Seeing Both Sides to a Rainy Day

I can’t believe its been 5 months!

This one is going to be short, I am sorry my life is exciting but I usually get a week to collect my awesome stories. It’s only been four days. They have been good days filled with lots of laughter, one of the staff members here has been talking about Frisbee golf for a couple of weeks, and ever since we started the ultimate Frisbee unit in P.E. he keeps talking about it. So at school on Friday he came to me with his face beaming and shows me a piece of paper, to which I respond “oh nice a treasure map, can I help!” he rolls his eyes and says “are you kidding me WHERE IS THE X!” then it hits me it was the Frisbee golf course map. I burst out in laughter, the kind where you are gasping for air. At this point break is over and I have to take my students to the classroom, so I do this while laughing. I had to tell my students and one girl colored a pirate and gave it to him on the next break while I was laughing from a distance and I hear him say “oh thank you, I love pirates” he turns around and sees me dying of laughter and he rolls his eyes and walks off. It was really funny.

I have taken one bold step in the kitchen recently and I purchased and prepared meat. Two random avoidable and connected fears have come up since I have been here. Speaking enough Spanish to go to a butcher and cooking meat. Well I didn’t necessarily conquer the first fear, I gave money to the house moms who all go shopping on Saturdays and she got the meat for me, but I did conquer the second! I made a marinade from scratch and had beef fajitas that were SO good! Today I made pumpkin cookies with a squash that is pretty much Dominican pumpkin. They are pretty good.

I was really challenged on Sunday; the preacher asked us if it would still be Christmas without the cookies, family, snow, hot coco, could you take all of that away and still call December 25 and the time leading up to it the Christmas season? This is what I have been mulling over in my head, what is it all about. I know “Jesus is the reason for the season” but no what am I celebrating. It’s much easier to ask the question here far away from familiar and to analyze without so much distraction.  It has been fun to think about and discuss about and chew on for a while.

This week is going to be my first “normal” week I have had in a while. I will be with the girls on the normal days I am supposed to be with them so that will be nice. Having a day off is nice for me but kind of stressful for the girls and the other staff. So I am excited for this week! Please keep praying for patience for me, I have three very attention seeking girls who wear me out. Please pray that I keep my temper and show them Jesus in the middle of the chaos. Please also pray as we move into the holidays for these students who are so far away from home, pray that they will be able to continue to work through their baggage during the holiday season. I miss you guys!

It’s been another crazy week. I feel like so much has happened since I last wrote a post.

Today is thanksgiving and it is so weird to be celebrating a holiday the rest of the country is not. Our school is though. I am making rolls now to bring to the house my students live in, we are going to have a huge traditional thanksgiving dinner and play some football. I did subject myself to the cliché and I went to the store today but it was weird there was no one else frantically looking for that last minute ingredient to make this day special.

The moms working visit that I asked you guys to pray for went well. It was weird to see parents of my students. It was a very emotional week. Like I said the student’s whose moms are here are really emotional in dealing with the pain and hurt that has been polluting their relationship and the students whose moms aren’t here are missing their families and moms. I even started to really miss my mom so I can’t even imagine what it was like for the students.

Yesterday I took the day off for some rest and some restoration. It was nice I went with two of my friends to Santiago. It was the longest bike trip I have ever taken in my life. Santiago takes about an hour and a half by van to make it there; I think we did our trip in less than an hour each way. It was intense. My legs are sore today. It is crazy seeing the island from a bike rather than a car, it is breath taking beauty. We did have a scary moment when we went through a round-about. I love these in the states I think they are fun, however here it was terror. There are three or four indistinct rows of cars and bikes’ going around at once, bikes and cars’ entering whenever but the crazy part was the exit. People closest to the inside would randomly pull out cut diagonally through everyone to get out. It was chaos and I am not sure I ever want to do it again. I went because they were going to the dentist and I wanted to join in on this adventure. The dentist here was awesome he spoke English so that was a huge blessing. He cleaned my teeth and checked for cavities but my favorite part was at the end he said to me “your teeths are clean”. The worst part of the dentist was when I had fluoride put on my teeth, it was put in like a paper mouth guard put on the top and bottom of my teeth and I had to bite while all the fluoride is pouring out. The non-speaking dental hygienist signaled to me to keep it in my mouth for a while and then she took it out. After which I spit out the excess and she gave me a face. I guess you are supposed to keep it in your mouth. My friends and I were weirded out we thought fluoride was only for kids so we didn’t understand at all but my dad thinks it’s because they probably don’t put fluoride in our water here.

