couch. horses. fear.

sooooooo. here i am in la repub. the weather has cleared up and is now so so perfect. so that is the best. the past week has been real good. on friday we hung out with our dominican friends who are hilarious. it involved the battery being stolen out of one of them's (i dont have any idea how to write that grammatically correct)car. not cool. but fortunately a taxi driver came by and had one in his trunk that he sold to us for about 30 dollars. we are pretty sure he is the one who stole it. creative. but we moved on and the night was fun yet involved way too much techno music for anyones good. onto even better things...on saturday, my dear friend daniel couch came to visit the dazzling city of santiago. it was sooooo fun. we had an adventure finding his hostel which later that night gave his room to someone else. and then we went to the monument and went real high up in the air. always a good thing...this pic really captures the fun we had:


so then we went to my homestead and he met my dominican parents and we had a little history lesson with eduardo which is always interesting. in the afternoon, we went to centro leon which is a sweet contemporary art/dr museum. and we ended the day with dinner with eduardo and daysi and then a movie. the movie was yes man with jim carrey which we eventually realized was dubbed in spanish. that combined with my exhaustion led to my dozing off during the movie. but it was still great. basically, i am so thankful that daniel could come visit. it was so nice to hang out with an old friend and with someone who appreciates rihanna the way i do. obvi. okay then on sunday our group had a trip to jarabacoa which is a mountain town like 45 minutes away. it was sooo pretty. we rode horses around the pretty mountains and swam in a really cold waterfall. one of the best parts about the horseback riding was that we each had a 10-year-old riding bareback behind the saddle of our horses. so they took care of the steering and speed of the horse. all that to say, it was no po-dunk horse ride, but rather involved running, walking and in between. (i dont know horse movement terms). this is the scenery we saw...

k so that was definitely a highlight of being here thus far. then we hung out at the pool at the resort place we were at for the day and then headed to la vega for the infamous carnaval that we have been hearing about.
what did i learn there? that i am legitimately scared of people in scary masks. let me give you some visual images. and i think you will understand. oh and imagine them constantly trying to hit your butt as hard as they can with these sticks with barely padded really hard ovular things on the end. i think they hit anyone without a costume which is most people. i managed to only get half hit twice on my leg. at one point a scary masked thing stood in front of me while i was standing against a wall and when i wouldnt turn around he decided just to hit my thigh. that is definitely cheating. anyway, there were so many different kinds. here are a few. sorry if you have nightmares...




very interesting. and cool. so overall it was a great weekend. today i went back to the school i am volunteering at and the 3rdish grade teacher left me with 25 kids to work on pronunciation of numbers above 20 for about an hour. it was insane and very humbling. i can definitely say that no one learned anything. after a while of then running around and screaming and i just decided to read a book to one kid while everyone else went nutso. what can you do. but it certainly confirmed my decision to not be a teacher.
as for things i am learning. i am definitely learning more and more the importance of community. as i do miss my friends and fam at home and sometimes desire to be back with people that know me and people that i can really communicate with, i see how much we are made to live and function among others that can encourage and love us and that we can encourage and love. i also see this as i think about the poverty here. so many times i have thought how much more change a group can make than an individual in restoring the pain in the world to the way it was meant to be. not to say that god can't use anyone by themselves, but i believe we were made to serve him among others. and of course, we cant do any of it on our own. only through jesus.
okay well i should work on my take home test that is due in a matter of hours. but i miss you each a lot.
love,
salpal