July 5

Today we started our secondary project of revitalizing the community’s cemetery! The cemeteries here are very different from what many of us are used to. Instead of a grassy field dotted with tombstones, here people are laid to rest in tombs. So while some students stayed at the school to continue preparing the classrooms for paint, others began to mix and lay a cement foundation over the dirt floor cemetery. In the afternoon (after a long day of working under the sun!) we broke into two groups to learn and try traditional Dominican sweets! One group left for a local contact’s house to make jalao, a candy made from shredded coconut, honey, and ginger; and the other group made pineapple mavies, a smoothie-like, frozen drink that’s super popular here. As the sun began to set, we ended the day by hiking to the outskirts of town to watch two young guys scale 60-foot palm trees for fresh coconuts!

July 6

Today we woke up to rain, a refreshing change of pace from the unrelenting sun we’d been getting until then. This put a pause on our cemetery project for the morning; so after a traditional porridge breakfast we tackled a small school site project while we waited for the weather to clear and the paint supplies to arrive. The project included sweeping out all the dust and rubble from the classrooms and then mopping the floors. Once our work was done for the day, we took advantage of the now-clear sky and bused down to a nearby beach to get our first real taste of the ocean!

Until next time!

— Lucas y Jimena