are my pants too tight?

dominican fashion is ... interesting. it's very similar to what is popular in the united states - on tv and in magazines - but, despite the latina body-shape not being very similar to white-girl body-shape, clothes are sold only in junior sizes in cuts that are only flattering to people with little to no butts or thighs. if you know j-lo, you know that forever 21 and journey styles just don't really cut it.

and. while most stores have changing rooms, i'm not sure that i've ever seen one used to try on clothes. pants are measured by wrapping the waist around your neck, if it fits your neck, then you buy them. shirts are short and tight.

tight.
very tight.
and because the pants are usually the wrong size, they tend to be very tight as well.

the other day, when jewel and i went to the supermarket/superstore, we saw the staff trying to fit a pair of jeans on a mannequin's legs. we stood and stared - i am not above being the ridiculous gawker. then i quick stole her phone to snap some pictures. the process of fitting the jeans might have taken 10 minutes and it involved at least six store employees.

i'm sure there was probably a pair of jean just one size bigger that would have fit the mannequin perfectly, but that would have been too easy.

just another day in the dominican republic.

carrrrrrrne

my daughter is a carnivore. she loves meat. seriously, ask her what she wants for lunch. CARNE. or dog food, but that's another post for another day.

meat prices are, i assume, comparable on most levels to meat in the united states. except, that most people in the dominican republic don't make that much money. so. when chicken skyrocketed to about 45 pesos (about 1 dollar) a pound, the country was up in arms. in fact, there was a moratorium on buying chicken. for a day. because realistically, chicken was (and is) still the cheapest meat besides salami.

and dominicans just found out what salami is made out of. 

(really, how did you not know?) sales have plummeted. 

we buy our meat at the supermarket. mostly for convenience. believe me, the supermarket is no cleaner than the butcher. i can pick up the meat that looks nicest and doesn't smell and just take it home. nice. but, we really do prefer to buy fresh meat at the butcher shop. and while we're there, in the market, buy some fresh and cheap vegetables.

it doesn't happen often but it's a dream. i look at the slabs of meat hanging from hooks and say.... give me one that i can put on the grill. or chop some up to make like dominicans do. i'm no good in the kitchen, friends, and even worse at identifying cuts of meat. i know when it's fresh and when it's not. which for me, is about good enough.

the meat is cheaper by a few pesos, and fresher by days. usually, if we plan our trips right, we can get there a few hours after the slaughter and get super-fresh meat. and if i smile nicely, the guy will pasar la por la maquina - so that i don't have to use a hammer at home to soften it up. meat here is, afterall, mostly free range and can be kind of tough.

i'm sure one day one of us will get botulism or some other meat related illness, but to date i've heard more problems from the supermarket meat from the not-so-hygienic butcher meat, so i'm not too worried.

what's your favorite place to get food?

re-building of a house.

i'm super far behind and crazy backed up on my blog. i know. i'm sorry. but last week i sat down and emptied my little memory chip onto a computer and proceeded to break down the pictures into groups. we're talking photos from july. but, better late than never, right?

right before we moved out of our old place, it was raining. a lot. like every single day. and when it rains like that, streets flood. especially the street we needed to cross to get into our neighborhood. there were many days i was stuck on a kind lady's porch waiting for  the water to subside. mostly because the water wasn't rain water, but overflow from the sewers. gross. i know.

a friend of ours lives on this street. and every single time it rains, her house would flood. this past rainy season was intense, and a few times the house flooded up to the beds. can you imagine your house being inundated with aguas negras?

