Constanza: Little Switzerland

We spent some time in the mountains last weekend on a retreat with some of the school staff.  It was amazing, so cool and beautiful.  We wore sweatshirts all weekend, played games, hiked on a mountaintop, and rode horses.  Here are some pictures!

Perspectives on Suffering

I remember a book from my childhood about a man who was having trouble sleeping--I don't remember the name of the book.  There was a tapping on his window from a tree and a leaky faucet.  He went to the judge and told him he was having trouble sleeping, and the judge told him to get a cat.  That night, the man heard the taps and drips and the cat meowing and moving around on the bed.  

He went to the judge and said that he still couldn't sleep.  The judge told him to get a dog.  Of course, then the man had a dog and cat making noise and moving around in addition to the tapping and dripping sound.  The story continues with the judge recommending that this man fill his bed with a cat, a dog, a cow, a horse, and I don't remember how many other animals.

The man goes back to the judge, desperate, and tells him: "I still can't sleep!  Now there's mooing, neighing, barking, meowing, tapping, and dripping!"  And the judge says: "Get rid of the cat, the dog, the cow, the horse, and all the other animals."  And the man gets blissful sleep.

I feel a little bit like the man in that story--before getting rid of the animals.  I had sleep troubles in Philadelphia, where there would be sounds of car engines, occasional loud music from cars in the block behind us, a very occasional block party that lasted until 11:00, or an occasional dog left outside at night or overnight.

Now I live in the Dominican Republic, where each night there are roosters crowing, dogs barking (dogs live outside, it's warm and theft is a huge problem here), and my neighbor's unbelievably loud house alarm going off in the middle of the night.  Needless to say, I feel like I've jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.  I can only hope that things for me will end as they did for the man in the story.

This morning, after the house alarm woke me up at both 1:30 and 3:30 during the night and I didn't sleep much at all (after a week of interrupted sleep from the house alarm across the street), I was feeling a little low.  I must admit that I don't often listen to sermons, but in my discouraged state I thought it would be a good idea.  I found a sermon on suffering by Tim Keller to listen to while I made granola--Tim Keller being my favorite preacher both because he has such great insight and because he doesn't have a "preacher's voice."  

The sermon was really powerful and addressed a more profound suffering than I'm experiencing.  I found it really moving, though, and felt very encouraged.  I wanted to share it, in case anyone's interested:

The Furious Love of Jesus

(You have to click on the sermon with this name when you get to the webpage of free sermons related to suffering.)

An Original Favorite Color

Abigail, conforming to gender stereotypes, likes pink.  She is starting to learn other colors, but she could only correctly identify the color pink for the last year.  Every day she wants to wear pink, every day she wants a pink accessory, every day she wants to drink from the pink cup.  The most amusing recent example of pink insistence is that when we sing "Jesus  Loves the Little Children" Abigail wants us to add the color pink to the list.  She told me she's pink, so it's a legitimate request.  Since in somewhat recent years the color brown was added (well, since when I was little), it's pretty tough to squeeze the pink in:

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world:
red, brown, yellow, black, pink, and white, they are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

I'm glad Jesus loves our pink little girl.

By the way, we took that picture yesterday.  85 and sunny.  :)

Better Late Than Never

A techie friend of mine explained how to get the pictures off my phone using my husband's Blackberry charger (thanks Steve!).  I thought late Thanksgiving pictures of the slaughter of our turkey were still interesting enough to post in January for those of you who read the November entry and won't go back to see the pictures I now added:

The last two pictures are of the butcher who slaughtered my turkey for 50 cents and a chicken head that was on the floor of the slaughterhouse that I almost stepped on by accident.

Homemade Ground Cinnamon

Yesterday morning, I realized I had no ground cinnamon left for the baked oatmeal I was making.  But I found a big stick of cinnamon I'd bought at the big central market when I was there buying my turkey in November.  (A side note:  I had also bought two very affordable metal and rubber slingshots which I thought the boys would love for Christmas--and which were a tenth of the price of the beautiful wooden ones I'd seen on Etsy, but I had them in my carry-on when I flew in to the states and they were confiscated by TSA, who did not think that metal slingshots were appropriate carry-on items.  I'm pretty sure some TSA children are at this moment causing all kinds of mischief with them somewhere near Miami airport).

