Sorry to all of you who have been following my adventure, I know it's been FOREVER since I've last written. It's one of those things that keeps building day by day and becomes more overwhelming. I had to wait until I had a pretty big chunk of time to write. Keep in mind that the longer it took me to write all this, the longer it will take you to read it. My apologies in advance for those of you who only wanted the short version. With that being said, here are a few of my highlights and thoughts over the past two weeks:
We finished Spanish class on Friday, Oct. 8. Each person in my class had to give a presentation in Spanish about a topic of our choice. I talked about the history and culture of Jarabacoa in front of about 20 people for 10 minutes. It was a little nerve racking, but I did fine and it was a good test of our newly learned Spanish abilities. Later that night, we had a big banquet at the base celebrating our “graduation”. Each of the 4 levels of classes prepared a skit or a dance. Our class spent a whole night making a dance to the song “Waka Waka” by Shakira and performed at the banquet. It was a great night to let out any stress from the previous week and just be in community. And I’m not going to lie-it also feels great to be done with having 3 hours of homework every night!
From Saturday, Oct. 9 to Friday, Oct. 15 was our week for travel. Our group drove two hours to the capital (Santo Domingo) and stayed in a hostel there for 3 nights. As in other places in the country, the traffic is crazy getting into Santo Domingo. There is no such thing as traffic control-even at intersections-and it is necessary to be aggressive and cut off and weave around traffic in order to get anywhere. I’m just glad I never will be put behind the wheel in this country. This week is dedicated to learning about the history of the DR and experiencing it firsthand. Santo Domingo was the first city colonized by the Spanish in the western world and most of the original buildings are still standing. The streets are paved and the architecture is ornate. There is a town square with the first cathedral/university and many streets around it with little shops, restaurants, and street vendors. This part of the city is pretty Americanized. I saw a KFC and many restaurants sell hamburgers or pasta in addition to Dominican food. During the course of our first 2 days in Santo Domingo we visited a lighthouse that was dedicated to Christopher Columbus, a history museum, a modern art museum, a cemetery for important people in the history of the DR, a museum about Columbus, and also had lots of time to walk around and get to know the city. One night we went to the plaza and watched a mariachi band perform while Dominicans danced merengue. Another night we attended another outdoor concert where people just hung out and danced. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Dominicans love to dance. Monday we visited a beach 30 min. away in Boca Chica. It was exactly how I imagined the Caribbean beaches to look. I could walk into the water 100 feet out and still it only came to my waist and was crystal clear. It was a beautiful day to relax, swim, and sunbathe. And it helped that I knew that as I was soaking up the sun on a tropical beach, my friends back home were sitting in class dressed in sweatshirts. The fourth day of travel week we drove another 4 or 5 hours on bumpy dirt mountain roads to a beautiful national park called Los Haitises in the east. We stayed at an amazing hotel with every building and decoration made from all natural materials. It had about 15 natural water pools cut out from rocks and flowing into each other in a series of creeks and waterfalls. There is no way to describe how beautifully architected this hotel was. It was rustic and tranquil. Tuesday we went on hikes over hills and in caves. We saw cocoa and coffee trees. I tasted the fruit that chocolate comes from-it’s actually pretty sour! We took a boat ride through rivers that led out to the Samina bay. The trees there are called manglares. They grow above the water and their roots entangle with each other into the water and it looks so cool. Mountains surrounded us and the clouds reflected on the pristine water and palm trees lines the shores of many small islands. We spent Wednesday on a private beach on an uninhabited island and had time to swim and kayak in a beautiful bay of the Caribbean. It was absolutely breathtaking-like something out of a movie. Thursday we packed up to continue our travels and on the drive back to Santo Domingo we stopped to see another cave. After the cave we stopped at a gas station to get some snacks and thus began an interesting adventure that I’m sure most of you have heard about by now. Here’s how the story goes:
Right after we left the gas station, another student offered me a bit of one of her cookies. They were just chocolate sandwich cookies and I read through the ingredients in Spanish and I assumed they were okay because I only didn’t recognize a few words (this was my downfall). I had a small bite (about 1/3 of a cookie) and proceeded to talk. Margie made the comment that I was getting pretty adventurous with my allergy and I agreed, but that’s just part of being in a different country. I assured her that it was pretty safe because I’m always careful. As I usually do after I eat something new, I sat up and focused on how my throat felt just to make sure. I felt a little funny but nothing that my mind hadn’t tricked me into thinking before. About 3-4 minutes later, I started feeling really different. The tingly feeling in my throat kept progressing and that is when I knew. I was sitting in the exact middle of the 9 students in the back of the van (in 3 rows) and I immediately turned around and started mumbling “ok, wait…oh my gosh” and as my throat started tingling more “ok, guys, guys! I’m having an allergic reaction-this is not a joke-my throat is closing.” As I listened to my own words I heard them come out in a kermit the frog-like voice because of my restrained vocal chords. It was really weird. I shouted at Josh the driver to pull the van over to that we could get my Benadryl out of my suitcase in the back and that I would need medical help ASAP. At first everyone just froze for a couple seconds and it seems like forever to me that everyone was just staring trying to figure out what was happening. But then immediately all at once everyone snapped into ER mode and I started giving orders: for Neil to become acquainted with my epipen because he was going to be using it, for Vicki to call the SI doctor, for others to get me Benadryl and water. The students in the front immediately laid hands on me and started praying. Neil and Margie read my epipen label. Josh ran to the back to get my suitcase. Corrie filled my water bottle. I rolled up my shorts and turned my head as Neil counted to 3 and with all his might (and I have the bruise to prove it was in fact with all his might) stabbed the pen into my outer thigh. With the shot in my leg, we both counted 1 one thousand, 2 one thousand, 3 one thousand, all the way up to 10 and then a few more seconds for good measure. I felt my throat open and my heart speed up and immediately felt some relief. I then downed 3 Benadryl and lots of water in hopes that the Benadryl would kick in one the epinephrine wore off and the water would dilute the allergens and flush my body. I don’t know if that even makes any medical sense-but it sounded legit at the time. Josh started driving like a maniac and told me there was a clinic close. The first clinic knew nothing about allergic reactions and so we moved on in hopes of finding another one. In the meantime I called my mom and found out I needed a steroid to prevent the reaction from coming back. From then on, we just drove toward Santo Domingo and everyone kept an eye on me to make sure I was doing okay. I was calmed down but still unsure of what my reaction would bring since it’s been so long since last time I’ve experienced it. I was also super shaky because of the shot of adrenaline I had just gotten. Sure enough, after about 40 minutes of driving, my throat started tingling again. We were near Boca Chica at a stop light so in broken Spanish, Josh asked some people where the nearest hospital or clinic was. They said left so we went left. We were in the middle of a town that no one knew, so we shouted out the window at some workers to direct us. One, still with paint covering his hands, recognized the immediate need of some medical attention and hopped in the van with us and directed us to the clinic. We would have never found it without him. It was there that we explained the situation to a doctor and she got on the phone with Fernano-the SI doctor and he talked her through what she had to do. She luckily had the steroid that I needed so I got the shot in time. I also was prescribed steroid pills to take every 6 hours for the following three days to prevent the reaction from coming back until the allergens were out of my system. I felt pretty good after the whole experience. I was definitely shaken, as was everyone else (I think even more so than me), but I had survived and everything was okay. God is good! It actually surprised me how calm I was the entire time. I went back and forth from being totally freaked out to the other extreme of laughing and poking fun at the whole experience. I realized that there was nothing more I could do so I just tried to make the most of it. At least now I know what a reaction feels like and how to handle it. That’s a plus! The rest of the day I was really tired due to all the excitement, using all my energy in the adrenaline rush, the 3 Benadryl I had taken, all the other drugs pumped through me, and just the normal exhaustion of a long day of hiking and traveling. I felt so bad because no one got to eat lunch due to my little episode, but we all went to Hard Rock Café for dinner so it made up for it (even though I couldn’t eat it because they cooked with stupid peanut oil). We stayed at the Santo Domingo hostel again that night for the last night of travel week. I slept like a baby.
