Darlene

A group of American doctors (the Geheraty Medical Mission) recently came to Santo Domingo to perform free plastic surgeries on both kids and adults. The patients had problems ranging from cleft lips to extra digits to burn scars. These amazing doctors come every year to the Dominican Republic to stay two weeks helping those who are less fortunate.

Darlene is a 7-year-old girl in my site who has an extra finger and a extra toe. The extra finger doesn’t bother her. But the extra toe makes it difficult and painful for her to wear tennis shoes (which are required as part of the school uniform). When I heard about the medical mission, I thought that she would be a perfect candidate.

I found out about the medical mission when I was in the capital on Friday. Patient registration was the following Sunday. So I rushed back to Baoba to talk to Darlene’s mom. Darlene’s mom is a single mother who has two jobs: cleaning and cooking for a private home and working in a nail salon. When she heard about the opportunity, she told me that she would love for Darlene to have the surgery but unfortunately with the short notice, she couldn’t afford the trip or get off work. So I volunteered to take Darlene by myself.

We had to be at the hospital at 7 am on Sunday, so Darlene and I left Baoba on Saturday night. There was no way we could arrive on time if we left Sunday morning. This was only Darlene’s second trip to the capital, and she clung to me every second of the way. I traveled prepared for anything. I brought Dramamine, band-aids, Tylenol, mosquito repellent and anything else I could think of that she might need. Luckily she needed none of that. What she did enjoy however were my various forms of entertainment. I brought with us a deck of playing cards, a coloring book and crayons, the story Curious George and my ipod full of Dominican music. We got to the capital around 6 pm and went straight to dinner. I took her out for pizza because she had never eaten it before and she loved it! Afterwards, we just went back to the hostel and went to bed.

We woke up early on Sunday. I brushed and braided her hair, and we headed to the hospital. We arrived at 6:30, were given a ticket (number 68) and sent to stand in a line outside. I found the doctors, told them I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and they quickly changed my ticket to number 1 and moved us to a more comfortable waiting room. The doctors confirmed that they could perform the surgery on Darlene and scheduled us to return on Thursday.

We left Baoba early on Thursday morning (6:30 am) and arrived at the hospital around 11. For this trip, Darlene’s mom, Alexandra, also came with us. Once they put Darlene in the hospital gown, she became to cry because she was so nervous. So I went and put on hospital scrubs and told Darlene that I would go with her in the operating room and not leave her side until it was over. This seemed to calm her down.

We walked into the operating room and everything was going well. About two minutes after she received the anesthesia and fell asleep, I started feeling woozy (did you all see this coming?) so I tried to leave the operating room. But on my way out a nurse stopped me and asked me to open up a packet of gauze for her. This seemed to push me over the edge. My vision narrowed, I started sweating…and BOOM! I passed out on the operating room floor. So instead of taking care of Darlene, the doctors now had to worry about me. I woke up about 15 seconds later, lying on a hospital bed with a doctor holding my legs up in the air. Once everyone saw that I was ok and that I didn’t hit my head during the fall, the surgeons went back to the operating room. The Dominican nurses however stayed around me, offering me candy and Gatorade, and telling me that I was dumb for skipping breakfast that morning.

I stayed on my own little hospital bed until Darlene’s surgery was done and she was coming out of the anesthesia. Because I was at her side when she fell asleep and when she woke up, she thinks I stayed right there the whole time. She stayed in the recovery room for about 30 minutes, played with all of her gifts that the doctors gave her (a Barbie doll, 2 stuffed animals, stickers, coloring book, ball, jewelry), and then we returned to Baoba. Everyone keeps asking me how Darlene did in the surgery, and I can only reply “she did better than I.”

Only in the DR, Round Dos

My doña refuses to give me a glass of water to drink whenever I’m eating food that is served hot, like soup or rice pudding. When I asked her about it, she said it was because she knew someone who had gotten cancer and died from drinking something cold after eating something hot. In the same token, whenever I come back from running to the beach or doing some type of exercise, I am not allowed to open the refrigerator myself to get a glass of water. Because my body temperature is so hot, if I stand in front of something cold, like the fridge, I will die.

All Dominicans love the lottery. Every host family I’ve been in stops what they are doing every night at 9 p.m. to watch the lottery on television. Yet not one of those times has anyone ever bought a lottery ticket. They also repeatedly yell out the numbers in case anyone who happened to turn away from the tv for half a second missed the revealing of the numbers. The next day, everyone talks about the numbers that were selected.

I brought two photo albums with me to the DR: one full of pictures of my friends and me, and one with pictures of Jordan and me. These two photo albums sit on my counter for everyone to look at and marvel at how beautiful Americans are. I was feeling homesick the other day, so I went to look at the pictures. As I flipped through the photos, hundreds of tiny termites came running out of the album. Apparently they had nested in the felt background of the photo albums. So I sprayed the photo album and all of its plastic coverings with RAID in the hopes to kill the bugs (and not ruin the pictures!)

As I mentioned before in my journal entry on Baoba’s Patronales, a few of my girls were asked to dance at the town’s celebration. In the original dance, there were 5 girls, but for Patronales, only four of them were able to dance. Leidi’s mom wouldn’t let her dance because the sponsors at our little town’s festival were not going to pay the girls. So Leidi had to sit out on the sidelines simply because her mom was greedy and wanted some sort of compensation for her daughter to do what she loves.

Alvino had been bothering me for 2 months to start another English course so he could enlist. After all of pleading, I finally consented and signed people up for the course. The course lasted 4 months, and he only went to two classes. This made me so mad. I hadn’t wanted to teach another English class, and then the one person who convinced me to do it didn’t even attend the class regularly. After the course ended, I asked him why he never attended. His response: he was in love with me and being so close to me during the class made him nervous and gave him an upset stomach.

"Busca el colin"

When John Carlos (my 17-year-old handyman) came over to take care of my house’s termite problem, I got a little more than I had bargained for. I had been hounding this kid for 4 months to come over and kill all of the termites. I had the poison and the spray bottle, and all I needed was a muchacho to do the dirty work for me.

So I finally convinced him to come over by baking a chocolate cake and promising him two pieces as payment. He showed up, climbed up into my “attic” (which is really just like an open crawl space above my living room) and started spraying the insecticide. Just as he was about to finish, I heard him say “Whoa!”

“What is it??” I asked.

“Lauren, it’s nothing,” he replied. “Pero busca un colin rápido.” (translation: run and get a machete!)

I was a little confused as why he told me there was nothing, yet sent me to find a machete. But I quickly complied without asking more questions. As Frank once taught me, if everyone behind you starts to run, don’t stop to ask them why they are running; just run with them.

I gave him the machete, and went outside. Whatever was going on up in that attic, I did not want to be near it. After about two solid minutes of hearing the metal repeatedly clink against the wooden beams, I heard a soft thud. In my living room floor was a 3 foot long black snake (now a beheaded and bloody mess).

John Carlos threw the snake outside in the community trash pile, threw some bleach on my bloodstained floor, washed his hands and asked for his cake, while I stood there in shock, creeped out by the fact that a snake had been living in my house for who-knows-how-long.

When I went to return the machete back to my neighbor, I explained about the snake and she asked me what we did with it. I told her that we had thrown it in the trash pile and she informed me that (the superstition is) we have to burn the snake as a warning to all other snakes in the area. Otherwise more will come. So then she and spent the next hour going through the trash to find and burn the snake. We never found it, so I’m just hoping that the other snakes will see their buddy beheaded and get the message even without setting it afire.