So I needed cinnamon and had a big yard-long stick of it.  I broke it into pieces over my knee, put it in a bag and smacked the pieces with a hammer, and then ground the pieces into powder in my coffee grinder (which is almost never used for coffee but rather for grains and seeds).  It made just the right amount to refill my ground cinnamon container.  And I felt like the conquering pioneer woman!

Blender Spaghetti Sauce

I like homemade spaghetti sauce, and because I don't like to use canned tomatoes because of the BPA, I have in recent years canned tomatoes in the early fall  and then use them for the fall, winter, and spring when I wanted to make spaghetti sauce.  And it's not rocket science: I'd just saute some onion and garlic, and then add the jars of tomatoes I'd canned along with some roasted peppers from the freezer, kale from the garden, red wine, salt, pepper, oregano, bay leaves, chopped mushrooms, hot pepper flakes, a little sugar . . . and whatever else struck my fancy.

Since we moved to the Dominican Republic, I have had fresh local tomatoes year-round.  This actually didn't seem so great for spaghetti sauce making, initially.  Because while the above formula makes a quick and easy sauce when you have canned tomatoes on hand, somehow a bag of fresh tomatoes and peppers inspires less motivation for making spaghetti.  Too much work.  And so, always driven by a sort of creative laziness, I came up with a quick pasta sauce for when all you have on hand is fresh ingredients . . . using the blender.

I throw the onion and garlic in the blender first (with the peppers, if there's room), and do my best to pulse them without pureeing them.  Then I dump them into the pot with some olive oil and salt and get them sauteing.  Then I throw the tomatoes into the blender and blend lightly (usually I have to do a couple of rounds, for a full pot of sauce) and once the starter veggies are sauteed, I add the tomato and a little wine.  Sometimes (when I'm in a hurry, which I usually am) I'll even blend the mushrooms with some of the other vegetables.  I add the seasonings I mentioned earlier, and then I'm done.

Then I just let it cook on the stove while I make eggplant or ground beef and while I cook the noodles and make a salad.  And when everything else is ready, the sauce is ready.  Anyway, I realize that for most of my readers, this is not the season for fresh local tomatoes or peppers.  But it really is fast and easy, and if I don't share it now, I don't know if I'll remember to later.  So at the very least, here's something to try this summer when you have fresh tomatoes on hand! :)

Two Week Winter

I had gotten so hungry for some "real" winter.  Caribbean Christmas lights flashing at night as we drove by in our air-conditioned car just didn't feel right.  And somehow muggy, rainy afternoons listening to Christmas carols near our decorated houseplant couldn't compare to the afternoons in PA we'd spent in sweaters or blankets next to the fresh-cut tree.  We were doing our advent each night, and our church had a great Christmas service the week before we left, but I was really excited for the cold!

 

So when we got to Pennsylvania again, it was amazing!  I prayed for snow, and we got some three different times.  We only took pictures this first time, when there was barely enough snow to cover the grass, but the next two times were actually deep enough for sledding (the fact that it was not deep enough to sled on Christmas day, as you can see, did not stop us).

We had a great time with our family and friends, it was a blessing to see everyone and to have some relaxing weeks to get a break from school.  But, I must confess, it was dark and bleary much of the time, and the wind was sharp and not too enjoyable.  By the time we got back to our warm Caribbean D.R., and were unloading from the plane in 80 degree weather, I must confess I said, "Wow, it's good to be home!"

. . . And Back Again

(Yes, that's a Hobbit reference, can't wait to see it when we get to the States)

We're almost packed!  Abigail has checked her plane bag about 20 times to make sure the Hello Kitty pez dispenser and lollipop are still there.

