Election Day is Here

Yesterday was Election day in the Dominica Republic and that means the days and months surrounding the is day have equalled organized chaos. Two parties the PLD (Partido Liberation Dominicana) and the PRD (Partido Reformista Dominicana) have displayed their colors, purple and white respectively, with fanatical pride. I know it was a big deal when we elected our first black president, but political campaigning here is ten times the explosion of pride and noise. Everyday for the past two months we´ve enjoyed parades, strikes in the street, flag waving, giant billboards of slick looking candidates staring at you every 15 feet along the highway, and catchy-annoying public announcements booming from a dozen speakers loaded onto the back of a small pick up truck passing infront of every house.

I was most recently in the capital enjoying a relaxing moment of pitch and catch (we were actually playing ¨Pickle¨ with a few kids, Arecito, Christian, and Esteven) when a propeller plane flew low over our neighbourhood showering the streets with shinny sheets of paper on which was plastered those slick pictures of Dominican politicians. No one could escape their gripping stares. Yoryi and Mariano are a vivid in my mind as the very words on this computer screne. The rain of paper was like New Years in New York, but instead we were being showed in election propaganda. I learned that the local mayoral and congressional races are of supreme importance because the Dominicans often get to see their leaders in person... something most presidential races could never offer and small pueblo or rural campesino family.

So a little background on the ¨democratic¨ voting system here: Right now across the country it seems to be two parties dominating the political campaigns, each paying bribes of up to 1000 pesos ($30) to the poor and uneducated if they will promise to vote for their party. Live chickens, salami roles, baseball caps, sandals, bright colored T-shirts, baseball caps again, electrical wire, free water, tired smiles, you name it, are given out by campaign promoters to help each party ¨buy¨ a vote. ¨Promises are made that they will never be follow through with,¨ says my host mom, ¨because anyone in power is going to find a way to siphon the pueblos $ into their pockets.¨ It is as if politics is a game that is played here, where those who are the most corrupt win the gamet. I can´t vote because I don´t have a cedula (Dominican ID card), but even if I illegally bought one, which apparently happens quite often during election time, I still not sure which candidate is promising something they can actually are commited to accomplishing. One can surely not fix all the social inequalities of a developing nation in one election term, so the perfectly crafted speeches of a utopian tomorrow often seem hallow. That is not to say that I do not believe there is great potential and resources her in the DR. It´s a country in which you can do almost anything you want and always be celebrating along with others doing the same.

One thing is for sure is that this country needs to find a way to develop its education system. They put no resources forward to support their students and teachers and thus they receive one of the lowest ranked education systems in Latin American. If there is one thing that I firmly believe is a sustainable path out of poverty, it is education. A pueblo educated is a pueblo that knows how to prioritize its needs. Right now the DR´s filled with many happy people, but I think it could be even more organized and realize its hopeful political agendas if it fought the tough fight of great schooling.

Celebrate your right to be an educated voter,

Paz Paz,
Jared

Here´s a group talented artists and the gringo painting a world map at the local high school.

Youth Brigade Celebrates

My father´s birthday passed and I was so engrossed in the art of playing with Dominican kids that I forgot to call him from the island and wish him happy birthday. There are moments of extreme alegria (or happiness) in the Peace Corps experience and this past weekend was certainly one of them. Ask me to plan a youth camp that brings together 72 Dominincan teenagers from around the island, including those of Haitian decent, and I´d probably respond: ¨Who? What? Where? When? Why?¨ However, there are some things that are consistent in this world and one of them is that children will always want to play and learn together. Never have I felt so comfortable around Dominicans as I did in that room of 37 boys singing, sharing a sip of water, brushing our teeth, sleeping, waking up, and of course eating together. We were a brotherhood, 25 American Peace Corps Volunteers serving as fathers, mothers, counselors, and trustworthy friends to a captivated audience of vibrant youth. Perhaps the 3 day conference was more time than any of these kids had spent away from their homes and family, but I´m positive Arenayi will remember that first ever bike ride (without shoes and no breaks on the bike... the Dominican way) in the National Park Mirador Norte, and 16 year old Exeido will surely remember his fantastic presentation about the impact of humans on planet Earth´s natural environment.

