Yellow

We painted the outside of the house yellow! What vibrancy and life yellow brings. It’s perfect, because the sunflowers that I planted in the garden and along the driveway wall just started to bloom, and we realized that the flowers in front of the house that are budding are yellow, too. Plus, I’ve got a couple of other different kinds of yellow-and-orange-combo flowers in the garden, along with the orange oyama (squash) blossoms. We just picked our first huge oyama and boiled up a section of it for dinner! Yum. Yellow is a color of excitement and surprise, which life has been bringing lately in even the littlest of ways.

At the same time that things around house, home, and relationships are flourishing, at times I get a little down with how little I seem to have achieved working at the office of public health. I have to remember that while it all may look meager, I have to look at the big picture. I did encourage people in their personal walks of life and work, and I was most definitely challenged and stretched to work in a totally different environment than what you’d ever find in the US. What were my professional and educational goals, anyway, in being here? To put to use my social work skills and gain more experience in a health setting in order to figure out how I should focus my graduate studies. I ended up deciding to apply to public health school, and these experiences have confirmed that I would like to continue my social work studies with a focus on health. Now, I am very aware of how the health system works – or rather doesn’t work – here in the DR, and all the patience and determination that it takes to get even the littlest of things done. I have learned first hand how to work with HIV/AIDS patients, with those who are the poorest of the poor, and with those who have such a different lifestyle, upbringing and ideology than mine. I have to admit, I’d never worked with anybody before who thought tetanus was brought about through a curse of witchcraft, or with an adult who had never learned the alphabet.

Right now, everything around here is wrapped up in politics. It’s seems like more progress is made in painting the house than sitting in an office like a dodo. I feel like nothing is getting done as far as public health is concerned, because all funding is going to the presidential campaign and we have zilch resources to work with. It’s normal to have few resources in a government run office in a developing nation, but now it’s to the extreme. They’re even paying students to vote for the re-election of the PLD. Talk about abuse of funds.

One of the kittens is playing with my feet. All five of them romping around are such a little joy! They especially like to play with and sit in my shoes. Thank the Lord for such a fun little gift to perk up my spirits any time I’m feeling down.