We're heading back to the U.S. for Christmas.  It's crazy, it's going to be crazy.  Drinking tap water, flushing toilet paper, shopping at Trader Joe's and Walmart, loading and unloading the dishwasher, being cold . . .  I'm really excited!  Mostly to see everyone.  The phone and internet make people seem much closer, but it's still not the same as physically being with people.  It's been a long time, almost 6 months, since we've seen almost everyone we've known our whole lives.

I'm excited to talk with those I'm close to about my life here.  In some ways, if this makes sense, going back to "report back" will make my life here feel more real.  Analyzing my life in the D.R. from a distance will I think click my new life into focus.

It's a great time to go back.  God is so good.  I can't tell you how much better I'm feeling this month than last (and all the months before).  As a super honest communicator much of the time, I've struggled with my answer when people have asked, "Do you like it there?"--admittedly a pretty innocent and seemingly non-threatening question.  But in survival mode, I found that question a difficult one to answer.

Life here has been physically, emotionally, and mentally harder.  New language (still wildly frustrating), new culture, new jobs added to the routine (related to a less sterile environment), new worries (Dengue fever, for one), new noises, new bugs in food . . .  And none of that has changed, but I'm figuring out how to navigate my life without expending quite so much of my energy and internal resources.  You don't realize how much of your day you do in automatic pilot until you have to think about each interaction and task for a while.  It's exhausting.

I feel like I'm inching my way over a big initial hump.  Suddenly I'm finding it possible to do some "extras."  I got some editing done, I started a quilt I had meant to make for Abigail, I made a few batches of ice cream, and I did a few other projects I had put off for a "someday" that seemed quite remote.  I didn't see it coming, but somehow I seem to have gotten adjusted enough that I'm able to do a little more than just the daily tasks of living before collapsing on the sofa.

But I started to realize in the last few months that my biggest issue at this point is relational.  I mentioned in a previous blog how I don't have close friends here yet, and my friends from the States can't relate to my life here (though they are still an important part of my life).  But what is so great is that in the last few weeks we've had more of a chance to hang out with friends from our church here, and we are genuinely starting to be real friends with them.  And real friends, to laugh with about the ridiculous things we do here because we still don't know what we're doing, are what I have missed so much.

Feeling like I'm leaving and will return to people who get us and care about us gives me a very different perspective on my life here.  I honestly feel now like I can say, "It's great!  It's hard and we're still adjusting, but we love it!"  :)

Brrr!

It's right around 70 degrees this morning, and boy, it's really chilly.  We all have on layers.  :)  It was definitely in the 60s last night.  We've really adjusted to the temperatures here.  I should add that I'm wearing capris, and say that it's supposed to go up to 80 this afternoon.  Christmas in the U.S. should be a little bracing for us.  I'm really excited to feel wintry, Christmas just isn't the same when it's hot and sunny.

Different Perspectives

We just had some, "Hmm, we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto" moments.  I thought I'd share a few:

Doctor Visit

Owen had to go to the doctor the other day.  His name is difficult for people here.  None of his names seem like first names to anyone particularly.  So the receptionist at the doctor's office had a lot of trouble with his name, even though he showed her on his driver's license.  He told her many times which name was his first, middle and last in Spanish--as did the nurse from his school who went with him as his translator--but she did not seem confident.

When he got back to the exam room, the doctor had trouble pulling his name up.  Owen looked at the computer as the doctor was looking under his last name and saw "Organ Donor" as first and middles.  He said he was pretty sure that was him.


Dinner Party

We were invited over for dinner today after church.  Ice cream here is pretty much awful, so I offered to bring some I had made--I am loving the chocolate ice cream with coconut milk I found on an Oprah website--which I think is infinitely better (mostly because it doesn't contain all sorts of artificial colors and flavors and tastes "real").  So I thought I'd bring it to church with me and stick it in the freezer in the church kitchen.  But when I got there this morning, the refrigerator was gone.  It turned out someone in the church needed to borrow it because they didn't have one.  So then the pastor's wife asked a neighbor who attends our church to keep my ice cream in her freezer during the service.  It felt distinctly un-American, the whole thing.

