Week 2 in the DR

We have officially been here in the DR for two weeks!  So, so crazy.  It feels like it has already been a month.  We know the neighborhood well, know how to get around Puerto Plata a little better and my friends and I feel like we've known each other forever even though it hasn't even been that long.  But when you live in a third world country and teach English to little devil kiddos with a group of girls, you're bound to get close to each other haha.

This week truly was rough though teaching-wise.  These kids are absolutely adorable but can be such nightmares in our classes.  It's hard too because we've been told that the semester before us was not a very successful/diligent group of girls so we kind of have to clean up the mistakes that were made.  We really are so motivated as teachers though to fix all of the things going wrong here with the program so that these kids can learn English and use it to benefit their future!  I could write a million pages worth of things we need to change and how we all feel about the frustrating parts of teaching, but there is so much more I need to document on here!

After the first few days of teaching, we all had a better attitude going day by day because we knew that the weekend was coming up and our trip to Samana was going to be on Saturday.  It was so nice to have something to look forward to because teaching is so draining.  Our coordinator here (Amarillas) that is ILP's leader here in the DR was going to take us to Samana but recently had a major surgery so her son and daughter took us to Samana, which is a little peninsula on the island. We left at 5 am to take a bus for four hours to the docks, then took a boat for probably 20 minutes to Samana.  It was really pretty but it was raining off and on all day which was a bummer.  It felt so nice to just sit on the beach though, and I was reading Harry Potter all day so it was bound to be a good day :)  The water was so clear and pretty, but since it was rainy and a little cold we didn't stay in the actual ocean for too long.  There were cool clear jellyfish everywhere in the water, and some girls saw sea urchins and starfish.  Super cool! And of course we had pina coladas again, so yummy.   

Honestly though, the best part of the trip was finding the yummiest taco place on the way home.  Food here has been a hard adjustment, even though that might sound silly.  We have pretty much the exact same meal for lunch and dinner every day--some sort of fatty meat, rice and beans.  And there's no seasoning or anything on it, and we don't get a very big portion so we are always hungry. We live off of snacks that we get at the local grocery stores and the local fruit from the fruit stands in our neighborhood. Amarillas' (she's the coordinator of the program that lived here) son took us to a taco place called La Casa de Dona Petra here in Puerto Plata.  SO YUMMY.  We all downed the tacos, you get two of them for 80 pesos, which is like $1.50.  It literally changed everyones moods knowing that like 10 minutes away from our house was this amazingly yummy taco place that actually kept us full!  It was so good that we went back and tried the burritos, which are huge and only $3.  So, so, so yummy.

On Sunday we went to our local branch for the first time since last week was an area conference and I loved it.  I love singing the hymns in Spanish and I love trying to figure out what everyone is saying in their prayers/talks, even if I can barely understand.  It's still so cool to me to hear the church in other languages, it's also so comforting to have the routine of church even here in the DR.  One of the Elders that is here from Nevada translated Sunday School for us which was so nice of him.  It was so cool to learn with the locals in the same class, even though we didn't speak each others language.  We learned about the Atonement and how you never have to go through trials and hard times alone, which is exactly what we needed to hear during this super hard time.  Teaching is hard, I don't know how many times I can say that.  It truly is and it takes a toll on us every day.  Last week during the area broadcast Elder Anderson said, "Although He won't always take away our transgressions, He will take them with us." That has been so comforting to me knowing that I'm not alone in this trial.

After church a little group of us took the teleferico up to the little Christus statue here in Puerto Plata.  We were expecting it to just be the statue to look at and nothing really else, but it was seriously so pretty up there.  We had a beautiful view of the city, the statue was amazing, there were hardly any people there and they had gardens and paths everywhere that were so fun to explore and walk around on.  It was a perfect little Sunday trip and I felt so much peace up there, and felt like I can get through these four months successfully.

                

The past couple days have been filled with the stresses that come from teaching, but these kids have my heart.  The more we learn about them, the more I love them.  They come from such hard homes and are part of such a scary culture/neighborhood.  I know that is why they act out so much in class but I really wish we could change their lives in a way greater than just teaching them English.  I wish I could give them all a mattress to sleep on and clean clothes to wear every day, but for now we're doing what we can to try and make an impact on their lives even if every day is so hard.

