Tita y Titachiquita's

September 26-

Tita had kittens three evenings ago... during the day, while I made dinner. I tried to be considerate and focus on dicing my onion, but couldn’t help but being fascinated and peeking over. Bets had floated around the community about how many Titachiquitas were growing in her bloated stomach, and news of the babies spread quickly, with the kids coming over the following day to see if they had been right. The five kittens make a constant chorus of premature meows that sound like seagulls in the distance. I am surely more preoccupied about their well being then Tita, who seems relatively ambivalent towards her blind pups.

October 1-

I left for four days for a one year celebration with the 30 other volunteers. I left the kittens in the neighbor's house, a 90+ year old lady, who has no children to mess with the kittens. My host family assured me that Tita would feed them. The other volunteers and I went to an all inclusive resort and ate plate after plate of delicious food, and threw our scraps in the mouths of garbage cans instead of starving dogs. I returned exhausted, stomach aching, feeling unsettled about having left, but excited to see the kittens. I made it to Pita and poked my head into my host family's house, and similar to the time my dog died the first thing I was told was that Tita had died. She had been tied up by a string and the string had tightened around her neck, killing her and subsequently all her kittens were eaten by a dog. Whenever I came home, she would accompany me to my house, walking behind me, pretending not to care. The death of animals is not unusual here, but as I have joked many times, she was my bosi, my gal, my only companera who I lived with, and I felt her absence immediately. My house was quiet, no seagulls in the distance, or gentle meow as Tita rubbed up against my ankles.

October 22 -

Wilson, the newest addition to la casa de Tikan, was recently carried up from Kuirima in the rain. He is a muchacho, but still likes to rock a fresh purple nagua.

Water Committee Seminars

“It’s a group of old jolly men,” I tell the volunteers that arrive each Tuesday to help me with Seminars for Cerro Pita’s Water Committee. Seven men and two women make up Cerro Pita’s Water Committee, with a mean age around 55. They are all cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, or nephews and act like they have known each other, and lived together their whole lives (which they have).

We have interactive class every Tuesday where we play games, learn about sanitation, leadership, conflict resolution, working in groups, collaborating with governmental agencies, professionalism, and technical information with regards to aqueducts. They’re not much different than college students, in that a few really want to learn, some sleep through class, and others are there just to scrape by. The seminar is written for a literate committee, and much of the committee is illiterate, so each Monday evening we modify the lesson plan to assure it is friendly for the whole committee.

Every member of the committee, along with the volunteers, brings something to contribute to a post seminar lunch or coffee break, which is prepared by a cook from the community. We have a coffee break in the middle and eat after five hours of seminar.

The Seminars are accompanied by lots of laughter, people breaking out of their shell (myself included as I open every seminar with a self composed guitar piece about the committee) and a few breakthrough moments for the participants that confirms the value of the whole seminar.

It's just a phase

When the degrees of separation reaches it's boiling point,

bonds break. Steam disconnects from water.

Is it just a phase, or is it a phase change?