Arrival in the DR (and my ginormous apartment)

So I have arrived here in the warm little island country where I will be spending the next year. That's a hard concept to fathom. It's good to hear people speaking Spanish again, and yet this version of Spanish sounds like a different language to me, so far only about 50% comprehensible (better, for a start, than 0% I guess). As expected, Dominicans really do speak faster, more informally (the famous example is "Como tú ta?" whereas Peruvians would say "Como está usted?"), they never, ever pronounce the letter 's' at the end of a word, and even their inflections are infinitely different from the Peruvian or Mexican way of speaking. For some reason, the musicality of Dominican Spanish sounds more like Italian to me than Spanish. It turns out one of my next-door-neighbors in the apartment building where I'm living is actually Italian, which is bound to confuse me even more.

I met Catherine, a nurse who usually works down here from September to May, on my flight from Miami. She will be spending the first few days with me in the apartment, showing me around Santo Domingo and giving me as much job training as possible before she leaves next week. She is a middle-aged, spunky woman, one of those who wears her white hair well, and judging by the food she brought along with her to stock the fridge (whole grain bread, cheddar and swiss cheese, crunchy Trader Joe's natural peanut butter), it seems like we're going to get along. She did the peace corps as a nurse in the 80's, in Haiti before the political situation there became volatile, and then in the Dominican Republic, where she learned Spanish. Our private taxi driver, Juan, drove us to the apartment in Santo Domingo where I'll be living, for the most part alone, for the next three months.

Which brings me to the main point of this entry. The apartment. The apartment is, well, it can only be described as ginormous, yes, as both enormous and gigantic, all rolled into one. No joke, my entire family of five could live here, no problem. It has three bedrooms, including one room with two single beds and a crib ("in case you have a baby," said Catherine), three bathrooms (excluding an additional one made for the supposed house servant, which I will get to later), a living room, a dining room, a sizeable kitchen with a stove AND oven, a sizeable balcony, air conditioning, WiFi, cable TV, and a DVD player. I'm not paying for any of it, but still, I don't know if I can handle this. It's just not how I'm used to living in Latin America, or even at home, for that matter (my house only has two bathrooms!!). A little disturbingly, there is also a little annex made for a house servant. It is supposed to serve as a small bedroom and bathroom, although right now it is acting as a storage space for cleaning supplies (oh yeah, there is also a cleaning lady). The house servant's annex can only be locked from the outside, and the light can only be turned on and off from the outside, meaning that the head of the household can decide to lock his/her servant in and instruct him/her to go to bed at the time that Master deems fit. The thought frightens me.

This morning, in my characteristic way, I woke up at 4:30, evidently in anticipation of my first full day in Santo Domingo (why is my subconscious mind so impatient?). Which is why I've had time to write this entry. More to come about the clinic where I'll be working and job training.

I also found out this morning that Paul Farmer himself once slept in my bed!!! Evidently he hates the Dominican Republic, but staid here once when he couldn't get into Haiti because of political violence. But... my bed!!! I am never washing myself again (or at least not until tomorrow).