Day Sixteen in the Dominican Republic

Much of my day was spent either in a workshop or traveling to and from the workshop. The workshop was for a group a chaplains from the province of Monte Plata. We spent the day talking about Cultural Intelligence. Like I've alluded to in other posts, there is a deep rift between Dominicans and Haitians. So, there is a lot of work being done to help bring these two groups closer together. This workshop was primarily focused on helping equip people in understanding the differences between different cultures. So, much of the workshop was spent talking about various stereotypes of different cultures and different values between cultures. Since I was in the group, the talked about how the United States values punctuality, however, that is very low in the value list of Dominicans and Haitians :-)

The meeting was good. However, I was completely exhausted by the end of it. Unless you've experienced it before, you have no idea how much energy it takes to try to comprehend what is going on in a foreign language. Add to the fact that one-third of the group didn't speak Spanish very well, so they were speaking in Creole quite a bit. So, I spent all day intensely focused and concentrated.......and not understanding much. I had some conversations with a couple people. One went alright. A couple others did not. I have found out that I can speak to them fairly well and they understand me. However, I cannot understand what they are saying. So, it makes conversation pretty difficult. Needless to say, by the time I got back to the apartment, I crawled into bed and listened to a podcast (in English) until supper was ready.

Rachel and the girls had a good day. Lauren said the day seemed to go by pretty quickly. Giudo brought them to and from church this morning. When talking to me about how the service went, I could tell they were much more comfortable with the way things go on a Sunday morning. They said the guy who preached this morning spoke very fast and they hardly understood anything. However, he we very passionate, animated, and funny. So, they enjoyed it.

After lunch they connected with my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, and their cousins via Google Hangout. They said it was really nice being able to talk to them all again. They also made sure to call Rachel's dad and wish him a Happy Father's Day. Then, they spent most of the afternoon playing with the neighborhood kids in the ministry center. They took a break to eat supper. Then, we had some more neighborhood girls knocking on the door looking to play. So, they played for a little bit longer before bed. It's been pretty fun.

The rest of the evening was spent packing and getting everything ready for our week in La Romana. We leave here at 6am tomorrow morning. Hopefully, everyone will be awake. We are almost all packed and ready to go--just a few things to finish up after this post.

Prayer requests are basically the same as they have been. So, I'll leave it at that. We have an early morning and I need some sleep. Hopefully, we'll have internet in La Romana and I'll be able to post tomorrow night. If not, I'll talk to you in a week.

Buenos Noches!