School Days

OK - we haven't been very good at updating this blog so far, so we are going to take a different approach.  We've figured out that it's a lot easier to post several pictures to Facebook for everyone to see, adding a caption here and there, rather than trying to write a blog post centered around one or two pictures.  So, if you want lots of pictures, check out Emily's or Erik's profile page on Facebook.  We're going to try to update this more regularly with descriptions of what is going on with our day-to-day lives.

Anyway, things are good here. We're about two months into school, and are definitely settled in to a normal school-year routine. School starts at 8:45 every day and ends at 3:30.  We all leave for school around 7:45 or 8:00. The boys just started walking to school this week (about 1/2 mile).  Emily gets there by 8:00 to get ready for the school day, and Erik's playground duty starts once the kids get there around 8:15.  The morning 4-square games on the playground can get pretty intense.  Emily's classroom is the last door on the left in the photo.

8:45 - 9:00 is morning assembly.  Responsibility for the morning assembly rotates among the teachers weekly - usually a good bit of singing or other activities to work on the kids' language skills, followed by the Dominican version of the pledge to the flag.  Our kids are starting to pick up a few lines here and there (it's a lot longer than the U.S. pledge) - they like the end where they can yell "¡Libertad, Libertad, Libertad!"

From 9-10:30 is intensive English class with the students grouped by ability. Emily has the highest level non-native speakers (mostly 5th-7th graders), some of whom are approaching fluency. Our friend Cameran has the other end of the spectrum - kids who have had no exposure to English and are learning their ABCs! Emily's class just got done working on contractions and prepositions, and is now moving on to adjectives and adverbs.  Our kids are in a class with all native English speakers (there are 7 of them) - the others have been raised bilingual, so our kids are the only ones in the school that can't speak Spanish fluently.  Each week, all of the students get 3 hours of Spanish and 3 hours of Sociales (Social Studies) taught in Spanish by Dominican teachers.  Between the classes in Spanish and the playground and the fact that none of the kids in our neighborhood speak English, the kids are really starting to pick up a lot of Spanish.

After the intensive English in the morning, the rest of the days are spent with a mix of math, Spanish, Sociales, science, PE, homeroom, and lunch and recess.  Most of the time, lunch is meat, rice and beans with a spaghetti day and a ham and cheese sandwich day once a week or so.

Vandy Gras 2009

Last weekend, Erik flew to New Orleans for his annual get together with his friends from law school.  He had a rough start when his passport was lost (stolen?) in the Santo Domingo airport.  After a couple hours of fruitless searching at the airport (including a fun look through an overflowing restaurant trash can), he caught a cab to the U.S. consulate and was able to get an emergency passport the same day. After dinner and a night on Bourbon Street Friday night, they all drove up to Baton Rouge for some tailgating and the LSU-Vandy football game Saturday night. Unfortunately, Vanderbilt lost the game in a steady rainstorm, but they still had a great time (Tiger Bait!). The best part was Erik spent several hours at Target, Wal-Mart, etc. on Sunday getting many of the things that we can't get here.  He left with one small carry-on of clothes and two big empty bags and came back with them full.  We don't have any plans to return to the U.S. again before the end of the school year, so this was our last chance to get some of our favorite things from the U.S. until we get some visitors.  Shelf liner, hand sanitizer, Oxi Clean powder and Shout spray, Starburst,  etc. Oh, the simple things:)

Links to More Pictures

If you are interested, here are links to two albums of pictures Emily posted to her Facebook page this week.  You don't need to be a Facebook member to view these pictures:


http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034221&id=1437787501&l=768b461c79


http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034225&id=1437787501&l=09963c8bcf

Where the Streets Have No Names

Here's the view from the balcony of our house. As you can see, the ocean is quite close, but we're situated on a 50-foot cliff, so you can't just walk out to the water.  Like many of the streets here, ours isn't paved, or even named . . . must be why we can't seem to find a Domino's that will deliver to us. The little hut in the foreground is Manny's Bar - great place to go for a cerveza under the stars after a hot day (which they all are).

My Class

Bottom left to right:
Cadiz Ernesto, Analisa, Ysmerlin
Top left to right:
Luis David, Nelson Paul, Natalie, and Tara
I got a new student today named Adriana.
This is my 5th grade homeroom.  In the morning the students split up into proficiency groups for intensive English lessons. I have 4 of these same kids and Luis Rafael, Shaylin, and Omar.  Just to give you an idea, we are working on capitalization, punctuation, complete sentences, and pronouns.  They definitely need the most help with writing.  School-wide there is a huge range of language ability: some kids came at the beginning of the year not knowing a word of English. For that matter, some of them aren't even literate in their own language yet!
The maximum enrollment per class is 12.  Our building is actually an old disco and the room sizes are pretty small.  The school desperately needs a new building, which they had hoped to be in already.  The A/C hasn't been working properly, so you can imagine how hot it is (especially when the dress code mandates long pants for the kids)!
So far I have really enjoyed being back in the classroom and working with these kids.  They are really fun to be around ; plus, for some reason they think I'm only 26 years old.   'Ta bien!:)

New Addition

The Elsea family has grown!  There are an abundance of street dogs  here, so being the soft-hearted suckers that we are, of course we just had to get one.  Meet Fresca.  She was abandoned down at the dock with 2 littermates, both of whom died.  But Fresca is totally feisty, which is probably why she survived.  The fishermen fed her every couple of days until Emma (a friend we met who is here to help with the animal problems) brought her to us. In this culture, Fresca is the equivalent of "rascal" .  Fresca has adjusted well to our house and loves to play, especially with Clifford the chihuahua.  She tries to play with Mimi and Lola, but they aren't too interested.

All I Want for Christmas . . .

