"Hay Charlie, nobody works today, today is a holy day, oyete," Criseida chides me. It's Good Friday, and I am perhaps the only person in El Seibo who is working. Since yesterday at noon the atmosphere in town has been changing. Families pile into their SUVs and go to the coast or to the river to swim and visit relatives. It's almost nine and I am eating the breakfast that Criseida has made me. "You have to rest," she goes on. She's bitter because she is up and cooking for me, a task I insist I can do perfectly well myself. Unfortunately for us both, as a man the culture here requires that I be doted upon by the women of my family. Criseida literally threw a fit when she learned she would stay home and care for me and Daisy who is still recovering from her surgery. Jesus and Libby are going to the beach and she is indignant.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we had two volunteers, Geoffrey and Adam, come to teach us how to take a room full of disused computer and turn it into a useful technology education lab. For our guinea pig, we had a lab at EEMUR, a vocational school near the liceo. The computers were donated by the Unión Dominicana de Escuelas de Formación de Alternancia (UDEFA) and bear the stickers of the NGO who had them before. Most have 256 MB or RAM or less and 40 GB hard drives. After Adam and Geoffrey demonstrated how to reformat a hard drive and install windows, we went on to clone a drive on which Geoffrey had installed a variety of educational and administrative software.
Keep up the good work bro!
ReplyDeleteDon't forget to grab a beer from time to time and take it all in though :)
Take care.