La oficina

Cambiaso

The first day I arrived in the DR, I accompanied Lexi, the in country medical coordinator here, while she checked on patients way up in the mountains. The second day I was here, I went with Jon, who is a construction genius, to this place. On this day, this was my office. You drive seven miles down this crazy bumpy windy dirt road, so bumpy and windy that those seven miles take over forty minutes to drive (we timed it), and eventually you arrive in the beach village of Cambiaso. And when I say beach village, I mean it. No one in the entire village wears shoes, not because they live in extreme poverty (which they do) but because their houses (if you can call them that) are built right on the sand, so there is no need for shoes. Previous crews of the mission built two houses there, but they made a bunch of mistakes, and we were there to fix them, well... "fix" them. I still basically have no idea what I'm doing in construction, but lucky for me Jon gives really really REALLY good instructions so he tells me to do something once, and I'm able to pretend like I know what's going on without missing too many beats or asking too many questions. I like doing the work, but like I said, I'm not great at it, and on this day alone I cut myself five separate times, usually with a saw, and twice I bled kind of a lot. In fact, I think I've hurt myself doing construction everyday so far, whether it's falling off something or hitting my thumb with a hammer (did that today). Like I said the work is good, but by far the best part about it is where I get to do it, illustrated in the photo above. It's not always on a beach like this, but it is always sunny and hot (you should see my tan lines already), which is pretty awesome. I got to go back to Cambiaso a few days after I took this photo to finish fixing the rest of the mistakes, which only took a couple hours, then I got to spend the rest of the day on the beach. We walked through the village, over this ridiculous foot bridge, and came out into a Rocket Power-secret-spot-esque type of beach. It was freakin awesome to get to spend a bunch of hours there. I was sure I would never find another beach as incredible as the one I was on in Vietnam last summer, but this one certainly rivaled it, and even reminded me a lot of it. Needless to say that was the best day I've had since arriving here, which says a lot because life has been pretty damn good here. I'm hoping to spend as much time as possible in these types of places while I'm in the Dominican Republic.