Language School and Homestays

Posted by Maddy September 18, 2023

Language School and Homestays

Hello everyone!

It's time to catch you up on what I've been doing these last two weeks. The main events have been the first week of sites, a retreat in Jarabocoa, homestays, and language school! Before I get into all of the details, I should explain the basic structure of homestays and language school. Each semester we have two homestays, and each homestay is two weeks long. During the week, we travel from our homestay back to the base to have language school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. On the weekends, we stay with our host family and go to church with them as well. After homestays, we go back to our regular schedule of living at the base full-time and doing sites from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Recently, Santiago has been working to transfer school from half days to full days, which has impacted the sites that work with kids, forcing them to adapt to fit the new schedule. That's been tricky, but we're figuring it out. Before the switch, the tutoring site had two separate classes of kids, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, but now we only have one class of kids in the afternoon. The majority of these kids are Haitian, and don't have papers, and therefore cannot get into the schools. So the tutoring site helps them practice Spanish and writing until they're able to get their papers. But this solution still leaves the mornings open. My site leaders, Emily and Elizabeth, along with two of the sports site leaders Kendra and John, volleyball and baseball respectively, have decided to start English and Spanish classes for the adults in the surrounding community. These classes started on the 12th, while I was at a homestay, so I won't get to participate in them until the 25th, so expect an update about that in my next post!

Way back when, on September 4th, 2023, I started my first week of sites at the tutoring center. In the mornings, we planned for the brand-new adult classes at the base. I listened to a couple of meetings in Spanish, something that totally killed my brain. I took a nap during lunch those days. One morning, we went to the mall (!!!) to get supplies like whiteboard markers and a new whiteboard. They had escalators to get from the parking floor to the actual mall, but they weren't stairs, just a moving mat that was slanted upwards, kind of like the moving sidewalks that you find at Bunker Hill. In the afternoon, Emily, Elizabeth, and I went back to the tutoring center and have our afternoon classes. The kids are wild and an absolute joy to be around. They've taught me so much Spanish, like the word tramposa, "cheater" in English. Let's just say that one of the girls loves to look at everyone's cards during Uno. Of course, learning Spanish has come with its fair share of linguistic mess-ups. While trying to conjugate the verb "to eat" I accidentally said "I am like yuca" and not "I eat yuca." Good thing we're learning conjugations starting on the 18th!

In between the first week of sites and our first week of homestays/language school, we had a retreat in Jarabacoa. Staff from both the Santiago base (where I am) and the Jarabocoa base (where I will be if I do the second year of the Global Bridge program) met up at the Young Life Retreat Center to have fellowship, teaching, and a fierce basketball game. The retreat center was absolutely gorgeous and was also significantly cooler than the hot city. (I even got to wear my hoodie! Not because I was cold. It was like 70 degrees F. And I ended up taking it off like twenty minutes later... but still, I got to wear my hoodie!) Something strange that I noticed while I was there: there were pine trees and avocado trees side by side. Being in the mountains does not mean that I've left a tropical island. Another highlight of the retreat was getting to try papaya for the first time! 10/10 taste, 0/10 texture. It was kind of slimy. We had papaya juice, and I really loved that.

Over the two days that we were at the retreat, there were three different pastors who spoke. Two spoke Spanish, and one spoke English. The Spanish was translated into English, and vice versa. All of the messages thought-provoking, but the one that stuck with me most is this: without intimacy with Jesus, we cannot have good disciples. Without good disciples, we won't have a healthy church. Without a healthy church, we cannot change the world. It's up to us to work on our own relationships with God, and then when we come together, to help each other so that we can change the world.

Of course, the retreat would not have been complete without the Santiago vs. Jarabocoa staff basketball game. As noted in the previous post, I am not a sportsball kind of person, so I stood on the sidelines with most of the Global Bridge students and cheered as loudly as I could. At one point, someone on our side stole the microphone from the referee/commentator and was leading cheers. We had the spirit, and definitely a better cheer section than Jarabocoa, but unfortunately, our team hadn't practiced together before, and so we weren't as coordinated as Jarabocoa. On the way back, we stopped for popsicles in "tour-bus town" and I enjoyed the dozens of colorful umbrellas strung up between the apartments.

We started homestays on the 11th. I've been with Makayla, staying at Ariel and Jhanna's house. They have one daughter named Isabella, and she's the cutest thing. I've really been enjoying my time here, practicing Spanish in conversation while making homemade pizza, visiting Quinn and Ava at Ariel's parent's house, and playing various board games. On Friday (15th), there was a thunderstorm, and we sat out on the porch and played Exploding Kittens (it was nice to have it finally cool down). One of the things that I've learned about Dominican culture while I'm here is that they eat dinner late. I mean like really late. I think the earliest that we've eaten has been at about 8 p.m. That being said, the food has always been worth the wait. One night, we had Yaroa, a type of Dominican street food. It's layers of french fries, shredded pork or chicken, mayo, and ketchup repeated and then you top it off with a layer of melted cheese. Absolute heaven. I will be eating it every chance I get as well as attempting to recreate it in the following months.

On the topic of Dominican food, we got to make a very traditional dish called Tres Golpes ("Three Punch") in Spanish class. It was definitely a very hands-on way to learn kitchen vocab, and I loved it! Tres golpes is fried salami, fried cheese (it definitely has me missing cheese curds at the state fair), fried eggs, and mangu. Mangu is mashed green plantains with onions. It's got the consistency of mashed potatoes and it's pretty good. Not all of our lessons have been that hands-on. Most of it has been sitting at tables on the balcony and learning the sounds of the Spanish alphabet as well as the basic grammar rules. It's really made me realize that there are definitely rules like this in English, but it's been so long since I've learned them that I don't remember what they are anymore. It's a strange feeling to realize that you're so fluent in a language that you don't really know how it works.

Other random things of note include having a pulga ("Sale") at the base. Short-term teams bring things like towels, sheets, and clothing, and every year they have a sale. I bought a shirt that has the Dominican Republic on it and a really cute, blue skirt! One of the women who works in the office makes her own juice and sells it at the base. It's only 50 pesos (1 dollar) and unless someone else drinks it... I may be going bankrupt in the very near future. One morning, we had a girls bonding brunch. We went out to get frappes and waffles! (I miss caribou.) But the waffles... definitely worth it.

For those of you whose mouths were watering while I was describing the food... don't worry. There are pictures below. Thanks to all of you who are reading my blog, supporting me, and praying for me. If you have any additional questions, let me know. I'd love to answer them! That's all for now, and see you on October 2nd!

¡Hasta luego, y'all!

Maddy <3