I have somewhat of a crazy story for you guys. I live on the first floor of an apartment building in which currently my roommate and I are the only ones. So this week she was house sitting, she started yesterday so it was just me on the first floor. I was a little scared to be down here by myself. Don’t get me wrong its not the country that is increasing my fear its just the normal level of fear of being “home alone”. So I took extra precautions, I have started watching Lost and I think it was freaking me out a little so I didn’t watch an episode yesterday (even though I desperately wanted to), I have been reading Ted Dekker books and I have recently started a new one and am not sure if it is a scary one or not (he can be the Stephen King of Christian books sometimes) so I avoided reading that. I went to bed trying to put out of my mind that I am the only one here. I wake up at 1 am to someone saying my name, totally unaware of what is going on I start looking around, I realize its Kate’s voice but it is so dark and I am still groggy and have no idea what is going on so I respond with “where are you?” she says I am outside your window, I had an allergic reaction to something in the house I was staying at so I had to come home. She had to wake me because we have the locks you slide across from the inside on our door so a simple key was not enough this time. I was a little freaked out that the sound of the gate opening didn’t wake me or her bike pulling up right by our apartment didn’t even cause me to stir, it was her saying my name from my window…with absolutely no response until the third time. I sleep too deeply to live by myself.

There was so much that I wanted to say but now it’s not coming to me. So tune in next time to keep up with the adventures of Heather.

Many of you are wondering why this blog is titled APA, well I wanted to quote my friend and his one request was that I use APA format to do so. I searched for 37 minutes with no luck on how to cite a facebook message in APA and really have only written one (praise the Lord) paper in my life in APA and that was a huge struggle for me because I have MLA down! So here is the blog post with a bibliography at the end that I made up. So here is my blog post in HAF (Heather’s Awesome Format).

Surprise! I didn’t think I was going to have a chance to write today. Since my last blog post it has been crazy. I received a Facebook message from a friend telling me of what he is learning spiritually from his mentor. It rocked my socks and I had to remind myself to breathe after I read it. So be careful because reading this next paragraph could change your life like it did mine. Speaking of his mentor he writes:

“He doesn’t believe in the 10% tithe…. which sounds rather blasphemous at first glance, but really is awesome when you look at his reasoning. He believes that 100% of your money and time belong to God, along with 100% of your life…. So rather than a 10% tithe, its all God’s and you need to justify what you are using God’s money for. Just as justifying what you are using His time and energy and love and life for. Its a doctrine of total surrender to God….. Which is much easier said than done…. I find it difficult to even picture what that would look like in my life…. Roger (the guy I’ve been talkin to), says, and I believe, that most people, Christians, do surrender to God, but its only a partial surrender. Even the most sold out Christians, Roger included, still hold on to things in their lives that they haven’t surrendered to God. I think I probably have a rather hefty list…… (Hardin) ”

Intense right…I know! My socks were convicted off when I read this. Many things have happened that I don’t have the “why” for, or I find myself in low times spiritually, and I often times ask God “what are you doing right now?” and “why!” I hope you guys will join me in your prayers for total surrender to God.

On the same note please pray for the students here this week is going to be rough. We are having what is known as a “mom’s working visit”. Within our ministry we not only work with the kids but also the families, they go through counseling as well. Every year we have a mom’s working visit and next semester we will have the dad’s working visit. Any way the mom’s come and they have scheduled activities and talks with their teens. After hearing one of the students candidly talking about what it’s like anticipating his mom coming was intense. There was a lot of fear, reservation, hurt, and excitement in his voice. It helped me to realize from a kid’s perspective what this week was going to be like. For the kids whose mom’s are not coming it will be intense because they will really be missing their families, So all around its going to be intense.

I had some fun times this week. On Saturday I had P.E. by myself (I normally supervise now that we got an awesome staff member who knows how to play things like soccer and basketball) so I decided to have them play childhood games. We started with duck duck goose, went to red light green light, end ended with variations of tag. It was fun. Duck duck goose got out of control one guy was running around the circle and slipped on the grass got up without skipping a beat, because this kid does not loose! The next day at church he came to me with a huge grin and showed me scrapes that covered his entire calf! I laughed really hard and said “now you get to tell everyone you got that crazy looking battle wound from duck duck goose!”

We did not go to 27 waterfalls this week because a student’s grandparents came into town so in wanting the student to go with us we postponed. Instead we went to “Wal-Mart” and to some historical places. It was all in all a good day but I want to close with my favorite part. We ended the evening with the students, staff, and grandparents. The grandma was talking about her fears of getting around in the country having little Spanish, she said she had been learning from tapes for some time but just doesn’t know how to work “You have brown shoes” into a conversation. They were great people and it was a perfect way to end a day.

Documentation for awesomeness:

Hardin, W. Alain. “Sup Heather”. 13 11 2009.

