Depues Clase de Ingles

I did two days of community service helping the children in the poorer parts of the country learn English. One of the girls taught me how to step:




I've decided that I could seriously move to another country and teach children English after I graduate. It would be a joy.

He Will Cover You With His Wings

Within the last two weeks I’ve been robbed, spent a fabulous weekend at an all inclusive resort in Punta Cana, got attacked by mosquitoes (I counted over 50 bites on one leg), went kayaking in the Caribbean Sea, performed poetry for the U.S. embassy, taught kids in the mountains English, went white water rafting, and best of all, I’ve eaten French toast! Yes, I do believe that these past two months have been some of the best two months of my life, although if you would have asked me two weeks ago what I thought about living here I probably would have told you quite the opposite. It’s only as my study abroad experience is reaching its end that I’m beginning to appreciate everything for the blessings that they are.

Now, let me tell you what happened to my class ring. A couple Saturdays ago, just two blocks from my host family’s house in Santo Domingo, me and my close friend Arcena were waiting outside of Greg’s apartment to go on an exploration of the city. We were planning on just hopping on the train and just going somewhere for adventure’s sake. These plans were rudely interrupted when a young guy about my age approach me on the street at two in the afternoon. At first I thought he was trying to talk to me like most men on the streets in Santo Domingo try to do, but this time it felt a little different. He was too close to me. I backed up and spoke in nothing but English. My defenses were up.

“What are you doing? Get away from me!” I yelled at him while retreating. His eyes were worrisome. His eyebrows squinted down to give off the look of anger, wrath, seriousness and strength. But his dark brown eyes weren’t steady. He continued to mumble to me in Spanish when I heard a word that I recognized. Anillo.

“Your ring,” he was saying in Spanish, continuing to step closer to me. “Give me your ring.”
“No,” I yelled. Pretending like I didn’t understand I kept backing up telling him to get away. Why not my purse? Why nothing else? I looked quickly at his hands to see if he had a gun or a knife. His companion waited for him on a motorcycle in front of the street, there was no where for me to run. Suddenly, he grabbed my hand and yanked my ring from my finger. Pulled it straight off. And my gold class ring was gone.

Class of 2008, Raiders, Alyssa, number 6 inside of a volleyball, high school badge, and a cross. I hope he stared long and hard at that cross engraved on the ring that he stole.

My body trembled. My eyes watered. No tears fell. I felt like the ground after an earth quake. 2 o clock, broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon, I was mugged. And my ring was gone. The strangest part was that he didn’t want my purse or anything, just my ring. Later, we were to conclude that he had to have been watching me, which made the situation scarier. For the next couple of days I was distraught. I kept having flashbacks to the guy, I was scared when I walked in the streets, and I kept having “what-if” wars. You know after something major happens (or doesn’t happen) and your brain won’t stop replaying the situation, asking yourself “What if I would have done this” “or what if I would have done that”. It’s a very unhealthy practice. I hated the Dominican Republic. I wanted to go home.

But I kept praying, and soon God healed me. I realized that I was blessed, nothing bad that bad happened. I wasn’t hurt, I could be dead, and it was only a ring. I made a thank you list, giving Him gratitude for everything good in my life. The experience was a test of my faith, and I believe that everything is everything. All is good. It could have been much, much worse.

-The Girl With the Monkey Mind

"But if we have food and clothing..."

"But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that." 1 Timothy 6:8

I was afraid his bones were going to bust through his skin. His dark body looked like an X-ray sheet, with skin so thin that all his bones were visible. He lay on the ground naked. Bare and barren he stared up into the sky as if asking “why” with full, opened eyes pleading in perplexed agony for an answer to his one question as if he was in a conversation with his creator above. I’ve never seen anyone so skinny.

I was out with my reporter that I shadow at my internship, Julio Caraballo, when we saw this homeless man without clothes starving on the street. Our original story was intended to be at the hospital but we stopped when we saw this man. Julio approached the man cautiously as a crowd began to form and stare at this homeless man in all his nudity. A white sheet lay to his right side and he weakly pulled it over him to cover himself. He looked embarrassed and ashamed to have all these strangers staring, but he was too frail and weak to lift himself.