 

this summer, she was accepted into a new government program that was supposed to rebuild the house in three days. like many governmental programs however, three days turned into 6 weeks. and, like many other not-very-well-planned-out "do-good" projects, the government planned to rebuild the home without actually raising it up out of the danger zone. 

so, three truckloads of debris was ordered in, money was found (somewhere, who knows?) and a bunch of neighbors chipped in to help fill the foundation of the house.

a few days later we stopped by and the floor was laid (simple cement) but the family was still waiting for windows and doors to be installed. (see? larry allen was here this summer! he's there in that picture!)

i'm sure that in the end all of the house-guarding, not being able to leave and living with two grown children and a baby in a small room for six weeks was worth it. the new house is gorgeous, and even more importantly, out of flood danger.

i had pictures of the finished product - doors and windows installed and painted. but i'm following the lead of the government and doing this in installations. look for more pictures of this house at a later date!

dis--organization

i've grown used to many many things on the island - from the requisite 1 hour lateness to any social event, to the lack of any kind of formal lines in the corner store. i've even gotten used to the lack of water and come-as-you-please electricity.

but seriously, if one more person comes into my life to disorganize, i might scream.
or punch someone in the face.

i've learned to build up my tolerance walls when it's necessary - to bite my tongue and hold my fingers away from others' eyes.... but often, when i build up my tolerance wall in one area, it crashes down in another.

recently, it's been the mess.
don't get me wrong. i'm not a not-messy person. i work at the dining room table and leave my papers and books there until i get a chance to put them away. it could be days later that my stuff finds its home., but it finds its home eventually. the laundry sits in baskets until there's time, but it does get put away.

and anyway, if you come to my house, please understand i have two children at home, 94 at school and a bunch in the university. add that to all 500 of amalio's teenage BOYS and our house gets a little left behind.

but samil and amely takes showers and brush their teeth everyday. we've got the basics taken care of.

last week i implemented an organization system in the kindergarten classroom - notebooks in piles according to purpose, toys together, blocks in the corner. pretty well labeled and taught to the kids. and then the cleaning woman comes in and decides to clump everything together. in a big huge messy pile. i bit my tongue and re-organized.

and then the next day it happened again.
so i asked. wth. she says "oh i don't know what it is so i just put it away." really? when i don't know what something is, i don't mess with it. but whatever. i let it go.

until i organized the first grade classroom and the teacher, THE TEACHER, disorganized it in three seconds. and then complains about how long it takes her kids to get their notebooks. YES, friend, because they were all separated in piles and then you mixed them all together.

i might be able to handle it. except it happens in our house sometimes, too. our lovely babysitter/cook/cleaner extra-ordinaire moves things, but she knows better than to put away or shuffle... and even better, she knows that if she doesn't know, she doesn't touch.

except. there is a bizarre cultural practice of women who visit wanting to clean. for a long time i took it as an insult. as if my house wasn't clean enough for their presence to bless it, but i realized it's just how it goes. it doesn't get to me as much if i'm at home - but i don't help. if i don't ask you to clean up, don't expect me to stop what i'm doing and pick up a broom, ya know? but.

on sunday i went to church. house completely disheveled but with a plan to knock out all the laundry and put away school papers in the afternoon. imagine my surprise when i get home and the house is spotless. and my SIL sitting on the couch. bite my tongue. go about my business.

i spent the whole day doing what i do, without saying anything to SIL. when i looked for the school uniforms, couldn't find them. some of amely's skirts were in samil's pants drawer, some of samil's pants in amely's shirt drawer. the underwear in every.single.drawer they own - as if their undies drawers were not empty (i'm bad at laundry, folks). i scavenged out what they needed, shoved my fists in my pockets so as not to punch with them and went into my room.

SIL tells me, "I didn't do anything in here because i knew you'd be mad when you couldn't find anything in the morning" WHAT? really? because i just spent 30 minutes looking for my kids' uniforms but thank you for not touching my closet really.

i know i'll get over it. but it's hard when every day since amalio has had to tear the house apart looking for his papers - papers that had been neatly stacked together on the table and have somehow mysteriously been distributed through the house. and perhaps focusing on this is way easier than focusing on some of the sad stuff that happens and we deal with on a daily basis.

one day at a time people. see you soon with pictures!

fire.

a few days ago, our apartment filled with smoke. it smelled rank and nasty and, well, smoky. 