My schedule has been thrown off by training. Last week I was in a four day course known as therapeutic crisis intervention (TCI). It was a useful course teaching me how to best deal with teenagers while in “crisis”. We learned many techniques to help them better learn how to deal with their emotions and feelings in a healthy way. With that said I give you a funny moment from the training…on Monday while I was in training on what would typically be my day off my roommate spent the day cleaning and I got to come home to a clean apartment and she even cooked dinner for me! It was crazy awesome. The next day I go to training and we learn how to use what’s known as “active listening” it’s a counseling technique where you listen to what the person says, you summarize what they said and in our case we help identify the feelings behind what is being said. We then broke up into groups to practice this new skill in my group was the fresh of the plane new IT guy and one of the counselors here at our school. We were given instructions to talk about something for five minutes and my listener was the IT guy. Given the opportunity to go back and choose a different topic I should have talked about all the beef my lap top has given me the last couple of months but instead I talk about the previous night. I tell him how after we got home from training I came home to a freshly cleaned apartment and a roommate who offered to make me dinner! I continued to talk about how nice that was and when I came to a pause he interjected “I can see how that would make you feel loved, a similar thing happened to me last night I came home and my wife had the house cleaned and dinner on the table and it really made me feel loved”. At this point I am super awkward because now in my mind Kate sounds like my wife. So I am trying my hardest to recover without my awkwardness getting in the way. So I continue by saying “you know it was really nice because we work together and are around each other a lot so when I got home we talked about how each of our days were… oh my gosh!” at this point my head is in my hands and I have no idea what to say that will make it less awkward, at this point he realizes why I am so awkward and he becomes a little awkward and recovers well by saying “so can you describe what you ate” for safe ground. The “observer” of the group found this to be SO funny and when the teacher of the course called us back to talk to us as a class he asked “did anyone’s listener lead the speaker in a direction they weren’t going”? The “observer” proceeded to draw attention to our group and make me share what happened. It was intense.  

This week was First Aid and CPR training. I am officially certified by Canadian Red Cross. That class was so funny! For most of it I had a partner who is very funny. When we were learning how to do CPR with an AED (it one of those paddle things that you rub together say clear and put them on the body except just a little different) and my partner went first and half way through her saving her manikin’s life her practice AED’s batteries died. When I put it up I put it with the line of others fully knowing it was my turn next. I get back to her and she looks at me and says where is the dead AED I said its up there (pointing to the others) she says “what you put that one with the rest, it was dead!” to which I responded “hey I am here to learn how to save lives, I can’t do that with a dead AED!”

Training is done! Hopefully soon I will be getting back on schedule. It was nice to hear from most of my girls Ms. Donohue we missed you! While I was in training they had various substitutes. I do have some awesome news to report! It rained for three days in a row this week! I got nasty looks from many people as I sat there with a huge smile on my face during these three days I need to throw a scowl there way now that the sun is out. My blogs are going to be a little crazy for a little longer because next Monday I am going on a trip to 27 waterfalls (from what I hear this is an amazing hike) with the house so I will get a different day off. I love you guys and miss you! Please keep praying for unity among the house staff, which would be me, the house mother, father, and group leader.  

I am trying to establish myself as a daring domestic single woman in the DR and I feel that every potluck is a test to prove how far along I have come. This Saturday we had a potluck with a challenge, a “salad toss off” we were all to bring a salad and it was to be judged. This was it, my moment to shine. I decided to go bold, mainly because I didn’t know how to really make an interesting salad, and I wanted to make the famous Chinese salad with ramen noodles in it. Here is the recipe http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1843,147164-250206,00.html but before you rush to your kitchen to make it I want you to finish reading the story. So I went into town and bought all the ingredients including a 6.8lb cabbage that was about $1! I ran into another staff member named Tammy and we talked about the heftiness of my cabbage (seriously I hope you guys are blown away by its 6.8lbs) and she asked what it was for. I then told her my plans to make my salad for Saturday and what was in it, and then I quickly remembered the 5 minute training that went down on how to choose an impartial judge during our last education staff meeting. I told her “oh no I bet Steve is going to ask you to be a judge!” she replied “I have not heard anything I think you are good” to which I replied “well just in case now you know what salad to vote for”. The big day came and Tammy came down to campus and I watched Steve approach her, both of us knowing what for, to which I gave a little head nod that she then returned with a smile. I was so excited I mean your odds go up remarkably at winning when you have an impartial judge. After the judging Tammy came and sat down next to me and I asked her “did I win!” she said “I can’t tell you!” Then they began to announce the winners starting with third place, and they didn’t call my name which is ok because I am at least going for second. Then they move to second and still no “Heather Donohue!” and the crowd goes wild. That’s alright I must have won! Then the moment that was to change my life, the announcement of the winner was …Cindy…what! I turned to Tammy and exclaimed “you didn’t vote for me!” she said “I did, it’s just that the others didn’t come through…I did what I could I am sorry” I even had an impartial judge and I still didn’t win. I think my salad was to monochromatic, there’s always next time.   

This week was a really funny week! It was spirit week and inanimate object day was the best! Not having a Good Will here or anything like that the kids had to be super creative and they were! I went as a domino (I stole this costume idea from the Chi Alpha party last year), but my favorite was the manikin! He slicked his hair down and put on make-up to make him look plastic and then he put tags on every item of clothing and would be walking around and just freeze it was so funny. The second best on this day was two students came as closets. Of course we had Bible character day, I dressed up as a hair dresser and made a black apron from a trash bag, had hair clips attached and carried scissors to go as Delilah. The girls came as the manger scene complete with one of my girls being the manger. I laughed so hard. One of the boys came covered in a huge brown comforter and a green blanket over his head. Every morning we would go down the lines and the students would explain their costumes when his name was called having no part of his body visible, out from the blankets we hear “I am the rock of your salvation!” it was so cute he would lay around and people would stand on him and I would hear “Ms Donohue I am standing on the rock of my salvation!” I would say “that’s great but remember not to hurt the rock.” It was a week full of laughter and creativity to say the least.