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.