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