Then on the way to the dinner party the host of the party asked for a ride to his house.  We checked if he needed us to drive his kids (and wife?) too, mentally trying to figure out how to cram the our two oldest and one car seat into the back (where the boys could sit on pull-down jump seats) and counting seat belts.  He said, never mind, his brother had room (maybe he heard that infinitesimal pause as our American minds thought, "How could he think we have room?").  We followed his brother's car to his house (they made one stop to let out someone who had needed a ride--Owen thinks they had a kid with them, but I cannot corraborate that) and when we got there, five adults and five children poured out of the car.  I told him maybe the expression "has room," which in America involves the number of seat belts in the car, means something very different here.  The meal was delicious!

(Hilariously, when it was time for all fifteen of us to eat, he told us to all sit at the moderate-sized round table with seven chairs.  I asked if he meant just the seven kids, or all of us, and he said we'd all fit.  I told him I think maybe he just has trouble with the concept of "fitting.")  These are some of our best friends we have made here, I'm sure there will be many future chances for us to see from different perspectives.


On a personal note

I'm feeling an unusual sensation a lot lately of needing to call someone but not being able to think who it is.  I think it comes from feeling the need to talk with someone who 1) knows me very well, and 2) understands the context of the story I want to tell from my day.  And while I have wonderful friends in America who know me very well, and new friends here who understand the context of my story, I have no friends who both know me very well and understand the context of my story.  It is a tribute to my wonderful friends in the states who walked so closely with me through my daily experiences how very much I miss them now in my new daily experiences.

I know I will always have those friends, and I know in time I will have close friends here who understand my daily life well, but it's a very wistful, indescribable feeling to not have that right now.

Two more weeks till we visit the states!

The Girl Effect . . . in Santiago, R.D.

I went to a fundraiser tonight for a girl's school in the barrio of La Vega (about 30 minutes from where I live) called Nueva Esperanza.  It's an incredible school and has an incredible mission serving girls and families in an extremely poor neighborhood.  They showed a video tonight highlighting the incredible need of pre-teen and teenage girls worldwide.  It was thoughtful and moving and just a few minutes long.  I must share it, click on the link below to watch it:

The Girl Effect Video

Getting ready for Christmas!

The Davis annual gingerbread house building--these collapsed the next day due to humidity.

The Davis Family Christmas "Tree"

We don't have enough room on the tree for all the ornaments, so we put some on our doorknobs

One more picture!  I took this picture in October, someone's festive porch in the mountains.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hilariously, while we'd never done the Indian and Pilgrim Thanksgiving in the states, we did it here for the kids' Thanksgiving parties the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  Abigail joined Jesse's class and went as pumpkin kitty, since I didn't have an Indian costume for her.  Apparently, they sell costumes here of Indians and Pilgrims this time of year.  Who knew?  We did homemade.  :)

I then hosted a Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday evening so we could leave Thursday morning for the beach.  We had a really relaxed, good time.

Turkey Slaughter

Today my friend Holly and I went to the open air market downtown to buy my Thanksgiving turkey (because of course I have too many scruples with buying the Butterball turkeys shipped in from the States).  This market is almost impossible to describe, but there are blocks and blocks and blocks of produce stands and tiny open-front stores with dry goods and everything imaginable.  We picked our way through mud and traffic and people, Abigail strapped to my back in an Ergo to keep her out of the yucky stuff, to the poultry area and found some turkeys in a cage.We examined them as they strutted, large as life, around their cage and I pointed to one and said, "I'll take that big one" (that's not exactly how it went, it was in Spanish and my friend was helping and I did have to make sure that I wasn't going to have to carry the living turkey myself to the place of slaughter and find out the butcher's fee--50 cents--but I'm keeping the dramatic flow going).  I got the seller to pose for a picture with me and Abigail, and I must mention that Abigail was awed by these proceedings.  He walked it around the corner to the butcher's, tied it's feet together and hung it from the scale, and then collected the money for it.  Then we shook hands and he left.

