“What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!”

Happy-Thanksgiving-Christmas-Merry-New Years! What a cool experience it was celebrating the season in a different country/climate!  You know how people have bucket lists? Well, I don’t have one (I should probably make one) but I think in some dusty corner of my mind, I knew I always wanted to celebrate the holiday season in a different country!   So, for those of you who have read this each month, maybe you noticed that I happened to skip altogether posting in December. Like they say…it’s the most  wonderful busy time of the year! I can’t believe that it’s already January!! 5 months have passed in the Dominican Republic. It seems like an eternity that I’ve been here!  And it also seems like nothing at all! These last two months went by so rapidly and at the same time it seems like forever since the last post. The last time I posted, though, things were a little difficult! Beautiful, but difficult! But I’m happy to report that Tom is on the mend and almost fully recovered (THANKS BE TO GOD!) and it looks like he’s going to live a happy mostly normal life ( Tom and “normal” aren’t usually used together), minus 10 inches of his bowel! J If you don’t call living in different countries while the other undergoes major surgery “marriage prep”, I don’t know what is! Through sickness and in health….we’ve got that part covered! Haha! I’ll be happy when I can give him an abrazo grande and check out his sweet new scar!

I finally got to go to a Dominican baseball game in November!! Two actually!! Baseball is a HUGE sport in this country and an important cultural aspect as well. The two games that I went to were really great! All the rules are the same as American baseball, but there is a noticeable difference in skill level of the players. They say that there are scouts for American baseball at almost all the games, so any player that is remotely “good” gets snatched up to go play in the USA. Like any other baseball game, they had overpriced drinks, pizza, and empanadas. And the fans are CRAZYYY!!! I mean really…you thought fans in the US were crazy about baseball…come to a game between Licey and the Torros!! Licey was the home team, and I don’t think there was a second that the Torros fans sat down or stopped chanting! Loudly…with blow horns. Two rows behind us!

Lots of other stuff happened in November too! There was a 3 day festival honoring Ciudad Colonial, the neighborhood I live in with free entrance to all the museums, concerts, a ballet (Swan Lake!), and vendors. We had a beautiful Thanksgiving celebration at our casita, and I cooked my first turkey! (more on this experience in a moment! It involves turkey feet…real turkey feet.) We also went to an awesome presentation of Christmas lights in one of the parks in Santo Domingo! They had a total of 27 million lights that you could walk through and enjoy! We actually wound up going twice! One thing is for sure! The Dominicans love their Christmas lights! Not just in this park, but everywhere! People have had their houses decorated for Christmas since the beginning of October! And they don’t take them down until after Jan 6^th, which is the day of the three-kings (side note: In the DR, the day of the three kings is the day that kids get presents, if families give our presents. NOT Christmas day.) I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have Halloween and Thanksgiving to decorate for! I’m a sucker for Christmas lights, so I can blissfully say I enjoyed them for almost 3 straight months this year! No complaints from this girl!

So, let’s re-visit my Thanksgiving experience and my first time cooking a turkey. My friends here wanted to celebrate this American holiday. We wanted it to be very “traditional” with mashed potatoes and corn and stuffing and a beautifully roasted turkey like you see in all the Norman Rockwell pictures. Of course I volunteered to make the turkey. I’m supposed to know how to do this, right? We do it every year…well, my grandma does it every year. So, it’s two days before Thanksgiving and we are talking about the turkey. We need a non-frozen turkey because we don’t have time to thaw the sucker out. Mercedes, the older lady who I live with, was given the task of purchasing the turkey…non-frozen, please. So, in my mind she was going to go to one of the bigger grocery stores in Santo Domingo, grab a turkey that’s nicely wrapped in air tight plastic and I can just take the nicely wrapped bag of goodies out of the inside and get to work. No big deal. I arrived home from school the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Mercedes was beaming. She found a turkey! We go to the fridge and she reaches in and gets a thick (and abnormally long) black garbage bag from the top shelf. I ask her in Spanish, “This is the turkey?” And she replies, “Yes!” still beaming.   

Thanksgiving dinner!

 We plop the bag on a table and she starts to untie when two turkey feet poke out of the top! Complete with turkey doo from their turkey pen this morning when this turkey was still alive. If I thought my heart stopped there, it stopped again when I saw that this turkey still had a neck, a few feathers for plucking, and all the insides were NOT in a nicely wrapped little baggie. They were just THERE. Attached to the body, still inside this freshly killed skinny little turkey! This was not your normal Normal Rockwell turkey for Thanksgiving. So, I did what I thought I needed to do…. I asked someone else to cut off the feet and neck and take out all the guts for me. I just couldn’t do it! And then I washed that sucker inside and out for a LOOOOONG time! I mean seriously…it had turkey poo on his FEET!!! In the end, and after I was slightly traumatized by our very real turkey, we had a beautiful end product. The turkey turned out great and we had a beautiful meal with some even more wonderful people! It will probably be one of the Thanksgivings that I remember most, not only because of cooking my first “real” turkey, but also because of the fellowship we shared and how much it meant that my friends here didn’t want this holiday to pass by without a celebration! I certainly was thankful for them this year!

