My PC Site- Boca Chica!

Yesterday was officially the longest day in training I've had--a full 12 hours of excitement.  It began with a visit to the Ministerio de la Mujer (the government department dedicated to expanding women's rights) and ended with a birthday party for one of the volunteers, where I had an allergic reaction to something I ate and broke out in hives all over my body!  My heart goes out to everyone with a food allergy--not fun.

In the late morning, we had a very suspenseful two hour session where our boss, Adele, who came in from the capital, announced our provisional site placements.  She had us pick names out of a hat and sit in a chair in the middle of the group while she gave us a two minute summary of each of our site placements.  We have all been waiting for this day since training began and I was all nerves.  Along the way our technical trainer and current volunteers have been reassuring us that Adele works very hard to match sites with volunteers backgrounds and after hearing about my site, I truly believe this.

I will be spending my two years in Boca Chica, an overcrowded touristy beach town of about 100,000 just east of the capital, Santo Domingo.  Boca Chica was the site of the country's first resort back in the 1960s and an area where rich Dominicans from the capital built luxurious vacation homes.  Over the last few decades, Boca Chica has experienced the deterioration that often accompanies rapid tourist development.  Many current travel guides describe it as "slightly seedy" and a recent article goes as far as to say "Boca Chica is a has-been of a resort town along the crystal blue Caribbean. It is a place of worn-out luxury, where prostitutes ply their trade openly and children of poverty, often undocumented Haitians, are easy targets for drug runners and sex traffickers".


Now that it is clear why a youth Peace Corps volunteer would be needed in a beach resort town, I will describe the NGO I will be working with for the next two years.  Caminante, meaning "One Who Walks the Path", is a grassroots organization that provides a safe space where hundreds of at risk youth receive counseling, health information, legal assistance and educational and vocational programming.  The purpose of Caminante is to serve children who are at risk of being drawn into prostitution (primarily street children, many of whom are Haitian) as a result of the tourist economy in Boca Chica.  Additionally they provide services to those who have already been victims of sexual abuse and exploitation.  I still have not been given the details of what my role within Caminante will be, but I am extremely excited to be working with them and hope that my background in education and public health will be a valuable resource for them.  As a side note, Boca Chica is only about a 10 minute drive from the Santo Domingo International Airport, so, easy access for all of you who are thinking about visiting!  


Things are winding down here in Constanza.  We have a little less than two weeks left here.  Tonight I'll be attending a party my youth group is throwing as a fundraiser for our project for the final week of "Celebrando la Juventud" (Celebrating Youth).  It has rained for 10 days straight here!  Not fun when you have to be out and about, but wonderful when you are lying in bed with the background of rythmic pings coming off the tin roof.  


Dominican word of the week: “vaina” 

Literally, vaina means “thing” but it is used just about every other sentence in colloquial Dominican Spanish when someone is searching for a word and can’t think of the name of something. Example:  My host brother hands me yet another fruit that I have never seen before (but which I will surely eat) and I respond “Que es esta vaina??”