I lay in my bed completely exhausted from this weekend of recreation and environemtal lessons from ¨Leave No Trace¨ to ¨Indigenous Taino Farming Methods.¨ I am here to reflect upon hom much I enjoyed this expereince. The swimming and singing the Boo-Ga-Loo were my favorites memories with those 15 years olds, followed by the talk about AIDS and self-esteem, the skits performed by animated volunteers, the pizza and home made tamarindo and wheat drink, and ohh yes, elbow tag. Sounds a lot like summer camp, yeah?!

Anyways, I realized nothing can be taken for granted when everthing is completely new to someone. The kids were filled with vigor and emotion about everything... maybe the kind of feeling you get when you ride your first roller coaster. These young dominicans certainly have a grand job in front of them to care for their environment, and clean that which has been contaminated, but they also have the spirit of firecrackers. Explosion of culture one might say. I´m glad to be back here with more of a feeling settled in than ever! This job is teaching and offering me so much. The kids are inspiring!

With the renewed heart of a kid, go out and play today.

Love,
Jared

Color Brings Life

The breeze made for a refreshing week here in Ojo de Agua. It is tonight that I will celebrate 3 weeks in the country. My good friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, Kevin, from small town Indiana, just came to visit me. My plate is full of project ideas as well as mounds of ¨habichuelas and arroz¨ (beans and rice). On Good Friday every kitchen and Dona in the Dominican Republic was busy stirring together their favorite sweet ingredients to ¨Habichuelas con Dulce.¨ Four mugs were delivered to my home within a couple of hours and my stomach was more than blessed. However, perhaps the most beautiful scene thus far in my return to Ojo de Agua was the faces of 500 plus Dominicans lit by candle light the night that we celebrated Jesus´s resurrection, or Easter Sunday. Their smooth skin gleaned inside the packed church, different shades of brown, light and dark (This is a country filled with mulattos, diverse in appearance but certainly all very much sharing the same loud and happy Dominican culture). Little girls sat on the laps of their fathers fresh in their new dresses and hair straighten and neatly pulled back. Grandpa and grandmas were tightly sandwiched alongside children and children in law, perhaps uncomfortable, but they didn´t have to stand along the walls. Everyone connected through the beautiful light of God, holding candles to celebrate the bright example Jesus gave the world. I felt part of something special, part of a spiritual moment.

And then the most classic of Latin American scenes… the congregation offered water as a blessing to Christ for having given his life to teach humanity the power of the healing Spirit. Together the 500 plus Dominicans and I raised water containers above our heads furnishing a shiny sea of plastic before the crucifix. One can only imagine the dozens of different brand names displayed on the sides of the recycled and reused plastic containers. Two liter Coke-Cola bottles, 20 oz. Dasani water bottles, Clorox, Cristol Corn Oil, and Apple Juice gallon jugs raised high above the church pews. Some even furnished old tupper-wear with water, while others had nicely pealed the plastic bands glued to the sides of the bottles allowing for a more cleaned up look at church. Everyone had water or perhaps a large framed painting of Mary, but for that moment we were again united, different colors, different brand names on out containers, and different amounts of water, but still united. It was a day to colorfully celebrate one of the most admired and humble persons to walk this earth. It was a Latin American day.

The colorful ideas and desire to invent always bring fresh perspective to each and every day here.

Go celebrate with something colorful and recycled today.

Peace,

Jared

Brotha's Back

The humidity flushed over my new hair cut, the drums thumped loud, and the comforting sound of children singing greeted me as the airport doors slid open. People with signs and smiling faces jumped up and down as they saw their brother, or cousins, or parents arriving fresh off the plane. I scanned the energetic audience behind the large metal barricades and found Francisco, a Peace Corps driver, winking at me. I knew who he was and I knew I was returning home to the Dominincan Republic in good hands.