Beach on Palmar de Ocoa surrounded by mts

I’ve really been missing my students the last month or so because I’ve been on break since the second week of December! All public schools take tests the last week before holiday break and I wasn’t able to teach my English lessons during those times L. So, I did what anyone would do…I went to the beach!! My friend Zoila is working at her medical school internship in a small town named Sabana Buey that is close to a bay on the south side of the country. We went to the beach of course, and the beach there was GORGEOUS! It was a little bay with dark blue water surrounded by cascading mountains on all sides! But the thing that I enjoyed most from my trip to spend time with Zoila was getting to help with their end of term medical school project! They were going to all the residence in this tiny city that were over the age of 70 and asking health related questions, taking vitals, and spreading the word that “Hey! If you’re sick, come to the clinic! We are nice people!” Because we found that there were people who hadn’t been to see a medical professional almost NEVER in their whole lives!! The two girls I was with were actual doctors, so they just called me their nurse when explaining to these people why the white-girl-who-doesn’t-speak-much-spanish was there. I took people’s weight, height, pulse, respirations, blood pressure, and listened to them tell their life story (really…sometimes people would tell us their life story!) It was a really cool experience to get to meet these families! One family even invited us back to their house that night to eat habichuelas con dulces, which is a sweet bean soup kind of dessert. Also, a guy who plays for the Minnesota Twins triple A team lived at this house that we went to for the sweet beans and I got to chat with him about American baseball and the stadium in Louisville and his trips to my home state! It’s a small world after all…

At the mañanita...approx 5AM

For the holiday’s, I went to my friend Juanny’s house in Santiago Rodriguez and got to spend about a week and a half with her beautiful family! I obviously missed my own family an ton during this time because it was my first Christmas season away from home and our own traditions and excitements. One of the first days that I was there her family participated in what’s called a mañanita. This is a tradition held on days in December in their Dominican city to walk the streets singing Christmas songs blaring from giant speakers in the back of a truck…at 5:00 in the morning!  Then everyone who participated gathers for a morning mass in the street and then after mass everyone drinks ginger infused hot chocolate! Let’s be honest, when I woke up the morning of the mañanita, I wasn’t really in the mood to walk miles through the streets of Santiago Rodriguez singing Christmas songs. What I really wanted to do was just tell Juanny’s family that I’ll pass on this particular Dominican tradition and I’ll see them back at the house when it’s all over. I’m so happy that I didn’t do that! Once we started walking and Christmas songs like “Feliz Navidad” and “Mi Burrito Sababero” (my new favorite Dominican Christmas classic - you can listen to it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=638T3fAN11s) started jammin’, I really got into the Christmas spirit! It was like that moment in How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch realized that Christmas came without ribbons, it came without tags. It’s not that I never thought that before, but when I was in the middle of the street dancing with strangers to Spanish Christmas songs at 5AM on our way to make a mass in the middle of the road, it really just hit me. The most important thing is waiting and anticipating and celebrating the arrival of JESUS! He was coming, and we were gonna welcome him with open, dancing arms! It was a very cool experience for me! Probably one of the coolest Christmas traditions I’ve taken part in before! I am really grateful I got to experience that and I hope to bring that tradition of walking in the streets at 5AM and blasting Christmas songs to Flaherty, KY as soon as possible! Haha!

With the family I was staying with (my Dominican family J ) we also took a trip to a very special place that I’ve been wanting to visit: the house of the Mirabal sisters in Salcedo. The Mirabals were 4 sisters who in the 1950s lead resistance and protested against the dictatorship of one pretty terrible (for the most part) Dominican man named Trujillo. To name a few things that they went through fighting for a better government for their country: their father was tortured by the government and eventually died from the stress, one witnessed a massacre by Trujillo’s men, two were put in prison and tortured, their husbands were put in jail and tortured. They started a movement to fight to end Trujillo’s leadership and within the movement the sisters were known as “Las Mariposas” – “The Butterflies”. One day, after a trip to visit their husbands in jail, three of the sisters and the driver of their car were stopped by Trujillo’s men and clubbed to death. Their death enraged many people in the Dominican and the Catholic Church and brought more people to the resistance against Trujillo. He was assassinated 6 months later. Now, the house that they lived in with their families the last 10 months of their lives is a museum. And I finally got to go to this house and walk where the Three Butterflies, pillars of hope and persistence in the face of injustice, spent their last days. It was very surreal experience. The museum even has the long braid of hair from one of the sisters. It still has leaves and dirt in it from her attack.  Now, many Dominican’s hang three butterflies outside the doors of their house as a symbol of the Dominican courage, dignity and strength…you bet that I already bought us a group of butterflies for my and Tom’s house in Indy!

 

We celebrated Christmas together with Juanny’s family and it was really a beautiful time to get to laugh and share! The mass we went to for Christmas Eve was very beautiful, complete with a recreation of the nativity story (and lots of glitter thrown everywhere by the Angel  of the Lord!). And then that night, we had a HUGE dinner with the rest of their family! Actually, this night, Christmas Eve, is like Thanksgiving to the Dominicans. This night is actually called “día de acción de gracias” which is literally “Thankgiving” but it’s on Christmas Eve. Their main meat is a wonderfully roasted piece of pig leg! And along with our pork, they had typical Dominican chicharon which is crispy pork fat (aka…pork rinds, but better). I got to talk to my family on the phone that night a few times, which was great to feel a little connected to them, but it was also great to get to eat and play games with my Dominican family as well!

Since this post is getting a little long (IT’S BECAUSE IT’S TWO MONTHS FOLKS….SORRY!!) I will save the rest of the month’s stories for another post later! My family (Mom, Steve, and Rachel) actually visited the DR and we frolicked and gallivanted about the country for a few days and celebrated the new year together! But those stories can wait! If you really did finish this entire post in one sitting, give yourself a pat on the back! Way to go! Hopefully my next post is not quite so long and unbearable!

I started off this New Year with a big smile on my face with my family and knowing I have one more beautiful, exciting, short month here! I’m going to try to love as much as I can the people around me and give all I have to God and what his plans are for me here! Let’s see what he has in store for me for the beginning of this wonderful year 2014!!