it's not abnormal for people to burn their trash, but this was a little bit extreme. we closed all of the windows and doors and had to open them right back up again - dying of smoke inhalation and foul smell was preferible to roasting to death in a closed apartment in the middle of june. in the carribbean.

after a while, i guess the wind changed, and while the smoke hazed over the street, it wasn't nearly as unbearable as it had been earlier. i looked to the west for the usual culprits - an empty lot, about 200 meters big, routinely burned to get rid of trash and weeds. nothing.

so i went up on the roof and looked around. an entire field was on fire. 

burning is common here - it rids empty fields of un-wanted undergrowth and allows growth to the plants we want (tubers, vegetables, etc...).it is also not unusual for people to use empty lots as trash dumps because of the scarcity of public services. burning gets rid of the garbage quickly without having to do much work. it also produces nasty smelling smoke for the neighbors, but, hey! you win some, you lose some.

apparently, the fire got out of the control of the burn-ers and took over the entire field, instead of just the square patch they were supposed to burn.

they were able to cut open a water pipe in the street (welcome to the DR!) and redirect the water to cool the fire down. it was smoky for awhile, but everyrthing worked out in the end~!

bugs, galore.

we've always got something in the house - if it's not moths, then it's lizards. no lizards? mosquitos, ants, roaches, flying ants, bees, wasps.

we're packing up the apartment and getting ready to move to a new place next week (more on that to come) and i'm trying to take as few buggies as possible from our old place to the new. gross, i know, but it's the tropics and you  get used to different things. (roaches and maggots still creep me out and i don't think that will ever change)

i found this nest attached to the outside (thank god) of one of our suitcases. it's been in the dark (moist, i'm sure) closet for about 7 months now. it's perfectly made the circles are all the same size. i sprayed it with some off (sorry, rebecca, vinegar just didn't seem like it would do the job!) and scraped it off with some scissors.

it was hard, with a texture similar to recycled paper.

when i flipped it over, it looked like there had been bug coccoons inside (i know that's not the real term... help me out here) 

anyone know what this is? i've seen them before but never in my house. and i can't figure out what kind of bug would house in it.

who needs scaffolding anyway?

i've never really stood around and watched a house go up in the united states. skyscrapers, yes. but a little house? except for watching some old movie with my grandmom where the community raised a barn, i've never really paid too much attention to construction.

even when i got here, it wasn't on my radar. short-term groups would come down and participate in "construction projects" but mostly i just assumed the "locals" were accomodating a group of not-building-savvy teenagers and therefore dumbed it down.

nope.

the foundation is dug, filled up with rebar and filled in - with cement mixed by hand on the street in front of the new building. traffic is diverted. a lot of people stand around and watch.

just this week the woman who owns the salon where i get my hair cut began an expansion on her house. the salon had been in the garage, and at first i thought she was just extending the walls out so she wouldn't need to blow dry hair three feet from the passenger door. apparently not.

she's expanding up and out.
and the up is where construction gets interesting.

instead of using a scaffold system or even... you know, metal beams, the foreman finds some sticks that are about the same height, they push them up under some plywood and pour cement. it actually works quite well and isn't nearly as frightening as it seems.

don't get me wrong, though - i'm not walking into that construction site anytime soon.
i've lived through enough simple cracks in my walls from little earth tremors and have learned not to trust the earth not to shake when we're least expecting it.

 it seems that she's building a new apartment on the second floor of her house and incorporating the salon into her "house"and building out a bit for the car-park. the ramp you can see in the picture above will eventually become the outdoor stairs to get to the second floor.

my favorite part of this crazy construction site is that the fourth "pole" from the left is the old fence column that has been broken apart (presumably when they tore down the front wall) with a little stump of a log extending it to the "roof".

cross your fingers and say a prayer there are no crazy earth movements in the next few days!

swim, anyone?

 there's this really nasty, dirty, polluted, contaminated, infested, gross canal in cienfuegos. (if you're from philly, imagine the manayunk canal 18 years ago when they fished dead bodies out of it). it's beyond my vocabulary to explain this body of water.

