nos vemos. adios. bye bye.

i guess it's time for me to give my official goodbye. i don't remember ever making an official blog announcement about my departure, so i guess this is it. i leave puerto plata tomorrow at 4pm, and i'm not quiet sure when i'll be back. but there is no doubt that i will come back.

i'm returning to austin to work on my master's thesis, which is about 2 years over due. i now only have one year left, so i decided it would be wisest to get going on that.

it's kind of strange as i sit here in any empty MAK house, my suitcases on the floor - and full. it was this time last year that i was UNpacking them, and now i'm repacking. it's all a bit surreal.

it has been an incredible year and i will truly miss this place. but the great thing is that my goodbye doesn't mean the end of the work. even after i leave, 3 summer interns will remain (constance, philip and rebecca), with 3 full time staff (robin, jennie & miguel) waiting for the return of camille and the arrival of a new teacher (kate), not to mention those who are always here, like crisitina and ruben.

please continue to pray for all of these people as they continue with the work that the Lord is doing through MAKARiOS.

nos vemos!

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post a comment if you'd like more info!

hi

My name is Phillip. I am 24, went to the University of Texas, came here more or less from California, and will be here in the DR until mid-September. I’m here to help build the school and to help with the groups and blog a bunch.

I’ve recently learned that:

-- Walking about town without a shirt is considered an affront to the Dominican police.
-- Dominican wine is terrible.
-- My Spanish is terrible.
-- I actually, quite literally, get seasick from surfing. It’s terrible.

But really, my Spanish is hideous. I go to Tamarindo to help build the school almost every day, which is good because it takes me a week to finish a conversation with anyone. I took between ten and 13 semesters of Spanish between high school and college, and to me it’s no more discernible than Turkish. It's maddening and humbling and hilarious all at the same time.

My favorite things about the DR are:

-- The cows. The Mak house is in an upper-class neighborhood in Puerto Plata, where the houses are huge and beautiful and gated with views of La Isabela to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the north. The mayor lives nearby. Several of the streets are not paved, there are Haitian squatters in at least three houses within spying distance, the next door neighbor takes bucket baths in the backyard, and cows roam freely. Cows! Who owns them? Can I have one?

-- Taking public (beat up guaguas [vans] that take us to and fro for cheap). We pile in. Twenty or 25 more pile in. Some with geese or chickens or lizards pile in. One driver prays out loud with his eyes closed each time he pulls back on the road. It’s hot and sticky and large men inevitably end up on my lap — and it’s the epitome of Dominican culture. Hot and humid and sweating shoulder-to-shoulder — we’re all in this together.

-- Chickens. I want to kick one. It’s wrong, I suppose, but they’re the perfect height — like a teed up football. It might mean some family might not be able to eat for a month, but I can’t make any promises. I also hear the mayor of Chichigua has some for sale – some gallitos (roosters) muy furioso y peligroso! My cockfighting dreams may yet come true.



-- That this place is wonderfully, terribly, wildly stimulating. En serio, can you believe this place? It’s so unpretentious, so perfectly unkept, so delightfully disordered. So raw, so spoiled, so dynamically beautiful. It’s so impractical yet so resourceful. It’s so hopeless, so helpless, so humbling -- so human. Isn't the heartbreak just fantastic? There’s so many problems to solve, so much room for solution and so much impossibility. Too much impossibility -- the crushing weight of which hangs in the salted air. There’s so much of nothing to do at so many perfect beaches.

Can you believe this place? It’s enlivening.

I hopped into a guagua my first morning here and the world exploded into action. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road, and no one gets in wrecks. There’s trash everywhere and all I see is the mountains. Chickens cross the road. Big dead pigs get strapped on motos. There are people everywhere on donkeys. Donkeys! There are no men on donkeys in Texas, and that is a problem.

The plumbing can’t handle toilet paper (it goes in a trashcan). We don’t refrigerate our eggs (found one with a feather). Gas is almost $5 a gallon. Lunch stops turn into dance clubs at night, and you can do laundry and wash a car at the same place with a swimming pool. The drive-by fruit man with a loudspeaker sounds like he wants to start a revolution. There are cows in the neighborhood. Why is this?

Why is this country so left behind, yet so for ahead of Haiti on its immediate left? Why is Chiquito so left behind? Why is Papito so pensive? Why is Dominic so forgotten? How are kids like Ruben so smart yet so already stuck?

