SO MUCH TO WRITE!!!

Monday June 27, 2011 TECH TRIP

Wow, so we have a lot to talk about here! It’s been over a week and lets be honest I don’t remember a lot of last week…training, nothing too boring but boy did it fly by! We are already on Week 4. One month from today is my birthday. I'm excited but at the same time not because that means that my 20’s are going to fly by. I will have turned 24 by the time I get back home.

So today we arrived in Santo Domingo. They have recently added Santo Domingo as it’s own province. It’s about a 2.5 hour drive from Quito. We met bright and early to leave for S.D. today. The new bus station is absolutely spectacular!! If anyone who reads this remembers the old bus station, it was more towards the colonial part of Quito, sketchy, creepy..etc..I think you get the idea. The new one is like an airport, super clean, fancy..a lot better. The bus was really nice too. The ride went really quick. So many curves

Santo Domingo is def more like the Latin American city we all expected. It kinda felt like a Cluster F*** to be honest; In a way though it’s organized chaos, so many random stores and wired hanging everywhere. I’ll try to get a picture up. I know I know I’ve been completely failing at picture uploading. Although there are some on my Facebook.

We took a taxi to the “hotel”, nice, hot water-that’s always a plus. We then met with Ronald, PCV at one of the communities. He works with one of the health centers there. It isn’t supported by the state so it’s hard for them to get simple things like medicine and other resources that regular state run health centers would have. We then gave our charla about nutrition to a group of women. We were expecting a lot of people and only about 20 showed up. We had to tweak it a bit but for the most part it went well. The women were really patient and def willing to learn!

We went back into Santo Domingo, had Spanish, which was pretty much a review of what went well and what didn’t, then was dinner and we got together to go over tomorrow’s charla-hand washing with kids. It should be more hands on and fun…

A little about this past weekend, I went to Mindo with my host sister Lucy, her husband and Jose Luis. I thought it would be a bit bigger group aka not a couple’s retreat. All in all it ended up being fine. Jose Luis got the hint that I wasn’t interested in him. We did a hike on Sunday to some waterfalls and then did an hour zip line trip through the mountains!!! It was sooo cool! Lucy and Jorge chickened out but whatever. All in all it was a really good short trip. Oh yeah it’s really hot and humid here..
Peace