The next day we went to like 4 more museums, and another cave. One of the museums was Diego Columbus’ house (Christopher’s son). It was pretty interesting to see his set up and know that it was from the 16th century. Friday, after we had finished visiting all of the historical sites that we needed to, we made the two hour drive back to Jarabacoa. Another girl in the group had been throwing up for 2 days straight, and another one had a panic attack. Travel week was a lot of fun but we’ve been having a lot of medical troubles, so just continue to pray for our group and our health. It’s been something or another for almost everyone here. I guess that’s just part of the experience of being in a foreign country.
We ate dinner that night with a group of Americans on a short term mission trip that had just flown in to work with SI for the week. We moved all of our stuff into a cabin at the base where we would be staying for the next week. Saturday we started ministry class. A professor from Bethel flew down to spend 3 days teaching us what a normal class would cover in 3 months. We covered the Bible in 7 acts, the history of missions in the church, and the evolution of methods of missions into what it is today. We also talked about “the call” to missions and had a question and answer session with local missionaries. It was such a great class! Sunday night we had culture night with the group of Americans (mostly adults from a church in Indiana). We learned Merengue and a cup game. I love dancing so much! That is a big part of Dominican culture that I will miss when we return to the states.
Tuesday we started culture class with Samuel-a local Dominican man who studied sociology and started an mission organization called NET. We learned about the history and culture of the DR. We mostly talked about the mosaic of this country. It is the most multi-ethnic accepting Latin American country. There is such a diverse mix of people here due to people groups immigrating during different time periods. I love that about the DR-it’s such a beautiful country filled with such a beautiful mosaic of people-everyone from Europeans to Africans to Spanish to Arabic to Japanese. I feel like a minority here but at the same time I feel so accepted for who I was made to be.
Tuesday night our group had a big cross cultural experience. I say that because we spent the night in town with the group of Americans that were here for a mission trip, and American culture is the foreign one to us now. It was interesting to see from a 3rd person point of view the interactions between both these contrasting cultures that we have identified with and know so well. We only went for about 2 hours-one hour to shop for souvenirs and one to eat. Everyone was so concerned with time. I guess we’ve just gotten used to Dominican time-a.k.a. there is no such thing as time-and it was hard to process. They had to keep on the strict schedule and couldn’t handle something changing. The group would try to speak to the shop owners and when they didn’t understand their English, they would say it louder and act it out in overemphasized motions. This is a natural tendency that we all have, but really it’s silly when you see it happen. At the restaurant, one lady insisted that the ice was dirty and she made a point to collect everyone’s ice from their cups and dump it outside, even though she saw all of us drinking it. It was really a funny scene seeing the Americans interact with the new people and culture. I’m glad we got the orientation that we did so we didn’t look quite as silly at the beginning of our time here. Really it was all a learning experience and reminded us that we are going to reenter American culture and need to be able to reconcile the differences. We didn’t even realized how much we had changed until we had this experience. But we also need to realize that we are so blessed to have had this experience and had the opportunity to learn and to broaden our worldviews. We need to be stewards of this blessing and use it to live differently but still accept American culture for what it is. It will be a tedious balancing act, but they will prepare us for it when the time comes. Right now, we still have 8 more weeks to soak up this culture and to learn even more so we need to stay focused on that.
All in all, our two weeks away from our family was great for time to spend with our group. I got to know our team so much better and it was so fun to be able to spend hours every night playing games together and reflecting on our experiences. Our group has such a great team chemistry-we all get along so well. I don’t think I’ve felt so at peace with a group of people in my life. We are all so different but it just works. It was a blessing to spend 2 weeks with all of them. But, at the end of it all, I was so ready to return to my family. I had felt like a vagabond moving all the time and living out of a suitcase for 2 weeks. I wanted to go home.
When I walked in the door of my home Friday morning, such a feeling of belonging swept over me. Mami and Cheila and Ashley and Alberto all ran up and greeted us with the biggest smiles on their faces and we hugged for so long. This culture truly knows what love and family is. They had all heard about my incident and were so concerned and had a million questions. My family is so protective of me. Amy and I moved into our rooms-we switched so now my window is the one that looks into the church. It was the absolute best feeling to unpack and get settled somewhere. I felt so at peace.
I’ll have to write about my experiences from this week and starting ministry sites later and post it Saturday because I don’t have more time at the base for internet today. Thanks to all of you who have been supporting me though this journey in prayer. I love you all!
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