it's not in my commute, but walking through the neighborhood usually leads me to pass by fairly frequently. the sector is very much urban - yet, at the same time, it's not. it's slum. the streets are not paved, and most pathways are really just footpaths behind houses and across property lines (as if property lines exist). there is little electricity and even less running water. 

i see women washing clothes in the dirty water, men peeing into it. americans with ministries go blue in the face telling the kids not to swim in it. but it's a waste of breath - these kids are often bathing in it. and on these hot days, with little respite from the carribean sun, you need a calculator to add up the number of kids in the water.

 on saturday, we were driving by and saw these kids swimming in the canal - with their mom on the banks cheering them on. this little guy had three bottles tied around his waist with a rope to keep him afloat.

i've said it once, and i'll say it again - necessity is the mother of invention - and dominican people sure can invent something from nothing.

he jumped in a few times and bobbed along, jumped out again so we could take some pictures (shameless,i know!). his older brothers were swimming with floats as well - but the rope was longer and the bottle bobbed around - if they got too far away, mama could easily grab onto their bottle and pull them to safety.

here we are spending money on new floaties - when a few empty bottles would do the trick!

political opinion.

i'm not one to get too involved in the political mess that happens in this country every four years, but sometimes i get stuck in conversation about it. it's always important to be prepared for those inevitable moments, right?

the political situation here is... blatantly corrupt. í know that corruption is prevalent in many places in the world, but here, it's just so... transparent.

the mayor of santiago was voted in two years ago, based on a campaign that promised to rid santiago of trash. at the time, the former mayor had been slacking in the trash-removal department (and apparently many other departments as well). two years later, santiago is inundated with garbage because new mayor isn't paying the trash-collectors.

it's all a cycle. and it's common. and in order to avoid the headache of worrying about something that is not really my problem, i ignore it.

now, i pass by this wall every day, and occasionally things get spray painted that catch my attention.

 this one is my favorite - it says "the bitches to power, the sons are already there" - a cute play on how many people feel like those in power here are just sunofabitches. the phrase translates literally to the sons-of-whores.

if the politicians weren't so damaging, they'd make us laugh.

so true.

there was also some poster wall-art stuck around the city that said "nuestros suenos no caben en sus urnas" - our dreams don't fit in your ballot boxes - and how true is that?

creepy crawler

has anyone seen this bug before?

it was about the size of my hand and had pincers like a crab coming from it's "head" area. at first we thought it was a flying cockroach, so the ladies tried to kill it with a sandal, but the thing would just.not.die.

reason number #243 why i can't live in the campo full time.

color del campo

i spent the weekend in the campo with the kids - we didn't really do much besides visit (and i did a lot of reading/planning). i don't have a great camera - in fact, i usually use my blackberry's built-in, but here are some pictures just of the color. i love the countryside and small villages throughout the country. simple lifestyle, laid-back. i couldn't do it full-time, but it's a great break from my "real life".

not boobies, sitll outrageous.

i was in the supermarket just the other day, picking up a few things after work. i almost never really shop in this supermarket, and so i never have any real need to enter into the diaper/baby food/toilet paper/tissue aisle. i usually breeze right past and don't even think twice.


except, i needed some baby wipes to take along on our bus trip to the campo this weekend and turned into the aisle. oh.my.god

remember the outrageous boobies on these mannequins in the city? i guess this store decided they couldn't be shown up by hard nipples on a hot day, and stuff the pants of this geriatric diaper model!

i looked once and thought i was mistaken. afterall, there is no good reason for stuffing the crotch of leak-free panties. but, alas, my eyes were not playing a trick on me. so, then i thought, maybe the diapers bunches poorly in the front? and if that is the case, why would i want to use them? i don't want people to know about my incontinence.

so, me being me, i touched it. and then opened and looked inside, and sure enough the pants were stuffed.

maybe if they stuff it just right, more men will be convinced to buy it thinking it will make them look bigger? i'm not sure. to me it's just a little ridiculous!