“What’s your name? Where are you from?” Julio asked the man gently. The man didn’t respond. Now that we were closer I saw a plate of food to his left side probably given to him by someone out of kindness. Flies buzzed over the food and over his body but he was too weak or maybe he just didn’t care enough to swat them away, maybe he knew they would eventually return again. Looking at this man I was in awe. How did he get like this? What happened to him? Was he going to be okay? I wanted to help but what could I do? I reached in my purse to give the man some pesos but the camera man, Christian, told me to put my money away. It was pointless to give him money because he didn’t have clothes or shoes. No one would allow him to enter their store in order to buy things. Laying money next to him, someone walking by would probably just take it.

“Do you have any family?” Julio asked, still trying to get this man’s story. The man turned his head away from the mic as my heart turned in my chest. He seemed disarrayed couldn’t help but think, yes we are trying to cover his story, but how are we helping him? We have a camera filming him and everyone is staring but what are we actually doing for him to possibly save his life? The man still wouldn’t speak. His dark wide vacant eyes just continued to look up, and then we left.

That same day we left the city and traveled to the outskirts of Santo Domingo to cover a story about this community police force in the community. We passed children walking home from school on the dirt roads and passed shacks that were their houses. Men sat outside playing Dominoes and sitting on their porches in conversations as more children ran by. The unemployment rate in the Dominican Republic is 15.1% (2009 estimate) and driving round in the streets you see a lot of people doing nothing. The houses aren’t air conditioned so it’s cooler to be outside during the day, so they just appear to be sitting around, doing nothing. Looking at their community from the window in the truck I was riding in, I wondered if they were happy. For some reason, America, in all its vast idealization of materialism as idols of self-worth, has brainwashed us into believing that the items we own determine our happiness. But Americans have more wealth and materials than a “third world country” (I hate that term) like the Dominican Republic, and we still have people with all the items in the world that are depressed and unhappy.

According to the World Health Organization from 2008, the United States had 11.1 suicides per 100,000 people compared to the Dominican Republic which had 1.6 suicides per 100,000 people. In fact, Central and South Latin America have the lowest suicide rates overall in the world and these are the countries that most of the world powers countries look down upon because their lack of “modern developments”. Is it really THAT big of a deal that people are living in places without hot water or air conditioning? If you never knew of something “better” that existed, you would be perfectly content because that is the only thing you knew. Henry David Thoreau says it best:
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

So I wonder who’s really better off. Us or them?


Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. ~Michael Harrington


Here's a Video of what I saw:

Welcome to Paradise

When we arrived at the island, butterflies greeted us. They swarmed around us like snow in a winter blizzard, so vast in numbers that they looked more like fallen leaves then butterflies. But the only trees around us were palm trees and we were far away from any winter storm. When I tell you that we went to paradise, I am not exaggerating.

My day started at 5:00 that Saturday morning as I woke up and began my day with my newly acquired routine Bible study. Every morning I have been waking up earlier to begin my day with prayer, and then I open my Bible and read and ask God to help me take away the message that He wants me to understand. That day I was reading the book of 1 John (which is one of my favorites because it is all about how God is love) and the verse 1 John 3:18 really stood out to me:

“… let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.”

I immediately began to think of my friend, James*. He recently told me that he discovered his parents are separated and are considering a divorce. James is a student in the DR program with me, and he feels lost. He never would have imagined in a million years that his parents would divorce and here he is in the DR, helpless to do anything about the situation. “All I want to do is go home,” he told me with a voice that sounded like a sigh full of a heavy longing for comfort as his eyes slid past mine, drifting away into his own thoughts. With this memory in my mind, I flipped the page in my notebook, picked up my pen, and began to write James a letter. Today we were all going on an excursion to Isla Saona and I wanted him to enjoy himself and not worry about situations that were out of his control. So I did the one thing that I do best. I wrote.

I arrived to campus around 7 am and quickly claimed my seat on the bus for the 2 hour ride to the island. I slipped James the letter that I wrote which included Bible verses about the love God has for him, how things will all work out for the best, and how if he ever needed to talk I was here for him. A couple minutes later I was captured into his warm embrace and he thanked me sincerely saying how at the exact moment I gave him the letter, he was beginning to feel sad and was thinking about his parents. God is good.

