I feel like my spanish and my sweat glands are slowly aclimating to la vida Dominicana.

And I'm getting aquainted to the small wonders of campo life...the rats that knaw on the walls at night and sometimes find their way inside your mosquitero!...the excessive amounts of coffee, second suppers and second breakfasts at the ready...every activity happening ¨Dominican time¨, ahorrita, which does not translate to right right now on schedule, but rather, in an hour, or maybe more...bathing in a river every day... hand washing my clothes in a stream bed and then lugging up the 2 gallons of water that I'll need to wash my hands and face the rest of the day.

My Doña's kitchen is always filled lots of kids, lots of yelling, lots of chickens, and and lots of dogs. And the dirt road is not without its cow and donkey road blocks. I aprovechar (take advantage) of the infrequent bouts of luz in the house every other evening that allows for a few hours of entertainment and juice with ice.

And its wonderful.

The nights are filled with the enormous moons and the outlines of palm trees. And endless games of dominoes. Its orange season here in Las Batatas and every time I march off into el monte, the outback, with my ayudantes (volunteers) to survey, check the water system's spring source, or even just visit a neighbor, it is mandatory to go orange picking. My compañero scrambles up the tree to toss down 10 or 20 fruits. I tuck in my shirt and rapidly fill it like a potato sack. Pregnant with oranges, I wabble adelante (forward). We then proceed to peel the fruit and check if it is sweet for eating or sour to squeeze into juice later. If its dulce (sweet), the next kilometer of the hike finds us stumblling, as if drunk, our mouths full of juice, spitting the seeds and tossing the orange peels behind us to mark our route.


Scrambling up orange trees and diving fully clothed into pools of crystal clear spring water, its hard to imagine that its snowing somewhere. But I know that Christmas is approaching because the houses in my little campo have put up colorful lights that twinkle on the nights we are lucky and have electricity. And so I've started sharing traditional carols that I play for people on my computer. And I sing about snow in English.

Miss you, happy holidays.