Why is naturalized citizenship impossible for the children of Haitian immigrants? Why aren’t the sugar companies going to harvest the cane this year? Why is homelessness so hidden here — so much less obvious than that in Austin or San Francisco? Do they realize that people live like the Haitians do? How do people keep track of their chickens? When will I learn Spanish? What do you do when a mother of six kids gets HIV? Why does this just one of a 1,000 similarly desperate places around the world? Why are the human elements of pride and selfishness and greed the same in each? Why isn’t Americanization the answer? What do we do? How do the Haitians sing Merci over and over and over in their comfort-less church? Why do I feel it too? Who created these mountains but forgot about jobs for the poor? Does this poverty even matter in war-torn Africa? Is this -- this place, these problems, this time for me -- real? When do I stop asking questions and just serve?

I’ve been here two weeks, and already there’s a thousand of them.

Can you believe this place? It’s exhausting.

But exhausting in all the right ways. It’s why we all came. Here, then, is a beautiful baby we call “Toad”:

jaina

One of the things to affect me most here in the Dominican Republic has been my relationship and interactions with a girl named Jaina. Jaina is an 11 or 12-year-old wheelchair bound girl who suffers from Cerebral Palsy. There’s a hut at the edge of the village in Chichigua where Jaina usually sits all day while everyone plays around her. She doesn’t really speak but seems to understand and can make some noises that sound like words. That said; she is one of the happiest girls I have ever met. I love getting to sit with her, or bring her into the schoolhouse when we are doing activities. One great memory of mine is when I brought some bubbles that a group had into her hut and blew bubbles for her. She tried so hard to blow them as well, and after about 15 tries, succeeded! Even the other kids, who often ignore her, cheered.

Yesterday, the group (an awesome youth group from Philadelphia) and Constance and I went to Chichigua for the afternoon. When I went to see Jaina, she was smiling as usual, but a complete and total mess. I think she had been eating sugar cane and so she had crumbs and drool all over her, plus her arms and legs were covered in dirt. She just smiles and squeals when people come in so of course she was excited. I had some antibacterial wipes on me that the family group left the other week (thank you guys for leaving those!) and so I took them out and cleaned her up. She loved it! She took one of the wipes once I was finished (I used at least three to get all the dirt off of her) and started wiping it up and down her leg the same way I had. Her skin is so cracked and dry so I might bring lotion next time I head over there.

Many of the group members came to sit with this sweet girl as well, just to be there and to read some Bible stories we have in Spanish. She absolutely ate up every second, smiling and laughing and just enjoying the attention she so deserves but never receives. The group who is here this week has tons of energy and so they were running around playing tag with the kids and Jaina kept pointing outside, partly because we could see her horses, cows and her father, and partly because she wanted to be out there so badly having fun. So, I picked her up and ran around with her in my arms. It brought me so much joy to see her so happy and laughing! I loved seeing some of the guys from the group pick her up as well and run her around. I’ve never seen a smile so big. Overall, it was one of my best days in Chichigua.

I think part of why being with Jaina is so special to me is because of my own sister, Abi. I see a lot of parallels between the two of them, as my sister is handicapped as well. It kills me seeing Jaina’s legs, scrunched together and unable to be straightened, knowing that if she had the resources we have in the States, she might have been able to have the physical therapy to make her legs straighten out—maybe to even have walked. I guess we can't know for sure. It reminds me just how much I have been blessed to live where I do and that my sister has had the opportunity to thrive under her circumstances. However, I think I am affected more by the fact that Jaina is still one of the happiest children I have ever seen even though she does not live under the best of cicrumstances. God has used this sweet little girl to be an example for me!

some reflections

My name is Rebecca Rawson and I am interning with Makarios here in the DR for the summer. I am a senior at UT majoring in Spanish and Public Relations and came here because I have a heart for Spanish-speaking nations and the Lord called me to be here. I truly cannot believe that I have been here over a month, and I don't even want to think about how quickly this next month is going to pass. Before I know it, I am going to be back in Austin. That's exciting in some respects, but a lot of me doesn't ever want to leave! I am trying to enjoy every minute, to not be frustrated when I am exhausted, to love even the hardest to love well.

I think that one of the biggest lessons I have learned being here is just how little I need to survive. I was sending an e-mail to a Young Life girl of mine whom I love and I made a list of things I missed about Texas. Surprisingly, I found my list to be very small, comprised mainly of people--my family and friends and roommates, etc. All the comforts of the US -- my bed, air conditioning, reliable water, my car and cell phone and clothes; all those things are nice, but here I am, not just surviving but thriving without any of those comforts! Really, we are spoiled here in the MAK house. I am sitting here, on the Internet, with a fan pointing at me.

I am so thankful that the Lord is teaching me not to depend on my earthly possessions. I feel like he brought me here to break me of sin in my life and that each day he is forming me more and more into someone who possesses a joy not from anything this world can give, but solely from him.