Two hours later, we were taking a motor boat out to the island. With our bright orange life jackets on, we screamed and laughed in excitement while riding over the clearest ocean water I have ever seen. It was light blue and turquoise, sparkling under the sun like a sea of gems. We couldn’t have picked a more beautiful day. The clouds in the sky were white, fluffy and shapely, placed specifically to decorate the sky like jewelry adorns the body. The motor boat stopped halfway to the island where the water was shallow and we were told to jump out of the boat and take a moment to swim. So we did. We took off our life jackets, striped down to our bathing suits, and jumped into the Caribbean Sea. It was amazing! The water was as clear as a sanitized swimming pool and was only about 4 and a half feet high, so it stopped at my chest. The salt in the ocean burned our eyes, but we were so ecstatic that we didn’t mind. I felt like I was in a dream, the beauty of this place was surreal. And just to add the Dominican feel to this moment, I have to mention that one of the boat drivers brought out a bottle of Rum and was pouring plastic glasses full so half of the students on my trip were sipping rum in the middle of the Caribbean at 11 am. Like I said, surreal.

We got back on the motor boat and about 15 minutes later we arrived to Isla Saona (Saona Island) which is a tiny, remote island off the Dominican Republic’s coast and that is sometimes used to film movies that need a “deserted island” setting. It looked like an advertisement for heaven. Soft, white sand, crystal clear water, palm trees surrounded by butterflies; I felt like I was in a postcard. The beauty of Isla Saona was unbelievable. The only thing on the island that we saw other than its own nature were beach chairs, a volleyball net, and two picnic covering areas. Under one covering people were dancing salsa, bachata, and merrengue, and under the other was food. There weren’t any hotels, no roads, no pollution, just pure beauty. There weren’t even that many tourists. There were about 100 people that we saw on the island in total but we had our own strip of the beach to ourselves including an open bar with as much rum and beer as you want. I spent the day in the water soaking up a golden tan while delighting in God’s majesty. I could have stayed there forever, just me, the sun, the beach, and the butterflies.

While my friend, Arcena, and I were playing in the water, a man joined us. He had brown hair with blue swimming trunks and shades on his face and started a conversation with us in Spanish. We found out he was an Argentinean on vacation. We then proceeded to have a full conversation in Spanish! The conversation flowed so naturally that I forgot I was speaking Spanish. A couple other tourists from Brazil joined our conversation except they spoke Portuguese. I spoke to them in Spanish since it is similar and they were amazed when I later told them that I was actually an American and my primary language is English. So here I was, in the Caribbean ocean off the coast of the Dominican Republic having a conversation in Spanish with a man from Argentina and a Brazilian who spoke Portuguese. I still can’t believe it.

As the day progressed, the other students in my program quickly became drunker and drunker from the free rum and soon became very entertaining to watch. A couple of them were sprawled out on the shore, passed out from too many shots of the cheap rum. One girl was crying on her beach chair and speaking nonstop slurred Spanish while proclaiming how beautiful the island was, it was quite sad and yet hilarious at the same time. I didn’t want to leave, but soon it was time to get on the boat to go back to our foreign homes. So I waved goodbye to my isla de paraiso from the sail boat we were taking back to the bus. I discovered on this sail boat (my first time ever on a sail boat) that I am susceptible to seasickness and that I prefer to swim in water rather than ride on top of it for too long.

The excursion to Isla Saona made me happy to be doing this program again. My homesickness was an inevitable phase, but now I’m ready and excited to continue my studies and finish off my program strongly. That one day made everything I’ve experienced thus far worth it. I’m learning to do everything that I wanted; to love others, to grow closer to God, and to speak Spanish. Isla Saona helped show me that I am maturing into the person I’m supposed to be. It was a little piece of heaven that God left here on earth, and there, on that beautiful, glorious Saturday, the butterflies carried a glimpse of the blessings that await me on their wings.

-The Girl with the Monkey Mind

Al Menos mi Espanol es Mejor

My Spanish is improving. With class 3 hours a day and then my internship for about 6 hours after class, my nights typically end with my brain spinning faster than Dorothy’s house in the twister from the Wizard of Oz. Some days I even catch myself thinking in Spanish. Well, it’s more like Spanglish, Spanish with some English thrown in, but it’s not intentional my brain is just becoming accustomed to thinking in that way. My English spelling is horrific. I’m glad I’m typing this so I can spell check otherwise anyone reading this would seriously believe that I suffer from dyslexia (and ironically I spelled this word correctly without the little squiggly red line appearing!). But I am able to hold conversations and understand when people talk slowly and are speaking directly to me. However when Dominicans speak to each other in Spanish I feel like I never learned Spanish at all because I still won’t understand a word they are saying.

