Dominican Connection : Its beginning to smell a lot like sugarcane!

These past couple of weeks I have been really excited to see my student’s progress in my classes, especially with my 6^th graders. As stated before, I am reading the Magic Tree House books with them and they absolutely love it!!! They cannot wait to read the story and because I pull their vocabulary from the chapters we are reading, they are able to see it in its context, thus they are doing fantastic on their vocabulary. This past week they all scored a 100 percent on their vocab quiz! Not only that, but we are working on answering comprehension questions from the story and they are able to understand and correctly answer the questions, which is a huge improvement from the beginning of the year. Another 3^rd grader of mine is doing really well in my group and whatever vocabulary we go over, she has got it all nailed down perfectly a day or two later. So this week, we are going to try to join the rest of her classmates for a few days as a trial run to see if she would be able to go back into the regular classroom. My 2^nd graders are even making some progress and have been able to read and identify the nouns in a sentence, as well as get the basic understanding of simple sentences. We still have a long way to go, but it is progress! We also have officially celebrated the 100^th Day of School here and how else would you celebrate except for having all the kids come in that day dressed up as old people! It was adorable to see all the kids come in dressed up and acting like old people for a day, even some teachers got into it too!

100th Day of School!


All my 6th graders scored 100!

It is also that time of the year when they are harvesting the sugarcane at the factory and San Pedro and so it is not uncommon to smell the sweet aroma in the air of the sugarcane being cooked, which I personally love! One of my roommates likes to say that it smells like burnt marshmallows. But on the downside, there is also this weird poop smell at certain times (usually around 5:30 or 6), which is apparently the smell of the “cleaner” they use and the ash from the sugarcane plant that at times overwhelming when you see remnants of it around your house on the counters and floors. In fact, you have to make sure you are almost always wearing sunglasses when you are on a motorcycle this time of year or else you might end up with something flying into your eye and trust me you would be surprised how big those pieces of ash can be at times! But it is all worth it when I think of this beautiful country that I get to live and serve in and I love this time of year when I get to see the Dominicans working so hard out in the hot fields (thinking to myself how horrible and taxing their job is), harvesting the cane and seeing huge trucks shipping it to the factories, something I would never to get see in the US.

On Saturdays, I have been going out with a missionary family (The Dombroskys) and a close friend who worked at the school last year (Nicole) to a batey called Concho Primo that’s land is officially owned by a Sugarcane company and is there for those who are working in the fields. On Saturdays, we go out and we do a little kids’ club with the little children living there called “Ninos para Cristo” (Kids for Christ). This past week we had a fantastic turn out with a bunch of kids and they all really seemed to enjoy it. There was even one boy, (who usually just leaves if it gets to boring for him) who said that he loved the club and when asked what his favorite part was, he said “Todos!” (everything). It is so great to see the kids excited about the club and learning more about God. We usually sing songs at the beginning and then have a little puppet skit used to focus the kids on the message of the lesson for the day, then there is the lesson, and after that we break up into three groups and do our memory verse and a craft along with the kids. This week Nicole taught them a new song, Quien es el rey de la selva? (Who’s the King of the Jungle?) and they absolutely loved it and kept singing it the rest of the day and doing the motions!