I will not even try to explain what it was like in the butcher's room, except to say that the butcher was amazingly efficient (he butchered a chicken and our turkey in about 15 minutes) and at one point I had to avoid stepping on a chicken head.  I will also add that whatever loud machine strips all of the feathers off is quite alarming.  They handed me my turkey in a thin bag that barely covered the bird and I had to get two more bags to be able to carry it with no bird parts sticking out.

However you are getting your turkey this year, unless you shoot it yourself, I imagine it may be a far less colorful experience.  Wish you could have been there!  :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Full-Service Food Court

The Davis family hit the local mall to see what it was like and to have dinner at a Dominican style restaurant on Monday night (National holiday, no school).  It was my first experience with a full-service food court.  The waiter was extremely helpful and diligent.  And the food was way better than what I expect from a food court.  And the price was higher than I expected, too.  Not bank-breaking, but not the American food court experience.  They did have a Burger King.  I imagine that would be closer.  :)

They have a movie theater there.  I was shocked to see that The Hobbit is coming soon!  Owen tried to prepare me for the fact that it may already be in the states and back out again before we go home for Christmas (when I told him I plan to see it).  Please tell me that is not true!

Pumpkin Kitty, Bunny, and the Ocean

Happy Halloween from the Davis children!

Fall is . . .

Just thought I'd put a request out there to my friends in the States actually experiencing fall.  I generally feel nostalgic on Sundays, and think of what people are doing back home.  And especially after posting about Fall, since there really isn't Fall here.  So I thought I'd pitch one to my readers.  Here's my interactive blog topic: When do you really feel like it's fall?  I used to feel like it was fall when I started going to the Friday night home football games in high school, but that was a really long time ago.  Right about now if I was in Philly we'd be going to Farmer's Markets and eating lots of apples and I'd be coordinating my local meat purchasing for our "co-op."  If you want to, I'd love to read some comments with what fun Fall things you all are up to.

Feeling Like Fall

Well, it was 90 degrees yesterday, and we had an awesome time swimming at the club we just joined. [ I know,"Who is the woman?" I hear you asking, "She drives an SUV and joined a club?"  The irony is not lost on me, don't worry.]  Well, the kids and I did--Owen was gone almost all week and gets back tonight, which made the very long weekend due to hurricane days off school a little less bearable.  Anyway, I digress.  The point is that it once again feels like summer.  But for a few days there it was cool, we wore jeans during the day, and it felt like fall.  During the stormy cool weather, the kids decorated for Halloween.  I didn't see that they have imported carving pumpkins in the grocery store ($5 for a tiny one) until we'd already painted pretend local ones.  Ours are some kind of squash (auyama, I think), I picked out the ones that looked the most pumkiny.  The kids wanted to keep going on the pictures, but we're running out of construction paper and I thought a dozen was enough.  

They have their Halloween costumes ready, and I have some expats lined up as trick or treat sites.  No one does trick or treating in this country, a fact of which my kids were informed, but my kids are very committed and unfazed by that knowledge.  I don't have the heart to tell them we can't go anywhere.  Their costumes: Jesse is going to be a bunny (because we already have the tail and ears), Abigail is going to be a pumpkin kitty (because we already have a pumpkin shirt and ears and tail), and Micah is going to be the ocean (because I really didn't think I could make him into a shark, but I thought we could pin his various ocean-related stuffed animals to a blue shirt).  Pictures forthcoming on Wednesday.

Mountain Drive

One of my favorite parts of the area we live in is the mountains.  It is about ten degrees cooler at any given time in the mountains.  So while I live near beautiful tropical beaches, what I really crave a day trip to the mountains.  The only problem, as we discovered, is that it's tough to take a day trip there.  The mountains are not filled with paths and parking lots for hikers and there are no trail maps to be found.  So when I told Owen I wanted to go hiking in the mountains--Owen, as lover of maps and guide books and web pages, being, of course, our trip coordinator--he had to rely on descriptions of a hike from a guide book.  We told the kids we were having a hiking adventure in the mountains, packed a few granola bars and water (the guide book promised restaurants and shops near the hiking location), and headed off.