The atmosphere at the airport well descibres what this country is about. Celebration! Every moment is to be enjoyed together. Unity can certainly be found in family, and though my family is not here I feel as though the Dominicans have welcomed me a son. This morning I took off on a run in Santo Domingo's historic downtown... one of the oldest downtowns in the Americas dating back to when Christopher Columbus landed on the island (he call it Hispanola). On the streets I saw faces that I hadn't seen in 8 months, I saw the sun rising from the east over the blue Caribbean water, and I splashed my face into the sea "baptising" my own arrival to Peace Corps PART II. As my aunt used to recommend when traveling, "Get up early and see a city wake up and you'll get a good idea of where you are and who the people are." It was a beautiful experience and easy to get excited about waking up my first morning here. Now I've promised myself to keep it up for the remainder of my stay here in the DR. Jared's saying it right now for all you doubters... he's going to commit himself to the rural farmer motto: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise." I've got plenty of examples in my community of Ojo de Aguas, so why not do it.

So the brother is healthy, he's back, and he's going to love the heck out of playing with Dominincan kids again. If you have any fun games to recommend that aren't too complex and don't require many resources let me know, I'd be interested.

Brotha's Back!

Get up early and take some time alone.

Peace de Santo Domingo,
Jared

Peace active in Olympics

Many of us saw the 2010 Olympic champions stand on those podiums and receive their medals: gold, silver, and bronze. The medals honored these athletes for their a level of commitment and determination that we all can admire. Certainly they make their parents, coaches, and country proud, but perhaps more importantly they make the world proud. There would be no Olympics without the thousands of competitors. There would be no Olympics if the competitors did not train and make sacrifices to be in the best shape of their life for these two weeks. And there would be no Olympics without the sportsmanship that transcends cultural and language differences. To see so many different nations represented on those podiums cheering each other on and listening to the many national anthems of the world was inspiring.

When I was young I had that dream of becoming an Olympic athlete. I thought maybe someday I would be sprinting like Jesse Owens around the track in Berlin or speed skating so fast like Dan Jansen that tears would stream from my eyes. Though my time has come and I am no where near those podiums, it makes me proud to see the young people of the world getting together to compete; to share the universal language of athletic competition. The vigor, defeat, victory, and pure emotion that sport demands. I think these athletes help us remember how very much we all share in common. Ice skaters in the small country of Slovakia trained for four years to compete against the hockey stars of Canada, and they lost. South Korean teenagers carried high hopes for their 19 year figure skating "Queen," Kim Yu-Na, and she set a world record score with her gold medal performance. And the country of Georgia remembered the courageous and fierce competitor in Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died hours before the Olympics started during a training run on the Skeleton slide.

So the world comes to relate to each other through these different stories. Perhaps at first when the games begin we are inclined to focus solely on the successes of our own country men (our "ambassadors"). However, as the competition progresses we begin to realize their would be no competitive spirit in the Olympics without all the different athletes from all over the world. It is here where the meaning of the Olympics expands beyond the gold, silver, and bronze. We realize that competiton forces everyone to best their own mark and thus produce a higher level of excellence. This excellence is the same energy that drives peace. My desire to succeed and your desire to succeed are mutual because we can not alone be pushed to greater levels of excellence... for we need our fellow competitors. In fact we need the best in the world.

So my personal dream to run along side the likes of Jesse Owens in an Olympic setting may not be fully realized, but my dream for peace is seen in events like the Olympics.

Find ways to make Peace active,

Jared

Haiti on Our Minds

Last time I took a moment to write down some thoughts on this blog I was fresh off the job of jack hammering the plaster from a pool. It was then I was thinking about the work it might take to clean up a giant earthquake. How many days and volunteers it might take to make sense of the rubble and reconstruct civilization again. Here I am a month later and Haiti is in the middle of a relief and clean up effort I don't think any of us could ever imagine. Daily I pray for God to meet the needs of our Haitian brothers and sisters who are searching for a home, searching for their family, and desiring just one sip of fresh, clean water.