I’ll be at my internship talking to my reporter Julio in Spanish, and we will be talking so naturally and without me thinking too hard that if he goes somewhere and then comes back, I’ll start talking to him in English because I forget that we were speaking in Spanish because I understood him. The educated Dominicans (also normally the ones with more money) speak much clearer Spanish that is easier to understand, just like in the US. The ones, who come from a lower-income neighborhood slur their words together, talk fast, don’t annunciate, and use slang words that are impossible to translate. They could be speaking Chinese for all I know. They say that Dominican Republic Spanish is the hardest Spanish to understand because it is like Ebonics in the US, also derived from their African roots. But if I can learn Spanish here, then every other type of Spanish should be a piece of chocolate cake.

Speaking of chocolate cake, I miss US cake. And ice cream. And cereal! Down here they eat Corn Flakes and call every brand of cereal corn flakes and I miss my sugary, cavity giving Captain Crunch Berries and Fruit Loops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Apple Jacks. All of us here are getting homesick. I haven’t had a hot shower in almost a month. I’ve lost at least 8 pounds since I’ve been down here. My host family has started to become more diverse with food, but I’m still just missing our American tasting milk, and hamburgers, and pizza, and spaghetti!

In class the other day my teacher brought in pictures of food for us to learn new vocabulary words. Then, he gave us Chinese food menus for us to pretend like we were ordering food at a restaurant. I am craving Chinese food. General Tzu chicken with broccoli and white rice, Shrimp Lo-Mein, my mouth is watering at the thought. But in class, I began to notice how much weight I lost. I gripped my hands around my thigh and was able to connect my fingers. I lost it. I stormed out the classroom as if someone insulted my mother. I went to the bathroom to breathe. I took a deep breath to calm myself down and realized that it wasn’t that serious. You’re just being dramatic, Alyssa.

I took another deep breath, walked back to my class and told the teacher, “Lo siento. Yo tuve un momento.”

I’m sorry. I had a moment.

"I am Strong, I am Invinicible-"

Do you remember in middle school when you were trying to pass a note to your friend in class but she wasn’t looking in your direction so you “pssssst” at your friend to get their attention? Walking the streets of Santo Domingo, that “pssssssst”-ing follows you wherever you go. You know how Mexicans whistle? Well Dominicans “pssssst”. It’s the most annoying thing ever. Because our ears are trained to automatically turn and look in the direction of the “psssssst” in expectation of an urgent request for your immediate attention only to find a dirty, perverted stare of a Dominican man whispering words in Spanish that I’m happy I can’t understand.

In my Spanish class, we had a discussion about these men and the way they treat women. Some people in my class think that Dominican men are only expressing their beauty and can’t contain themselves when they see a pretty woman and want to share their feelings. I disagree. The men here will “pssst” at anything with legs. Fat, ugly, no hair, no teeth, shoot she could be blind and only have one leg and they would still “pssst” at her like she was Halle Berry. The one Haitian girl in my class, Natalie, said, “You’re a woman.” Like because I was a woman what did I expect? Like the treatment I was receiving from men ogling me like I was walking pornography came with me being a woman was as natural as having a monthly period.

“And? I don’t care if I am a woman. God created Adam and Eve equally. I am not just some sex toy, I am a human being with a mind and deserve to be treated with respect!” I blurted this out in Spanish before I had time to realize how furiously I had reacted. I forgot that there are people in this world who TRULY view women as nothing more than sex, as nothing more than a pretty face and nice legs. I can’t imagine being raised in a country where these ideals and standards were prominent. I know the US isn’t perfect, and that there is still injustice and that some people still share these same beliefs about women, but at least in the US, I can file a lawsuit if I feel I’m being discriminated because of my sex.

I’ve never been proud to be an American before coming here, but now I’m starting to realize all of the simple freedoms we take for granted, especially the rights we've acquired as women. I miss you, United States.

- The Girl with the Monkey Mind

Sundays are for webcam

Me and my two year old cutie pie brother, Hosea.. I tried to give him some lessons about American dance culture

His first encounters with webcam

Isn't he adorable?

<<<------- Me and Darjennie