 9am and we went straight to the beach. The beach isn´t as nice as other beaches on the East because it is man-made and has lots of waves and rocks yet we still enjoyed ourselves. We stayed at a hotel that is owned by an Italian but the style is completely Indian. She gave us a good rate, $10 a night, but ofcourse that meant mosquitos and no AC or internet (I slept in a portable bed while the other girls shared a queen).

I forgot to mention, we stayed there on May 29th to wake up May 30th, Paola´s birthday. While there we met up with a few Esperanza interns, they kept us up celebrating Paola´s birthday with several games. Afer my failed atempt to call Anthony, I went to sleep around midnight. The girls stayed out later finishing a game of dominoes. I was waken up by Noemi at 4am, she wanted some shampoo and couldn´t find it in my bags. She woke up early and couldn´t go back to sleep because of the heat and the mosquitos. But unfortunatly she wasn´t aware of the time and kept on telling Paola and me to wake up to get ready to catch a guagua (mini van) to San Pedro. I refused to get up until I saw that the girls were showered, packed, and ready to go by five thirty. I got ready against my will and then went to take a walk with them along the coast. We stayed at the beach until eight to wait for Carlitos, the receptionist at the hotel, who was friendly and was going to join us on our trip to San Pedro. Carlitos was great help, he carried our bags and took the girls out to a grocery store while I said hi to my host family and bought cake for Paola to surprise her later. It was mother´s day here in the Dominican Republic so I also hopped on a motorcycle and bought flowers for my host mom (10 roses with other little flowers as filers, that how much I could buy with roughly thirteen dollars). After the girls came back from their long walk to th grocery we went to Angelita´s house, my host family last year, where she invited us for dinner. We were too hungry and couldn´t wait three hours so we headed off to Amable, a restaurant that sells "pasteles" basically tamales made from bannana. After we ate we took a much needed nap then went to dinner with Angelita. She made chicken smothered in red wine, moro (mixture of rice and beans) and a vegetarian gluten free eggplant casarole. After dinner we had the cake I bought to officially celebrate Paola´s birthday. In the evening we went to the boardwalk to see the Dominican way of celebrating mother´s day, dancing and drinking. At night we were given a dance demonstration by the local kids who danced to popular songs.

The next morning we headed towards La Romana, where I am today. We got here yesterday and pretty much rested until dinner time, since we were tired from Juan Dolio and San Pedro adventures. Today in the morning we took a boat to La Saona (a 2-2.5 boat ride) where we enjoyed our time on shallow water and white sand. We took a faster boat to a natural pool where we saw a couple of large starfish. You can see some of our pictures below. After our beach day we showered and went to our nail appointment at Jazmin´s house, a lady that does nails from her house. She was absolutely amazing, she was friendly, had great prices, and had a natural talent painting and decorating our nails. After our nail session we headed of to a fancy restaurant where we waited more than an hour for our food, we were all so tired and hungry that the wait didn´t do us any good. But now that I think about it, we can´t complain much about bad service when we´ve had such a good time here.

As you can read all is great here. Sorry for not being able to post more pictures of some of the stuff mentioned above but there isn´t wifi and I am too lazy to tranfer pictures from my laptop to the computer at the reception. But enjoy the ones below of us here in La Romana.

PS
If you want one of these pics ask me I have them as large files (they were taken by professional photographers).

Big hug and lots of kisses,
Maira

We are having a great time!

Sorry I haven´t been updating this but we don´t really have much internet. Paola´s birthday was an experience. We went to the beach, had fun with Esperanza volunteers and enjoyed a nice dinner and cake with my previous host family.

We are in La Romana enjoying time in the sun.

Love,
Maira

Santo Domingo tomorrow Juan Dolio

We arrived just on time to Santo Domingo and were greeted by one of Esperanza’s drivers, Rafael. We were thankful when we saw him holding up a paper that read, “Maira”, since we were uneasy about calling a cab without a cell phone or Dominican money.

We chose to stay at a hostal to save ourselves some money. So far we love this place. It isn’t so much a hostal as much as it’s a friendly hotel. We have our own bathroom and our room has a queen bed and a twin. The room has sweet amenities to it too, like AC, cable, wifi. The hostal has a kitchen we can share, we are making our own breakfast here to save money and time.

When we arrived from Santo Domingo we slept for a bit, 15 hours of traveling can get exhausting! Paola was a little sad and for a moment wanted to catch a plane back to San Diego but after a nap, a shower, and a call to her mother she was encouraged. After we freshened up we went out to the main touristy street, El Conde. We had great taxi drivers and didn’t have a problem traveling from one place to the next.

The next morning we made eggs, toast, and oatmeal for breakfast and then headed off to the Esperanza office. At the office we were greeted by Claire and all of the other staff that I left a year ago. Clara was so good too us, she let us borrow a cell phone for the time we were in the Dominican Republic and helped us book four nights at an all inclusive hotel in Bavaro. We then made our ways to several museums only to find one open the rest were being remodeled. We enjoyed our time at the Modern Museum of Art, the air conditioning was the best part.