So what do we do as a world? How can we lovingly attend to this small island nation? First thing that comes to mind is to keep these brothers and sisters in our thoughts and prayers. They need our positive thinking and to be included in our dinner table prayers. We can bring up discussions with each other about the social inequalities that remain ever present in our world. The 7.0 quake that hit the poorest nation in the western hemisphere had a much greater affect than the 6.9 earthquake that hit San Francisco two decades ago. Why is this? Haiti does not have the infrastructure nor the building codes nor the resources of that of a wealthy city like San Francisco. There are so many layers to poverty that I have yet to understand, but nothing makes you think about it more than when it presents itself on the front cover of every newspaper in the world.

Living near many Haitians in the Dominincan Republic has opened my eyes to the resilience of these people. They are a strong people because they know how to come together and share whatever they have. I believe poverty can be extinguished by human kinds efforts to share all that they have including Love. Food, bottled water, and medical supplies may be waiting to be distributed on the runway at the airport in Port au Prince, but the supply of Love is never waiting. Love is in infinite abundance if we choose it to be. Our direct loving interactions with people most closely around us can ripple across the world and better the human race.

So I urge everyone to start loving more and think about how they can tap into this infinite supply of love where ever they live on the globe. It can help the people in Haiti.

DIVINE LOVE ALWAYS HAS MET AND ALWAYS WILL MEET EVERY HUMAN NEED. - Mary Baker Eddy

I Love you all,
Jared

Jack Attack

As I was jack-hammering at Forest Hills swim club I started to think about the pile of plaster rubble that was growing higher and higher. Then I thought about the project of cleaning up an earthquake. Plaster is hard and the hours of trying to control the vibrating jackhammer led my mind on a wild moment of pulsating reflection. Where do you begin in an earthquake clean up? What tools are available? How long until electricity arrives again? Who’s responsible for what space? How long will all the clean up take? Each jab of the long steel shaft on the thick white plaster lining of the pool sent small shocks through my body. Shocks that remind me of the "physicalness" of physical labor and the real work that goes into everything I seem to take for granted, like a nice pool to swim in. I was mad at the jackhammer for quite a while, or rather maybe it was the impervious plaster, nonetheless I needed to allow my mind wander and allow the labor to just happen.

This job is no earthquake clean up. This job is learning a heck of a lot about patience. We’re removing the old plaster lining of a six-lane lap pool so it can be lined anew. I work with two cool guys who have found the Bible and the Christ like example of Jesus as an inspiration, leading them away from a past life of heavy drug addictions. Everyday I look forward to shoveling out plaster in the crisp cool morning and breaking for lunch on the pool deck where I listen to stories of the street life, unwanted drug dealers, soup kitchens, drive by shootings, and a desire to change. Neither the open relationship I’ve built with my co-workers, nor the on the job personal reflection time was written into the contract when I signed up for this temp job. And I am certainly grateful for these unseen opportunities. I think God may have led me wandering down an unmarked road as I await Peace Corps reinstatement, but certainly it is no road of waste or barren. Rather, I find myself stumbling across many treasures, sweet fruits, good Samaritans, and reflection time that challenges my sense of what is a good job for me.

Some wonder how the recent college graduate has found himself at the bottom of a drained pool hammering away at nasty plaster with x-drug attics... and I respond... there’s something to learn from everyone and every moment. This temporary job has certainly humbled me and introduced me to people who are Good men despite their past struggles.

And you can certainly say Dad’s seasoned turkey burgers and squash soup tonight tasted twice as good after the long days work, and I know tonight’s sleep will be nothing less than solid.

So I wish you all a wonderful Holiday Season and may the spirit of Christ bless you all. Sing many songs, drink hot chocolate like it’s going out of style, and write a few personal letters to the people you love.

Drug addicts will always have many interesting stories. Be curious and have them tell you a fun story. It'll open you up.

In the Spirit of Christ,
Jared



Snow fell upon Mt. Diablo this week... a rare occurrence for the mild Bay Area climate, and nearly an impossibility in the tropical Dominican Republic.