Sunset over Santiago (from off our balcony)
The winter months in the Dominican Republic are simply perfect when it comes to temperature and weather. You don’t have to worry about getting out of bed in the morning and stepping on a cold hardwood floor and rushing for the thermostat to get the furnace going, no worries about scraping car windows, no forecasts to listen to of sleet and rain that lasts for days. The temperatures are around the mid-twenties during the day, with an occasional shower here and there, a light breeze most days, but always a guarantee when it comes to sunshine. Beautiful, amazing.
Our Christmas holidays were wonderful. We tried to keep ourselves fairly busy for the first few days, especially Christmas Day and Boxing day, so as not to feel lonely being away from our families in Chilliwack. We had a nice Christmas evening, however, at the house of the Cohens (the director of SCS) together with many other SCS staff and their families. We sang Christmas carols, read Bible passages about the advent and birth of the Saviour, and at the end of the evening we sang Silent Night while standing outside under the stars and everyone holding a small candle.
On Tuesday evening, December 27, we picked up Jonathan and Jennifer Gelderman and their children at Santiago airport. It’s so much fun to get visitors! Mattais and Kaelie were also very excited to have William and Annaliese come and stay with them in our apartment, the first visitors which are close to them in age!
Annaliese, Kaelie, Mattais and William
When you have visitors, you have a wonderful opportunity to go exploring and sightseeing, so we decided Wednesday morning that we might as well get started immediately. Our initial plan of ‘getting to the cacao plantation by eleven’ became a wonderful drive through the country between here and San Francisco de Marcoris, about an hour from here. The rice fields around San Francisco are beautiful, stretching for miles, and the groves of orange and cacao trees create an inviting farm community atmosphere. Although the cacao plantation was not open in its entirety, we did get to admire the cacao trees and their seed pods full of cacao beans which take many months to mature, and ate as much free chocolate as we could, since we have not forgotten our Dutch roots after all. The kids really enjoyed the little puppies that freely ran around at the plantation.
Rice fields around San Francisco de Marcoris
Pure delight! Kaelie and a puppy.
Master stackers of rice.
Back to La Vega --New Hope Girls' Academy
With Joy and Vidal Reyes and several others we had planned a Christmas gift bag walk through the barrio near the New Hope Girls’ School, and so on the Thursday morning we set out for La Vega. At the New Hope Girls’ School we filled twenty-five beautiful nylon shopping bags with rice, beans, oil, tomato sauce, a roll of salami, and packages of chicken bouillon, all as a Christmas gift to the families of the girls which attend the girls’ school. The walk through the barrio was quite the task, since part of the barrio is found up in the hillsides near the school. The hike was very rewarding, however, every bag being received with happy smiles and words of thanks. We saw a lot of poverty. On the hillsides, some people live in shacks built from sticks and large flattened out tomato-paste and canola-oil cans (pretty nifty idea, nonetheless!) and some children walk around with little to no clothes on their bodies.
Jonathan with some of the Christmas bags
We really enjoyed doing what we did, and yet, giving somebody a bag of food is not the best way to make a difference, even though it feels good. It’s the pointing in the right direction, the guidance, and the modeling of right Christian values and morals that will help these people on their way. It is exactly that which is going to make a difference in this country, and anywhere else in the world for that matter. Like the Chinese saying goes, ‘Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he can eat for a lifetime.’ That is why the work at the New Hope Girls’ School is so important, and in getting the local community involved, Dominicans themselves will hopefully begin to see the value of what is happening in this place.
Anthony and Vidal
The sandal shop
It was really nice to see the place where several women of the barrio make fancy sandals, to be sold for a reasonable price in order to pay for their families’ expenses. This is a wonderful and rewarding alternative for these women, who in many other cases sell their bodies as prostitutes in order to make due. We also saw a large number of men working on constructing an entirely new level to the already existing parish school and church, all of which is managed by the Roman Catholic priest of the barrio. This man has done a lot of good to this small community, from providing good education to building small but sturdy little homes for the people in the barrio and renting them out for affordable prices. It is wonderful to see these glimpses of happiness, organization, and hope amid the sadness, mess, and despair of these people in this barrio in La Vega.
Beach Vacation in Puerto Plata
Our stay at the RIU resort in Puerto Plata during the second week of our holidays was very nice. Mattes, Kaelie, William, and Annaliese could not get enough of the beach and the pool, and the adults could not get enough of the tasty cappuccinos and Spanish coffees. The weather was great for the most part, aside from a few rain showers so now and then. The surrounding nature at the RIU is gorgeous, and we all had many ‘wow’ moments.
"Anybody down there in China?!!!" (thanks for the subtitle, Jonathan)
Anthony sailing
Sherilyn and Jen enjoy a tall coffee
One evening, as we were playing some games on the deck of Jonathan and Jen's apartment, it started poooouring rain. Jonathan looked at me, and said, "Anthony, I would love to take a run in the rain without a shirt. It's one of those things I would love to do, but I never get to do it. BC rain is too cold, and when do you get the chance. This rain is warm at least!" "You bet!" I said. So here we are ready for a run in the rain. It was great!
Up on the bluff, overlooking the ocean
"God made them, great and small". This is a tiny hermit crab, the size of a pea. (macro zoom)
North coast mountains and ocean at RIU
On January 9th, the Gelderman family returned to Canada, and routine set in for us once again when we returned to school on the 10th of January. The last few weeks have been busy at school in getting the second semester under way for the secondary students, and in getting our preparations under way for a spring concert, a grade five musical, and a grandparent and grandfriend event for the elementary classes. The pre-school and kindergarten students love their songs and games, and it is very cute to hear them excitedly sing their English songs with a Spanish accent. The first and second graders love the ways in which the various ORFF instruments (xylophones, drums, rhythm sticks) create wonderful rhythms and tone colours, and how these can be manipulated in enhancing the energy of the music they sing. The fourth and fifth grade classes are busy with recorders (yes, they play them here too! –you can’t escape recorders when you get to fourth grade, anywhere you go in the world!) and ORFF, and are getting on well in playing simple recorder tunes to short classical arrangement for groups, such as Beethoven’s famous 9th symphony and a cool piece called Tick-Tock Shock. The sixth graders in choir are too cool for ‘kids songs’, so they are off on a series of medleys including both well-known hymns of the past and contemporary pieces such as ‘The Wonderful Cross’. The high school music class is facing a nice mix of theory and practice for this term, and you can probably guess which one of these goes over best. For some of these students, this is the first music class they have ever taken, and for others, this is second nature. At this age, however, it is nice to be able to have them help each other in some cases, so that some of the students that need the one-on-one help receive a bit more teacher attention during class.
Time seems to go by fast, and you ask yourselves if you are actually covering everything you are supposed to cover as a teacher. But then again, in many ways it’s not really all that important if you cover a lot and forget the big ideas, the ideas that have the greatest value and are of the greatest importance. The moments when we sit down with students in our Friday morning mentor groups, and talk about what is on their minds or how their week has been, and our interactions with the students outside the class or apart from the lesson material are of great importance. We really have felt that the students are opening up more as time progresses, and it’s the positive teacher-student relationship that becomes the environment in which the seed of God’s Word has a wonderful chance of taking root.
Love from all of us. :)