This week we don't have school on Friday because we are going with the ward to Santo Domingo for a temple trip!  We are staying at the MTC Friday night and then going to the temple in the morning.  I am so excited to feel the peace that comes from the temple.  And I hope the next few days of teaching go smoother than the past few days :)

The First Week in the DR

My heart is so full with all that I have already experienced in the last week and a half of being here. I'm going to write this first post in the DR just about the first week, then I'll write another one about the last few days!  It has been so, so hard to adjust to the culture and living conditions and has been even more difficult to start teaching the crazy kids down here.  For the first few days everyone here was super homesick.  It was hard to adjust to cold showers with hardly any water pressure, not flushing toilet paper and only flushing the toilet a few times a day (if they will flush), randomly not having any water in our sinks/showers/toilets and not being able to drink the tap water.  We learned quickly that bug spray is vital, otherwise you'll wake up with tons of bug bites haha.  We don't have air conditioning in the house but do have a few fans in our room which is so nice, I don't think we would survive this humidity and heat if we didn't have those fans!

The first few days of being here, after two red-eye flights to get here on hardly any sleep, we stayed around our neighborhood and took a few days to unpack, walk around and see the different schools we would be teaching English at and walked to the local beach with our neighbors.  We just took a few days to get familiar with the area and had a few more trainings before we were going to start school last Monday.  For the first weekend here my roommates (Alyssa, Brenley and I) went to Sosua beach with a few other girls in our group.  It was absolutely beautiful.  The waves there are crazy big at high tide right at the shore but the water is a beautiful turquoise color and was so relaxing. They also had the yummiest pina coladas there with fresh pineapple chunks.  It was heaven!  We got cheeseburgers for lunch just because we needed familiar food haha, but they didn't taste anything like American burgers.  It was still nice to have something other than rice, beans and unknown meat haha.

On Sunday about half of the group came to the local LDS church meeting, this week was an area conference so we ended up listening to a broadcast Elder Anderson speaking in English which was SO nice to hear English.  There was a family there from Norway visiting so it was fun to chat with them about what we're all doing here.  There are also white missionaries here which is so comforting to all of us for some reason.  One day when we walked home the Elders were just standing outside of our gate and it was so fun to talk to them in English and actually understand what they were saying haha.  My Spanish is actually way better than I thought it would be, I can pick up about 60% of what people say to us (which is them using basic Spanish so that we can understand, so I really am not that impressive with my Spanish haha).  But the high school Spanish is coming in handy!

Monday was the first day of classes, which also meant the start of a few mental breakdowns throughout the week.   These kids are so, so cute but it's so hard to describe how terribly behaved they are without coming here and seeing it in person.  These kids come from such broken homes, many of whom only have moms and only have one bedroom in their house.  Many of these moms are prostitutes, not because they want to be but because they have to be in order to put food on their table for their families.  And since the whole family shares a bedroom, these kids see things in the night that they should never ever have to see.  They mimic those actions every day during class and disrupt everyone's attention, they pee on us, spit on us, bite us, flip us off and know hardly any English even though the program has been here in the DR for a year and a half.  It is so mentally draining to try and settle these kids down and teach them a lesson.  It truly has been babysitting this week, not really any teaching.  We've been in contact with the leaders of ILP (the program i'm here with) and we're working on tweaking and adjusting some things here because the program isn't being successful the way it is set up now and we truly want to change that so these kids can be successful and learn English. We love these kids already, even if they're hard to teach, and really want what is best for them so they can be successful! These cuties in the pictures below were eating lunch when we walked into the cafeteria on the first day. 

Part of why this first week has been so overwhelming is because we want these kids to learn English so that in their futures they can have a job that requires English, even if it's a job at a hotel nearby it would make such a huge difference in their family's income.  And right now we see that they are not being successful and that the kids and Spanish teachers don't really care or put any effort in trying to make the classes successful.  A lot of us felt useless being here, thinking that we would make no difference in our four months being here.  We got homesick all over again thinking of why we came and how we should've stayed home and done something else this semester.  But as the week went on, we became more motivated to change the program by talking to the ILP leaders and really truly make it work in this country not only so that our semester is successful, but so that future semesters can be as well.  Our goal is to bring back the mindset to the community that English classes truly are a privilege for them.  They don't have to pay anything for the classes and we are here as volunteers to help them, which they often take advantage of.  The Spanish teachers see us as babysitters to give them a break for a few hours which is so frustrating!  So we're working hard at making things better so that these kids love to learn English and can use it in their futures.  We know their backgrounds and know how much we need to just make them feel loved them and care for them.  Since we already care so much about them, we'll be working hard this semester to make an impact so that this program works here!

The kids are the cutest, most photogenic little cuties but I promise they are little devils in the classroom haha.  We love walking around the streets of our neighborhood with them, and they're always waiting at the gate to talk to us or to have us come play with them.  We LOVE them at home and in the streets when we can have fun together, but in the classroom they are absolute horrors which is so hard!