The drive is a mountain road which connects Santiago to Puerta Plata, a nearby beach.  It's a beautiful drive and we had a promising start to our day.  However, the guide book accidentally confused two "La Cumbre" roads and when we turned off of that road we had a terrifying ride straight up a broken concrete road (turns out this one runs on a fault line and is broken up by earthquakes) with an unbelievably steep slope.  I did not get a photo of this one because I was too terrified for photo snapping and we were too busy reading the owner's manual to make sure we had the four-wheel drive correctly engaged and to make sure that the picture-of-the-car-on-the-steep-downward-grade button was in fact the button you push when going down a .

We got back on track, through broken and insufficient Spanish, to find a more substantial-looking "La Cumbre."  When I say substantial, what I really mean is that this one was marked for tourists.  It was still unpaved and tiny.  This one looked more promising, as it led to a memorial to the Mirabel sisters (opposed to and killed by the dictator Trujillo); their death helped to gather even more support to Trujillo's overthrow.  The monument is constructed where their bodies were found in their car, and is truly in the middle of nowhere.

Here is the Davis family at the memorial; three of them have no idea what the memorial is for.

We got directions from there for the mountain hike near the amber mines (as read about in Owen's tour book), slightly vague ones, involving more driving up tiny mountain roads.  People kept vaguely waving us on ahead, and while we grew gradually less hopeful about finding a trail, people did seem to know something of the amber mines.  Eventually, some man looked at us curiously when we said we wanted to see pretty sites and go for a walk near the amber mines and waved us down the road a few feet and pointed off to the side of the road.  It did not look remotely possible that a trail could be where he was pointing, but I got out of the car.  I walked over to where he was gesturing and realized that he was pointing down into an amber mine.  I assured him that we did not actually want to take our walk in the amber mine, but said I wanted to take a picture.

After that, we had a good laugh, broke out the Nutri-Grain bars, and told the kids we'd just go out to eat, as promised.  I got some great pictures on the way down, which I must post here in order to justify making our car ride a little longer (I mean, for a family hike, this was turning out to be pretty sedentary and boring for the kids).

I had no idea that a banana tree flowered until I saw this

We made our way back to the main mountain road, and started to look about us for restaurant options.  There weren't any.  At least, there certainly didn't appear to be, and lots of people were staring at us as though we were a travelling zoo.  I'm going to just take a wild guess here and say that there probably aren't so many tourists going back to see the Mirabel sisters monument.  So we told the kids we'd stop at the "town" on the way down.  But the few stands there offered Snapple and a few fried meat products that looked unappealing and which I refused to feed my children.  So the rest of the granola bars were divvied up, and we started back down the mountain.  Owen wanted to stop at an amber store he'd noticed, so we unloaded the kids and went for a little mini-field trip, as it turned out (perhaps not so riveting for the early childhood age-group).  The tiny shop sold amber earrings and such, but what was far more interesting is that it also purchased amber.  And there were two men there selling amber in rock form to the owner--one of them even had a more rare turquoise-colored amber (the edge was amber, when he put the flashlight behind it it was the familiar golden brown color).  And, thankfully for all of my faithful readers here, they had no problem with me taking pictures of everything they did and all the different forms of amber.

The contender

A rare color of amber

Quality assessment and comparison

Weighing

Filing it down a little

The merchandise

The pair I liked

Mommy's choice approved by all

Family hike, pretty much a failure.  But an interesting one at that.

I Got to Wear a Sweater Today!

OK, only for a little, but it was so wonderfully cool.  It was also a hurricane, and classes were dismissed early and school cancelled for tomorrow.  The cool breeze and wearing jeans and drinking hot tea tonight . . .  I can't even tell you!  So delightful!  And we painted "pumpkins" today.  I'll try to post pictures tomorrow.