After the museum we grabbed a “carro” that would take us to the Independence park. Taking a carro was an experience of it’s own considering we were seven people squished in a small Honda made only to fit four to five people comfortably. We walked through El Conde once more and then went to Banco Popular to take some cash out for the next few days. Can you believe they charge me $3 to take out money and an addition 3% for all withdrawals!? After the bank we went around the corner to a taco shop, El Taquito, where we ordered tacos and hamburgers. I know all this way to eat Mexican food! We toured a little more and then came back to the hostal to shower and get ready for dinner. We went to Adrian Tropical, a nice restaurant on the shore, where we waited at least an hour for our food. This place is three stories high and always crowed but the wait is well worth it. I had traditional food while the other two Becky’s enjoyed Italian food. After dinner we tried to catch a movie only to find out that we missed the last ones by 10minuts or so.

There was talking and so brief planning to hit Puerto Rico for Paola’s birthday on Sunday but we think spending around $300 for a night there might be a bit much. So we are going to Juan Dolio, a beach town, tomorrow and might head towards Boca Chica on Sunday.

So far it’s been awesome. Keep on praying so this trip can continue to be safe fun.
God bless,
Maira

Airports: San Diego to Salt Lake City

I am ecstatic to be on the road to the Dominican Republic. I am currently at the Salt Lake City Airport. We left San Diego in a rush and ended up in the wrong terminal, whops my bad, but we finally made it to the correct terminal, checked in, and headed to the lobby where we waited for the airplane.

There were two previous delays for Salt Lake City but thankfully our flight wasn’t one of them. But unfortunately it did mean our flight here would be booked. Noemi, my sister, was especially impatient when she couldn’t find a place to put her carry on but I found a spot for her luggage and told her to chill (she made a little scene).

After the 3 hour flight we headed to Burger King where an older man came up to Paola, my friend, and handed her two 6 dollar vouchers. We were quite thankful and used it all to pig out on burgers and French fries (I had some fries and onion rings).

We are now waiting for our next flight to New York (we have a 2.5 hour delay), leave at 11:45pm. And finally we will arrive to Santo Domingo at 6am on the 27th.

Update on the $2 Challenge

$2 Challenge spread awareness and even brought in some cash that will get donated to Grameen Foundation and its partner organization for recovery efforts in Haiti.

There were several christian newspapers and local news stations that reported on this.
I don't have all the links ready to share but check out the few below.
Grameen Foundation Blog: The first story, but if it changes there is a second link below
http://grameenfoundation.wordpress.com/
http://grameenfoundation.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/living-on-2-a-day-in-san-diego-ca/

San Diego Source: Daily Transcript
http://www.sddt.com/Education/article.cfm?SourceCode=20100414czf

Fermanian Business Economic Institute Blog:
http://fbei.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/students-to-live-on-2-a-day-to-raise-awareness-of-poverty/

We were on the front cover of our school's newpaper, the Christian Examiner's newspaper and I believe NBC San Diego did a short clip.

Last I heard we raised over $700!

Thank you all for your prayers and donations. It will make such a great impact.

Sleeping on a bed

The three days went by quite fast.

Wednesday:

I had stayed up until 2am Tuesday night buying food, creating last minute handouts, and finishing up as much homework for the week as I could. I woke up at 6:45am Wednesday morning to finish up packing and getting ready for the Challenge. My nephew, Noe, arrived at my house around 7:45am to accompany me to Costco where I would meet a Supervisor and pick up cardboard boxes for the event. The cardboard was then delivered by my dad and brother-in-law to PLNU while my nephew and I attended biotechnology class at 8:30am. My six year old nephew was shadowing me for the day (teaching him about poverty and living on $2 a day or less). Noe was such a good sport he helped with the food preparations and building my cardboard home. Noe had lunch with Anthony while the other Challenge participants enjoyed bean tostadas with lettuce and sour cream. Later I found out that Noe had a hamburger, pasta, grilled cheese, pudding, and 2 ice cream cones! I don’t know how he ate that much, so unhealthy… After lunch Noe flew kites Rufio, a PLNU alumni that was joining us for the Challenge. He absolutely loved Rufio. Noe stayed until about 4:30pm, which was good timing since I started to feel quite sick after that. Dinner was beans and rice, Rufio and Jen helped prepare the meal. (I forgot to mention- a group walked to Fresh & Easy at 3pm to buy food for the next day)

While everyone was having dinner I took a short nap under my “house”. I began to feel cold and super uneasy, then I felt I needed to relieve my stomach. I ran to the bathroom and barely made it, all my food came up :( I briefly talked to Anthony on the phone to let him know I wasn’t feeling well. While on the phone I could contain my tears. I didn’t want to give up on the Challenge but at the same time I knew I had to go home to prevent any liability issues if something were to happen to me. I prayed about it and tried to sleep it off. Anthony arrived at 11pm to drop of Rob, the staff that would be staying on campus. He offered to take me home but I refused and told him I was feeling better. I am glad I did.