Here are pictures of our boys with their missing teeth! Liam lost his first top tooth as we landed in Santo Domingo, then Ryan lost his first tooth ever, and Liam lost another. Luckily, we discovered that the Tooth Fairy comes to the DR and gives pesos.

Gustamo del Helado!

This is Bon, one of our favorite spots in town:)

We pass it everyday on the way home from school, so we're always tempted to stop for an ice cream treat.

Jumping Into Dudu

Last Sunday we went Lake Dudu (yeah, that's really the name) lagoon. If you look on the picture to the left, you can see Elizabeth, Liam and Erik sitting at the top of the cliff. It's about a 40-50 foot drop. Elizabeth and Liam both jumped off!!! Erik wanted me to make sure I mentioned that he did it, too (which is a big deal because, as you may know, he's very afraid of heights).

Our New Rides

One of the first items of business when we arrived was to get a couple of pasolas (scooters). After 2 weeks of walking everywhere in the blazing hot sun, we finally bought them. Here we are on our pasolas headed home after teacher-training. Most people here get around on pasolas or motorcycles. Cars are too expensive to buy and maintain, particularly given that the salty air eats up everything and the gravel roads and potholes are killers on a car. You will often see three, four and even five people on a pasola, moms carrying newborns, and 10-year olds driving around. Stop signs, turn signals, etc. are all deemed optional, so you really have to pay attention. As Erik says – It’s like that old videogame Paperboy, but with real lives at stake!
(Note to family members who are a bit disturbed by this image- Usually I have one passenger and Erik has the other two. Still not totally safe, but safer than what you see here.)

When in Rome . . .

Here we are with some of the other people from the school going to the beach Dominican-style. We thought it would be safer to put all the kids inside the truck, so we rode along in the back! Kids were mad - they thought they would get to ride back there. There are several great beaches only a couple miles from Cabrera in either direction. The one where this picture was taken, called Caleton, is the furthest, so it was an interesting ride there and back.

Neighborhood Dogs

The day we arrived at our house, we found Mimi (the black dog) lounging in the middle of the living room. She belongs to the people who live behind us, but she prefers hanging out in our house or outside on the front patio. She is supersweet, but really dirty. We bought some dog shampoo this week, so we’re going to try to give her a bath this weekend. She’s a great guard dog since she sleeps on our doorstep; the only problem is that sometimes she decides she needs to lead the neighborhood dogs in all-night barking sessions. Apparently, it is not unusual for dogs that bark a lot to get poisoned by neighbors, so hopefully Mimi will make it through the year with us!

The other dog, ironically enough, is named Clifford (pronounced "Cleeee-ford")! (Yes, after the Big Red Dog.) He belongs to a family across the street but sometimes we find him in our kitchen. He's a yappy little scaredy-dog.

First Day of School

Today is the first day of school at AIC!! Kids were all up and dressed before 7:00 ready to go. Each of them were super-excited to meet their new friends and get started with the year. Their grades got shifted around a bit here, so Ryan is in 1st grade, Liam is in 2nd grade and Elizabeth is in 4th grade. Emily is teaching 5th grade. Erik is helping with PE, lunch and the website, among other things.

We’re here and settled in! The kids have adjusted amazingly well. They were total troopers about walking all around town for the first 2 weeks, as we were without transportation. Luckily we got our pasolas (scooters) last Monday.

Our house is great- even closer to the ocean than we’d thought. We spend a lot of time upstairs on the balcony where the breeze is nice and the view is even better. It has been crazy hot here, even by Dominican standards. We’ve been to the beach several times already, which everybody really enjoys. There are a few different beaches about 10-20 minutes away in either direction. Our favorite is Playa Diamante, where you can walk out a couple hundred yards and the water is still at waist-level. I’ve been busy at teacher training. The first official day for students to come to school is August 26. Still waiting for the internet at our house, so getting access to update the blog has been tough. Street power has been out quite a bit, so we have had some hot nights with no fans (not to mention losing everything in the fridge) - of course, if the heat doesn't keep you up in the night, then the all the crazy barking dogs will!!

We will post pictures soon.

Packed and On Our Way!!

We are now in Miami, leaving for Santo Domingo in the morning. We filled up the rented truck for the trip to the airport with 10 checked bags, 5 back-packs, 4 carry-ons and one cat carrier! The trip to Miami was pretty uneventful, other than the 90 minutes sitting on the tarmac waiting for the lightening to clear. Lola the boy cat did pretty well on the flight, considering -- only problem was he/she suddenly got quiet and stopped moving about halfway through and I was briefly nervous that we had another animal casualty, but fortunately she had just finally given up the fight and fallen asleep.
We are super-excited for tomorrow. We will post an update as soon as possible from Cabrera, but not sure if we will have internet access anytime soon.

Does this look like the face of a killer?

As many of know, one of our neighbors kindly volunteered to take in our yellow lab Luke for the year, which was super-nice. We dropped him off to his foster home Saturday at 1:00 and then headed to our farewell lunch with our families. By 2:30, Luke was back in our custody! We got a call that Luke had killed the family's pet bird when they had it out of its cage, and that he was no longer welcome to stay. Maybe he was trying to prove that he was worthy of his breed as a bird dog. Of course we feel terrible about what happened. Luke is now an extended stay customer at the local kennel until we can get settled and figure out another option ... Not a great beginning to the year, but things were going so smoothly we figured something was bound to happen. Just didn't imagine it would be this!

Three More Days!!!

Well, we are getting really close to heading to Cabrera. Here's the house we are renting for the year. We didn't see it when we visiting in May, but pictures look great. Not having air conditioning will take some getting used to, but that's probably going to be just one of the many changes for us. Our dining room and toy room at home in Newburgh are currently full of piles of clothes and other items as we are struggling to fit a year's worth of stuff into 10 bags!