Reflection:

Looking back on this day, I didn’t have enough to drink for all the moving around I was doing- I was dehydrated. I was also stressed about making sure all the details for the food and what not were in place. But I am glad I didn’t feel well. The reason I say this is because in a sense my situation allowed me to think about the many challenges that people in a developing country have to face. I didn’t have enough water consumption because all our water had to be boiled. It took us a while to get the water boiled, and ready for people to drink, in that processed I must have forgotten to drink some myself. I also didn’t want to take any medication since that would put me over my $2 budget. My not feeling so well also put me to question how dedicated I was actually going to be. Right after I got off the phone with Anthony my mom called to check up on me. Before I told her how I was feeling, she started giving me all sort of food advice for the meals I was going to prepare for Thursday. After the short conversation I had with her I knew I couldn’t give up. If I had left it would have let down both the fellow participants and my family that was rooting for me (especially my nephew). So I sucked it up and choose to stay, I don’t regret it.

Thursday:

The rise of the sun woke me up naturally. It was such a good feeling to feel tired after the sun set and be ready to go once the sun rose. Now in days we don’t pay attention to nature we work until it’s late because we have artificial light and get up according to our plans for the day. I woke up in time to help make breakfast, there were three helpers already there preparing hard boiled eggs and toast. We were trying to get the breakfast out by 7am so we accidently undercooked some of the eggs. They were a little runny but people didn’t complain they just ate them :)

I attended both my classes for that day, theater and econometrics. It felt a little weird to look “bummy” while everyone else was nicely groomed. For lunch we had rice and beans. I have to say I am a good bean cooker, a talent I never knew I had. I babysat on Thursday evening so I didn’t get to help with dinner, baked potatoes. When I came back from babysitting, from 2-7pm, I ate a potato, so good! We had a debrief session at 9pm to get to know one another and talk about why we were doing the challenge. I forgot to mention that our group shrank from the 80+ people that signed up to 35 people who actually committed to doing the Challenge. I was relieved in a sense to get a smaller group since this meant less cooking and more intimacy with one another. The debrief session really intrigued me we had almost all the majors at Loma represented. And in my head I broke the participants into four groups:

1. Those who had travelled abroad and had personally seem people live on less than $2 a day.

2. Those who were active with local homeless organizations

3. Commuters who cared about the cause but were also glad to stay on campus (save on gas & time) and get their meals covered for $2 a day

4. Those who just wanted to have a giant sleepover under the stars and enjoy time with friends

Friday:

For breakfast we each had a banana and a cup of oatmeal with a choice of raisins and brown sugar. After breakfast I attended my biotechnology class. Besides the beans I didn’t have to do much for lunch so I enjoyed a nice walk cross campus to attend my international economics class. The challenge ended at 2pm after that people could go back to their “homes” clean up and then meet up again at 4pm to eat our last meal and debrief. We had a little less than $100 left that was leftover from our budget of $2 per day. The choice was presented if the group wanted to add some chicken barbeque to the menu for the last meal, as a group we voted to donate the leftover money instead. I was quite grateful that many choose to donate instead of treating themselves to meat. For the last meal we literally cooked up all of our leftovers and had a feast while we discussed what we learned during our Challenge. Oh I can’t forget, before we began our discussion, Rufio made an entrance with two cakes for Jessica. It had been Jessica’s birthday on Sunday but she was so busy planning and working out the details for the $2 Challenge that she didn’t get to fully celebrate her birthday. While we all sang Happy Birthday to Jessica and thanked her for all she did I couldn’t help but think how real this Challenge felt. We had all grown so close in the past few days that it truly felt like a little community working through all of our struggles. The singing took me back to the days under sun in China, Dominican Republic, Haiti and Mexico where I had celebrated many birthdays with a homemade cake, rice and beans. Even though our living conditions were not exactly like a developing country with that I mean our “houses” on manicured grass and ocean view, we did come to a realization that living with such limited supplies is a struggle. In the few days that we did this Challenge many opened their eyes to think of new ideas on how to help our fellow brothers and sisters abroad. Some learned that cutting down on their resource usage was not as hard as they imagined. Some vowed to use the computer lab more often, cook a few meals that were cheap, not use their cell phones so much, and so on. For me, well, I came to appreciate my bed and the shower a little more. As much as I like to pamper myself with long showers I came to realize that not everyone could so I should try to conserve as much as I could. My bed, lets just say, it never felt so good!

I am feeling much better

All your prayers much have been heard. After an upset stomach in the evening I tried to sleep it off under my card board home, it worked. I woke up at 6:30am feeling great. So far the experience has been quite eye opening. We are all living in community and as a community we have split up chores. My cooking hasn't been as hectic as I thought because of all the great help everyone is putting into meals. We have groups that walk and buy the meals at a local grocery store and usually have about five people preparing the meal. Yesterday we had bean tostadas for lunch, and rice, beans, and tortillas for dinner. Today we had hard boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, and toast for breakfast. For lunch we enjoyed rice and beans with tortillas and for dinner the group is having baked potatoes. We have actually been doing quite well with our budget and all of our meals together are less than $2. With the leftover money we have decided as a group to treat ourselves to something nice Friday, the last day. We plan on adding coffee to the menu and fresh fruit. The group was even thinking about a barbecue for our debrief session but of course "I've rather not" ;)

Thanks again for all your support!!!

Love,

Maira